On the tenth day of November in the year of our Lord 1985, the seventh episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled A Lady in The Lake, it’s set at a resort not too far from Cabot Cove. It’s an interesting episode; I’m not entirely sure why, but I still have fairly vivid memories of the first time that I saw A Lady in The Lake. (Last week’s episode was Reflections of the Mind.)

Jessica is off for a writing retreat at a lakeside resort near Cabot cove. But before we learn this, the camera spends a while taking in the scenery around Stone Lake as swelling music plays and we get the credits.

We definitely take our time; part of this is spent follow the car bringing Jessica. The proprietrix, played by Lee Meriwether (perhaps best known for playing Catwoman in Batman: The Movie starring Adam West), apprehensively watches her pull in to the parking lot from a stop story window. Clearly, this is not a rushed episode.

Then Harry and Jessica get out of the car…

While Harry explains to Jessica that when he heard she was writing a book called Murder At The Inn, he knew this would be perfect for her. Edgar Allen Poe even stayed at it, once! Not this version of it; the original inn burnt down, of course.

Inside the inn, there’s a painting of Edgar Allen Poe.

In the lobby/main area, Jessica meets the proprietrix, Grace Overholtz.

Grace has a six month lease on the place with an option to buy it.

Later on, after Harry leaves, Grace is showing Jessica her room and Jessica notices that it, too, has a picture of Edgar Allen Poe above a fireplace.

Grace explains that the pictures of Poe were Harry’s idea. Grace doesn’t seem overly thrilled with them, but she’s humoring him for some reason. She then sees something out of the window and excuses herself.

The thing she sees out of the window is her boat house manager, Jack Turney, giving some hands-on instruction to one of the guests.

The guest’s name is Betty Jordan, and it turns out that she’s married. Grave gives him a talking to about not looking for trouble with the female guests, but he’s unreceptive to her advice.

Also, here’s a better view of the shorts he is wearing:

Ah, the 1980s.

We then meet more of the guests. First is Carolyn Crane.

She’s playing gin rummy with her unbelievably unpleasant husband, Howard:

We then meet Father Mulcahy Burton Hollis, a teacher on vacation who is devoted to bird watching.

He fills Jessica in on a little backstory for Howard Crane. He’s worth millions because he recently sold his small family business to a conglomerate.

Kyle Jordan then comes in looking for his wife (she’s the one who was getting stretching lessons from the boat house manager).

We then meet Joanna Benson, a nature lover who enjoys running around naked in the morning to more directly experience nature.

There’s some chit-chat, but the relevant part is that Burton invites Jessica to go on a morning bird-watching walk with him the next day and she accepts.

After Joanna goes running by naked, Burton suggests that they split up. He tells her to take the path down to the lake—yellow-bellied flycatchers love water—and he lends her the second pair of binoculars he brought. He’s going to take the higher path and look for its nest in a tree. After shushing her a few times, he then sneakily wanders off.

Down by the lake, Jessica sees Howard and Carolyn in a boat. Almost immediately, they start wrestling with each other. Jessica calls out, but the wrestling continues then Carolyn goes into the water.

Howard looks around, then even jumps in the water (one hand firmly on the boat) but he can’t find her. At Jessica’s call, Burton comes running and asks Jessica what happened. She replies, “Well, I’m not sure, but I believe I’ve just seen a murder.”

On that we fade to black and go to commercial. Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:

When we come back from commercial, divers are unable to find Carolyn. Sheriff Tupper loses no time in jumping to the conclusion that Howard Crane murdered his wife.

Jessica isn’t so sure, but doesn’t say much. We get a few reactions. Harry the real estate agent rushes in to tell Grace this will put Stone Lake on the map and she better buy right away. Joanna is crying even though she had never met Carolyn Crane. Betty Jordan finds it all too much and has to go back to her cabin. Kyle Jordan approaches the Sheriff and gives some damning evidence.

Kyle had asked the Cranes to go fishing many times, but the they always declined. Howard made it out that it was his wife who was refusing but he believed it was Howard. He thinks Howard couldn’t have meant to go fishing otherwise the Jordans would have come with them; clearly this meant Howard needed them out of the way to commit the murder.

