Trace Their Shadows Read Online Free Page A

combination welcome home and engagement party at the home of Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Able on Shirley Shores Drive, Lake Dora, turned tragic Sunday afternoon with the apparent death by drowning of a guest, Eva Stone, 23, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Stone, 210 St. Abrams Street, Tavares. The weekend celebration was drawing to a close about 5
    P.M. when a maid cleaning on the top floor looked out a window and saw Miss Stone enter the lake. The witness, Lily Mae Brown, 20, of 55 Lincoln Street, Tavares, said the young woman was in street clothes. Alarmed, Miss Brown called for help. By the time the gardener, Henry Washington, could launch a row boat and summon assistance, Eva Stone had disappeared beneath the surface.
    Mr. Able, Sr. and the male guests returned from quail hunting in time to join Sheriff’s Office deputies in a search of the area and in dragging the lake. According to Mr. Able, the lake bottom takes a sudden drop several yards from shore.
    Earlier, water activities had included boating but not swimming. The other women guests had departed earlier and did not see Miss Stone leave the house.
    Both family members and guests were unable to explain Miss Stone’s actions. Her parents were not available for comment. The search for the body continues.
    The evening before the tragedy the engagement of Grace Southerland, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. D. Southerland of Leesburg, and Captain Brookfield Able, son of hosts Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Able of Tavares, had been announced at a gala dinner–dance on the property.
    An inquest will be held on Friday at 2:00 P.M. at the county courthouse in Tavares.
    Brandy carried the story to a microfiche copier, then flipped quickly through the next week’s file to find the report of the inquest. The verdict, she learned, had been an apparent suicide by drowning. The girl’s parents remained uncommunicative in their grief. No suicide note was found. Since authorities couldn’t recover the body, a memorial service took place with little publicity two days after the inquest in the historic Tavares Congregational Church.
    Sitting back in her chair in front of the viewer, Brandy drew in her breath. Sylvania Langdon had said nothing about her brother Brookfield’s engagement party that weekend. Nor did this newspaper account sound like the accidental drowning Sylvania described. Yet for what reason besides suicide would Eva Stone have walked into the lake that November afternoon fully clothed? Was there a scandal that Sylvania did not want resurrected? A good reporter, she decided, would go to the original source. But where was Lily Mae Brown now, the witness to the drowning? A task for another day.
    At six Brandy parked in front of her mother’s white clapboard cottage on the outskirts of Tavares, next to a vacant lot of pines, saw palmettos, and wax myrtle. Brandy and her mother shared the house conveniently——if not very congenially——until Brandy could afford her own apartment. Until then, this isolated back street was handy to the court house and the city hall for Brandy, and to the high school for her mother, an English teacher there.
    Mrs. O’Bannon’s Ford was already in the driveway in front of the small frame garage at the rear of the lot. From the back yard Brandy heard a familiar happy bark. Inside the gate she knelt beside a ligustrum hedge, glanced at the border of petunias, and put her arms around the frantic golden retriever to whisper, “No digging today. Good. C’mon, Meg. Let’s chance it.”
    As soon as she opened the kitchen door she could see her mother at the dining room table. Mrs. O’Bannon, an imposing widow of fifty–two with a tight permanent and a square no–nonsense face, sat with her lesson plan book open. She turned level gray eyes toward Brandy. “Have you forgotten our war with fleas? The dog stays out.”
    “She’ll be in my room just a few minutes. I see little enough of her now.” Dropping her feathery tail, Meg slunk, head down, toward