by Nancy Bush
Coby didn’t know how she felt about the booze, but she was in no mood to be called names for refusing to join in. She glanced at Rhiannon, who hesitated but then accepted a beer, and given what she’d just shared about her family history, Coby thought she understood why. If Rhiannon was joining in, so would Coby, and in truth, all she wanted to do herself was escape, and so she ended up with a full eight-ounce tumbler of mostly vodka with a splash of Sprite and settled herself into the party.
Jarrod whispered into Coby’s ear, “Telling secrets?” Like his older brother, he was tall, dark, and handsome. But Danner Lockwood, three years older, was the man of her dreams—quietly observant and a bit of a loner—while Jarrod was more of an exhibitionist whose scripted appearance and guitar playing seemed designed to win him female attention.
She looked over at Lucas, who was now half lying on the ground beside Rhiannon, stroking her hair and smiling into her eyes. “Not really,” she said to Jarrod, sort of depressed that Rhiannon and Lucas’s relationship was now looking like the real deal.
“Oh, come on. What was your secret?” Jarrod teased Coby.
“I didn’t have one,” she said truthfully, earning her the evil eye from Wynona, who was still recovering from being overheard.
“Yes, you did. We all did,” Wynona snapped.
“Who invited you?” Genevieve suddenly demanded of all of the guys. “Huh? Who invited you?”
“Jesus, Knapp. PMS, why don’t you.” Kirk Grassi yawned and added, “Your ass is tight enough to hold water.”
There were sniggers from the rest of the guys and Genevieve scoured them all with a baleful look. “We were having a private meeting,” she said with a bit of acid.
“I’ll say,” Vic Franzen said. He burped heartily and lifted his beer can in a salute to himself. “Greer there was telling how she and Coach Renfro did the dirty.” He gave Wynona some hip action to emphasize his point.
Wynona’s face was pale, deep circles beneath her eyes. “It wasn’t Coach Renfro.”
“Sure it was,” Vic said.
“It wasn’t!” she declared.
“There’s nobody else,” he responded.
“Shut the fuck up,” McKenna told him coolly.
“Sure thing, lesbo.” Vic smirked and looked around for support from the rest of his buds, but they had collectively cast their eyes aside, not willing to get into that dogfight.
Ellen said in a near whisper to Coby, “Maybe we should go back.”
“Maybe we should all have another drink,” Kirk suggested, looking straight at Ellen.
Coby glanced over at Wynona, who seemed shrunken in on herself. She thought how she would feel if the guys had appeared when she was telling her supposedly most private, deepest, darkest secret. Or Ellen. What would have happened if they’d heard about her abortion? Or of Yvette having sex at thirteen?
Some secrets just shouldn’t be shared with a group, she concluded, and it was her last serious thought of the evening before the effects of alcohol took over and they all let go of their annoyance over the boys’ intrusion and settled in to party.
Chapter 2
Coby paid for her coffee, jammed her rain hat on her head, and stepped back through Halfway There’s vestibule into the miserable weather outside. If this current November storm was any indication, the winter ahead was going to be a doozy.
Hurrying through the rain, she paused to look at her axle, couldn’t tell anything more, jumped in her car, and switched on the ignition. Tossing her hat into the passenger seat, she snapped the seat belt, then slowly backed out onto the highway again. She eased the accelerator down and was gratified when the car seemed to be holding its own, not straying to the right as it had been. She held her breath, expelled it, then held it again, for several miles, and when nothing worse happened decided that maybe the car had been pulling to the right because of the wind and rain, that the pothole she’d banged through hadn’t damaged the axle. Anyway, she would go on that assumption until she found out differently. She just would drive more slowly than she wanted, which was practically a prerequisite anyway given the shitty weather.
Her mind tumbled back to that long-ago beach party as if it were stuck in a groove. Every time she drove to the coast her brain traveled this same path, some times worse than others, like tonight.
