Cordelia Cates stepped out onto her deck overlooking the lake as she cradled her coffee cup, which had more than a splash of Bailey’s Irish Cream added in for good measure. She sighed as she wrapped her cardigan around her with the other hand and surveyed the red clouds overhead.

What was that old saying? she thought to herself. “Red in the morning, heed the warning?” Could a storm be rolling in?

“Please, no,” she said aloud. She was up under a deadline as it was. She had to get a proposal, outline, and two sample chapters for her next novel to her publisher by tomorrow, and so far, she had nothing. It was the worst case of writer’s block she’d ever experienced. After the lukewarm success of her last two novels, her agent feared Cordelia was losing her touch as the “Queen of Suspense.” She had a deal for at least one more book (making it number thirteen), but she was already two weeks past the deadline they originally presented her with.

Cordelia went back inside and paused a minute to enjoy the silence. Wasn’t that what she’d always said she needed more of—uninterrupted time to work? Well, now she had it. Time to get down to business. She went into her study with the built-in bookshelves filled with color-coordinated copies of her past novels, turned on her computer, and twisted her dirty blonde hair into a knot on top of her head. She was in desperate need of a dye job, but there was no time for that now. She sat down at her desk and sipped her coffee again as she flipped through the journal where she jotted down most of her ideas.

Idea #1: Man surprises his wife with a weekend getaway for their anniversary, and she winds up dead at the base of a cliff. He takes over raising their toddler together, and when police start looking into the case, they realize he had a previous wife die in a freak accident twenty years earlier. Had this man ever worked a day in his life?

Cordelia crossed this idea out with big “X” on the page. She had just watched a documentary about this guy two nights ago, so it was probably too early to spin a novel out of it. Plus, how could she come up with a different motive than good old-fashioned greed? Ugh, she needed a new idea and she needed it now!

“I have an idea for you,” a male voice said from across the room. Cordelia was so startled she almost knocked over her cup of coffee. That voice—it couldn’t be.

“Harold?” she whispered, looking over at the man standing in front of the picture window that overlooked the lake. “How did you get in? I thought I changed the locks!”

“Oh, you did, dear,” he said with that dismissive tone he had been using with her since the early days of their marriage. “The thing is, I didn’t really need a key to get in.” He ran one hand over his receding hairline. “I can’t imagine you, of all people, having any shortage of ideas.”

Cordelia pushed herself back from her desk. “Seriously, Harold. How did you get in here? You know I got this house in the divorce, and you got your condo in the city. It’s what you wanted, right? A bachelor pad of your very own?”

“Harold never wanted to be a bachelor and you know it,” another voice chimed in. Cordelia whipped around to see another man standing in the doorway. He looked very much like her ex-husband, just built a little slimmer and with bushier hair. The face, the eyes, the condescending tone . . . those were all the same as she had pictured in her head when she was writing about him.

 

“Harvey?” she said in a whisper. “Harvey Simmons? This can’t be.” He strode across the room to stand beside Harold, and they both stood with their backs to the picture window, arms crossed. Cordelia blinked. The sky was starting to darken outside. Had she put too much alcohol in her coffee?

“Here’s what you do, Cordelia,” Harold said. “You base a character on yourself, maybe make her a bestselling screenwriter with a horrendous case of writer’s block. Then you turn her into a woman who steals an idea from her best friend, murders her to keep it a secret, and then rides off into the sunset in Los Angeles with a big fat check in her pocket.”

“That’s a stupid idea, Harold,” she told him. “I would never do anything like that, and I’m insulted you think I would.” Her response was met with a loud guffaw from Harvey.

“Are you serious, my dear?” Harvey said. “Think about what you did to Harold in your book Lingerie Lane. Did you not turn your computer software engineer husband into an ethical hacker who turned out to be the neighborhood Peeping Tom?”

Cordelia opened her mouth to speak but no words came out.

“Yeah, do you know how embarrassing that was, going into work at the office after that book came out?” Harold said. “People were whispering about me behind my back for weeks. I had to quit my job!” He yanked at the tie around his neck.

“That’s ridiculous Harold,” Cordelia replied. “It was a NOVEL. Everyone knew your wife was a writer. Why would they automatically assume I based the character off you?” In the distance, they heard the faint sound of thunder in the background.

Harvey wandered over to the bookshelf and began running his finger along the spine of Lingerie Lane.

 

“Hmm. Let’s see. We were both tech nerds, obsessed with model trains, and basically had the same physical description. I just had better hair!” he cackled.

Cordelia looked at Harold helplessly. “Is that what you thought?” she asked him. “Is that why you finally asked for the divorce?”

