by Rick Mofina
Some mistakes can never be forgotten—or forgiven.
Janie Klassyn was only fourteen years old when she made the blood pact with her friends. She could never imagine she was setting in motion the horrifying crime that would tear her peaceful prairie town apart.
Twenty years later in California, school counselor Emma Grant struggles to keep her past buried. But when she finds a note on her car threatening to reveal her secret, it becomes harder to keep up the deception. Even her teenage stepdaughter suspects that Emma is hiding something. Now, with her celebrated true-crime author husband digging into a decades-old murder case for his next book, and a suspicious accident involving someone who’s been following her, the perfect life Emma’s built is crumbling, forcing her to take desperate steps to save it…
Keep reading for a sneak peek of Their Last Secret.
CHAPTER 1
Eternity, Manitoba
2000
Waiting to die. Or dying to get out.
Those seemed like your only choices when fate had dumped you in a small, prairie town where nothing happened and your secret torment burned like a lit fuse.
That’s how it was for Janie, Nikki and Marie, best friends born in and, as Nikki said, condemned to, Eternity.
The rest of civilization was at least a two-hour drive east in the metropolis of Winnipeg. Saskatchewan was about an hour west. Nothing to see there but the sky and land so flat you’d think you were driving to the edge of the world.
Drive south for about an hour and you’d see rolling hills, or what some people called mountains, until you came to the North Dakota border. If you really wanted to push things, you could spend a day getting to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
If you were Janie, Nikki and Marie, growing up in Eternity, there was nowhere to go. You were a prisoner, yearning for something, anything, to happen.
They’d all just turned fourteen in the previous months. It was the summer that preceded high school. A fact they were pondering on another scorching day while they considered things to do as they walked through town.
The Windflower Mall was out because last month the clerks at the drug mart had suspected Nikki of shoplifting eyeliner. They couldn’t prove it because she’d deftly dropped the evidence in an old lady’s bag. Still, security called police. Nikki wasn’t charged but they took her fingerprints and her picture, and under some law or rule, banned her from the building for six months. Nikki took it as both a badge of honor and an affront that stoked the rage forever bubbling under her skin. For as long as Janie and Marie had known her, Nikki seemed to be at war with the world, carrying a deep, invisible wound.
“They can ban me for all my life—I don’t care,” Nikki said. “We see the same people at the food court, nothing to do there but laugh at seniors, Hutterites and cripples.”
Besides, Nikki boasted, she’d stolen enough makeup from that place to last years and she piled it on to create the mask she hid behind. With her quickly maturing body, she looked older than Janie and Marie, who believed her claim that she was no longer a virgin.
After Nikki’s father died when she was younger, her mother, who was a cashier at Eternity Market Mart, began drinking and gambling, running up massive debts until she couldn’t pay the bills. She met a man named Telforde, a contract painter at the bar, and they moved in with him. That was her family. Nikki smoked, drank her mother’s alcohol, read dark books and listened to bands like Exact a Toll and Kill Me Now.
As for Marie, she had beautiful skin and soft brown eyes. She was a smart-dumb girl, a genius at math and science but always missing the obvious in real life. She was self-conscious about being a little heavy. A few years ago, her little brother, Pike, had choked on a piece of apple when the family was having a picnic by the creek. He died right in front of her. Marie felt safest with Janie and Nikki. They allowed her to love NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys and maintain her crush on one of the Hanson brothers. She was always humming “MMMBop,” because Pike had loved it.
Janie’s battle with zits didn’t detract from her almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones. Of the three girls, Janie’s personality was the sweetest. She loved French fries, Coke, ice-cream and Elton John. She liked all kinds of music, even—to Nikki’s horror—country. But the weird thing was all three of them loved one particular song, an old one, “Ring of Fire.” They sang it together, belting out the chorus because for each of them something was burning inside.