The day following that fateful night of the campfire, Lucas Moore’s body was found floating in the surf. He’d fallen from a cliff above onto rocks below, and the waves had dragged him into the ocean and then back to the tide pools where he’d gotten hung up, his arms and legs and hair pulled and pushed by the ebb and flow of the water. All the girls were devastated. Not just because one of their group had died, because it was Lucas. Lucas! Who seemed touched by the gods. That morning they were wailing and screaming and pulling at their hair, even fainting, in grief and denial, and when Detective Clausen showed up it was a melee.
Tell me what happened, in your own words.
She’d told Clausen about the beach party, how they’d been sitting around a campfire, just talking, bonding as good friends do. The words were ashes in her mouth but she would rather cut her tongue out than tell their secrets. If someone else did, so be it, but it wouldn’t be Coby.
But no one did.
And then she told the detective about the guys showing up with alcohol and how they’d all imbibed. That she would confess because it could have been the reason Lucas died, and she knew Wynona would not be able to keep that secret. She’d had a few drinks herself, but her father was still the vice principal. The shit was going to hit the fan in more ways than one, so Coby spilled about their drinking with no serious regrets.
She and Clausen were together in the den, the room he chose to conduct interviews so they could have a modicum of privacy. Not everyone wanted to talk to the detective; well, no one did, actually. But they were called in one by one, so Coby related what she knew, keeping the secrets they’d told around the campfire to herself. She realized even through her grief and fear that Clausen was just doing his duty, gathering the facts. She sensed he didn’t think there had been foul play, but he needed to talk to them all to fill out an accident report.
Of course, the fact that they were all drinking became a significant factor later on, and there was serious talk from the authorities about going after whoever had supplied the alcohol. Then it was learned the guys had stolen the beer and vodka from their own parents’ houses, and the horrified dads of the girls heard this and looked shattered. No one knew exactly what to do. Eventually, the boys’ parents all heard about what happened and their punishment was meted out in varying degrees of harshness, depending on who those parents were. Jarrod’s parents were divorced and he lived with his father, who grounded him until January. His older brother, Danner, was away at college, presumably, and Coby didn’t learn till later what he thought of it, which was that his little brother and his friends were boneheads who should have taken better care of their friend. Lucas’s parents were also divorced, each spouse remarried, and they, though heartbroken and miserable, blamed their son as much as anyone for drinking and didn’t try to go after anyone for retribution.
Coby was up front about her own drinking, but she was quiet about Pass the Candle. She also neglected to mention that Lucas Moore had kissed more than one girl that night. She didn’t say that after Rhiannon fell asleep, he moved over to talk to some of the others and found himself kissing Genevieve and Dana, and yes, even Coby herself, later on. She didn’t point out that drinking alcohol made a convenient excuse for why they wanted and planned to kiss Lucas, even though they knew he was with Rhiannon; that being under the influence was a means to claim they didn’t know what they were doing later, in case Rhiannon found out.
In the end Lucas Moore’s death was ruled an accident. It was decided he fell from the edge of an unstable cliff above the ocean, impaired by alcohol consumption, and died of massive trauma to his head. Even when the lab work came back and his blood alcohol level was .00, no one
wanted to believe it was anything more. So he hadn’t been drinking. So what? Then the accomplished surfer/ athlete had simply fallen to his death.
Accidents happen.
“You didn’t see him after he left your campfire?” Detective Clausen asked at the end of Coby’s questioning.
“No.”
A lie. She had seen him. Briefly. While fuzzy-headed. Late in the night when she took a stumbling walk to the ocean and stood with her bare feet in the water, numbed by the cold, and Lucas appeared beside her and raised his arms skyward and howled like a wolf. When he turned her way, his mouth a slash of white in the moonlight, she just wanted to crush her mouth on his.
“Isn’t this great?” he’d said, tossing an arm to encompass the black ocean with its white ruffled waves.
“I think I’m drunk,” Coby responded, to which he laughed and reached out for her hands, rubbing them between his as he felt how cold they were. She looked up at him, seeing a little double. “Where’s Rhiannon?”
