A Deadly Reunion

by Odette C. Bell

  Which included the two Scott boys. Perhaps it was time I should start cutting them some slack, and by them, I mostly meant Denver.

  He was doing his best in a very difficult and stressful situation, and I was taking turns at either teasing, flirting, or berating him.

  He’d come on a holiday reluctantly, and his work had followed him. So much for beers at the pub with old schoolmates – he’d be knee-deep in this investigation until he caught the perpetrator.

  As for me, I would flee home and forget it the first chance I got.

  “Well look now, I know a great mechanic in town, so how about I take you over there? We can arrange to have your car towed. Then if you’re feeling up to it, I can buy you a drink and some cake with real whipped cream at the diner?”

  I smiled. Again it was a genuine, instinctual move.

  Annabelle was being nice, and I really needed nice right now.

  “That sounds great. I had planned on heading back home today, but that clearly isn’t going to happen now,” I began.

  “Home? But... oh no, I get it. I was going to say that the reunion isn’t even over yet. But who am I kidding? It was over when poor James was found in the bushes.” Annabelle gave a heavy sigh, her chest pushing tight against her beige, embroidered cardigan. “Would you listen to me? Two people are dead, and all I can do is complain about all the wasted planning and effort that went into organizing this darn reunion. You must think I’m a right cat, Patti Smith.”

  “No, of course not. I think you’re a right saint for rescuing me on the side of the road before anyone else could.”

  She smiled warmly and even reached over to squeeze my arm. “You see, people like you are why I organized this reunion. I wanted to see how much my classmates had changed, or hadn’t, in some cases,” she added in an unusually subdued voice for her.

  It made me frown slightly. “We’ve all changed a bit, surely. Even me,” I laughed awkwardly.

  “Oh, especially you, Patti. You’ve sure blossomed.”

  She made me laugh yet again. And not out of defensiveness, because I knew she wasn’t putting this on. Annabelle really did think the best of people.

  Relaxing into the chair and letting the last dregs of fear fall from me, I started to enjoy the same scenery that had freaked me out barely minutes ago. The trees were no longer dark and menacing; they were stark and full of life.

  We continued to chat as she drove, and I found myself easily enjoying her company.

  Annabelle, despite the frothing sweetness, was still down to earth and just a touch wise at the same time.

  She was the kind of person who you could confide in. So it wasn’t all that much of a surprise when I started blurting out my own problems.

  I admitted to the threatening postcard, to the blue pins – hell – I even slipped in somewhere that I had seriously mixed feelings for both Scott boys.

  Annabelle did not judge. She didn’t laugh – well, not unless I was making a joke. And she didn’t fob off my fears.

  She acted like a true friend.

  By the time we made it to town, I found I was enjoying her company so much that the thought of heading out for coffee and cake was exactly what I wanted to do.

  “You know, I went online and I read some of your books,” she admitted as she pulled up at the mechanic’s shop.

  “Oh dear,” I joked.

  “You keep saying that if you want to have a successful life, you’ve got to de-complicate things. Always keep communication simple and direct; if you don’t, that’s how feelings get hurt. Well right now, Patti, if you don’t mind me pointing out, you’ve got yourself a communication problem.”

  That I did. I also had a huge case of confusion. I had no idea what was going on, and I certainly had no idea what I wanted.

  I vacillated between thinking Denver was grittily attractive to calling him the biggest jerk in the world. And as for his brother, I thought Thorne was country perfect at the same time as being drastically naive.

  So yes, everything was complicated.

  “But I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Annabelle leaned over and squeezed my arm again. For most it would have seemed like a patronizing move, but with her it just underlined how goddamned genuine and trustworthy she was. She was textbook best-friend material. The kind of person you could share your secrets with and know 100% that she wouldn’t tell a soul.

  “What do you mean?” I asked as I got out of the car, closing the door respectfully as I stared over the hood at Annabelle.