The girls had known each other all their lives and while Janie was not sure what she wanted to do with hers, she was resolute in her desire to one day get as far away from Eternity as possible. To move someplace like New York, London or Paris. She was already working on her dream by saving her babysitting money.
Janie and her friends were determined to leave this town for their own painful reasons. But today, they just wanted to escape boredom.
“We haven’t been to the cemetery in a while,” Nikki suggested, once more forgetting about Marie, not seeing the hurt in her eyes.
Nikki liked counting the graves, guessing how people had died. Once she jumped into a freshly dug grave and lay in it for a while. “It’s cold in here.” Janie and Marie had to help her climb out.
It was during the last time they’d gone to the cemetery and Nikki was doing her Empress of the Dark thing when Marie couldn’t take it anymore.
“I hate it when you do this crap. I don’t like coming here like this.”
Nikki smirked and shrugged. Fighting tears, Marie ran across the cemetery. Janie and Nikki let her go, then sat under the shade of the tall poplar trees, listening to the birdsong. In the distance they saw Marie kneeling at her brother’s grave, which they always avoided when they came here, the breezes carrying her voice as she sang Pike’s favorite song.
Some days Marie got so sad about Pike. Other days it was like she was almost glad he was dead. It was a little disturbing.
Now, after digesting Nikki’s suggestion, Marie said: “I do not want to go to the cemetery today.”
Nikki took stock of Marie’s face, reconsidered. “What about the railroad tracks or down to the creek?”
“We’ve done all those places to death,” Janie said.
“What about the restaurant at the golf course?” Marie said.
Nikki rolled her eyes and Janie gave Marie a sharp glance, correcting Marie’s memory lapse as to why the Eternity Country Club was off-limits.
Janie’s mother was a waitress at the club’s restaurant, a job she was still clinging to after the incident that happened the first and only time the girls had gone there.
It was in the spring and Nikki had dared them to go. “We’re just as good as those rich snobs,” Nikki had said. “I bet they’ve got the best desserts and I’ve got money from the creep.” She waved cash she’d stolen from her mom’s boyfriend.
Janie had been uneasy about going to the restaurant because of her mother’s caution. “I know you and your friends wander all over town but you are never to go there,” her mother had said. “It’s not for us. It’s not the mall—it’s where I work. Do you understand?”
Janie had never set foot in the place.
A few times in the past she, Marie and Nikki had walked up to the gate of the forbidden kingdom, marveling at its vast and perfect green lawns, the trees, the waterfall, people gliding around in the little carts and the clubhouse, a low-standing stone building that beckoned them.
They were curious about what it would be like to go inside.
Maybe it was Nikki’s bold defiance of authority that drove her to break rules. The way she saw it, the world owed her a better life than the one she was living, and maybe it was because she seemed older, more experienced, but these forces shaped her persona, never failing to pull Janie and Marie into her orbit.
“Are you little girls afraid to walk in there? Because I’m not.” Nikki had challenged them that day.
Marie turned to Janie—it was up to her.
It was a Saturday and Janie’s mom was not workin
g at the golf course. When Janie had left that morning, she was still in bed. Janie had figured by the empty bottle on the kitchen table from the night before that she’d be sleeping much of the day. Ever since Janie’s dad had walked out on them two years ago, leaving them nothing but bills, her mother had become what Janie had later learned was a functioning alcoholic.
“Come on,” Nikki said.
“But we’re not members,” Janie said. “We won’t get in.”
“We’ll get in. I’ll do all the talking,” Nikki said. “Let’s do it. It’ll be fun.”
Janie saw sparks in Nikki’s eyes, felt herself being pulled, felt her resistance crumble. Nikki was their leader and always would be. So they went, setting in motion events that would change Eternity forever.
Copyright © 2020 by Highway Nine, Inc.
Their Last Secret—available now!
ISBN-13: 9780369701459
Full Tilt
First published in 2015. This edition published in 2020.
Copyright © 2015 by Highway Nine, Inc.
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises ULC. 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor Toronto, ON M5H 4E3 Canada.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com