Killer Romances

by Dana Delamar, Talullah Grace, Sandy Loyd, Kristine Mason, Dale Mayer, Nina Pierce Chantel Rhondeau, K. T. Roberts, H. D. Thomson, Susan Vaughan

  They stared at each other. Pain, fear and understanding filtered into his gaze.

  "Meg, is that yours?"

  She swallowed hard, closed her eyes, then opened them to look directly into his worried dark eyes. Then, she nodded and whispered, "I think so."

  ***

  Chad let his gaze wander over Meg's devastated face. There were tears in her eyes. He hadn't thought about the cost to her personally of taking on this job. He'd been thinking of the cost to her not being involved. From what he knew about her, from his research and the articles written on her, she was very exacting in her work. She was a perfectionist that coaxed the most from the evidence. He needed that, both professionally and personally.

  And now he'd hit a snag he could never have foreseen.

  But first things first; he motioned at Larry to take over the chain of evidence and to document everything that had just happened. With one last glance at the necklace, he nudged Meg into putting it carefully in the bag, where it was sealed and written on for the evidence tracking.

  He tugged her to her feet and walked her back out of the circle. "You did your job. Let them finish this up."

  "You know me being here is a problem now, don't you?" She stared at him, dazed and unfocused.

  Shit.

  Who could have prepared for this? The best thing was to follow procedure and carry on. It's what they all did best. Process the evidence and see where it led them.

  And if it led them to the woman standing corpse-like in front of him, then he'd follow it there – and find a way to clear her name. The prosecutor would say Meg had been wearing this necklace when she'd fought with Cia as she had killed her. The necklace had fallen off during the struggle, unnoticed by Meg at the time.

  He had no doubt she'd had nothing to do with Cia's disappearance. Stephanie had also backed up Meg's statement that she had never left her sight. In other words, they'd provided each other with alibis. And that could be another problem.

  He watched in silence as the techs continued working the crime scene.

  Why would that necklace have been there? After all these years…

  "When did you notice it was missing?"

  Meg glanced at him, her gaze unfocused as if churning back through the memories. "I don't know. I don't remember a time that sticks out." She shrugged helplessly. "Who can remember that long ago? I missed a lot of stuff back then. We packed in a hurry, left in chaos."

  How true. Back then he'd been taken to the police station. He didn't even know who'd packed his stuff up. Just that he'd gotten it back at some point in time. It had been hell. She was right. Who could remember?

  And it was a small, relatively insignificant item that could have been removed at any time. Before Cia had gone missing or after. Cia could even have taken the necklace to wear herself. Either borrowed it, as the girls had often done before or stolen it from Meg herself. In fact, if Meg had it there at the camping trip, everyone had access to it. But why bother?

  Unless Cia had taken it herself...or someone had wanted to implicate Meg.

  And that meant one of their camping group – who else would have known about it? And that was just wrong. He'd sworn that his friends were innocent at the time.

  But he was older now, and, hopefully, wiser.

  He'd swear Meg had nothing to do with Cia's disappearance, and he knew he hadn't. That left six others. Could he in good conscience still say they were all innocent?

  It had been so much easier back then to band together and choose to believe in a stranger abduction. He knew now that those were the hardest kinds of abductions to deal with. Strangers who picked random victims for weird reasons that lurked in their minds. This made it hard to track them and even harder to find a pattern in their behavior, making them almost impossible to catch.

  With nothing having surfaced in the case over the years, the stranger abduction theory had seemed more and more likely. But was it?

  Did the necklace even change anything? Or just confirm that someone had it in their possession. Hell, for that matter, Meg could have lost it while they were all out searching for Cia.

  "Could she have borrowed the necklace from you?"

  Meg frowned, her head tilting to the side as she considered the concept. "It's possible. We shared clothes and jewelry and make up all the time. I'm not even sure why I'd have had it with me that weekend. Josh gave it to me."

  "Josh? Then she wouldn't wear it, would she? She was going out with Josh at that point."

