by B. J Daniels
“You’re still determined to find her killer.” Even after seeing how everyone felt about Megan, he was still in love with the woman. Or at least the idea of the woman. That should tell her everything she needed to know about why she was keeping him at arm’s length.
“I told you it isn’t about Megan for me, but it is for you, isn’t it?” He rushed on before she could interrupt. “You came here to destroy the hotel and put an end to all of this. But even if I buy the hotel and raze it tomorrow, a killer will still be out there. The past won’t be gone. Neither will the suspicions. Can you really say you don’t care?”
“Yes,” she said with more force than she felt.
He eyed her. “Who are you trying to protect? You or your grandmother?”
She felt as if he’d punched her. “What?”
“Remember, I’ve read your grandmother’s journal from that summer. She suspected Megan was mistreating you. She wanted to protect you, wished she had. I suspect you’re doing the same thing.”
“You can’t really believe that my grandmother killed Megan.”
He shook his head. “Your grandmother’s guilt was from not stopping it before it happened. I’d put my money on someone down at that campfire, someone who’s come back to the scene of the crime. I have two days. If I’m right, the killer will show themselves before it’s over.”
She stared at him for a moment before she shook her head. “I’d be careful if I were you. A lot can happen in two days.” And three nights, she thought.
But she wasn’t sure if she was warning him—or herself.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JEN HAD HOPED that Claude would make the first move. When he hadn’t, she decided she had to. “Smoke,” she said as an excuse to move over by Claude. “It was in my eyes.” He didn’t look up as she joined him. All his attention seemed to be on the fire. He looked as bored as she felt. She wondered what he was thinking about. Was he remembering that summer? Did he remember what they did back in the woods that first night? Or was he thinking about Megan?
“Hey,” she said and gave him a nudge with her hip, thinking maybe she could get his mind off the woman.
He looked over at her in surprise as if he hadn’t noticed her join him. He blinked now as if trying to place her, his brow furrowing, his eyes a little unfocused. She didn’t think he was drunk. More like lost in his own dark well of thoughts.
She felt her confidence spring a leak when it became clear that he didn’t remember her. She’d given herself to him. She’d been his first, and he didn’t remember her. “Jen. Jennifer, if you prefer.” Which he had, ten years ago. “Mullen.”
Recognition came into his eyes, and he quickly looked away as if wanting to forget her. Why had she thought what they’d done ten years ago had meant something to him just because it had her?
Her punctured ego deflated like a burst balloon. She raised the nearly empty wine bottle to her lips and fought tears. She’d always sold herself short. She had the gall to give Shirley a hard time about Lars. They were both losers. That was why Jason had left them out when he went around the campfire telling how everyone else had become successes.
“Looks like you could use a beer,” Jason said, suddenly beside her. He took the empty wine bottle from her and handed her a beer can. She felt his other hand rest gently on her shoulder. “There’s something you have to see,” he said and drew her back away from the fire, away from Claude, away from the others and her embarrassment.
He led her into the woods, and she followed, too shattered to resist. She just assumed he planned to take advantage of her. She realized that she would let him, and that made the tears come again.
They’d gone just far enough into the woods that they couldn’t be heard or seen when he turned and looked at her. “You okay?”
She realized she was sobbing silently, tears streaming down her face. Jason Underwood had come to her rescue? She’d never thought of Jason as the least bit heroic. She’d always thought he was a jerk. “I think I’ve had too much to drink. It’s making me melancholy.” She swallowed, the sobs juddering to a stop. “Or maybe it’s Megan’s ghost screwing with me.” She made a swipe at her tears and tried to smile.
“This is hard on all of us,” he said, and she laughed.
She hadn’t meant to and quickly added, “Not you. You’re in your element.”
He looked back toward the fire. “Don’t fool yourself. I’m just good at not showing any real emotion. Don’t you wonder why everyone came back?”
She shrugged. “They didn’t want the rest of us to think that they killed her.”
He shook his head. “Would you really care if we all thought you’d killed her?”
Jen considered that for a moment and then laughed. “You’re right. I wouldn’t care.”
“Obviously some came back to show that they’d not only survived but also thrived in spite of what happened that summer,” Jason said.
She followed his gaze back toward the glowing fire, thinking about that. She knew her reason for wanting to come to the reunion. It had nothing to do with Megan. “What about you?”
“Me?” Jason continued to stare in the direction of the campfire and the dark silhouettes of the former summer workers that could barely be seen through the pine boughs. “I just came back to see what happens next.” He finally looked over at her. “I suspect for most of them, Megan’s just an excuse. Except maybe for whoever killed her. I would imagine that person wants to make sure no one ever knows the truth.”
She hugged herself against the growing chill in the dark pines. “Or maybe that person has put it behind them and just didn’t have anything better to do.”
He looked over at her. “Maybe. I came also because I felt sorry for Megan.”
She shot him a disbelieving look. “You really were in love with her, proving love is deaf and blind.”
