The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

29 : Blaire

"If it works, it works," I say, itching to get my hands on the book. The slim volume is battered with age, quite impressive that it's still in one piece after nineteen years of checkouts, and it feels old and worn when I get to hold it at last.

"You've got ten days, love," Regina says. "Enjoy!"

I don't know what to do with myself or where to go. Naturally, I end up in the café, where Sukie's dealing with a customer and barely manages to conceal her delight and surprise when she sees me and the book.

"Blaire! Is that your aunt's copy?" she blurts out the moment the guy in front has his drink.

"I wish. No, it's the library copy. Do you mind if I have a latte and I sit here until I've read it from cover to cover?"

She laughs. "That suits me perfectly. I've been so desperate for you to read it! I need to be able to pick your brain about it, so you sit your arse down right now, and I'll bring your drink over."

I leave a handful of change by the till, a bit more than the cost of a latte, and find my usual seat, tucked away in the corner at the end of the counter where no-one but Sukie can bother me and my book and my sticky notes.

And I begin to read.

*

It isn't a long book. Less than two hundred pages, with a mix of long and short chapters, and a larger than average font size. It doesn't take me long to speed through the book for the first time, devouring every nugget of information that I haven't gleaned from listening to Sukie's podcast – sorry, Oli, you've been discounted from now on – and something sticks out.

But I don't know if I'm right.

So I down the rest of my latte, which was lukewarm by the time I took my first sip and has since turned icy cold, and I go straight back to page one.

There's no proper introduction. That's one thing that bothers me – the book launches straight into the first chapter, which plots out a timeline. It's almost like Mary never meant for anyone else to read this; she makes no attempt to explain what the reader is about to experience.

By the end of my second reading, a little slower, a lot more cautious, that nagging feeling remains.

Sukie comes over with a fresh drink. I didn't ask for one, and she waves away payment. "You need it," she says. "Also, you probably need to pee. You haven't moved in three hours and these drinks are huge."

"Elephant bladder," I say.

"Found anything?" She nods at the book, which is turned to the last page. It's almost exactly the same as the first page, with the timeline summarising the events, but there's an extra line after 1994. All it says is Who next?

I tap it. I nod. I can't find the right words. Sukie's eyes widen and she launches herself at the table.

"What'd you find?"

"I wasn't sure when I read it at first, I thought maybe I hadn't been paying close enough attention." Sukie leans closer, absorbing my every words. "But I've read the whole thing twice now, and I realised that not once does Mary say that this is about a pattern."

Her eyebrows crinkle. "What? What d'you mean?"

"I noted every single time Mary mentioned twenty-five years, or four times a century, and she only ever points it out as a frame of reference. Like, this event comes twenty-five years after the one before." My head is shaking; so are my hands, gripping the book that I've waited weeks to read.

"No." Sukie shakes her head rapidly. "No, that's not right. She does, I'm sure she does. The book's about the pattern!"

"It isn't." I flip through the book, each neon pink sticky note a time that Mary has alluded to the pattern that Sukie and the book club are obsessed with. "At one point, she does say that it's been twenty-five years since the floods and fifty since the burning of the witches, so the town is probably due another disaster. But that's the most she says."