At the Cold, Still Bottom of the Lake: Five Mysteries Set in Still Waters

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When I was a little girl, my parents rented a lakeside cottage.  The owners would be out of town for a year, and they needed someone to keep an eye on their property, so they rented it to us cheap.  My sisters and I were excited about living next to a cool blue lake with tiny islands to explore.

Down the hill from our house was a small beach with a private dock.  My father bought an old rowboat and patched up the holes in the hull, while painted turtles sunned themselves on the shore and king snakes curled up in the grass like warm inner tubes.

That summer, I dangled my feet over the end of the wooden dock and searched the water for sunfish or bluegills.  Sometimes I’d catch a glint of something bigger, an eel or a whiskery trout gliding past my toes and disappearing into darkness.  As much as I loved it there, I was secretly terrified of the cold blue depths of the lake.  That summer, I’d read a paperback mystery about a camp counselor who was killed and dumped in a lake, and I couldn’t get the horror out of my head.

I refused to go swimming unless my father was watching over us.  I hated that I couldn’t see the bottom.  Whenever I walked barefoot into the murky water, I could feel my toes squishing through matted patches of pondweed, while slippery quillwort tangled around my ankles.  Living things lurked in the slimy undergrowth—worms, tadpoles, eels, snails, fish, hermit crabs.  I dreaded stepping on something sharp and cutting my foot.  Worst of all, I imagined that one of these days, a skeletal hand would reach out of the primordial ooze and pull me under.

I thought about dead bodies a lot, probably more than a little girl should.  One day when I was playing on the dock, an old knotted plastic bag drifted ashore.  Inside was a waterlogged napkin from a local diner, a pink barrette, a bottle of crimson nail polish, and a laminated nametag that said “Rita.”  I waited around all afternoon, but nothing else washed ashore.  No dead bodies, no waitresses named Rita.

I didn’t tell anyone what I’d found.  Instead I hid the nametag and other stuff in a shoebox under my bed and invented a story about how Rita came to rest at the cold still bottom of the lake.

In my story, there was a jealous man—a line cook at the diner—who’d fallen in love with Rita and her crimson nails, but one night after closing, when she rejected his advances, he flew into a rage and killed her.  He got rid of the body by weighing it down with a cement block and rowing out to the middle of the lake, where he pushed her overboard.  It was gruesome, and I loved it.

In my imagination, Rita sank to the cold, still bottom of the lake and remained there in her watery grave, while far above the seasons passed.  In the summer, the sun blazed and the wind danced on the surface of the water, but not a single beam or ripple reached down into the depths of the lake.  In the fall, lightning crashed and thunderstorms riled the choppy waves, but the bottom of the lake remained cold, dark, inert and silent.

I wasn’t sure how my story would end.

But then, real life provided one possibility.

It was early September when a terrifyingly loud noise shook me and my sisters out of bed.  As we huddled together in the living room, my mother explained, “The dam broke, girls.  That sound was the lake whooshing away.  We’re lucky it happened in the middle of the night when no one was swimming in it.”  She shuddered to think about her three daughters getting sucked away.

Since we were on high ground, we were safe from the flood waters, but the people who lived down below were almost dragged away.  Trees crashed into their roofs and smashed through their windows, and muddy water flooded their basements.

Fortunately, no one was killed.

The next day, my sisters and I hurried down the hill to see what was left of the lake.  We couldn’t believe it—the whole thing was gone.  Our little dock extended out into nothing.  The drop was deep into water-speckled mud.  The dock’s legs were covered in slime, and small fish splashed around the remaining puddles.

It was sunny out—a beautiful September day.  We climbed down the wooden ladder onto the lake bottom, where the mudflats bore our weight like sandbars at the beach.  Everywhere you looked, trash mucked the lake bottom—tar-colored fishing poles, plastic buckets, half-buried flip-flops, boards with rusty nails sticking out.  Dead fish floated belly-up, while a few still-living fish twitched their fins and snapped their gills, trying to wriggle away into the deeper pools.  Everything smelled rotten in the strong sun.

