The Bodies Left Behind

lake were deserted on this cool Friday afternoon in April.
    Emma Feldman, in her early thirties, set down her martini on the kitchen table, where she sat across from her husband. She tucked a strand of curly black hair behind her ear and walked to one of the grimy kitchen windows. She saw nothing but dense clusters of cedar, juniper and black spruce rising up a steep hill, whose rocks resembled cracked yellow bone.
    Her husband lifted an eyebrow. “What was it?”
    She shrugged and returned to her chair. “I don’t know. Didn’t see anything.”
    Outside, silence again.
    Emma, lean as any stark, white birch outside one of the many windows of the vacation house, shook off her blue jacket. She was wearing the matching skirt and a white blouse. Lawyer clothes. Hair in a bun. Lawyer hair. Stockings but shoeless.
    Steven, turning his attention to the bar, had abandoned his jacket as well, and a wrinkled striped tie. The thirty-six-year-old, with a full head of unruly hair, was in a blue shirt and his belly protruded inexorably over the belt of his navy slacks. Emma didn’t care; she thought he was cute and always would.
    “And look what I got,” he said, nodding toward the upstairs guest room and unbagging a large bottle of pulpy organic vegetable juice. Their friend, visiting from Chicago this weekend, had been flirting with liquid diets lately, drinking the most disgusting things.
    Emma read the ingredients and wrinkled her nose. “It’s all hers. I’ll stick with vodka.”
    “Why I love you.”
    The house creaked, as it often did. The place was seventy-six years old. It featured an abundance of wood and a scarcity of steel and stone. The kitchen, where they stood, was angular and paneled in glowing yellow pine. The floor was lumpy. The colonial structure was one of three houses on this private road, each squatting on ten acres. It could be called lakefront property but only because the lake lapped at a rocky shore two hundred yards from the front door.
    The house was plopped down in a small clearing on the east side of a substantial elevation. Midwest reserve kept people from labeling these hills “mountains” here in Wisconsin, though it rose easily seven or eight hundred feet into the air. At the moment the big house was bathed in blue late-afternoon shadows.
    Emma gazed out at rippling Lake Mondac, far enough from the hill to catch some descending sun. Now, in early spring, the surrounding area was scruffy, reminding of wet hackles rising from a guard dog’s back. The house was much nicer than they could otherwise afford—they’d bought it through foreclosure—and she knew from the moment she’d seen it that this was the perfect vacation house.
    Silence  . . .
    The colonial also had a pretty colorful history.
    The owner of a big meatpacking company in Chicago had built the place before World War II. It was discovered years later that much of his fortune had come from selling black-market meat, circumventing the rationing system that limited foods here at home to make sure the troops were nourished. In 1956 the man’s body was found floating in the lake; he was possibly the victim of veterans who had learned of his scheme and killed him, then searched the house, looking for the illicit cash he’d hidden here.
    No ghosts figured in any version of the death, though Emma and Steven couldn’t keep from embellishing. When guests were staying here they’d gleefully take note of who kept the bathroom lights on and who braved the dark after hearing the tales.
    Two more snaps outside. Then a third.
    Emma frowned. “You hear that? Again, that sound. Outside.”
    Steven glanced out the window. The breeze kicked up now and then. He turned back.
    Her eyes strayed to her briefcase.
    “Caught that,” he said, chiding.
    “What?”
    “Don’t even think about opening it.”
    She laughed, though without much humor.
    “Work-free weekend,” he said. “We agreed.”
    “And what’s in there?” she asked, nodding at the backpack he carried in lieu of an attaché case. Emma was wrestling the lid off a jar of cocktail olives.
    “Only two things of relevance, Your Honor: my le Carré novel and that bottle of Merlot I had at work. Shall I introduce the latter into evid . . .” Voice fading. He looked to the window, through which they could see a tangle of weeds and trees and branches and rocks the color of dinosaur bones.
    Emma too glanced outside.
    “ That I heard,” he said. He refreshed his