“We had a lot in common—controlling parents, too much money, too much privilege. Her parents had forced her to come out here, and she was miserable.” He met her gaze. She could see the shine of his eyes. “She was scared that someone out here was going to hurt her.”
“Because she was such a bitch.”
Jason shook his head. “More like revenge. She confided in me that she’d been grounded for several months after getting in a car wreck. She was driving too fast. Several of her friends were hurt. One was killed. She’d lied about being the driver and had blamed it on the girl who was killed.”
She looked at him openmouthed. “Was this true?”
“She was in a wreck, and according to the news reports, the other girl had been driving her car, had taken the keys and insisted on driving, even though she was drunk. There were two other girls passed out in the back. Why would you think she’d tell me if it wasn’t true?”
“Seriously? For sympathy, as an excuse for her behavior.”
Jason sighed. “She’d been getting death threats before she came out here. She didn’t tell anyone but was glad when her parents sent her away from San Francisco. When she got here, though, she was still scared and miserable and didn’t feel safe. Then things started happening, she said. Someone started stalking her. She couldn’t sleep or eat toward the end.”
Jen laughed. “She sure hid all of that well while she was busy terrorizing the rest of us. You really don’t believe any of this, do you?” she asked, getting anxious to return to the fire. “A friend of a friend came to work here to kill her? That sounds like bull.”
He shrugged. “Well, she was right, wasn’t she? She’s dead. Someone killed her. Truthfully? I didn’t believe her. I felt just like you do. Until she was murdered. Now I think there might have been something to it. She really thought that one of you was after her.”
Jen scoffed again. “I think she just pushed one of us too far.” She glanced back at the campfire and shook her head, bored with the conversation. Megan was
dead, and she wasn’t sorry. She let her thoughts return to Claude. She felt injured by his snub, and now that she’d gotten past the tears, she was angry. Who did he think he was? He’d been glad enough to fall into her arms that first night ten years ago. Just because he was now some famous doctor—
“I thought I could do this,” Jason said, interrupting her thoughts. “But—” he met her gaze “—I might lose it.”
“You might? We all might.”
“Especially whoever killed her,” he said.
It was getting colder and darker in the pines. She realized that she’d finished the beer Jason had brought her and now chucked it into the woods. She preferred the second cheap bottle of wine she had in her car. She thought about going to get it. Or maybe she would just leave for the night. She wasn’t sure if she would be back, though.
A sick part of her wanted to give Claude another chance.
“I’m cold. I’m going back to the fire,” she said to Jason and touched his arm. “Thanks for getting me out of there.” He nodded mutely. She could see that he was still lost in his memories, but there was nothing more she could say without hurting his feelings. He’d brought her back here to talk about Megan. Of course he had. She knew it shouldn’t, but it hurt her feelings that he hadn’t even tried to make a pass at her.
“Be careful,” Jason called after her, as if he thought there might be something in these woods she had to fear.
Jen laughed to herself as she headed toward the warmth of the campfire. She wasn’t the one who needed to be careful.
* * *
CASEY FELT IT the moment she stepped into her room. That sense that something was wrong. She’d turned up the heat earlier. Spring in Montana often teased. One day the temperatures would leap, only to fall just as rapidly come nightfall because Buckhorn was in the mountains.
A numbing cold breeze curled around her neck, sending a chill through her like the one she’d experienced earlier coming up the stairs.
But that wasn’t all that had stopped her just inside the door. At first she didn’t know what had sent her heart plummeting and made her freeze in midstep.
Nothing looked amiss, and yet she sensed it. Someone had been in her room. She smelled the scent still in the air. Megan’s perfume. Megan’s signature perfume was so distinctive that Casey would never forget it.
“She’s dead,” she whispered to herself. “She isn’t wearing perfume where she is.” Casey closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Don’t let her get to you,” Anna had said ten years ago. “Be the better person. You need to learn to deal with this sort of thing. Someday this experience will serve you well.”
Opening her eyes and letting out the held breath, Casey wanted to laugh. She’d let her imagination run away with her. No one had come into her room. Hadn’t they all been down at the campfire? She tried to remember. People often would walk into the woods to pee after too many beers. But one of them could have doubled back to the hotel. Or come to her room while she and Finn were talking at the back door.
The wind blew the drapes aside. She rushed to the window to close it and shut out the cold night air, recalling that it had been locked when she’d left earlier. She was sure of it.
That was when she saw it out of the corner of her eye and felt her stomach knot. She turned slowly to look into the bathroom to the words written in lipstick on the mirror.
I know what you did
The letters were half scrawled, poorly shaped. But with a shudder, she knew exactly what the person wanted.
A confession.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AS FINN CAME out the back door of the hotel again, he studied the figures silhouetted against the firelight at the edge of the woods. He’d felt the tension around the fire earlier. It was as if everyone was trying too hard to get into the party mood, while all the time knowing that there was a probable killer among them.
