by Nancy Bush
And with that he found his guitar, settled it over his shoulder, returned to Genevieve’s side, and started lightly strumming, silently inviting everyone to relax and stop ripping at each other.
Coby, after a moment, did just that, determining she would leave the group once they were all settled in. Her last thought before falling asleep herself was that Lucas Moore might be a man-slut, but he was good-looking and boyishly sexy and they all sure liked kissing him.
Chapter 3
Jarrod’s guitar playing did the trick; everyone settled down around the campfire and into their sleeping bags. The evening grew later and the beach got colder and Coby let alcohol keep her there long after she was ready to leave. She nodded off for a while, distantly aware of the other kids continuing to argue loudly for a while, but she lost track of the gist of it and didn’t much care anyway.
Late in the night, she climbed from her bag, looking around at the humps of bodies in other sleeping bags, unable to tell who was who. Some of the guys must’ve gotten in with the girls because it didn’t seem like there were the right number of bags for every individual. She thought about heading straight to the beach house, but she stumbled toward the water instead, and that’s when she had her moment with Lucas.
Thinking about it now, she was pretty sure it was Jarrod who’d broken up that tête-à-tête, but she really couldn’t say for sure. Later still, as she was sneaking away from the party, sleeping bag in hand, she’d caught sight of Lucas and Genevieve really going at it. They were down the beach, standing up, pressed against each other, their hands all over each other and, as if sensing her, they slowly moved away, farther south. As if that hadn’t been enough, when she turned northward she interrupted Theo and Ellen, who were humping frantically behind a huge piece of driftwood. Their voices drew her near and as she passed, she glanced over, wondering what she was hearing. She was totally embarrassed upon seeing Theo atop her and hearing Ellen’s mewling in the dim moonlight as their bodies moved rhythmically. It didn’t take much imagination to understand what they were doing.
After that, she hurried back to the beach house, where she climbed the outside stairway on the side of the house and entered through the front door, which was on the road side, opposite from the beach, allowing her to enter with no one seeing her. She then found the love seat in her dad’s study, spread out her sleeping bag, and collapsed inside it. The next morning she woke up late, swimming up from a deep sleep fueled by both exhaustion and alcohol, to a bright morning that hurt her eyes and head.
Loud voices emanated from the main room. Girls’ voices. Angry . . . or maybe fearful? Her companions had clearly made it back from the beach sleepover and were now yelling shrilly.
It hurt Coby’s ears.
With an effort, she staggered from the den, rubbing her eyes, and worked her way down the hall to the main living room, where her friends and the dads and a couple of the guys were all staring in wide-faced shock.
“Coby!” her dad cried in relief. “You were here?”
“I was in the den.” She squinted at them. The light was bright and everyone looked pale and ill.
“We were about to send out a search party!” He hurried toward her and threw his arms around her as if he hadn’t seen her in years.
“I came back last night.” She gently pulled back from her father’s crushing hug, ran a hand self-consciously through her hair, and asked, “What’s going on?”
“It’s Lucas,” Genevieve said after a moment, her voice raw. Her gaze shifted to Rhiannon, who looked as if she were staring into the yawning gates of hell. “He fell from a cliff into the ocean. He’s . . . dead.”
“Dead?” Coby repeated, uncomprehending.
“Dead,” Rhiannon whispered, fresh tears welling in eyes that looked as if they’d already cried a river. She started sobbing and wailing and Coby realized this was what had woken her up.
“I’m sorry, Bug,” her father said, murmuring his favorite nickname for her. “I’m so sorry. The police are on their way and want to talk to all of us. . . .”
Twelve years ago
Now Coby pulled into the gravel drive that led to the same house, still her father’s beach house, listening to the crunch beneath the tires, watching the rain pour over her windshield and the trees wave their branches menacingly as she slowed to a stop. Twelve years that felt like a lifetime ago in some ways; like it happened yesterday in others.
Switching off the engine, Coby sat for a moment, her hands still on the steering wheel. She gazed at the familiar beach house and wondered, as she had so many times before, if there was any way she could have stopped the events that happened later that night. It was the same thing she wondered anytime her thoughts touched on the beach and Lucas Moore. If something—if just one thing—were different, maybe there would have been a different ending as well.
