by Dixie Davis
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
The chief glanced at the officer at his side. Eddie just studied his notepad. Finally, the chief spoke. “He was hit with his own car.”
Trey sucked in another breath, nearly choking on his crumble. “Hot!” he said again, between coughs. “Still hot. Sorry.”
The chief scowled at him and turned back to Lori. “We haven’t ruled out a carjacking gone wrong, but we believe he might have given up his keys willingly because he knew the driver who killed him.”
Lori took in the news. The police were going to treat this as a murder, without her insistence?
Of course they were. They couldn’t possibly believe Nate had gotten out of his car, and then the car had run him over of its own accord, could they?
No. Obviously not. She had to give them some credit: once she pointed them in the right direction, after leaving them some serious clues, they’d been efficient and even helpful sometimes.
But would this be one of those times? Were they here looking for . . . suspects?
Lori resisted the urge to look around the room at the people she thought were Nate’s closest friends from high school. The man only lived thirty minutes away and he’d gone to school with a lot of people around town. He worked at the boat factory about half an hour in the other direction. Any number of his coworkers could have been at the festival tonight.
She quickly outlined those objections to the police, but even Lori couldn’t ignore the silent conversations going on in her peripheral vision. Serena kept giving Trey a meaningful nod, her expression insistent. Trey shot her the occasional skeptical look, but mostly focused on the crumble in front of him. Brett, at the other end of the couch, sent pleading looks Serena’s direction.
Finally, Serena turned her gaze to her own dessert with a sigh.
Once Lori finished her arguments to Chief Branson, he sighed, too. “Mrs. Keyes, we understand all that. Believe it or not, sometimes we do try to do our job.”
She buttoned her mouth. She wasn’t trying to overstep, just to clear Doug and Annie and her friends of suspicion. Having known a man ten years ago didn’t mean they killed him.
“And part of our job is asking for alibis. Can I ask where each of you were tonight around nine?” Chief Branson turned to Lori first. “Festival, right?”
“Yes, with Doug, and some people from Arizona, and Ray.”
Val had been at the festival too, with two friends. Brett was next. “I was at home,” he said softly.
“Can anyone corroborate your alibi?” Eddie asked. “Anybody see you there? Did you talk to anyone on the phone?”
Brett shook his head. “I was watching a movie.”
It was Annie’s turn: “I was with Doug and Lori at the festival.”
Lori resisted the urge to glance at Doug. Was she still with them by nine? Lori hadn’t looked at her phone or her watch. Had he?
But Annie wasn’t the only one who’d left. What time had Doug snuck out? And why?
Surely her son would never hurt someone — kill him — just because the man had known Doug’s girlfriend. Right?
Chief Branson moved on to Doug, who pointed out that both Annie and Lori had placed him at the festival. Trey was next: “I went out for a drive. On Oak Island.”
Eddie and the chief wore identical expressions of incredulity. “Any chance you had a friend or other witness with you?”
Trey just gave him one long, slow blink.
Eddie rolled his eyes and made a note of his answer, or lack thereof. Chief Branson turned to Serena. “And I assume nobody can vouch for wherever you were.”
Her eyes slid to the side, and she shook her head. “Took the long road home from work,” she murmured. “Didn’t get there until after nine.”
She had another job? One she actually showed up for? Lori tried to keep her expression neutral.
“And how did you all hear about the death?” Eddie interjected.
Val raised her hand. “Kim called me.”
“Brett called me,” Trey said. “And I called Serena.”
The chief glanced at Annie. “I heard when Val and Brett got here.”
Lori leaned into Chief Branson’s line of vision. “Meanwhile, hundreds of other people who might have known Nate from school or work or the community were also at the festival,” she reminded him.
“We’ll continue looking for anyone who might have information about the death,” Chief Branson assured her. “In the meantime, I want contact information for each of you — and I’d like to ask you to stay in town.”
One or two of the kids — they weren’t kids now, even if they were the same age as Lori’s kids — nodded. Most stared ahead or down.
Annie rattled off her number, Trey and Serena each reacted just a little, a tiny, curious flinch. Eddie looked up. “Sorry, I didn’t get that.”
They should write their numbers down, but Eddie’s police notes probably shouldn’t leave his hands.
“Hang on.” Lori hurried to her office to retrieve a notepad they could pass around. She grabbed the first pen she saw and returned to the parlor. “Here you go.” She handed the notepad to Brett.
Brett took the pen as well and scribbled furiously on the page. “Pen is dying,” he muttered, but he managed to scratch down his number before passing the notepad to Annie.
Trey and Serena were still staring at her with concern.
These were people who had once known each other all too well. Lori was sure the silent conversations she’d seen a minute before weren’t the only ones that had to be going on.
Serena passed the notepad to Eddie, who ripped off the top page and handed it back to Lori. She set the notepad on the coffee table, then ushered the chief and Eddie to the door, bidding them good luck on their quest. They’d need it. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of attendees at each night of the festival. Canvassing them all would take all night, and that would just be the ones staying in town. Tracking down the hundreds of people who’d come from nearby would be nigh on impossible.