Worse, the previous night Kyle and his wife overheard the Cranes having a loud argument in their room. Carolyn wanted a divorce but Howard said that she wouldn’t get a nickel of his money. Burton’s room is on the other side of the Crane’s room from Kyle’s, and Burton confirms he overheard the fight, too.

After this, Jessica and Sheriff Tupper go to the room where Doctor Hazlet is tending to Howard Crane (apparently, jumping into the lake after his wife and holding onto a boat requires requires medical attention for some reason) to interview him.

The interview will need to be short, however, since Doctor Hazlet gave him a sedative. It seems that getting wet in a lake takes a lot out of you and rest is important. Howard says that his wife just went crazy and jumped out. He jumped in after her and tried to save her, but he can’t swim so he had to keep a hand on the boat and thus couldn’t reach her. In answer to a question, he says that not only could Caroline swim but she had actually won medals for it in college.

Jessica and Sheriff Tupper confer, and Jessica thinks that Howard’s version makes more sense than the idea that he tried to kill his wife. Inspiration strikes and Jessica goes to look at the boat. In the boat room she finds Betty Jordan and Jack Turney kissing. Betty is bold, saying that her husband doesn’t mind how she amuses herself so long as she doesn’t disturb his fishing, but after Betty leaves Jack tells Jessica that hopes she won’t mention it to Betty’s husband. Jessica assures him that she has no intention of telling anyone anything.

When she asks where the fishing equipment was, Jack replies that there was no fishing equipment. She then examines the boat and finds a hook on the bottom of it.

Jack has no idea what that’s doing there, nor when it got there. Some time passes and Sheriff Tupper and Jessica confer. Sheriff Tupper’s research confirms that Carolyn was a champion swimmer, which he takes to mean that Howard must have held her under the water.

Jessica points out that it’s implausible that a non-swimmer would try to kill a champion swimmer by drowning her in a lake. It occurs to Jessica that another explanation would be that Carolyn had made the thing up, to pretend that her husband tried to kill her in order to get a big divorce settlement. This tête-a-tête is broken up by the discovery of Carolyn’s body.

And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.

Carolyn’s body was found on the north side of the lake, which apparently is pretty far away from where the resort is. (They never say that they’re on the south side of the lake, nor how big the lake is, but this is how everyone reacts to the body being on the north side of the lake.) Sheriff Tupper says that this blows Jessica’s theory out of the water and clearly proves Howard killed his wife as he (Sheriff Tupper) had been saying all along. Jessica asks him how the body got to the other side of the lake so quickly, to which Sheriff Tupper has no answer.

Some time later, Jessica is investigating something in a bird book.

What she is looking up we are almost conspicuously not told. This leads to a conversation with Grace (the owner of the hotel), who we find out is also a widow. Jessica asks to look at the reservation book, and makes an interesting discovery: Joanna and the Cranes both made their reservation from the same telephone number. Jessica goes and confronts Joanna.

It turns out that Joanna was Howard’s mistress. Howard had promised to divorce his wife and marry Joanna, but then this trip came along. It turns out that the trip was actually Carolyn’s idea, and Joanna made the reservations for Howard to prove that there were no hard feelings. She did, however, also make a reservation for herself, to keep an eye on them. She also came up early, to disguise her connection to Howard.

Jessica surprises Burton, who was taking (poloroid) pictures of birds, and asks to borrow one that also has a picture of Jack Turney in it. They then see the Sheriff arresting Howard, and Burton remarks that Howard won’t like jail, as he can’t stand to be cooped up.

At Amos’ invitation, Jessica accompanies the him and Howard Crane back to Cabot Cove. On the car ride it comes out that Howard is claustrophobic, and he accuses Jessica of having talked to his psychiatrist, who he believes broke confidentiality. He mentions he got accidentally locked in a closet when he was six years old.

It also comes out that Howard is indeed rich, but has no living relatives. He was an only child and his parents are dead. His only uncle and aunt are dead (interestingly, he refers to the uncle as “my crooked uncle Fred”). Even their son, his cousin Arthur, died a few years ago, or at least so he’d heard.

