by Paula Graves
She arrived at the Smokehouse Grill a few minutes late. The red-haired restaurant hostess directed her toward a large private room at the back of the restaurant and, with a smile, warned her it was a rowdy crowd tonight.
She tried to slip into the room unnoticed, but she’d been away from Purgatory so long that her reappearance was enough to elicit shouts of greeting, excited hugs and even a kiss from Logan Miles, one of Donnie’s old pals from his varsity baseball team.
“I swear, you don’t look like you’ve aged a day since high school,” Logan said with a sheepish grin as his wife gave him a mostly good-humored punch to the arm.
Sara knew better than to believe him, of course, but when she looked around the room at some of her former classmates, now more than a decade older and many married with children, like Kelly and Josh Partlow, she realized that in some ways, a part of her life had been on hold for a long time.
She and Donnie had discussed children, of course, but they were both working for the police force in Birmingham and parenthood had seemed like something they could defer until they were better established in their careers. Then Donnie had started becoming more and more obsessed with his sister’s murder the longer it remained unsolved, and the thought of starting a family became such a distant, unrealistic notion that they’d stopped talking about having children at all.
Now he was gone. There’d be no children. No possibility of restarting the clock and moving forward together into the life they should have had.
“Sara!” Kelly Partlow finally wriggled her way through the crowd to reach her side and give her a fierce hug of greeting. “You came!”
“I came,” Sara said with a smile and a nod, pushing her bleaker thoughts to the back of her mind. She’d come here to look forward, not back.
Josh Partlow trailed up behind his wife and smiled at Sara. “Hey there, Dunkirk. Lookin’ good.”
Sara gave him a light punch on the shoulder, wishing he wasn’t eyeing her as if he expected her to self-destruct any second. “Back at you, hotshot. Wow, big crowd.”
“Well, I might have let it slip that I’d talked to Cain Dennison about the get-together, and he didn’t come right out and say no to coming.” Kelly shot Sara a smile that was part sheepish, part naughty.
“You convinced people there’s actually a chance he’ll show up to a high-school get-together?” Sara arched her eyebrows at her old friend. “Wow, you should sell beachfront property in Kansas or something.”
“It could happen,” Kelly defended, hooking her hand through Sara’s arm and guiding her toward the back of the room where a small buffet of appetizers had been set up by the restaurant. “Oh, by the way, there are a few teachers and other staffers who show up for these things now and then—Mrs. Murphy has been a few times, and Coach Allen and Mrs. Petrelli—so if you have an overdue book from the school library or an uncompleted detention, be warned.”
“I’m good,” Sara said with a smile, a little overwhelmed by Kelly’s chatter but already enjoying herself more than she expected.
“Yeah, you always were the teacher’s pet, weren’t you?” Kelly made a face. “I don’t know how we became friends. I swear, I was your polar opposite in high school!”
“Opposites attract?”
Kelly’s attention fixed on something across the room. “So they say.”
Sara followed her gaze and spotted a tall, good-looking man in his early forties standing next to a slim, pretty woman with neatly styled blond hair and big blue eyes. “Wow, Coach Allen. Has he even aged?”
Kelly made a face. “And his wife, Becky. We all hate her.”
“We hate her?” Sara hadn’t known the coach or his wife well, but Becky Allen had always seemed nice enough.
“She hasn’t aged, either,” Kelly said with an exaggerated sigh. “And she’s married to that hunk of a baseball coach we all had crushes on in high school. Lucky b—”
“Sheath those claws, gorgeous.” Josh joined them, handing Kelly a glass of wine. “Anything for you, Sara?”
She shook her head. “I’ll grab a glass of tea in a minute.”
“This is so not the place to catch up on everything,” Kelly said, sipping her wine, “but we’re going to have a sit-down soon, right? You’ve been gone forever and I want to hear everything about what you’re doing now.”