“Oh, you know.” He inclined his head in the general direction from where they’d come. And then he pulled her forward and kissed her on the lips. She felt the heat on her mouth when the rest of her skin was cold, and the whole thing was cool and sweet, and kinda felt like a dream.
Pulling away reluctantly, she said, “You’re a bad boyfriend.”
“I like you,” he said, and kissed her again.
Vaguely she remembered somebody breaking them apart. Jarrod, maybe? Although it seemed more like Paul Lessington. And then in one of those snapshots that stood out later, a sharp memory surfacing from the drunken haze, she recalled seeing Lucas kissing Genevieve sometime later during the night.
She’d been right: He was a bad boyfriend. A bad, bad boyfriend.
But she didn’t tell Detective Clausen any of that. She told him about the guys and the alcohol but revealed as little as she could about Lucas himself. It just seemed wrong and unimportant. He’d fallen. It was sad and horrifying and a total loss, but he’d simply fallen.
Twelve years . . .
Twelve years since then.
Now Coby flexed her hands on the steering wheel of her Sentra and drew a deep breath. The road to the coast was dark, wet, slippery, and lonely, and she was driving with careful control, slowing to almost a crawl around the blind corners and snaking curves. She was in a hurry, but hurrying could get you killed on this stretch of two-lane highway, even without a bent axle.
A lot of things could get you killed.
Twelve years.
She seemed destined to dwell in the past tonight, and why not? It wasn’t just that she was going to the beach. For the first time in years she was going to be seeing many of the players from that fateful night: guys, girls, even dads. This was not a reunion she was looking forward to, and if there were any way she could have gotten out of it, she would have.
But she was stuck. Almost as powerless as she’d been all those years ago when they’d foolishly played Pass the Candle and the guys had invaded their secret meeting and the next morning Lucas Moore’s body had been discovered floating in the surf, his long hair tangled with seaweed, his surfer-boy good looks reduced to chilling purplish skin and cobalt blue lips.
Now, cautiously lifting a hand from the wheel, she ran it pensively through her auburn shoulder-length hair, brushing out leftover rain that had found its way beneath her hat. She’d spent these twelve years trying desperately to forget about Lucas Moore and Pass the Candle and a whole lot of other things. She hadn’t learned her lesson with Lucas, either. A few years after graduation she’d run into Danner Lockwood, her other secret fantasy, and had gone out of her way to get him to notice her. He had, too; in that she’d succeeded. But what she’d hoped was a fabulous romance had been a fling. She’d been infatuated, even more so with Danner than with fickle Lucas. And for a time Danner had been sort of interested in her, too, but then the relationship had died beneath them.
And later, another tragedy: Rhiannon Gallworth, Lucas’s supposed girlfriend, fell from a hiking trail to her death shortly after graduating from college.
Slam! The car suddenly jerked sideways again and Coby quickly grabbed the wheel hard with both hands as the Nissan shuddered and shimmied toward the side ditch, its back wheel having squarely hit the pothole she’d tried to miss. Carefully she guided it back onto the road, hoping she hadn’t screwed the damn thing up even further.
“Good God,” she murmured, her heart still racing. Six o’clock at the end of November. It had been dark since four thirty and the rain was a black, unrelenting curtain. At this rate she would be lucky to get to the beach house in one piece.
Swallowing, she waited a dozen more miles while the Nissan’s wheels spun on the wet tarmac and her headlights split the dark road ahead before allowing herself to uneasily revisit the past again. Rhiannon’s death, so similar to Lucas’s, at least in manner, had led some of their group to speculate that they were both suicides. A kind of lover’s leap where the first couldn’t find a will to live, and the second couldn’t live without the first.
Coby didn’t believe it for a moment. Lucas’s death was an accident. Period. She was still going with that. He’d fallen from a rocky cliff to the rocks below.
An accident, nothing more.
Like Rhiannon’s, years later.
Both accidents.
Unless . . . ?