  “Because you’re leaving town. The first chance you get, you are going to be walking out of the Scott boys’ lives. Let me tell you, that is not something that most women could do. Thorne might put on his independent bachelor routine, but every single eligible woman in town is after him and always has been. You will be one of the rare cases to have thawed the mountain bear’s heart and to have walked away from the prize.”

  I sniggered. It wasn’t an attractive snigger, and I kind of snorted at the end.

  Really, me, Patti Smith? The most awkward geek from high school would get the title of the first woman to walk away from Thorne?

  If I walked away from Thorne, that was.

  “And as for Denver, though he moved away, his mother always fills me in on his life. A string of unsuccessful relationships that make one automatically conclude that Denver Scott is a moody, unrelenting, and somewhat tarnished man. Nevertheless, he’s always had something about him,” Annabelle gave a rare seductive smile.

  Oh yes, Denver Scott had something about him. Unquantifiable, but not all that rare. It was the kind of quality that TV shows and romance books had been harping on about for years.

  The wounded warrior. The outcast who didn’t know how to connect to people, yet nevertheless spent every second of every day trying to protect them. The torn soul that just begged to be made whole again by the undivided attention of a suitable woman.

  I found myself biting into my lips as I entertained all of those rather ridiculous thoughts. Being a romance self-help author, I realized how truly damaging romantic fantasies were to reality. There were no ball gowns, no glass slippers, and no happily ever-afters. And you certainly couldn’t fix a man like Denver Scott just by hugging him to death.

  Even though I knew all of this academically, I couldn’t stop that little tingle of nerves that kept on tracing around and around my middle and back like the gentlest touch of a lover’s fingers.

  “Anyhow, you wait here, Patti, and I will go negotiate with the mechanic. Then we’ll head over for a cup of tea and a much-needed slice of cake.”

  I waved at Annabelle and then smiled at her as she walked off.

  Maybe there was more to stay in Wetlake for other than a complicated love triangle. Maybe Thorne had been right all along when he had counseled me to give my reunion class a fair go. Everybody had changed, hell, even Nancy had probably matured a little.... Okay, she likely hadn’t, but I was trying to be kind in the spirit of open-mindedness.

  By the time Annabelle made it back, I was committed to showing her just how thankful I was.

  “Annabelle, thank you so much for your help,” I managed quickly.

  “That’s about the twelfth time you’ve said that, Patti. You do it again, and I’m going to think you’re a broken record. Now what do you say to me buying you a nice cup of tea and one of East Lake’s famous cakes with cream?”

  Laughing, I shook my head and brought my hands up. “No, no, you really don’t have to do that. I should be the one buying you tea and listening to your problems for a change. I feel like I’ve been an insufferable motor mouth in your car. Sorry for harping on an at you about my pathetic little issues.”

  “Pathetic little issues?” She raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t start calling Thorne and Denver Scott pathetic or little. And I can completely understand how those two boys could be driving you wild. Plus, if you want to listen to my problems, it’s going to be a genuinely short conversation. Patti, I live one of th
e simplest lives in the world. You’d be proud of me. No husband, no long-term boyfriend, just a simple job as a teacher and a simple love of scrapbooking and being atrociously friendly.”

  “Goddamn you’re a nice person,” I said truthfully.

  She fobbed a hand at me then waved me forward. “The cafe that makes the best cake in the world is just over there. I figure we can walk.”

  Nodding, I hooked my bag over my arm and trotted forward alongside her. As I did, I forced myself to calm down and become more objective about this situation. With an appropriate sniff, I started using the one skill that had gotten me through high school and had assured my later success in life: the power of observation.

  The upshot of being quiet and left alone is that you have a lot of time to observe others. That’s how I’d made my romance self-help empire. It’s also how I’d eventually gotten over all of my low self-esteem and shame. When you realized that you weren’t the only person in the world going through something, it took a lot of the stigma out of it.