“Won’t need a sit-down for that,” Sara said with a rueful smile. “I’ve left the Birmingham P.D. and sold my house in Alabama. So, basically, all I’m doing right now is trying to figure out what’s next.”
Kelly’s eyes widened. “Why did you not tell me this?”
Sara shrugged. “Well, I looked for an ‘I just quit my job and uprooted my life’ card I could stick in the mail to announce it to my friends, but the Hallmark store was fresh out.”
“Are you staying with your folks?” Kelly’s eyes widened so much that Sara feared she was about to do herself harm. “Do you need a place to stay? Josh and I can totally make room—”
“Kelly, you have three kids, five dogs, six cats and four goats. Where on earth would I stay?”
“Five goats. One of them was a girl and we didn’t realize it,” Josh interjected. At Sara’s quizzical look, he shrugged. “Look, it had long hair and I don’t exactly go around examining goat privates as a rule.”
Sara laughed. “Well, as much as I appreciate the offer, I’m staying in my grandfather’s cabin up on Sandler Ridge while I clean it out and decide what to do with it. He left it to me when he died last year.”
“Is it falling apart?”
“No, actually it’s in better shape than I thought—”
“Sara?” A masculine voice interrupted her midthought. She turned to find Jim Allen and his wife standing behind her, both giving her the “How’re you holding up?” expression she was beginning to grow sick of seeing on the faces of old friends and acquaintances. “Jim Allen. I don’t know if you remember me—”
“Of course, I remember.” She made herself smile. “Donnie’s favorite coach.” Turning to the pretty blonde beside him, she nodded a greeting. “Hi, Mrs. Allen.”
“Becky,” she said with a laugh. “I’m reaching the age where hearing other grown-ups call me Mrs. Allen is very bad for my ego.” She extended a slim, well-manicured hand that made Sara glad she’d taken time to buff the rough edges of her own work-chipped fingernails before coming to the party.
She shook Becky’s hand. “Big crowd tonight, huh?”
Jim laughed. “Not a whole hell of a lot else to do in Purgatory, Tennessee, on a Saturday night.”
“Good thing the Vols have a bye week,” Josh interjected with a grin. “Hi, Coach. Becky.”
“Oh, honey, the organizers of these shindigs have some sort of spy in the Tennessee football program if you ask me,” Kelly added with a laugh, giving Becky Allen a friendly hug. “They always manage to work these get-togethers around the ball game start times in the fall.”
Next to her, Josh gave a sudden start, his gaze directed toward the entrance of the private room. Even as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, a flutter of gasps filtered through from the front of the room. On the heels of the quiet expressions of surprise, conversation in the room went from a deafening buzz to almost complete silence.
“Well, hell, Kelly,” Josh murmured, pulling a twenty from his wallet. “You win.”
Following his gaze, Sara saw what had shocked the crowd to silence.
Cain Dennison stood in the doorway, looking like a rabbit in a snare.
* * *
OF ALL THE bad ideas he’d ever had, and he’d had some doozies in his day, coming to the Purgatory High School alumni get-together had to be near the top of the list. Everybody in the whole damn room was staring at him as if he was wearing the skins of murder victims instead of his best pair of pants, an honest-to-goodness button-down shirt and a brown leather jacket. His hair needed cutting, he supposed, but he’d combed it neatly enough.
He’d even shaved.
As the stunned silence stretched on well past the point of comfort, he thought about saying, “Wrong room,” and heading back out the way he came. But just as he started to open his mouth, a tall, dark-haired woman in a curve-hugging brown dress stepped forward and shot him a quizzical look as she extended her hand in greeting. It took a second to realize the brunette bombshell was Sara Lindsey, all dressed up and looking like pure temptation.
Her shoulder-length bob of hair framed her face in soft, tousled curls, and tonight, some of the color was back in her cheeks. Her dress skimmed her body like a caress, with a skirt that swirled in tantalizing sweeps around her well-toned thighs. Beneath the skirt, the rest of her legs seemed to stretch for miles, ending in a pair of simple flat shoes that should have looked plain. On her, they looked sexy as hell.