After that conversation comes to a conclusion, Jessica asks Amos to check the photograph of Jack Turney against his wanted file.

Back in Cabot Cove, Jessica, Dr. Halzet, and Sheriff Tupper confer over the autopsy report.

It turns out that Carolyn Crane did indeed drown, but she hand mud in her lungs. Further, she had bits of glass embedded in the skin of her skull, around an abrasion, as if she were hit on the head with a bottle that broke on contact. Except the glass was not bottle glass.

Also, she was wearing a bathing suit under her dress.

This rather frustrates Amos, who complains that until now the case was cut and dried. Howard Crane killed his neglected wife, which Jessica saw him do!

At this, Jessica has a look of realization.

“Yes. Of course. Carolyn Crane was a neglected wife. I should have thought of that. Thank you, Amos.”

(This is here to tell the audience that all of the relevant clues are in and we can start trying to figure out who the murderer is because there will be no new relevant information.)

When Amos asks for what, Jessica explains that she’s thanking him for making her realize her original theory was correct. Carolyn Crane did intend to fake her own murder. What Jessica didn’t realize, at first, was that another man was involved.

At this point a deputy comes in with the information that Jack Turney is a wanted man, for blackmailing married women with whom he’d had affairs and even for assaulting one of them. Amos’ exact words were, “nearly killed one of ’em”.

And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.

When we get back from commercial, Betty Jordan comes back to her room, where her husband is waiting for her.

It turns out that Mr. Jordan tried to surprise Mrs. Jordan on her bike ride, only to find out that no bicycles had been taken out that day. He asks her what is going on, then figures out that she’s having an affair with Jack Turney. Apparently, contrary to what she told Jessica, he does actually care how his wife amuses herself while he’s fishing.

This is interrupted by a scene where Jessica and Sheriff Tupper talk to the owner of the inn, where it turns out that Jack Turney is her brother and she’s been protecting him, but didn’t know the extent of his crimes. Betty Jordan then runs in screaming that her husband has gone after Jack Turney with a gun. We then move to the boat house where Mr. Jordan is threatening to kill Jack Turney with the aforementioned weapon.

Sheriff Tupper and Jessica arrive, and after Amos talks Mr. Jordan out of shooting Jack Turney, we have the denouement. Jessica explains the whole thing, though only after a series of misunderstandings and jumped conclusions by Sheriff Tupper.

Skipping the jumped conclusions for the sake of brevity, it turns out that scuba equipment was missing, which Jack Turney had forgotten to mention (he explains he was hung over and didn’t realize it was missing until later). Carolyn Crane had a lover, with whom she had planned to fake an attempt on her life by her husband. She had attached the stolen scuba gear to the bottom of the boat via the hook she had installed, then when she was sure of her witness she wrestled with her husband and jumped out of the boat. She put on the scuba gear under water and leisurely swam, under water, to the north shore of the lake. There, her lover met her, but instead of giving her love and support, he killed her. He hit her on the head with a pair of binoculars, the only weapon he had to hand, then held her face-down in the mud until she was dead.

When Amos tries to arrest Jack Turney for the murder, Jessica corrects him to Burton Hollis. It turns out that Burton is actually cousin Arthur—that’s how he knew that Howard was claustrophobic. Burton/Arthur had planned the whole thing from the start, including killing Carolyn. Howard’s father had accused Burton’s father of embezzling money and had stolen the family business from him. Burton went through the whole elaborate murder scheme in order to get the money he was owed back.

Later on, as Harry is helping Jessica to go back to Cabot Cove, he asks Jessica what made her suspect Burton was not just an innocent birdwatcher, and she replies that he said that he would look for the nest of the yellow bellied flycatcher in a tree. They nest on the ground, as she confirmed in the book on birds in that scene where she conspicuously didn’t say what she found.

As she and Harry are going out the front door, he tells her that she’s far and away the best mystery writer who ever stayed in this lodge. Jessica closes the door behind them, and at that, the portrait of Edgar Allen Poe falls down with a crash. The sound of it crashing brings Jessica back in, and she looks, astonished, at the fallen painting. And on that, we freeze frame and go to credits.