  "I know. But she'd been bugging him for jewelry, so maybe wearing it was to put pressure on him. As if saying, see, I know you bought this for Meg. Prove you love me more by buying me something better."

  "And of course the last line, with the overtones of 'see, I know you loved her more than me. This just proves it. You didn't give me a necklace.'" He couldn't quite keep the bitterness out of his voice. Cia had been a lot of things, fun, pretty, smart... but she'd been conniving to boot. She wanted things, expensive things all the time.

  "It's not an expensive piece, just a trinket, really. I kept it because Josh gave it to me." She kicked the dirt at her feet.

  Chad felt his heart start. "You weren't upset when you broke up with Josh, were you?"

  She gazed at him, blinked, then, finally understood him "Oh no, I wasn't. It was not good for either of us. But he was my first serious boyfriend. I wanted to honor that time in my life and so I kept it. And obviously I didn't care that much, because I can't remember losing it or of even being aware of losing it."

  That sounded like the Mags he knew. And his mind immediately wondered if she'd done anything to honor their relationship?

  And once that thought entered his mind, he couldn't let it go. They'd been more than good together. It had been the best relationship he'd ever had. He'd had several since then but they hadn't been the same. They hadn't been Meg. How sad was that?

  And why was that?

  He hated that instinctive answer in his head, in his heart. Because his was a life interrupted, to be continued, so to speak. It was way down the road waiting for when Cia came home.

  As he stared around at the organized chaos working to take Cia home, he wondered what that meant for him...for Meg...for them...now.

  ***

  Meg retraced her steps to the cabin walking slowly, carefully, afraid a misstep would send her world listing again. It felt as if it mattered where she placed her feet. Somewhere along the line she'd gone off the track of the life pathway she'd expected to be on. It had taken a hard right and she'd forgotten to stay on course.

  Now she felt suspended, weak, hurt and injured in ways she couldn't understand. Her thoughts and emotions were left hanging.

  Chad had to follow the evidence and he would. She knew that. It was also the right thing to do.

  The necklace had been a shock. It was hers. At least she thought it was. The inscription stated her name. And there was no reason to believe there was another Mags in the vicinity. Or another Margaret, for that matter. She'd been Margaret all through school but her friends had called her Mags. A nickname her mother had abhorred. So of course, Meg had encouraged its use.

  After Cia's disappearance, Meg knew there was no going back to Margaret or Mags. That was a time of schoolgirls and innocence.

  She'd lost that.

  Then there was the whole guilt thing. Her adult mind knew she hadn't done anything wrong. But the part of herself was stuck in teenage mode from that time and couldn't shake the guilt off. She'd been there. On the spot. At the time, she and Stephanie had been deep in gossip. So involved that she hadn't seen Cia go to her tent or even leave for a walk. She certainly hadn't noticed her being carried away.

  That was the worst thing. How could someone disappear right from under their noses without anyone noticing?

  She approached the cabin silently, wishing her heart wasn't so empty, and her head wasn't so full.

  There were no sounds as she approached the cabin for the second time. It would be good if Pe
te had taken Janelle fishing to get her mind off what Meg was doing. Maybe Meg should have lied to her. But she was old enough to understand what Meg did for a career.

  She opened the cabin door and entered. The place was empty. She returned to the verandah and followed it around to the other side of the house. She could see out onto the lake but the boat was nowhere in sight. Sighing, she snagged an apple from the cooler and walked to the lakeshore. The boat was gone. Good. Maybe they'd enjoy their trip and come back happy.

  Happy was something she hadn't felt in a long time.

  She strolled down to the end of the dock, enjoying the way the water lapped at the edge of the wood. Once at the end, she surveyed the lake looking to see her family.

  Only there was no sign of them.