Her dark eyes crackled with energy as she dared him to shake her hand.
He took her hand, felt the slightly roughened texture of her palm against his, and felt as if the whole world had dropped from beneath his feet.
“Good thing I’m not a gambling woman,” Sara murmured as he reluctantly released her hand, “because I’d have lost money betting against your coming here tonight.”
He fell into step with her as she started walking toward the back of the room, careful to look only at her instead of the staring crowd that slowly began to settle into conversation again. The whispers swirling around him invoked his name more often than not, but he decided not to listen. They’d get tired of talking about him eventually, and maybe he could get around to doing what he’d come here tonight to do.
“Kelly Partlow was nice enough to ask me to come. I didn’t want to be rude and stand her up.”
“Is this part of your investigation?” she asked, her tone edged with hardness. “You think someone here might tell you that I secretly hated my husband and wanted him dead?”
“I don’t think you hated your husband or wanted him dead.”
“Your client does.”
He turned to face her. “I don’t think she believes you wanted him dead. I think she’s looking for someone to blame for an accident that stole her only living child from her.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, then her eyelashes dipped to hide her eyes from him. “I don’t have anyone to blame but myself. I was driving. Whatever happened was my fault.”
“Accidents happen. Sometimes it’s nobody’s fault.” He touched her arm lightly, but it was enough to snap her gaze up to meet his again.
“Then you’re here for another reason,” she said, her voice low.
“Maybe I’m here to renew a few old acquaintances. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Her gaze dipped again.
He bent his head close to hers so she could hear his whisper. “Or are you here to see if anyone knows who killed Renee?”
She looked up at him, her expression fierce. “Maybe I am.”
She was tough. He hadn’t realized that about her. Really, before now he hadn’t thought much about her at all, beyond the basics. Donnie Lindsey’s wife, Birmingham police detective—those were just words, really, identifiers that helped him place her in context with his investigation.
The truth was, he had two pictures of her in his mind. One was the Sara Dunkirk he’d run into occasionally at school, passing in the halls or outside waiting for the bus. She’d been a shy, skinny freshman, and he’d been so wrapped up in Renee back then that he hadn’t looked twice at other girls. And even if he had, a skinny fourteen-year-old beanpole like Sara wouldn’t have been on his radar at all. That had been the sum total of his memory of Sara Dunkirk until three years ago, when he’d run across the accident scene at the bottom of Black Creek Gorge.
His other picture of Sara Lindsey was a bloody, gravely injured woman in a mangled truck cab, screaming her husband’s name in fear and pain. And if there was any image of Sara Dunkirk Lindsey that had stuck in his memory since then, it was that heart-shattering moment of fear when he was afraid he was watching her last, desperate moments of life.
The woman standing in front of him fit neither of those images. She wasn’t shy. She wasn’t broken.
But she was scarred. He could see the faint white lines of her healed wounds, up close. A jagged streak that snaked down the side of her neck. Surgical scars on her left arm where the surgeons had repaired her broken humerus. There would be other scars, hidden by that snug brown dress, constant reminders of what she’d lost.
He knew what those kinds of inescapable reminders of a painful past could to do a person....
“I can’t believe you really came.” Kelly Partlow’s voice dragged his thoughts back from a morass of self-pity.
He smiled at her. “How could I say no when you asked so nicely?”
Kelly’s pretty face dimpled. “You remember my husband, don’t you? Josh Partlow?”
“I think we had an English class together,” Josh said, extending his hand for a shake.
Josh had also been one of the baseball team members who’d threatened him outside the school shortly after Renee’s murder, but if the other man remembered that little detail from their history, he didn’t let it show.
A few minutes later, however, when Kelly dragged Sara off to another side of the room to renew some old acquaintances, Josh edged closer to Cain, lowering his voice. “Thanks for not spitting in my face. You’d have been within your rights.”