Lori closed the door behind them and looked back at Nate’s friends from so long ago. Every encounter Annie had had with them today indicated that there was plenty that Annie wanted no part of now.
Lori slowly walked back over to the group sitting around her coffee table. Most of them had finished their desserts and she hadn’t even touched hers yet — but eating was the last thing on her mind now.
“It’s been a while since I had a teenager,” Lori began, “but tonight is taking me right back. I expect some more answers than what you just gave the police.”
Serena’s eyes went wide and she glanced around the room.
“Of course I’m assuming you’re all innocent,” Lori added, since the poor thing seemed to need the reassurance. “You were all friends with Nate in high school, right?”
Slowly, they each conceded with a nod.
“Then you want to know who might have done this to him, don’t you?”
Again, they each agreed, albeit a little reluctantly.
“And none of you have anyone who can vouch for your alibi?”
Annie and Val raised their hands, but Lori dismissed them with a wave. Clearly she didn’t mean them.
“That’s not great for any of you,” Lori had to admit.
“But you just said it could have been hundreds of other people there tonight.” Trey’s protest rang a little hollow. He tugged a striped pillow out from behind his back and deposited it in his lap.
Lori nodded. “It could have been. But with the way y’all just acted, I know if I were Chief Branson, I’d be looking closer at every one of you.”
Serena, Trey and Brett each seemed to grimace. Nobody wanted the police to look into their lives, sure, but these three — or four, including Annie — seemed to be hiding something.
Hadn’t Nate said something about the past coming back to get you to Annie this afternoon? He was right — but it had gotten him instead.
Val sprang up
from her chair. “Don’t worry, y’all,” she said, as if she’d just turned into this sad squad’s cheerleader.
“Why would we worry?” Trey practically sneered. “After all, we’ve got Little Miss Sunshine over here reminding us that we just acted perfectly normal in front of the police and we definitely have nothing to fear about them looking closer at us. I’m ready to do a tap dance all the way home.”
Val pursed her lips and fixed him with a Mom stare. Trey quickly schooled his features into an expression of penitence like any good son would, and Val continued. “Y’all might not know this about Lori — Mrs. Keyes — but she’s solved four murders in Brunswick County in the last year and a half.”
All eyes suddenly fixed on her. Doug was the first to speak. “What? What have you been doing with your time?”
“Solving murders,” Val answered for her, in a tone that said duh more clearly than most teenagers.
It was Lori’s turn to shoot her a quelling look. Val opened her hands in a gesture of you go right ahead and explain this, please, be my guest.
“Okay, yes, I did help the police a couple times.” The most recent of which had resulted in her wearing a walking orthopedic boot on a broken foot for six weeks. Definitely not an experience she was looking to repeat.
“A couple times?” Doug repeated. “You solved four murders? How do you even know four people who were murdered?”
“It was a bad year” was all Lori answered him. “But, yeah, I do have a little experience where this is concerned.”
“So you should listen to her,” Val added.
Listen to her? What was she supposed to say? Don’t kill people and you’ll be fine? Lori had tried that tactic and it almost hadn’t worked out very well for her. She’d been in their shoes a little over a year ago, suspected for a murder she didn’t commit. Because that was the direction the evidence pointed.
This time it had better point another direction. Although clearly these kids had a secret — and they were adults, not kids, she knew that — it didn’t seem like any of them could have murdered a man and then congregated with the rest of their former social circle to mourn his passing.
“Tell me about high school,” Lori began. “What was Nate like?”
Everyone — all right, Serena and Brett — looked to Trey and Annie. Obviously they must have been the leaders of their group.
“Nate was a nice kid,” Annie began. “I’d known him since . . . sixth grade, I think? But not well. And then in high school we started hanging out with Trey, who was friends with Brett.”
Lori turned to Serena, the only friend not covered in that retelling. “What about you? How did you get to be friends with them?”
“I started dating Nate in ninth grade. After we broke up, we still hung out. We were still friends, so we all hung out together.” She cut her eyes in Annie’s direction, which neither Lori nor Annie missed, judging by the lip-purse Annie shot back at her friend.
Or former friend, it looked like.
Trey remained oblivious, shaking his head in disbelief. “I totally forgot you two dated. Was that a long time? I only ever remember you two as friends.”
“It wasn’t long,” Annie said quickly.
“It was six months. An eternity in high school.” For the first time, it seemed, Serena cracked a smile.
“And then you and I dated,” Trey said, tossing the pillow at Serena.
“For a little while,” Annie hurried to correct him. Trey acknowledged her point with a nod.
Val jumped into the nostalgia now. “What about Brett? How long did you date?”
Serena turned to Brett, then threw the pillow across the room at him. He swatted it away. “We didn’t date, but we did kiss once.”
“On a dare,” Annie added.
Lori tried not to frown over the dynamic here. So Trey and Annie were the leaders, but Annie wanted to pretend Serena hadn’t dated the other boys in the group. Was she jealous of Serena or of her relationships with the boys? “Did you ever date anyone in your group, Annie?” Lori asked.
Annie glanced at Doug and Lori realized her mistake. It wasn’t her place to throw Annie’s history — as serious or innocent as it might be — out there in front of her serious boyfriend. The man who wanted to propose to her.