Harold’s neck was flushed. “I supported you all those years, Cordelia. Worked two jobs when Ava was little so we could make ends meet while you typed away at your novels. And that was how you repaid me? You turned me into a creeper who stole women’s underwear in the neighborhood so I could dress up in them and take Polaroids of myself!”

Cordelia sat back down at her desk and put her head in her hands. She took a few deep breaths just like her therapist had shown her. This couldn’t be real, right? She was under a deadline. Harvey was a fictional character who didn’t exist. And Harold had been gone for months, since before Ava had asked to be enrolled at that pricey out-of-state boarding school. She breathed in and out and looked back up.

Both men were gone. Okay, it had just been her overactive imagination. She was a writer, after all, right? She needed some water. She tucked her journal under her arm and padded into the kitchen to grab a cold bottle out of the fridge. As she sipped, she pulled out one of the kitchen island barstools with the brightly patterned cushions. The lake house had needed some serious work after she and Harold decided to make an offer on it, and her decorator, Beatrix Penland, had been top-notch. Now, the home was a stunning showpiece and the perfect place for entertaining.

Except, she was all alone now.

“I wonder who is to blame for all this emptiness, Cordelia?” It was yet another voice. Cordelia was afraid to look up. What was happening? She was under a deadline!

“Beatrix?” she whispered.

“The one and only!” Beatrix was smartly dressed in an ice blue suit with a pop of magenta in the blouse peeking out from the blazer. Her sleek brown hair looked freshly blown out and her make-up was perfect. Her designer heels clicked decisively as she crossed the room to stand across the island from Cordelia.

“I have to say I was so excited when THE Cordelia Cates wanted to meet with me to discuss renovating her lake house. I’d read all your novels and was such a fan. I knew we could take this rustic and fusty property and really make it dazzling.” Her eyes glittered with their usual enthusiasm.

“And you did,” Cordelia told her. “Every detail, every light fixture, every paint color, every throw pillow even, are all perfect. Harold didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He just wanted a place to park his boat. He didn’t care what the inside looked like, but I wanted a place where we could entertain people and have Ava’s friends over to swim, jet ski, and have backyard parties.”

She got up from the island, her heart racing. Cordelia knew Beatrix couldn’t possibly be standing in her kitchen. What was happening to her? How was she ever going to get an outline and those chapters hammered out if these people wouldn’t leave her alone?

“Kind of a shame to have this beautiful home with no one to share it with,” another voice, very much like Beatrix’s, said from the overstuffed chair next to the living room fireplace. The woman had brown curly hair and wore the off-brand version of Beatrix’s suit.

“Belinda?” Cordelia said slowly.

 

“In the flesh!” Belinda clapped her hands gleefully. She pulled a nail file out of her handbag and began working on her nails, blowing the dust from the emery board into the air, where it floated in slow motion.

“You could have at least made her something other than an interior decorator, you know,” Beatrix huffed. “I mean, the book was called Murder by Design, for God’s sake!”

Cordelia nervously gnawed on a hangnail that had been giving her trouble for days. “It was just too perfect—with that title, which came to my mind first, she needed to be a designer for the play on words to work!”

Belinda threw her head back in laughter, that wild look in her eyes that Cordelia had created for her present and accounted for. Beatrix wasn’t having it.

“She could have been an architect, or a contractor, even. But you had to make her the decorator of a mid-century, 1960s home on a lake, ahem, and have her murder her business partner after embezzling millions of dollars from their firm? Do you know how hard it was for me to attract new clients after that book came out? My reputation was destroyed!”

Cordelia snapped to attention. “Hey! If you recall, I sent you a bonus after the book was published. As a thanks for all your hard work on the house.”

“That was hush money, honey, that’s all it was,” said Beatrix. I would have been more grateful for your measly fifty grand if it wasn’t for the fact that I couldn’t line up any jobs after that. I work on referrals, remember? I realized then that you’d been holed away in your study, creating this murderess based off me, the entire time I was in here sketching out the plans for each room, running back and forth to Benjamin Moore, and putting blood, sweat, and tears into each little detail. You have some nerve, lady.”

 

Cordelia opened the sliding glass door and took the back steps down to the patio surrounding the pool. She needed some air. She stood on the stone pavers and shivered—the temperature must have dropped ten degrees from this morning. Gone were the red clouds and the sky was turning darker by the minute. She thought about the insomnia she’d been having recently—was it to blame for these wild hallucinations?