Coby clamped down on the thought before it could fully materialize. No. Nope. Nada. She was not going to start that nightmare again. Lucas Moore’s death had been ruled an accident, and Rhiannon’s was just an unhappy coincidence. Whatever happened, happened. Nothing more to say.
But at Rhiannon’s memorial service, where Coby had seen the whole gang again, or at least those still living in the area, she’d allowed some doubts to creep in; she hadn’t been able to keep them out. How could they both die so young? she’d asked herself. How could there be two accidents where they both fell? Was there something cosmic involved here, or were their deaths the work of a murderer?
McKenna had been the only one to dare ask such a question. When they were outside the service, standing on the steps of the church, watching the sea of family members drift out, she’d voiced the thought on everyone’s mind: “Two too many accidents for my taste.” Then she left, heading for a waiting motorcycle to roar away and out of Coby’s life.
Coby had gone on to finish her undergraduate studies at Portland State University, earning a degree in business. She’d taken a job at a law firm while she considered going on to graduate school and working toward an MBA, or maybe applying for law school. But she’d found a niche for herself at Jacoby, Jacoby, and Rosenthal, a prestigious downtown Portland law firm, and had never changed course. Her firm dealt mainly in divorce and custody issues, and as an offshoot, the establishment of financial health for the firm’s clients. That’s where Coby came in. She was a case manager, which meant she was the one who counseled the newly divorced into understanding their financial situation as it was in its current state, not as it had been. She was the one who had to break the bad news time and again, the news that though their client might have ended up with the house, mortgage free, that real estate they now owned—generally a huge property, for JJ&R clients tended to be among the wealthiest in the city—was a money-sucking albatross around their neck that would drain them of every penny within two years’ time, given the cost of property taxes and upkeep, yada, yada, yada. Coby was the one who advised them they would need to sell and hopefully buy something they could afford, something more modest. She was the one who pointed out in black and white that their previous lifestyle, the way they had lived, their world, was over.
It was a bitch of a job, really, but she was good at it. Understanding, but firm, impervious to the abuse they sometimes threw at her as she often became the target for their anger and frustration instead of their ex, the perceived block to their ultimate happiness. Coby wouldn’t say she was used to it; she’d actually had a paperweight tossed at her once by a
hysterical client, who ended up checking into a hospital for a few days directly afterward for “exhaustion.” But she’d grown a pretty hard crust over the years and felt she could handle most anything thrown her way, so to speak, at least at work.
That afternoon she had just finished a particularly grueling meeting with a woman who had cried bitterly into a tissue the whole time, Saturday being the only time she could arrange to see Coby as she felt she did not need counseling and had only grudgingly agreed to the meeting because her lawyer, the firm’s Joe Hamlin, had insisted.
“But I’m getting the house free and clear,” she’d declared frostily for about the fifth time. “He left me for that tattooed whore! I made him give me the house, and it’s worth a fortune!”
“Yes,” Coby agreed.
“We sank every penny into the house over the years. Every fucking penny. It’s all we had, and now it’s mine!”
“The house is worth a lot,” Coby agreed.
“And I’m keeping it! We’re in the worst recession in decades! Nothing’s selling. I’m not some stupid bimbo, you know. I’m aware of what’s going on,” she pointed out, her perfectly coiffed hair shivering a bit, echoing her outrage. “I am not selling until the market recovers!”
Her name was Shannon Pontifica, and she and her ex had bargained to the last cent over the palatial mansion located in Dunthorpe, one of the most tony areas just outside of Portland. Shannon had waived a suggestion of higher alimony in order to keep the house, a proposition Coby had tried to dissuade her from, to no avail. No amount of explaining the difference between cash versus equity had filtered through her stubbornness and attachment to the real estate. Shannon didn’t want to look at the fact that she was giving up cold, hard cash in the name of some nebulous value an appraiser would guess at, on a property she didn’t intend to sell anyway. The end result? She was basically broke. She had no income apart from the reduced alimony, which wouldn’t come close to covering the cost of her home’s upkeep. She had to sell or lose the property.