Lake Silence Read online

  BOOKS BY ANNE BISHOP

  The Others Series

  Written in Red

  Murder of Crows

  Vision in Silver

  Marked in Flesh

  Etched in Bone

  The World of the Others

  Lake Silence

  The Black Jewels Series

  Daughter of the Blood

  Heir to the Shadows

  Queen of the Darkness

  The Invisible Ring

  Dreams Made Flesh

  Tangled Webs

  The Shadow Queen

  Shalador’s Lady

  Twilight’s Dawn

  The Ephemera Series

  Sebastian

  Belladonna

  Bridge of Dreams

  The Tir Alainn Trilogy

  The Pillars of the World

  Shadows and Light

  The House of Gaian

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Anne Bishop

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bishop, Anne, author.

  Title: Lake Silence: the world of the Others/Anne Bishop.

  Description: First edition. | New York: ACE, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017024431 (print) | LCCN 2017027124 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399587252 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399587245

  Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Women prophets—Fiction. | Shapeshifting—Fiction. | Paranormal fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Fantasy fiction. | Occult fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.I7594 (ebook) | LCC PS3552.I7594 L35 2018 (print) |

  DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024431

  First Edition: March 2018

  Jacket art © Stephen Carroll/Trevillion Images

  Jacket design by Adam Auerbach

  Title page art © The Sun photo/Shutterstock.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  In memory of

  Mike Briggs

  and

  Emma Lee

  You are missed.

  January 2017

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to Blair Boone for continuing to be my first reader and for all the information he supplies that I transform to suit the Others’ world; to Debra Dixon for being second reader; to Doranna Durgin for maintaining the Web site; to Adrienne Roehrich for running the official fan page on Facebook; to Nadine Fallacaro for information about things medical; to Jennifer Crow for pep talks when needed; to Ineke Prochazka for introducing me to Jubly-Umph and the quokka; to Paige and Dominique, the excellent Herders of Authors at Supanova 2016, who always knew when to lose us for a few minutes as we passed a booth full of shinies; to Anne Sowards and Jennifer Jackson for the feedback that helps me write a better story; and to Pat Feidner for always being supportive and encouraging.

  CONTENTS

  Books by Anne Bishop

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map of the Finger/Feather Lakes

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  EPILOGUE

  Geography and Other Information

  Cast of Characters

  About the Author

  THE FINGER/FEATHER LAKES

  © 2017 Anne Bishop

  Note: The geographically challenged author created this map and did her best to match the main roads to the story but makes no promises about accuracy.

  CHAPTER 1

  Vicki

  Moonsday, Juin 12

  I wouldn’t have known about the dead man if I hadn’t walked into the kitchen at the exact moment my one and only lodger was about to warm up an eyeball in the wave-cooker.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t known I had a scream that could crack glass; I hadn’t wondered if an eyeball would puff up and explode in a wave-cooker like those animal-shaped marshmallows; and I
hadn’t realized my lodger—Agatha “call me Aggie” Crowe—was that kind of Crow.

  She seemed so normal, if you overlooked her timely payment of the rent each week and the fact that she had taken up residence in The Jumble three weeks ago and seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “You can’t eat that!” I tried to sound firm, like a responsible human and business owner should. In truth, I sounded a wee bit hysterical, and I wished with all sincerity that I had walked into the kitchen five minutes later.

  Then again, since the kitchen was one of the common rooms in the main building, I could have walked in when Aggie was halfway through her lunch, which I’m sure would have been more distressing for at least one of us.

  “Why can’t I eat it?” She looked at the eyeball rolling around in the small bowl that was now sitting on the counter. “Nobody else wants it. It’s starting to get squooshy. And the dead man doesn’t need it.”

  The words got me past the physical evidence. “What dead man?”

  “The one who doesn’t need the eyeball.” Little black feathers suddenly sprouted at her hairline, confirming the nature of my lodger. I was going to have to rework the rental agreement so that there was a space for unimportant bits of information like . . . oh, say . . . species.

  “Where did you find the dead man?”

  “On the farm track that runs alongside Crabby Man’s place.”

  I should have pointed out that Mr. Milford wasn’t usually crabby, but he did get exercised when someone took one bite out of all the ripe strawberries or pinched fruit from his trees, since he and his wife needed the income they made from selling fresh fruit and homemade preserves. But there were other priorities.

  “Show me.” I held up a hand. “Wait. And don’t nibble.”

  “But . . .”

  “You can’t eat it. It could be evidence.”

  Her dark eyes filled with reproach. “If I hadn’t wanted to warm it up because it was squooshy, you wouldn’t have known about the dead man and I could have had eyeball for lunch.”

  I couldn’t refute that statement, so I backed up until I reached the wall phone in the kitchen, and then I dialed the emergency number for the Bristol Police Station. Bristol was a human town located at the southern end of Crystal Lake. Sproing, the only human village near Lake Silence, was currently without its own police force, so Bristol had drawn the short straw and had to respond to any of our calls for help.

  “Bristol Police Station. What is your emergency?”

  “This is Victoria DeVine at The Jumble in Sproing. One of my lodgers found a dead man.” Okay, Aggie was my only lodger, but there was no reason to advertise that. Right?

  I started counting and reached seven before the dispatcher said, “Did you see the body?”

  “No, but my lodger did.”

  “How do you know the body is dead?”

  “I’m looking at an eyeball that used to be attached to the body.”

  This time I counted to eight.

  “We’ll send someone.” The words were slow in coming, but at least they were said and would be officially noted somewhere.

  I didn’t blame the dispatcher for hesitating to send someone to Sproing—after all, the police officer we’d had before last year’s Great Predation had been eaten, and a couple of officers who had answered calls since then had provoked something in the wild country and never made it back to their station—but I resented that I could feel her blaming me for whatever the police were going to find. On the other hand, I did withhold one tiny bit of information.

