Читать книгу Don't Scream - Wendy Corsi Staub - Страница 13

Cedar Crest is divided into neighborhoods, each with its own distinct character.

On the outskirts of town, closest to the highway exit, is the ubiquitous commercial strip lined with fast food restaurants, chain hotels, supermarkets, discount stores like Wal-Mart and Target.

Then there’s Stonebridge campus itself, a forested, self-contained enclave connected by a series of winding paths that meander past brick dormitories and academic buildings, a new sports facility, sprawling athletic fields.

Adjacent to the campus is a grid of old streets with two-and three-story homes. Once, they were upper-middle-class family residences; today, most are student housing with bikes and furniture on porches, doors and windows perpetually ajar. Most could use a fresh coat of paint, a handyman, and some yard work. Those in best repair display Greek letters beneath the eaves.

Today’s middle class resides on the opposite end of town, where winding streets like Tamarack Lane reflect architecture from the first half of the twentieth century: primarily Tudor and Arts and Crafts. Here, yards are well kept. Late summer perennials are in bloom, local election signs are already springing up on lawns sprinkled with the season’s first fallen leaves. SUVs and station wagons sit in driveways. There are wooden backyard swing sets and domed curbside mailboxes.

Both residential areas are dotted with churches, parks, and playgrounds; they’re bridged by the central business district, with Main Street running its length. Stores and restaurants spill onto the perpendicular numbered streets along the way.

There are no chains here, but plenty of locally owned bars, sub and pizza shops, and coffeehouses that cater to the college crowd. Those—along with a Laundromat, a coffee shop, and shops that sell books and postcards, T-shirts and Stonebridge memorabilia—are clustered on the north end, closest to campus.

The southern end is home to banks and realtors, cafés and pharmacies, a children’s clothing store, a couple of small markets, a yoga studio.

Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations is here, on the ground floor of a turreted mustard-yellow Victorian mansion that’s been converted to office space.

Brynn makes the fifteen-minute walk over from the bus stop, pushing Jeremy’s collapsible canvas umbrella stroller in the cool September sunshine.

“Come on, little guy, let’s go visit Auntie Fee,” she says with false cheer, and unstraps Jeremy from his stroller.

“No!”

“Yes.”

“No!” Jeremy squirms in her arms.

She’s forced to haul him up the wooden front steps, leaving the stroller behind. Well, if anyone wants to steal it, they’re welcome to it. It’s definitely the worse for wear after carting first Caleb, then Jeremy, around town.

Brynn really should pick up another one at Target before this one gives out altogether. But money is tight this month.

This month?

When isn’t it tight?

Well, it was less tight when they were a two-person household living on two incomes as opposed to a four-person household trying to make it on one.

She supposes she could always put Jeremy in day care and get some kind of job…

But she doesn’t want to do that. She wants to stay at home, fully available, the kind of mother she had.

Except that I’ll live to see my children graduate high school, and college, and get married, and have children of their own…

She wants to witness the big milestones just as she’s been able to witness the little ones: first steps, first words, first teeth…

I just want to be their mom. And Garth’s wife. That’s all I really need to be.

Which is good, because that’s all I am. And I love my life just the way it is…

There’s just something about being in Fiona’s presence that makes her a little self-conscious about the decidedly domestic path she’s chosen.

She crosses the porch with a still-protesting Jeremy on her hip, wondering if maybe she should have called first, instead of just barging in here.

Glancing at her watch, she notes that Fee will most certainly be in the office at this hour. She’s in the office at just about any waking hour—including some hours that the rest of the world may not necessarily count as waking.

“Shh, Jeremy.”

Opening one of the tall double entrance doors, Brynn steps into the dim hall that was once a grand foyer. High ceilings, ornate moldings, and a sweeping staircase bear testimony to the building’s past; several closed, placard-bearing doors to its present.

“It’s dark,” Jeremy informs her in a small voice.

“I know, it’s okay. See? Here we are.” Opening the door fronted by Fiona’s name, she steps into one-half of the former double parlor. It’s easy to picture the tall, double-hung windows, hardwood floors, and marble fireplace looking exactly the same in the late-1800s. The reception area, like Fee’s adjacent office, is tastefully decorated with nineteenth-century reproduction wallpaper and fabrics, and antique furnishings.