But it was what it was, and many other things had happened since, some good, some not so good, some out-and-out tragic. They had all graduated from Rutherford High the following spring and Coby had gone onto college and then her job at Jacoby, Jacoby, and Rosenthal. McKenna was a stand-up comic on the regional circuit and was still single, and Dana had moved to the East Coast, married, and had birthed a passel of children, apparently; at least three by last count. Genevieve Knapp was married also, to Jarrod Lockwood, and they lived in the greater Portland area but were unhappily childless at last report. Ellen was a mystery; living in California, maybe. At least that was the extent of the information that had reached Coby’s ears, though she thought McKenna kept in touch with her. Wynona was now a social worker around Portland, unmarried, according to her Facebook page, and uninterested in anyone from Rutherford High, according to her attitude. Rhiannon was gone, the tragedy of their group. She’d attended school in Arizona but had been home for winter break, hiking along a trail above Multnomah Falls, just east of Portland, when the fatal accident occurred.
Coby expelled her breath, feeling that eerie breath of fate brush her nape whenever she thought of unexpected death. Why Lucas? Why Rhiannon? It seemed like there should be some reason, some explanation, for what had happened to them, yet both deaths were accidents. Statistics.
Bad things happen.
She was cocooned inside her car by the rain, and it was a last moment of peace before she had to face the social battle ahead. With a sigh, Coby reluctantly climbed from the car and crunched up the gravel drive, head bent to the dousing rain and ripping wind.
Their last friend, Yvette Deneuve, had turned up pregnant her senior year. She’d delivered her baby boy in mid-March, almost nine months to the day after the beach trip, and that certainly got the rumor mill spinning. But Yvette had yet to tell anyone who the father was, to Coby’s knowledge. If she was asked outright, her answer was to walk away and cut that person dead. Everyone had expected her to give up the child for adoption; Yvette just didn’t seem like the motherly type. But she fooled them all, keeping her little boy and raising him as a single mom. Like all the rest, Coby had seen next to nothing of her since graduation, though that wasn’t true of Yvette’s sisters, who were a large part of Coby’s life for various reasons, one of them being this party.
As she approached the door, she remembered that Yvette’s son’s name was Benedict. She would probably see both him and Yvette tonight. Like she would probably see a number of her old high school friends.
Because that’s what this birthday party was all about.
Because Coby’s stepmother was none other than Annette Deneuve Rendell.
Go figure.
With a studied effort, Coby placed a smile on her face and knocked on the door. Maybe if she was lucky the power would go out and they would all have to abandon the party in search of electricity. Maybe there would be a mudslide that would prevent everyone from getting here. Maybe something would happen to put an end to this craziness. Maybe—
The door flew open, shattering her silent hope.
“Hey there, girlfriend! So good to see you!” Annette
declared, oozing with bonhomie as she hugged Coby for all she was worth. “So glad you could come and help usher me into my thirties! Isn’t this weather just the worst?”
“Pretty bad,” Coby agreed with a smile she hoped looked more natural than it felt.
Annette wore a pair of slim, body-hugging black pants and a fuzzy white sweater with a boat neck that exposed her collarbones. Her hair was pulled back by a slim black leather headband and she wore silvery earrings that caught the light. She looked young, beautiful, and elegant, and Coby had a mental image of herself: hair flattened in the rain; a tailored dark blue shirt; denim jeans; cowboy boots.
She should have really rethought her wardrobe for this event.
Looking beyond Annette, Coby saw her father standing where the foyer opened to the living room with its picture window and the ocean beyond. Tonight it was just a view of blackness upon blackness. Her father smiled at her uncertainly, and she understood why: Dave Rendell had married Annette Deneuve Rendell seven years earlier, when he was forty-six and she was twenty-three. Annette, Coby’s sister Faith’s good friend. One of the Ette sisters.
Some things were just plain wrong.
Annette released Coby and they entered together, Annette closing the door behind them with a shiver. “Brrrr,” she said. “Cold and wet.”
Dave Rendell walked forward and put his arm around his wife’s shoulders as he greeted his daughter. “Good to see you, Bug. So glad you came.”