She was worried about her career tanking and wished she had someone to talk to. You’d think being up all hours of the night would have led to her making progress on ideas for her next book. Nope, it had only led to countless hours bingeing “The Tiger King” on Netflix, trying to figure out why the entire world had been watching it during the recent global pandemic. Maybe Joe Exotic would make a good antagonist for her next book?

“Aaaagggh!” she screamed, her voice echoing in the cove she lived on. Was everyone right? Did she not have any original ideas of her own?

No, she thought to herself, repeating the words she learned when she spent a few thousand dollars attending a self-help seminar in Phoenix, Arizona, right before her book The Predator on the Pond hit the The New York Times bestseller list. I am capable of anything. No excuses. I was put on this earth to achieve.

Cordelia took a deep breath. Where to find an idea? She turned around and headed back up to the house. With all the craziness of the morning, she’d skipped breakfast and now lunch, but frankly, there was no time to eat. She nervously peeked through the sliding glass door before stepping back into the house, praying Beatrix/Belinda were gone. She didn’t see them, so she headed back in. She climbed the grand staircase set under the glow of the enormous, rose gold chandelier and made her way to the attic space above the second floor.

 

Carefully, she pulled the string that would release the pull down ladder for the attic space. There were boxes and boxes of old family memorabilia up there. Maybe looking through some of the old photo albums and documents would spark an idea—there could even be a yellowed newspaper article with a murder mystery buried in it that she could pull from. Yes, this would be a fruitful venture! She could feel it deep in her bones.

It took her a minute to hunt around in the pitch-black darkness for the light switch. Finally, she found it, but lighting in the attic space only consisted of a single bulb overhead. How was she going to see anything up here? She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and turned on the flashlight feature. That was a little better. A sound above her head startled her, and she realized it had begun raining buckets outside. Great. That almost sounded like hail. But on to the boxes! There had to be an idea somewhere in the attic.

Cordelia opened the first box and found a pile of old photos. She quickly flipped through them, squinting at the handwritten notes on the backs. At age forty-eight, her once-perfect eyesight was now giving her trouble with the smaller print, but she had held off on getting readers. Harold used to warn her that when it happened, it would come on fast. She regretted teasing him in restaurants when he had a hard time reading the menus in smaller print. Harold! She needed to banish him from her thoughts. After taking a quick look around to make sure he wasn’t occupying the space in the attic with her, she pulled a scrapbook from the bottom of the box. It turned out to be Ava’s baby book.

“Ohhh,” Cordelia said softly, turning the pages as she knelt on the floor. She had created the book during those early months of Ava’s life, when she had spare moments in between the feedings, changings, and baby gym outings. Her eyes misted over at that gummy little smile, the bright blue eyes, and the peach fuzz of hair on Ava’s tiny little head. Ava had such a hard time growing hair in the beginning, but the curls came in full force in the back. She’d sported quite the baby mullet there for a while. Ava. Why had she wanted to go away to that boarding school in Virginia? The town bordering the lake had a great private school she’d attended. It had been small but offered so many academic opportunities (and a travel abroad option her senior year), that Cordelia and Harold had jumped at the chance to enroll her there.

“Oh, come off it, Mom. You know why I wanted to get the hell out of here.” The voice came from a dusty corner in the attic where Cordelia’s great-grandmother’s wooden rocking chair sat. Cordelia could hear the familiar creak. Her hand froze in the middle of turning the next page of the baby book. She set it down and got to her feet.

“Ava? Is that you?” She rounded the corner and saw her beautiful, seventeen-year-old daughter sitting in the rocking chair. But there was no smile on her face.

“Missed you at Parents’ Day, Mom,” she said, her eyes shooting daggers. “Dad drove up, but he said you were probably under a deadline. Don’t worry—we had a great time without you. Went for a horseback ride, had lunch in town, I introduced him to my dorm mates. They were all pretty impressed that my mom is the ‘Queen of Suspense.’ Their moms all read your books. But then I told them about what you did to me, and they weren’t so impressed then.”

Cordelia swallowed hard, gnawing on that hangnail again. “What did you tell them, exactly?”

“Oh, just that you turned me into a female cult leader from a private high school in that book Rituals of Riverside High.”

At that exact moment, Cordelia’s phone began screaming at her and she dropped it. Picking it up, she saw a severe thunderstorm warning flash across her screen. She could hear wind whipping through the trees just outside the house. Great, she probably needed to be in the basement and not up here in the stupid attic!