  Unable to stop the jittery feeling inside, she walked further along the beach, climbing over rocks and ducking under low lying branches. She could try texting Pete, but he'd been the first to suggest they leave all electronics behind this weekend. So chances were good he'd been the first to ditch his. He hated the damn thing anyway. Not much of a sacrifice for him. For her on the other hand...yeah, she loved all electronics and made no excuses. She used as much up-to-date technology for her work as she could, used cloud based storage for everything all the time and always stayed connected both professionally and personally.

  She was a creature of today's world. Pete was a bit out of the loop in today's technological world. Janelle had been born in this era and didn't understand that the tech hadn't always been here. In fact, she complained when the Internet was slow, her songs wouldn't download fast, her pages wouldn't load immediately.

  Meg chuckled. Janelle was a child of the instant gratification generation. She could only wonder what the next few generations would be like.

  With perfect timing her cell phone rang. Glancing around guiltily, Meg answered it. "Hello Chad."

  "Are you okay?"

  She had to stop and think before answering slowly. "I can't say that I am fine, but I am holding."

  "Good." The obvious relief in his voice warmed her. "I was worried about you. Finding that necklace really threw you."

  "Didn't it throw you?" she asked quietly, only a tiny bit of bitterness leaking through. "Didn't you, for one moment, wonder if it had come off in a struggle that ended Cia's life and I hadn't known about the loss at the time?" Even as the words burst loose from her, something inside her recognized the hard ball of fear that she'd never quite managed to let go of. Instead, she'd kept it stuffed down deep inside. And now there was no holding it back. Torrential waves of emotion rolled over her, making her bend over, gasping for breath and trying hard to hold back the contents of her stomach.

  It was the fear that she'd be found guilty of something she hadn't done. She'd been so afraid that somehow, someone would find her guilty.

  "No." The response blasted through the phone, instinctive, reactive, righteous. "I definitely did not think that. You, more than anyone else, should know what I went through that weekend. I know you had nothing to do with it."

  She had gone through so much hell back then that she thought she'd never sleep again. She knew she hadn't done this horrible thing. She also knew Chad hadn't. But they'd always worried they'd go to jail for a crime they hadn't committed, like so many other people had.

  Still his natural response, the absolute belief in his voice, was a soothing balm to her raw emotions. A slight bitterness continued to leach through her soul nevertheless – albeit now at a slower rate. "But your knowing isn't going to stop the cops from looking at me sideways and digging deep into my life to see if they can find a way to pin this on me."

  "I'm a cop, remember?" Chad took a deep breath. "I know this is tough. It's tough for all of us. And...I will admit, it's going to get worse before we can solve the case and put it away forever.

  "You shouldn't even be working this case. Your bosses won't let you, you know that, right?" Meg wiped her dry eyes. There should be tears; they were inside her soul, but just not ready to fall yet. "It's stupid. I have wanted to find her for so long. I have needed closure on that part of my life...and now that it's here, now that we might actually have found some answers...I don't want to go there. I'm afraid this is a Pandora's box and I'm going to regret ever having opened it."

  "Don't say that. We didn't do anything to her, but we've been punished, and have been punishing ourselves, as if we had. This is our chance to get at the truth. We owe it to ourselves. And we owe it to Cia. She didn't deserve whatever happened to her." The force and conviction in his voice had her straightening her body and running her hands through her hair.

  "I know. I have to believe this is for the best. But it's hard." She sighed and admitted, "I've felt so alone all these years. Finding her brought everything slamming back."

  "You are not alone. You have your family. Don't isolate yourself, share this with them."

  She stared out over the lake and wondered about that. In fairness to Pete, he hadn't been given entrance to that part of her life. She'd shoved her history down into the same damn hole as the rest of the mess. "Pete doesn't know."

  Silence.

  She winced, understanding the myriad of questions her statement was bringing up. She was being forced to examine a few of them herself. Why hadn't she shared? And if she couldn't share before, why, after ten years, couldn't she share now? And was it Pete? Or was it her? And the big question – what was she going to do about it going forward?

  "I'm sorry."

  That surprised her. She frowned. "Why?"