  Well, right now I used those powers to look at Annabelle properly.

  She hadn’t aged that much, though she certainly had marionette lines cut deep into her chin and cheeks. She also had a slightly harder edge to her once frantically sparkly gaze. No doubt teaching the latest generation of Wetlake High School kids would do that to a girl.

  While those details were interesting, they were not the ones that I set my attention on.

  Annabelle had proclaimed she had no problems. Yet when she’d done so, she had not made eye contact with me, and I could have sworn that her voice had wavered slightly.

  Plus, there was no one on God’s green earth that didn’t have problems. It was part of being alive.

  “So you’ve never been married then?” I asked politely.

  She shook her head. “The men of Wetlake are far too complicated for me.” She offered me a ginger smile.

  On the face of it, the smile seemed genuine enough, but if you dug down a little deeper, you saw that her lips were a touch too tight as they pressed against her gleaming, white, neat teeth.

  I nodded quietly. “What about the reunion? You said you live a simple life, but it must have been a lot of hard work to organize this. And even if nobody else has said it, I appreciate all of the effort you put into it.”

  If you knew me, you might have thought I sounded smarmy. After all, I had spent at least a few solid weeks before the reunion complaining of its existence. I wasn’t trying to be smarmy here though. I was trying to find out what was bugging Annabelle without asking her directly.

  “An unbelievable amount of work,” she answered. With that smile still on her face, she glanced at her feet and then across the road for a moment.

  “Still, even if it was... interrupted,” I said clumsily, trying to dance around the words murder, killing, and brutal, “at least you got to see everybody on the first day, right? Like Denver and Nancy? You got to see how we all grew up, or didn’t, in some cases,” I added a little sarcastically.

  This elicited a sharp laugh from Annabelle, one that you would have thought was quite against her usual character.

  Sweetness and light didn’t snigger like the bad boss out of a mob movie.

  Nancy.

  It made sense that Annabelle had a problem with Nancy; every single person in Wetlake had a problem with Nancy, apart from the men for the brief few moments she was with them. Then they, like the rest of Wetlake, would find that Nancy’s explosive personality only ever led to people getting hurt.

  “I don’t even know what she does, you know,” I said, coughing at the end before I could add “well, other than men.”

  Annabelle sliced her gaze over to me. She still had that familiar crop of sandy blond hair that she kept wrapped up into one of the messiest but cutest buns I’d ever seen. Right now a few strands of hair chopped in front of her gaze, and she blew them out of her vision with a sharp breath. “Do you really want me to answer that? Or do you think you can just figure it out from the leopard print and the suicidally high shoes?”

  I grinned. My heart wasn’t quite in it though. While I was always the first to take a dig at Nancy considering our history, this didn’t feel right.

  There was an edge to it.

  I took a rather hefty swallow, suddenly realizing that talking about Annabelle’s problems might not be the smartest of strategies. For all I knew, they could cut a lot deeper than her apparently carefree surface. And I wasn’t exactly a psychologist or a trained counselor here.

  “She hasn’t changed at all,” Annabelle said a little darkly.

  “I thought you guys were friends during high school?” I interrupted.

  Annabelle shot me a look and then slowly followed up with a smile. “Really? You didn’t think she was just manipulating me like she manipulated absolutely everybody else? She is a class-one narcissistic personality. And hell, maybe she has a little bit of a psychopathic streak as well. She is the least empathetic woman I have ever met. She can turn on tears and screams and then turn them off again the next moment when they’re no longer convenient.”

  I glanced at my feet as I listened to Annabelle’s tirade. The unfortunate thing was, it was true.

  I’d seen it with my own eyes. Barely hours after James Wood’s body had been found in the roses, I’d seen Nancy flirting with the kid in reception. Then, once again, she’d turned on her tears when she’d seen Denver in my room only to turn them off to glare nastily my way.