A skinny blonde looks up from the tall potted fern she’s watering beside one of the two windows.

“Hi, I’m Brynn, a friend of Fiona’s.”

“Oh…hi.” The girl looks so uncertain that Brynn knows immediately that her days here are numbered.

Fee has absolutely no patience for indecision.

That’s why Sharon, who, during their college years had been the private secretary for the dean at Stonebridge, was the perfect office manager for her. The older woman doesn’t have a wishy-washy bone in her body. If she likes you, you know it on sight. Same thing if she doesn’t like you. Brynn, she always liked, and the feeling is mutual.

Toying with the watering can, the new girl asks, “You don’t have an appointment…do you?”

Brynn shakes her head, feeling almost sorry for the girl. She’s painfully skinny and inappropriately dressed in a gauze skirt and thick, flat sandals. Her long forehead and plain, egg-shaped face are unnecessarily accentuated by straight, wispy, straw-colored hair parted in the middle.

“I need a cup,” Jeremy announces, eyeing the Poland Spring cooler.

“Is it all right if I get him a drink of water?” Brynn asks.

Again, the girl is riddled with incertitude.

Brynn shifts Jeremy to her other hip and fills a paper cup anyway.

He takes a big gulp, squirms, and demands, “I want to get down.”

“No, Mommy’s going to hold you,” she tells him firmly, acutely aware of the stained glass lamp and porcelain bowl of potpourri on a nearby table.

I shouldn’t have brought him, she realizes, and on the heels of that thought, but I had no choice.

What she wouldn’t give to have a doting grandma nearby, as most of her friends do. But her father and stepmother are a world away in every sense, and Garth’s parents are retired in Florida. For Brynn, getting out of the house without one or both the kids is an impossible weekday challenge.

She hands her son the empty paper cup to play with and decides she’d better get down to business before Jeremy’s limited patience runs its course.

“You must be Fiona’s new assistant,” she tells the girl.

“That’s right.”

“What was your name again?” Brynn prods, fully aware that she never said.

She isn’t rude…just young. And clueless.

You poor thing, she thinks sadly. Fiona’s going to eat you alive.

“Oh, I’m Emily.” Of that, at least, she seems certain.

“Nice to meet you. So is Fiona here?”

“I’m not supposed to disturb her unless it’s an emergency.”

“Is she alone in there?”

Emily nods. “But—”

Brynn starts for Fee’s closed door.

“No, wait—”

“It’s okay,” Brynn tells her, as she reaches for the knob with the hand that isn’t wrapped around Jeremy. “You’re not disturbing her. I am.”

Settling into a booth in the Cedar Crest Coffee Shop on the northern end of Main Street, Isaac Halpern accepts the laminated menu from a pretty student waitress. She blatantly checks him out.

With his traditional good looks—clean-cut dark hair and blue eyes, a strong, but not too strong, nose, and a tall frame that’s both lean and muscular—he does get his share of attention from women.

Especially back home in Manhattan, where straight, single, successful men are as valuable a commodity as rent-controlled real estate.

“Know what you want?” the waitress asks with a toss of her long black hair.

“I haven’t even looked at the menu yet.”

She shrugs. “Most people already know.”

“Just give me a minute, okay?” he asks, and she drifts away.

The menu is stained with brownish splashes and there is a grain of dried rice plastered to the laminate. Terrific.

Holding it gingerly, Isaac scans the lengthy list of offerings beneath the heading:

Breakfast Served 24 Hours

Eggs, omelets, French Toast, pancakes, bagels, cereal, fruit, sides of anything you can imagine…

Pretty much the same menu as in any diner back in New York, but at less than half the price for everything. Pretty much the same setup, too—long counter along one wall, a row of booths along the other. Most of those are empty, and only a few of the stools at the counter are occupied.

But this is a college town; this place is ten times busier at two in the morning after the bars close than it is now.

Just a stone’s throw from here is the Zeta Delta Kappa house, its gray shingles freshly painted this semester with red trim. Those are the official sorority colors, the red representing the sorority mascot, which is the cardinal.

Why a cardinal? Isaac asked Rachel once, when she was poring over her secret sorority notebook, cramming for the pledge quiz. Why not something more exotic, like a pink flamingo, or a peacock?