This is a very fun episode, and takes advantage of what may be one of the cardinal rules of murder mysteries: have a beautiful setting that the reader (or viewer) would love to visit. It’s also got a great setup, and takes a number of well-paced twists and turns on its way to the ending. Something is clearly up with Jack Turney, and they play out the discovery of this at a fairly good pace to distract from the main murder investigation. The reveals on Jack Turney with Betty Jordan work especially well in this regard, as it does hint at the possibility he might have been involved with Carolyn, too. Additionally, the simple human drama of it is distracting.

Speaking of human drama, I didn’t hit on it much in my plot summary, since I was focusing on the murder, but there was a sub-plot in which the widow who is renting the hotel is trying to figure out what to do with her life and whether she wants to run the inn. It’s done sparingly, but comes up often enough to introduce a thread of human interest which pretty clearly as nothing to do with the murder. This is a good move, I think, because it helps to leaven the murder story. It keeps the story more anchored; murder mysteries tend to be better when real life goes on during the murder investigation.

The big problem is the ending. It doesn’t make sense, and ignoring that, it has a significant plot hole in the murder. Ignoring that, a key piece of evidence is very contrived.

I’ll start with the contrived evidence, which is Burton saying, as he and Jessica watched Sheriff Tupper taking Howard into custody, “Howard is not going to like jail. He can’t stand to be cooped up.” There was no earthly reason for him to say this. No one likes jail. It was just volunteering information, that he shouldn’t have had, for no reason whatever. It’s almost on par with the bad guy in Encyclopedia Brown saying, “I never looked inside the kid’s box. I certainly didn’t eat the chocolate chip oatmeal cookies with just a hint of cinnamon that were in it!” It’s one thing when the murderer reveals something he should have known to further his own ends, such as telling a fact he shouldn’t know that implicates someone else in the murder. The distraction of framing the other person can cover for the fact that he shouldn’t have known it. At the very least, there was some temptation for him to do it. Here, there was no reason for Burton to have said anything.

Let’s move on to the plot hole. According to Jessica’s theory of the murder, Cousin Arthur, that is, Burton, planned the whole thing before any of them ever got to the inn. He was, therefore, fulfilling his plan to murder Carolyn when he met her at the shore. Why on earth were his binoculars the only weapon to hand? Had he only put a single minute into the planning, he could have picked up a rock or a stick. Several minutes of planning might have yielded a better weapon still, like a piece of pipe. But even without any planning, he could have hit her with the scuba tank. When it comes to murder weapons, one’s own pair of binoculars, which one not only has been seen with but even drew attention to, is a terrible choice. And without the binocular glass embedded in Carolyn’s skin, there would have been no physical evidence linking him to the murder.

The other problem with the ending is even harder to get over—why on earth did Cousin Arthur kill Carolyn? Both Jessica and Burton seemed to talk as if he would inherit Howard’s money, now that the only other possible heir was dead. The problem, however, is that Howard Crane was still alive, and would presumably remain so for decades. The worst that would happen to him would be that he would be convicted for murder and go to prison for a long time. The rules of inheritance do not kick in when a person goes to prison. (For those curious, the state of Maine abolished the death penalty—for the final time—in 1887.)

In Maine in the 1980s, framing Howard for the murder of Carolyn would mean that Cousin Arthur would never see a penny of the money he believed to be rightfully his. In fact—assuming he didn’t murder Howard—the only way for Cousin Arthur to have gotten his hands on any of Howard’s money would be to keep Carolyn very much alive and marry her after she got a large divorce settlement.

This feels almost like someone ripped the plot off from a British golden age detective story in which a man being convicted of murder would mean that he was hanged within a few weeks and thus framing a man for murder was an effective means of inheriting money from him. In that context, this ending—apart from volunteering private information about Howard and using binoculars as a murder weapon—would make sense. In Maine in the 1980s, it’s nonsensical.

Next week we’re someplace where they race horses for Dead Heat.