“Me, too,” she lied. “And happy birthday, Annette.”
Annette dimpled. “Thanks. Dave, honey, take Coby’s coat.” Dave dutifully removed Coby’s rain jacket from her shoulders and hung it in the hall closet. Then he gave her a bear hug.
Coby accepted it all. She’d learned over the years that some things needed to just be let go and this was one of them, though it was still a work in progress. Coby, a fixer by nature, really wished she could fix this one. In the beginning she’d tried to reason with her father, pointing out their age difference. She’d been nicely, but firmly, told to stay out of his personal life, and it had been a struggle, no doubt about it. She’d wanted to scream at him: Annette Deneuve? Twenty-three years younger than you are?
She still kind of wanted to scream at him, but she managed once again to fight back the urge. Not that he didn’t have a point. She sure as hell wouldn’t want him interfering with her love life. But twenty-three years younger. Really?
Annette was chattering away about the preparations they’d made for the event. Like all the Ettes, she had an exotic look with a slim physique, mocha-colored skin, hollow cheekbones, shining dark brown hair, and luminous eyes, just as dark. She was a decent person, too, Coby supposed. A hard worker at her father’s partnership venture, the boutique hotel known as Lovejoy’s in Portland’s Nob Hill area—which echoed San Francisco’s district of the same name—his partner in the hotel being his good friend, and now father-in-law, Jean-Claude Deneuve.
Annette Deneuve Rendell. Thirty years old today.
“Is Faith coming?” Annette asked Coby a tad anxiously, finally daring an even touchier subject.
“I haven’t talked to her.” Coby and her sister were close in times of crisis, but they didn’t have a lot in common on a daily basis and their general relationship consisted of sporadic phone calls, amusing e-mails, and a line or picture on Facebook from time to time. But if Coby had difficulty with Annette, Faith was, well, not into acceptance at all.
Coby distantly realized that her heart was pounding as if she’d run a marathon. It had been seven years since her father had married Annette, but their romantic relationship had started not long after the beach trip. They’d met during that fateful night, which felt like the end of one life for Coby and the start of another. At the time Annette was eighteen and Dave forty-one. Of course, they kept their mutual attraction secret for a long while for a lot of reasons, the one Dave copped to most often being he wanted more time to pass since he was newly divorced. Bullshit, Coby thought, then and now. Her father just didn’t want to look at the fact that he was seeing a teenager. Couldn’t work that into his overall view of himself. A teenager.
Jesus, she thought, feeling the wrongness of it all sweep over her once again. It was not okay for her father to date one of her classmates, no matter whether it was legal or not. It just simply was not okay. And no amount of trying to logically accept it would ever make it okay.
But . . . whatever. A lot of years had passed. A lot of water under the proverbial bridge. She wasn’t going to change his mind now. Coby loved him and Daddy Dave was still a good guy, even if his crown was tarnished a bit in his love for a girl only a year older than Coby herself and one the same age as Faith. Coby had mostly kept her real feelings about the union to herself. Mostly. Her sister, her mother, and everyone else except for her friend Willa, who, though she still lived across the country, had become a deep confidante, did not know the extent of Coby’s ambivalence. Willa had given the marriage ten years and had wagered a hundred bucks on the outcome. Unfortunately It looked like Coby was going to win that bet.
“Let’s get you a drink,” Dave said, and Coby walked toward the kitchen across the familiar reddish fir floor of the living room, which had been remodeled and expanded westward to show off a commanding view of the restless Pacific. Tonight she could just make out the ruffling white edges of the waves in the darkness beyond.
The house itself was several short flights of stone stairs above the beach, and apart from the laurel and a few scrub pine trees to the south, there was nothing but sea, sky, and sand. And tonight, shifting, pouring rain and a low, keening wind.
“Hope you brought your suit for the hot tub,” Annette said. She was standing at the sink as Coby entered the kitchen and nodding toward the window and the outside deck. Coby raised her brows as she glanced outside again to the helllish weather and Annette laughed. “JK. Just kidding. How’s Cabernet suit you? Red wine makes bad weather better.”