Because cardinals stand out more than anything else, and they’re cheerful, and they’re everywhere, she replied with her usual Rachel decisiveness. When was the last time you looked out the window and saw a pink flamingo? There’s nothing better than spotting a beautiful, cheerful splotch of red in the trees on a gray winter morning.

There hasn’t been a gray winter morning since she said it that Isaac hasn’t searched—to no avail—for a cardinal.

“Did you decide?”

He looks up. The waitress is back already, pad poised, hair still hanging around her face. Shouldn’t she be wearing a hairnet, or a ponytail, or something? That she isn’t doesn’t bode well for the cuisine.

Yeah, he should tell her he changed his mind and get out of here.

Instead, he hears himself say, “I’ll just have a Western Omelet and whole-grain toast. And coffee.”

He isn’t the least bit hungry, but he’s here; he should eat.

And why are you here?

Not here in the coffee shop; here in Cedar Crest.

I’m here because…

Because…

God, I shouldn’t be here. What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I keep coming back here every September?

This was a bad, impulsive idea.

Not the first in his life, though, and it surely won’t be his last.

All because of her.

Rachel.

The waitress departs. As if on cue, his cell phone begins to vibrate in the back pocket of his jeans; he hurriedly grabs it and flips it open. The number displayed in the caller ID box is a familiar one.

“Hey,” a female voice says. “It’s me.”

“Hey. How’s San Francisco?”

“Foggy. How’s New York?”

He hesitates.

“Sunny,” he says, because it was supposed to be; he caught the local weather forecast on Z100 before leaving for Massachusetts.

“Did you remember to feed Smoochy this morning?”

The cat. Damn.

“Yes,” he lies.

That tabby is so fat he can probably survive off his own body fat for weeks. Still, Isaac should have remembered to feed him. If anything happens to the cat, Kylah will be heartbroken. And furious with him. Particularly when she finds out her pet’s well-being was sacrificed for this little annual expedition to New England.

No, not when.

Not even if.

She won’t find out. She’s safely on the West Coast, he’ll be home in New York before she is, and the world’s fattest feline will be fine.

“I miss you,” she says with a sigh.

“I miss you, too. How’s the conference going?”

“You know. Same as they always go. It’s all a big blur of name tags and handouts and bad food and watered-down drinks. I can’t wait to get home tomorrow. Don’t forget—my flight gets in at six and I’m coming straight home, so…”

“I’ll be there.”

And he will. Because he can’t stay here in Cedar Crest indefinitely.

But he’ll be back again.

And again, and again…

For as long as it takes.

About to protest the abrupt intrusion, Fiona looks up from her desk to see not the hapless Emily, but Brynn, framed in the open doorway.

Her heart sinks.

She isn’t in the mood. True, she was just sitting here, craving a cigarette and brooding about the very thing Brynn is undoubtedly here to discuss, but…

But I don’t want to talk about it. Not yet. Not until I’ve decided how I’m going to approach this whole mess.

Looks like she doesn’t have a choice, though.

“Hey.” Fiona stands and feigns an affectionate smile at Jeremy, whose lower face appears to be covered in some kind of sticky sludge. Lovely. “What are you guys doing here?”

Brynn just sends her a level look and closes the door behind herself just as Emily pops up, hovering nervously and looking apologetic.

I’ve got to get rid of her, Fiona thinks wearily. I’ll fire her first chance I get…

And replace her with whom?

“Listen, we need to talk about this thing,” Brynn is saying in a low voice.

“Did you get ahold of them?” Fiona asks.

Of course Brynn knows who she’s talking about. Cassie and Tildy.

“No, I couldn’t.” She sinks onto the visitor’s chair beside the desk with Jeremy on her lap.

“Did you try?”

Brynn shakes her head.

“Brynn, you said you’d call them last night.”

“I know I did, but by the time I got the kids ready for bed, Garth was home, and—”

“You didn’t tell him, did you?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Shh.” Fiona frowns and nods at the closed door, beyond which Emily could presumably be eavesdropping, though she sincerely doubts it.

That would take initiative and, as far as she can tell, her assistant doesn’t possess a blessed ounce of it.

Nor, apparently, does Brynn. She said she would call the others.

Figures. Well, you learned long ago that if you want something done right…You do it yourself.