Cain paused in the middle of picking out something to eat from the appetizer buffet to look at the other man. “I’ve made it a rule to leave bad stuff in the past if I can.”
“It’s a good rule,” Josh said with a nod. “Renee was a sweet girl and everybody was rocked by what happened to her. When you’re young and confused and angry, you do stupid things, you know?”
“You look for someone to blame,” Cain murmured, remembering his earlier conversation with Sara.
“Yeah. You look for someone to blame.”
And he’d been an easy target, Cain knew, walking around Purgatory like a wounded animal, snapping at everyone, even the handful of people who’d tried to reach out to him.
Josh lowered his voice. “Nobody knew your father was the one leaving those bruises on you, man. Every time you came in all black-and-blue, we just figured you’d gotten yourself into another fight. If we’d known—”
Cain shook his head, not wanting any part of this conversation. “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change anything.”
“Maybe it would have. If we’d known.”
Cain pinned him with a hard stare. “I wouldn’t have cared for your pity then any more than now.”
Josh held up his hands. “Fair enough.”
Cain took a quick, deep breath through his nose, pushing away the old bitterness. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“No, don’t apologize. I wouldn’t care to be pitied, either. And, just so you know, I don’t pity you. Frankly, I’m kind of in awe you got through it.”
“It wasn’t all him, you know.” Part of Cain wanted to leave this place as quickly as he could and find somewhere small and dark where he could lick his old wounds in private. But he’d spent a whole lot of years trying to pull himself out of that self-imposed isolation, and coming here tonight had been a big step in that process. Running away now would be like admitting defeat.
And Cain had long ago decided defeat was not an option.
“You’re not blaming yourself for what he did, are you?”
Cain shook his head, shooting Josh a faint smile. “I just meant that sometimes the bruises were from one of those fights I was always getting myself into. Don’t turn me into a saintly superhero.”
“Yeah, no.” Josh flashed a wry grin. “Saintly superhero never occurred to me, Dennison. Trust me on that.”
Cain returned the grin, deciding he might like Josh Partlow after all.
* * *
AFTER SPENDING HALF an hour following Kelly Partlow around the private dining room, Sara had begun to think the car accident had robbed her of
more than just her memory of the days before and after the accident. She recognized fewer than half of the people Kelly chatted with, despite Kelly’s obvious familiarity with them all.
“Oh, honey, you probably didn’t know half these people when you lived here,” Kelly said with a laugh when Sara confessed her confusion a few minutes later, after they’d paused in the social gadding about to grab another glass of wine for Kelly and a second iced tea for Sara. “Remember, Josh is a lawyer. He represents half the people in town, including pro bono cases. And as the receptionist at his law office, I know them, too. And their families and in-laws and—”
Sara gave an exaggerated shudder. “Enough said.”
“And I know some people from these get-togethers,” Kelly added. “I’ve made friends with tons of people who were at Purgatory High before we were there.”
Some of whom Renee Lindsey might have known, Sara realized. Maybe the mysterious father of her baby had been someone who’d already graduated rather than someone in her own graduating class.
“Sara, why are you really here?” Kelly asked softly, looking up at her with sharp blue eyes that reminded Sara why they’d really become best friends all those years ago. Kelly might not be an honor roll student, but she’d been as smart as a whip when it came to understanding people. Sara had always liked that about her. Kelly’s combination of insight and forthrightness had kept Sara honest, forced her to examine her own motives.
“I’m here to find out who killed Renee Lindsey,” she answered bluntly.
Kelly’s eyebrows rose. “You think the killer is here?”
Sara glanced around to make sure nobody was listening to their conversation. “I don’t know. It’s possible, don’t you think?”
Kelly took a surreptitious look around the room. Her gaze settled on her husband talking to Cain Dennison for a second, then snapped back to meet Sara’s, her blue eyes widening. “Oh, my God, you don’t think it’s Cain Dennison, do you? I thought he was cleared. Is that why you went and dragged him in here when he looked ready to bolt?”