  Just wait until the responding officer realized he had to interview one of the terra indigene.

  * * *

  • • •

  A bit of useful information. My name is Victoria “call me Vicki” DeVine. I used to be Mrs. Yorick Dane, but giving up my married name was one of the conditions of my receiving valuable property—aka The Jumble—as part of the divorce settlement. Apparently the second official Mrs. Dane didn’t like the idea that someone else had had the name first. Fortunately, she didn’t seem as possessive about Yorick’s Vigorous Appendage. I could have told her that a couple dozen other women had had it before she took possession. But it wasn’t likely that she would keep solo possession of the appendage for long, so let her figure things out the hard way like I did. Of course, if she had been one of those indulgences, then she already knew the signs and might be able to nip them in the bud. Maybe that’s why, before I had moved away from Hubb NE, I had seen her in the garden center buying long-handled loppers—the kind used to prune branches—when I’d heard her loudly proclaiming the previous week that gardening was a hobby for women who couldn’t do anything else and so not of interest to her.

  Anyway, I was married to Yorick Dane, an entrepreneur—aka wheeler-dealer—although I never understood what sort of deals were wheeled. He said I didn’t have a head for business. I finally said I didn’t have a head for cheating of any kind. Suddenly, after a decade of marriage, he said I wasn’t living up to the promises that were implied by my name, meaning I wasn’t hot or in any way sexy. The fact that it took him a decade to realize I was five foot four and plump instead of a five-foot-ten pole dancer with big tits was confusing. But once he made that discovery, he decided that he needed someone who would stand by him, and that would not be me.

  So that’s how I came to be the owner of The Jumble. According to the story that was muttered by Yorick’s family once they’d had a little too much to drink, The Jumble was conceived and built by Yorick’s great-great-aunt, Honoria Dane, a woman who was equal parts visionary and eccentric. She and her brothers were given equal shares in their father’s fortune, the shares being dispersed upon the child’s twenty-fifth birthday. Great-great (I never heard anyone refer to her by her given name) had sunk her part of the fortune into building The Jumble. It was supposed to be a self-sufficient and self-supporting community. It began its genteel decline almost from the moment Great-great finished building it.

  The Jumble consisted of the sprawling two-story main house, which had a small but fully equipped apartment for the owner as well as two suites with private bathrooms for guests. It also had a big communal kitchen, a dining room, a library, a social room, an office for the owner, several empty rooms whose use I couldn’t identify, and a large shower area off the kitchen that could accommodate up to four people at a time as long as they weren’t shy. Besides the main house, there were four sets of cabins—three connected cabins to a set—within easy walking distance from the main building. Each cabin was similar to an efficiency apartment with an open floor plan—no walls or doors for anything but the bathroom. Well, the three lakeside cabins that were closest to the main building had en suite bathrooms. The other nine cabins were a bit more primitive and an ongoing project.

  There were acres of land that could be used by the . . . beings . . . in residence—plenty of room for growing food or raising a goat or two for whatever reason one keeps goats. There was even a chicken coop, sans chickens. It was probably sans a few other things, but if the chickens couldn’t pay rent, I couldn’t afford to update their lodgings. But The Jumble had one thing the village of Sproing did not—it included easy access to Lake Silence, which was an afterthought body of water compared to the other Finger Lakes. There was a public beach at the southern end of the lake, but I thought The Jumble’s private beach and dock were a lot nicer.

  Whoever negotiated the original lease agreement for the use of the land knew every devious loophole a person might try to use to rezone/repurpose/re-something the land. But the terms were brutally simple: it was The Jumble, with its set number of buildings of a particular size and so many acres of cultivated land (being a modest percentage of the overall acreage), or nothing. The Dane inheritance was actually the buildings and their contents. The land could be used only within the terms of the lease.

  Last bit of information. Sproing is a human village wi
th a population of less than three hundred. Like most, if not all, of the villages in the Finger Lakes area, it is not human controlled. Sure, we have an elected mayor and village council, and we pay taxes for garbage pickup and road maintenance and things like that. The main difference is this: on the continent of Thaisia, a human-controlled town is a defined piece of land with boundaries, and humans can do anything they want within those boundaries. But villages like Sproing don’t have a boundary, don’t have that distance from the terra indigene. The earth natives. The Others. The dominant predators that control most of the land throughout the world and all of the water.

  When a place has no boundaries, you never really know what’s out there watching you.

  The surprising thing is there hadn’t been a reported interaction with one of the Others in decades. At least around Sproing. Maybe the Others have been coming in and buying COME SPROING WITH ME or I ♥ SPROINGERS T-shirts without anyone realizing it, but even though the village lost about a quarter of its residents because of last summer’s Great Predation, everyone still wanted to believe that the Others were Out There and didn’t find us interesting enough—or bothersome enough— to hunt down and have as snacks.

  Which made me wonder if the Others came into town seasonally, like tourists. And that made me wonder if everyone had missed the obvious when stores ran out of condiments like ketchup and hot sauce some weekends—and whether a run on ketchup and hot sauce coincided with people disappearing.

  Something to ask Aggie once we got past the whole eyeball thing.

  CHAPTER 2

  Grimshaw

  Moonsday, Juin 12

  Officer Wayne Grimshaw drove toward the village of Sproing, the cruiser’s flashing lights a warning to anyone else on the road that he was responding to a call and was all business. But the siren remained silent because that sound would have drawn the attention of everything for miles around—and when a man was in the wild country, even on a paved road that was a vaguely acknowledged right-of-way, it was better not to alert the earth natives to his presence.

  Dead body reported at The Jumble near Sproing.