“I’m just making sure you weren’t tempted to tell Garth,” Fiona says in a low voice. “I mean, he had Rachel in class, and he was in that faculty search party, so I thought maybe you figured—”

“Well, I didn’t say anything. You didn’t tell anyone, did you?” Brynn whispers.

“No.” Fiona ignores the slightest twinge in the vicinity of her conscience. “Who am I going to tell?”

“Jeremy, no!” Brynn unpries her son’s fingers from the fringed lampshade beside the chair.

He protests loudly as she removes several strands of maroon thread that are plastered to his sticky hands.

“Sorry, Fee.”

She nods, not about to say that it’s okay. Because it isn’t.

Brynn should know better than to come barging into her office first thing in the morning—or anytime, for that matter—particularly with a toddler in tow.

Anyway, this isn’t the time or place to discuss what happened in the past…ten years ago, or yesterday.

Then her friend looks up at her with those big puppy dog eyes of hers and says, “I’m scared, Fee.”

Fiona’s irritation dribbles away.

So am I, she wants to admit.

“The more I think about it, the more I’m sure it’s just Tildy or Cassie playing a stupid and totally unfunny joke,” she assures Brynn instead.

“Really?”

No.

“I mean, who else can it possibly be?” she asks Brynn, but her attention is focused on Jeremy, reaching for the tall Lladro figurine on her desk.

It depicts a mother and child; Deirdre sent it from Spain as a gift for Fee’s first Mother’s Day.

Fiona was stuck at home with a newborn at the time. For her, the beautiful porcelain figure was less a testament to new motherhood than it was a symbol of her lost freedom.

She had never been to Europe then. Saddled with a baby and a husband whose salary barely covered the rent, she probably never would get there…or so she believed at the time.

She pulls the Lladro slightly closer to herself, out of Jeremy’s grasp.

Brynn doesn’t seem to notice.

“I can think of someone else it can be,” she says, and Fiona’s heart skips a beat.

“Who?”

“Think about it, Fee.”

“I am thinking about it. Who are you talking about, Brynn?”

“Rachel,” comes the unanticipated reply, just as Jeremy grasps the figurine and drops it onto the hardwood floor, where it shatters deafeningly.

The Dave Matthews Band was on the portable CD player, drowning out the night sounds.

“Go for it, Fee!” Tildy commanded and Fiona, standing on the crest of The Prom, facing the lights of

Cedar Crest in dazzling array below, popped the champagne bottle with two thumbs. The cork shot out into oblivion; then they heard the faint rustle of its landing in the thicket far below.

“Woo-hoo!” Tildy reached to take the bottle from her.

“Um, shouldn’t Rachel have the first sip?” Brynn spoke up. “Since she’s the birthday girl?”

“Oh, that’s okay.” Rachel reached into her sweater. “I’ve got something better.”

She produced a pint-sized mason jar.

“What’s that?”

“Grain alcohol.” Unscrewing the lid, Rachel took a swig, made a face, and offered the jar to the others. “Who wants some?”

“Are you kidding?” Tildy wrinkled her cosmetically perfected nose. “Where’d you get that? Somebody’s disgusting bathtub?”

“No, from my stepbrother, over the summer.”

“Which stepbrother?” Fiona asked. Rachel’s family was a blend of full-, half-, and step-siblings as well as former and present stepfathers and stepmothers.

“Which one do you think? I’ve only got two steps, and Joshua is only in fourth grade.”

That would leave the older stepbrother, whose father had married her mother briefly a few years ago. Their parents had long since gone their separate ways, but Rachel was still close to him. He had graduated last May from Morgantown University in West Virginia; now he was living and working in New York. The sorority sisters were planning a road trip to Manhattan later in the fall, and Rachel said they could stay with him.

“So where did your brother get grain alcohol?” Cassie asked, after a delicate sip from the champagne bottle.

“Where else? This came straight from the mountains of West Virginny.”

“Hey, Rach, that hillbilly twang is about as believable as your fake English accent,” Fiona told her.

“Yeah, but at least it’s a lot better than her fake Southern drawl,” Brynn put in teasingly.

“Hey, my drawl was pretty good,” Rachel protested. “That guy I met in the Rat the other night believed me when I said I was from Mississippi.”

“Yeah, up until you told him your name was Scarlett,” Tildy said with a snort.