  Yet... did that mean that Nancy was psychopathic? Words like that and sociopath were bandied around far too often. These were actual clinical conditions, and if you ever met somebody who truly fit into either of those categories, you would know it.

  Serial killers, brutal murderers, they were psychopaths. Nancy was just... too much leopard print with too high pitched a voice.

  “You know she was asking a lot of questions about you,” Annabelle suddenly interrupted.

  “Sorry?” Her observation took me off guard.

  And I mean right off guard.

  While I’d had a relatively pleasant drive with Annabelle, I hadn’t forgotten what was going on in this town. Even though I wanted to pretend I was simply being overly paranoid, that rational part of my brain couldn’t forget that quite possibly somebody had threatened to murder me.

  “Too many questions, way too direct too. She wanted to know how much you earned; she wanted to know where you lived. Hell, I saw her cornering one of the kids who works at the motel when he was at the local pub and getting him to tell her which room you were sleeping in.”

  My skin went cold just as my heart skipped a beat.

  “Not many people know this, but she was a lot nastier in high school than she had a reputation for. Some of the things she did...” Annabelle brought her hands up and pressed them into her eyes. “Never mind, I’m probably boring you with this. You likely think I’m paranoid or just a total bitch.”

  I shook my head. “Why did she want to know which motel room I was staying in?”

  Annabelle shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t pretend to understand how Nancy’s mind works. Too many years of prescription medication, alcohol, and looking at herself in the mirror have damaged her brain.”

  Feeling exceedingly sick, I was no longer in the mood for the world’s best cake.

  I was, however, not about to turn around, excuse myself, and lope over to throw up in the bushes.

  Perhaps this was my chance to find out what was going on in this town. Thorne and Denver were not going to tell me. However, Annabelle seemed like a font of information. And she would likely know every single snippet of town gossip.

  “She got here about a week early for the reunion, and she came and found me and started suggesting things,” Annabelle rolled her tongue around her teeth in a stiff move, “and they weren’t exactly the nicest things I ever heard. When she heard you were successful and a writer living in Washington, she instantly brought up that silly story of you from the football game
. I tried to tell her that it was years and years ago, but you should have seen her. Her eyes lit up with malevolence just as they had on the day. Then she found some of those stupid postcards she made of you, and she printed them out again. I even saw her defiling a yearbook photo of you. The woman is mad. She has always been jealous, but ever since high school she’s gotten a lot worse.”

  If I’d felt sick before, it was nothing compared to the spiraling, desperate sensation that strangled my stomach now.

  She’d been the one to print out the postcards? She’d also been seen defiling a yearbook photo of me?

  “Look, I’m sorry, Patti, you probably really don’t want to hear me continue to bitch about Nancy. It’s just... I don’t know,” she trailed off.

  I looked up at her sharply, realizing that Annabelle had yet more to reveal.

  Despite feeling unbelievably queasy, I knew I had to push on. “What do you mean? You don’t think—”

  It was her turn to look up sharply.

  We were just about to cross the road as Annabelle paused, one foot in the gutter. “That she could have something to do with these murders?”

  Annabelle voiced the rather dark thought that had just popped into my mind.

  It was one thing to call Nancy borderline psychopathic; it was another to suggest without a scrap of evidence that she was behind the murders.

  ....

  Maybe I did have evidence? The postcard, the yearbook, the threatening glances she kept on giving me, the fact that she had been able to turn on and off her empathy for James Wood like the twist of a faucet – it all had to mean something.

  “Now, I know you can’t go around saying things like that without evidence. Innocent until proven guilty in this country, right?” Annabelle continued, her tone dropping as her voice lowered into a whisper.

  I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t say anything.

  “All I’m saying is that I know the people in this town and I remember my classmates,” Annabelle left it at that.

  “But... what about last night?” I shook a little. “I’m not sure if you know, but the police went around to the motel because Denver found... something in her room. Nancy burst out on the two of us and she was a hysterical wreck,” I pointed out meekly.