My sisters and I explored for hours.  We found a wine bottle filled with mud, a weed-covered diving fin, a capsized rowboat, a crooked golf club, and more than a few rotten oars.  I looked around for Rita’s body.  My feverish imagination had convinced me that she would be there, half-buried in the mud, her long silky hair turned to seaweed, her waitress uniform the color of algae, her skeletal waist tied to a cement block by a length of water-logged rope.  Needless to say, we didn’t find any dead bodies that day.

For weeks afterwards, I checked the news, but there were no reports of any Rita’s being retrieved from the lake.  I suppose I should’ve been relieved, but that didn’t explain the plastic bag and its contents that had floated toward me like a ghostly plea for help.  I was a little girl with a big imagination, and I needed an ending for my story.  So I figured the lake must’ve swallowed her up completely.  It had claimed her as its own.

My fascination with eerie, murderous small town lakes eventually took shape in my Burning Lake mystery series, where terrible secrets lie dormant just underneath the placid surface of the lake.

It all started back in 1712, when three innocent woman were condemned as witches and burned at the stake.  Before Abigail Stuart died, she cursed the town forever.  Now, in “The Shadow Girls,” Detective Natalie Lockhart finds herself in the middle of a gruesome murder case where, with the help of Lieutenant Luke Pittman, she must fit the pieces together and link up the strange and violent events that have threatened to destroy her idyllic lakeside hometown.

Here are five more mysteries involving murderous lakes that I highly recommend:

The House Across the Lake, by Riley Sager

This twisty psychological thriller is about a widowed actress named Casey Fletcher who seeks solace in a peaceful lakeside house in Vermont after her husband has drowned in this very lake.  Now Casey spends her time grieving, drinking too much, and snooping on an attractive couple, Katherine and Tom, who live across the lake.  When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey discovers things aren’t what they seem—and she suspects there’s something evil in the lake.  It’s an updated Rear Window with lots of surprising turns.  Just when you think you’ve figured it out—you haven’t.

Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger

Cork O’Connor is a former sheriff living in Aurora, Minnesota.  Recently separated from his wife and kids, he inadvertently becomes embroiled in a web of corruption and crime during a blizzard in this hardscrabble, lakeside town.  When a judge is murdered and a young boy is reported missing, the part Irish and part Anishinaabe former law man must deal with local superstitions along with a wealth of fascinating characters to get to the bottom of this case, where all is not what it seems.

Stillhouse Lake, by Rachel Caine

In this psychological thriller, Gina Royal shouldn’t be in this position, but she’s forced to remake her entire life when she finds out—to her complete and utter shock—that her husband’s a serial killer.  Now her ex-husband is in prison, and internet trolls are blaming her for the murders.  So she changes her name to Gwen Proctor and moves to remote Stillhouse Lake with her two children in order to live in peace and have a normal life.  But then, a dead body turns up at the lake, and her world is turned upside-down when she becomes a suspect.  As the threats against her mount, she’s forced to realize somebody has it out for her, and she must find the courage to keep her children safe from an evil predator.

Cold Lake, by Jeff Carson

In this fast-paced thriller, Sheriff David Wolf answers a call from a fisherman who has just reeled in a human head from Cold Lake, Colorado.  When other dismembered bodies are retrieved from the lake, Wolf discovers they’re connected to a missing teenager case over 20 years ago—an unsolved case that Wolf’s lawman father couldn’t solve.  Soon it becomes obvious that a serial killer lives among them.  A complex web of unsolved murders unfolds over the backdrop of Wolf’s troubles with his wife and son, and his impending election, but the question remains—just how many bodies are at the bottom of Cold Lake?

Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman

Who killed the lady in the lake?  The year is 1966, in the city of Baltimore.  Flawed main character, Maddie Schwartz, is an unhappy housewife who finally leaves her husband after 20 awful years to find meaning in her life by working for a city newspaper.  When a woman is found dead in a city park lake, Maddie attempts to discover who she was and who killed her.  As she goes about solving the crime, she puts everyone she loves in danger in this kaleidoscopic historical mystery.

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