Hopefully they’d already had that talk at this point.
Annie took a deep breath and stared straight ahead. “Trey and I dated our senior year.”
“Don’t spare my feelings,” Trey grumbled. “Tell us all how much you really hated it.”
“I didn’t hate it.” Annie seemed sincere, but she didn’t meet Trey’s eyes, either. “But it was a long time ago.”
Trey accepted that excuse with only a little acid in his expression.
Doug didn’t seem surprised by the admission at all, but Annie was still shifting uncomfortably, almost imperceptibly. What was the matter?
Lori checked on Serena again, who was staring at Annie.
Oh. That might make sense — Annie was jealous of Serena, and kept correcting her, because Annie dated Trey after Serena. Maybe she even stole him from her.
And maybe that wasn’t the first time. Perhaps that was what Nate had meant about the past. But if Annie and Nate had dated, it seemed nobody else here was going to mention that relationship — or maybe nobody else knew about it.
Annie shot to her feet. “I can’t — I can’t do this with you all. Good night.” She strode from the room. Doug glanced around, shot a pleading look at his mother, and followed her.
“Well,” Trey said, standing. “This has been super productive. Good to see y’all again.” He didn’t sound like he meant it.
Serena stood, too. “I should go.” She turned to Lori. “Thank you for the dessert, Mrs. Keyes.”
Lori forced herself to smile. “You’re coming in at seven, right?”
“Uh . . . maybe closer to nine?”
Lori barely managed not to clench her jaw. They served breakfast, and they had a full house. Literally. “Make it closer to seven.”
“I’ll try.”
Lori opened her mouth to argue, but Serena slipped out first.
Trey thanked Lori, too, and filed past her toward the door. Val tugged Brett to his feet. “We’ll let y’all get some rest.”
“Good night,” Lori bid her, holding the door for all the last-minute guests. She shut the door behind them and went over the exchange for the night.
With decades more perspective, secrets suddenly seemed so childish. And yet they were still so difficult to divulge.
Especially in groups. She’d have to try to catch each of them one on one — as the police were sure to try, too. Hopefully she could get to them before the police did.
Which one would be the best? Serena might have the most pertinent information about Nate, but she was proving herself more and more undependable. As an employee, anyway. Brett knew Lori a little, but he was so devastated by the loss — and so withdrawn even before tonight — that she didn’t think he would be willing to help much.
Trey, on the other hand, had seemed outgoing and more than willing to talk. If only she’d gotten Trey’s phone number . . .
It hit her like lightning: the notepad. Lori grabbed the notepad from the coffee table and hurried back to her office. She shuffled through three drawers before she found her basket of pencils. None of them were sharp enough to help, so that meant another search for a sharpener. She used to have an electric one, during the height of her crossword phase, but she had no idea where it was now. Three more drawers of shuffling yielded a manual sharpener at last. Finally, she rubbed the side of the sharpened lead gently over the paper.
The indentations from writing their phone numbers showed up along with the names, white against the gray of the pencil lead.
Lori smiled at her success. She pulled out her phone and sent a text to Trey’s number. I think there’s more I need to know, and I’d like your help, she typed after her introduction. Can we meet for lunch tomorrow? The S
alty Dog?
The text message came back almost instantly: Sure.
She’d just have to get away from Doug and Annie for a little while.
Lori was practically hopping to keep up with the guests in her dining room, refilling the milk and coffee, keeping the eggs warm — and making more eggs — and pulling another pan of her mother’s sour cream coffee cake from the oven every twenty minutes. Normally, she loved to try new recipes, even if they were a bit more labor intensive, but when she had this many guests, fast and easy had to be the rule of the day, or she’d fall behind before they even woke up.
For the last hour, every seat in her dining room had been full, and guests had chatted with guests from other rooms. The sound filled Lori’s heart as she set out another plate of coffee cake slices. Once her boys had left for college, her own house had felt so empty. This was exactly what she wanted when she had bought a bed and breakfast.
She couldn’t say the same for the housekeeping, laundry, bookkeeping and managing an unreliable employee, but that was a small price to pay to have happy company again.
Of course, one of her guests wouldn’t be nearly this happy when she finally turned up. Lori glanced in the direction of the stairs, though she couldn’t possibly see them from the dining room. Annie and Doug still had yet to make an appearance.
Poor Annie. She had to still be reeling from last night, whether Nate had been her secret high school sweetheart or not. Running into all those people she didn’t want to see all day long, Nate pushing the issue, and then him turning up dead.
Lori returned to the kitchen to stir a new pan of eggs, reviewing the whole course of the night. Things had been going so well after dinner, and sitting with folks, waiting for the lightning bugs. It was peaceful and perfect, everything she loved about Dusky Cove.
And then the hush had fallen and the lightning bugs began their show. The magic of the evening had permeated everything.
Everything except Annie’s text conversation. Who had she been messaging?
And then she’d taken the keys to their rental car and left. She was home by the time Lori and Doug returned, though, so she couldn’t have gone far — especially not if she’d contended with post-festival traffic.