He’d read the marshal’s report on the murder. No one else had been seen in the area that night. No tracks had been found other than those down by the firepit and Megan’s. Nor were any vehicles seen around the time of the murder. The pit was far enough away from the hotel that it was only used by the staff and always had been. The marshal had concluded that one of them had probably killed Megan. The question had always been which one. Because of a lack of sufficient evidence, no arrest had been made.
“Casey not coming back out?” Jason asked, a smirk on his handsome face.
“She’s had enough for one day,” Finn said.
“But not you.” Jason handed him a beer.
The talk around the campfire was hushed as the cold night hunkered just outside the flames. Patience was visiting with Jen and Shirley. Claude and Benjamin stood apart, both silent. Devlin stayed close to the cooler full of beer, looking sour and still upset. Clearly Jason wanted a party, but he wasn’t getting it.
“Claude, you should have brought your guitar,” Jason said.
“I don’t play anymore.”
The tension was as thick as the smoke rising into the air. As Finn looked around the group, he realized that Casey wasn’t the only one he had to keep an eye on. Jason was at the top of that list. He’d seen the tension between him and Casey. She’d tried to hide her dislike of the man, but, given what Megan had told him and what he’d read in Anna’s journal, he already had a pretty good idea why she couldn’t stand Jason.
There’d been something sparking between Casey and Jason before he’d hooked up with Megan and doused that spark before it ever had a chance. Megan, of course, had told a slightly different story, saying that Jason had begged her to save him from Casey, who he said had a schoolgirl crush on him. According to her journal entry, Anna had seen something entirely different but had been caught in the middle.
But Finn suspected Jason, at least, was still interested in Casey. He just wasn’t sure what that interest was.
“So you dated Megan?” Patience asked.
He nodded. “Just for a few months before she came out here.”
“Now you’re looking for her killer,” Jason said. “How’s that going?”
Finn smiled and took a sip of his beer. He pretended he’d never heard of these people and wasn’t biased, but he’d already learned about them from Megan’s phone calls and Anna’s journals. There’d been a time when he would have trusted Megan’s word about what was going on at the Crenshaw. But no longer. He’d known about the ugly side of her that struck out when she wasn’t happy. He’d heard enough around the campfire tonight to leave little doubt. Megan had gone after Casey because she’d been young and vulnerable.
He thought of Megan’s phone calls complaining about the way she was being treated. He remembered her contempt for the owner’s granddaughter, who she said was snotty and always tattling on her. Another lie. He’d felt guilty all these years because he hadn’t helped Megan. He’d thought she was the victim even before she was murdered. He’d put her on a pedestal, making her into someone who’d never existed—and certainly not someone to look up to, let alone love.
Finn still wanted to find her killer, but for Casey and her grandmother, just as he’d told Casey. He tried to imagine what could have happened to push one of those people around the fire into bludgeoning her to death from behind. Had Megan trusted the person? Was that why she’d turned her back on her killer? Or had they sneaked up on her?
“I think it’s time to play truth or dare,” Jason announced. There was a general groan around the fire. “Let’s start with Patience. A truth or a dare?”
Finn listened as the game moved through the group. He suspected none of them would tell the truth. Just as he suspected things had heated up over the weeks that awful summer before boiling over that night in the woods.
The lack of evidence still bothered him. Head wounds bled. The killer should have had blood all over him or her. The marshal had speculated that th
e person could have thrown the murder weapon into the nearby creek and then rinsed off the blood and buried the stained clothing in the rocky shoreline along the creek, since no bloody clothing was found in the area.
Had the killing been planned? Or was it spur of the moment? There were plenty of rocks around. He realized as he studied those around the fire that it was easier to think of the killer as a male. A man was stronger and taller and more likely to take a rock to someone’s head. According to the books he’d read, women were more apt to push the intended victim down a flight of stairs or resort to poison. But not always.
Casey had been the number one suspect because she’d had a very vocal and angry argument with Megan away from the campfire in the trees that night. Megan’s body was later discovered in those same woods.
She was still a suspect. He couldn’t imagine something like that hanging over his head. Another reason Finn wanted to find the killer. What confused him was Casey’s reaction earlier. She really didn’t seem to care if the killer was ever caught. More than that, she seemed almost discouraging when he’d told her his plan.
Until this moment, he hadn’t considered that she might have something to hide. He should have. She’d been coming to the hotel every summer for years—until the murder. That summer, when she was sixteen, was the last summer she would spend here with her grandmother. He’d thought she had just outgrown summers in Montana.
But what if she hadn’t returned until now because she knew something about Megan’s death, something she’d been hiding all these years? Was she protecting herself? Or someone else? His first thought was her grandmother.
What if it had been someone from the staff that she’d covered for out of fear—or love? But enough to lie for, if that person was here at the reunion and afraid she might still talk?
It would explain why she’d been so shocked and upset by the invitation—let alone the arrival of the staff from that summer. It might also explain why she was hell-bent on selling and having the hotel razed. Could Casey have kept the killer’s secret all these years?