“What’s the matter, Mommy? Scared to be alone? This time the voice came from behind her, and when she turned around, she saw the maniacal smile of Ansley Creighton, who’d orchestrated the murders of several classmates when they dared leave the cult she’d formed in “Rituals.” She was holding what looked like a smoking gun in her hand, and the image clashed with the brightly-colored ribbons in her blonde ponytail, just as she’d imagined when she wrote the book.

“Mom! What are you looking at? I’m over HERE,” Ava said from the rocker.  “Are you even listening to me? Do you know what it was like for me at school when that book came out? The side-eye I got from people? The flat-out jokes? Principal Hardy called me into his office, with that stupid hippie guidance counselor, and they accused me of running an underground cult! They interrogated all my friends and encouraged them to fess up so I could be kicked out of school! Did you have any idea? That’s why I didn’t want to go back. I don’t give a crap about how much money that book made. You ruined my life!”

A loud clap of thunder coincided with Ava’s shriek. The lone light bulb in the attic flickered, and then went off. She could hear Ainsley still giggling in front of the old, floor-length antique mirror that was propped up against the wall. In the darkness, with the glow of her phone screen providing the only light, Cordelia caught a glimpse of her reflection. Pieces of her hair had escaped her messy bun and wildly framed her face. Her sweater and baggy jeans drooped over her thin frame. She had lost so much weight with Ava and Harold leaving and the stress of her deadline. And then there was her mother . . .

 

Ava could read her mind.

“You drove Grammy to an early grave, too, you know,” she said, and Cordelia flinched. “After all she did to raise you after Grandpa died, and you turned her into an axe-murdering boarding house landlord who stole her boarders’ social security checks? How did you not expect her to die of a broken heart?”

That was enough. Cordelia couldn’t take it anymore. “Stop!” she screamed, running for the staircase ladder that would take her back downstairs. She was in such a hurry that she missed her footing and fell down the second half of the ladder, landing on her right hand at an odd angle.

“Noooo!” she screamed in pain, as she struggled to stand up. Not her writing hand! There was too much work to do. Pain coursed through her palm, and she could tell it was broken. What had she done? She limped down the stairs, her hand hanging at an awkward angle by her side and was greeted by both Beatrix and Belinda.

“Get away from me!” she screamed, running into her study, where Harold/Harvey were perched on her desk, looking through her computer. She threw her phone at Harold’s head with her left hand, but it went right through him. Weeping, she whirled around and headed for the foyer, slipping on the polished hardwood floor. Cordelia flung open the front door and was hit in the face by a gust of rain. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t stay in the house another second.

It didn’t matter that the sky was so black she couldn’t see two feet in front of her. Who cared that she was already soaked? She needed to get down to the dock and to the jet ski Harold had bought for her birthday last year. He’d been giddy with excitement as he presented it to her, and Cordelia had way more fun zipping around the lake on it than she’d originally expected. The keys should still be in the ignition, where she’d last left them. She ran, slipping on the grass, ignoring the fact that the trees bordering her yard and the lake were literally bent sideways from the wind. There was no time to grab a life jacket out of the boat house. Just a few more steps . . .

The next morning, as the sun began to rise on the clear fall morning, Officer Rick Calhoun surveyed the jet ski floating alone in the water on the other side of the cove. Beside him was the resident who had called it in, once he realized a woman’s body was floating face down a few feet away in the water. Her dark blonde hair was tangled in the tree branches and other debris from the previous day’s storm.

“I recognized that jet ski, and I’m pretty sure that’s Cordelia Cates with it,” Bobby Valentine said, zipping up his vest. “She’s kind of a famous author and moved out here across the cove a few years ago with her husband and daughter.” He thought for a moment. “Come to think of it though, I haven’t seen anyone but her around here for a while. And I definitely haven’t seen her out on the jet ski, which is why I came down here to investigate.”

Officer Calhoun scribbled something in his notebook. “Cordelia Cates, you say? I think my wife has a couple of her books in that never-ending pile on her nightstand,” he said. “What on earth would compel her to get on a jet ski, without a life jacket, in the middle of a Tornado Warning? Where was she trying to go? Didn’t she get the warning on her phone after the power went out? I couldn’t even get all the way down this road in my squad car because there was a huge tree that fell during the storm. We were damn lucky there wasn’t more damage out here.”

“I know, Officer, I know,” Bobby said. “It’s a shame to see someone who has accomplished so much killed in a freak accident like this. She must have been knocked off the jet ski and couldn’t keep her head above the water because of the storm. It makes you wonder what on earth was going on in her head.”

 

Officer Calhoun shook his head and headed back up the road to wait for the coroner, figuring he needed to text his wife that there would be no more books from the Queen of Suspense to add to her nightstand.