“Perfect,” Coby said.
Then Coby saw through the window above the sink that Annette wasn’t completely kidding about the hot tub. Sunk into the wooden deck on the south side of the house, it was clearly heated and ready, a cloud of steam on its surface spiraling upward through the slanting rain.
Feeling her dad’s eyes on her, Coby turned and gave him a smile. He hugged her again, as if he couldn’t help himself, wrapping his arms around Coby in another hard squeeze that always seemed to convey the question: Do you still love me? Is this okay? Am I still a good father?
Coby hugged him back before sliding away from his embrace, hoping this time that he would be assured that she was on board with his marriage when she clearly wasn’t. She was trying, but it was hard.
“Are we the only ones here?” Coby asked. “I thought I’d be the last one.”
“People are having a little trouble in this god-awful weather,” Annette said on a sigh. “But a bunch of them are here. Yvette, Juliet, and Benedict are at the store. My dad’s watching TV upstairs in his bedroom. Suzette’s taking a nap, I think, and Nicholette’s on her way with her boyfriend, Cal Ekhardt. Do you know him?”
“I’ve met him a few times when he’s picked Nicholette up.” Nicholette, Annette’s older sister, was an attorney with Jacoby, Jacoby, and Rosenthal and consequently had become the Ette sister Coby knew best.
“Juliet’s guy’s on his way, too,” Annette added. “Kirk Grassi.”
“Kirk Grassi,” Coby repeated in surprise.
“Well, she invited him, but I can’t really tell whether they’re together or not, you know what I mean? And you heard about Suzette and Galen Torres, right? They’ve been dating for almost a year. Those boys in your class . . . they seem to hook up with my family, don’t they?”
Not just the boys, Coby thought, shooting her dad a surreptitious look. “I haven’t seen Kirk since high school. He wasn’t at Rhiannon’s memorial service.”
“Yeah . . . I don’t know what his deal is. It’s going to be kind of like a
reunion around here.” Annette glanced at Dave, too, and smiled. “Even Mr. Greer is going to be here.”
“Donald,” Dave said, as if they’d had this discussion before.
“I know, I know. But I’m never going to be able to call him Donald,” Annette dismissed. “He was our vice principal, after all.”
Coby thought about Wynona’s serious-minded father. “Is Wynona invited?”
Annette made a face. “Yes, but she’s not coming. Said it was to do with work, and maybe it is, but she’s really not interested in any of us.”
“I haven’t seen her in forever, either,” Coby said, more to herself than Annette.
“Social work has made her really hard,” she said, grimacing. “It’s like helping people has made her totally hate them, does that make sense?”
“She hates the people who victimize children and women,” Dave corrected her carefully. “Not the victims.”
“Well, she doesn’t like any of us much, either,” Annette responded, giving Dave a long look. Then to Coby, “You know about her suicide attempts, right?”
“No,” Coby admitted, as Dave snapped, “Annette!”
“I’m not trying to gossip,” she snapped right back, “but if you don’t know the truth you can sure step into a whole big pile of shit without meaning to. Especially when you’re talking to someone like Mr. Greer . . . Donald,” she corrected herself.
“You shouldn’t just announce these things,” he said.
“I’m telling Coby. Coby. No one else.”
“What happened?” Coby asked, and Dave, annoyed, made a gesture of impatience, handed the opened bottle of Cabernet to Annette, then left the kitchen, as if he couldn’t bear listening in any longer.
Annette made a sound of frustration. “Oh, hell. I’m so sick of secrets. I know way too many of them, and keeping a lid on them is like bottling up poison. Eventually the container breaks and the stuff just spills all over everybody. Ugh.” She poured them each a glass of ruby red wine. “I’m thirty, and I’m just not going to play that game anymore. That was my birthday promise to myself. Bad secrets need to be laid on the table. What you know can’t hurt you as much as what you don’t. So, yeah, Wynona made two suicide attempts, one with pills, one by slitting her wrists. Neither effective. I don’t want to sound like a complete bitch, but they were cries for help, not a serious attempt to kill herself, and she got a lot of attention. Then she decided to dedicate her life to social work, helping others, but she’s not very good at it.”