Bitter Almonds

How the case begins

The Lakeview has closed its season the same way for thirty years: the last dance in the lakeside pavilion, the staff toast on the dock, the shutters going up one cabin at a time. At midnight on the final Saturday, Ned Berry carries the night's takings down to the boathouse office and finds the door locked from the inside, the lamp still burning, and Gordon Tice at his desk with a nightcap glass beside his hand. There is nothing to be done for him, and by morning the county doctor has said the word nobody at the Lakeview has ever needed: poison. Gordon owned the Lakeview the way weather owns a lake, and he was not loved the way his resort was. His young wife was not in their rooms at midnight, and the cabana key in her wrap says where she was. His manager was owed a partnership in writing. The singer in the bar knew him when they were both young and poor. And his sister Harriet, who has kept the books for thirty years without her name on so much as a door, closed the ledgers that night the way she always does, at eleven, alone. The season is over. The accounting has just begun.