  "Because this is too big for you to hold inside. You need someone to hold you, even just for a moment. Troubles shared are easier troubles to bear."

  "And do you have someone to share this with and to hold you at night?"

  This time the silence was awkward, uncomfortable. She bowed her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "I had no right to ask that."

  "It's fine." But when he spoke again, it obviously wasn't fine. "I have had several relationships since you, but none of them strong enough to last. And like you, none of them were close enough to share this."

  "We've always been alone, haven't we? Always waiting; always isolated." Now, there was no holding back the tears in her eyes. Tears for the lives impacted on and destroyed by Cia's disappearance. When he didn't answer, her anger flared at him, at herself and at the situation. She snapped, "Haven't we?"

  The slow deep exhale whispered through the phone, mingled with and supported by his softer answer. "Yes."

  CHAPTER 6

  Meg didn't know how long she been sitting on the end of the dock. She should have been making something to eat. Or, if she was lucky, Pete would have caught more fish for her to cook. Truly, she didn't care either way.

  Her mind was fixated on the necklace. What she had deliberately withheld from Chad was now a nasty, festering suspicion inside her. For all Cia's good qualities, the fact remained that she had some not so nice qualities as well. There seemed to her to be something wrong with saying bad things about dead people, but there it was. And Cia had always been jealous of Meg and of what Meg had had.

  It wouldn't be the first time Cia had 'borrowed' something of Meg's. Also it would have twisted the knife into Josh, something else she had liked to do.

  Not for the first time, Meg realized that had Cia lived, she would not have stayed friends with her. They hadn't been good friends even then. They'd been part of the same group. And that was different. There'd been an air of finality to that last summer. She had known that they were going to go their separate ways once college had started. She couldn't even remember each person's plans. Theirs had probably changed too. Meg had planned on becoming a dentist. She laughed at that now.

  Chad had planned on becoming an engineer along with his best friend. So much had changed…

  The soothing sound of splashing water brought her attention back to the lake. Pete and Janelle. At last… As she glanced at her cell phone to check the time
, she realized she'd only been waiting a half hour. Not bad at all. As she watched them come closer, she realized Janelle appeared to be dozing, her head resting on her arm, the other trailing in the water. Pete, in front, was rowing smoothly, and steadily. This was his favorite type of relaxation.

  He was lucky to be able to indulge as often as he could. The cabin had been his uncle's and he'd left it to Pete in his will. There'd been such a wealth of satisfaction on his face when the property had been signed over to him. The timing had been such that Meg had been on the verge of leaving on yet another job. Then Pete had left too, his truck loaded with tools and supplies, to make the modifications to the place he'd always wanted.

  She waved at him as they came closer. He nodded, but was silent. The soft dip and pull of the oar in water continued at a steady pace for a few moments until he brought the boat up alongside the dock. Meg grabbed the bow and held it steady while Pete turned around and noticed Janelle. "Hard to believe she's still asleep. She's been out for a good hour."

  "She must have had a bad night," Meg said quietly, reaching out for the rope and tying up the boat. Pete worked his way to where Janelle lay and gently picked her up. The boat rocked, but Pete held steady until it stabilised. In four strides, he was up on the dock. Grabbing the tackle box, she then followed the pair up to the cabin.

  Her phone rang before she'd take a dozen steps. It was Chad, yet again. With a cautious glance at Pete's back, she answered softly, "Hello."

  "I'm heading back into town. I'll call you when I get the paperwork sorted out."

  She knew what he meant. His choice of anthropologist hadn't turned out to be the best one now that her necklace had been found with the remains. "Fine, we'll be here for another night, then we'll head home tomorrow afternoon."

  The door slammed closed in front of her. Damn. "Or maybe we won't, I don't know yet. I haven't had a chance to talk to Pete."

  "I wouldn't leave it too long," Chad warned.

  "I know."

  "Anyway, I'll speak to my boss, but considering it was you who did the excavation, it should be you doing the examination. I know there are some issues, but are you willing to follow through, if I can make it happen?"