“You guys were in the Rat the other night?” Fiona asked.

They exchanged guilty glances.

“Sorry, Fee,” Brynn said. “You were working that night anyway.”

“Whatever. Just because I can’t set foot in there until I’m twenty-one doesn’t mean you all have to stay away.”

But she didn’t sound as though she meant it.

And she added a bit sharply, “Just don’t go in there when Pat’s tending bar. He knows you’re underage. He can get busted if he lets you stay.”

Somebody changed the subject to the upcoming Rush Week before anyone could point out that Pat had seen them there and looked the other way, plenty of times.

Fiona had some funny hang-ups about being the lone townie among them. It wasn’t easy for her to watch the rest of them hit the popular local bars with their fake IDs.

“Sure you guys don’t want any? It’s homemade.” Rachel brandished the jar of grain alcohol as though she was proudly referring to a tray of decadent brownies.

Still no takers.

Rachel shrugged and swigged, going about it almost grimly when she thought nobody was paying much attention.

But they were—each of the four, in her own way.

They all noticed there was something off about Rachel that night. As the night wore on, her voice vacillated between somber and shrill, but she didn’t really say much of anything.

Nothing that would strike any of them, later, as having shed light on her strange mood.

“You’d better go easy on that stuff,” advised Cassie, who took her pre-med studies seriously. “You’re so petite, Rach—you can’t handle that much. It can make you sick.”

“It’s my party, and I’ll barf if I want to,” Rachel sang to the tune of the old Leslie Gore song.

They all laughed…at first.

But their amusement faded as the four of them passed around the bottle of champagne while Rachel guzzled the contents of the mason jar, clearly hell-bent on getting trashed.

There was no joy in it; it was clear to them even then that this was no celebration.

Something was troubling their friend.

Brynn even pulled her aside and asked her, at one point, what was wrong.

“If I could tell you, I would, Brynnie. But I can’t.”

And sweet, pretty Rachel Lorent carried her secret to her death that night…or so they all believed.

Cassie’s cell phone rings a few minutes after she turns it on, just as she slips behind the wheel of her car in the hospital parking lot.

It’s probably Alec. She left him a message earlier saying that he shouldn’t come over tonight; that she feels as though she’s coming down with something.

He’ll probably insist on coming anyway, with chicken soup or ginger ale or flowers. That’s the kind of guy he is.

A great guy.

And I don’t deserve him, Cassie tells herself, not for the first time.

Why is she consumed by a familiar urge to drive straight to the barn, climb on her horse, and gallop off as fast as she dares…?

Where? Where would you go?

Anyplace other than here, in my life.

Because it doesn’t feel like my life.

She reluctantly presses the SEND button on her ringing phone.

“Cassie?”

It’s a female voice. Unfamiliar…

But only in that first instant.

“Hello? Are you there?” the caller asks, and Cassie realizes, with a quickening pulse, just who it is.

“Brynn?”

“Oh, you are there. I heard a click a second ago and I thought you’d hung up.”

“No, I’m here.”

“Can you talk? I mean…you know…Is anyone around?”

At her furtive words and hushed tone, Cassie understands why she must be calling.

“Yes,” she says reluctantly. “I can talk.”

“Did you get one, too?”

Cassie’s heart erupts in a wild pounding.

“Yes,” she says simply.

So it wasn’t just me.

“So did Fiona.”

Then what about Tildy?

Maybe I have a voice mail from her, Cassie thinks—though there wasn’t one the last time she checked, on her lunch break.

“Listen, we’re meeting at one tomorrow afternoon, near Springfield, to talk about it. Can you be there?”

“Who’s meeting?”

“Me, Fee, Tildy…and you.”

“You talked to Tildy?”

“Fiona did. She tracked her down at work.”

“So she got one, too? Tildy?”

And why didn’t she call me back last night?

“All four of us did. Can you be there tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? No, I can’t—”

“You’re working?”

At her hesitation, Brynn says firmly, “Cassie, you have to come.”

“But—”

“You have to.”

Brynn is right.

Cassie dutifully writes down the directions to the meeting place.

“You haven’t told anyone about…” Brynn hesitates.

“Come on, do you really have to ask that? We took an oath, remember?”

“I remember. But that was ten years ago.”

“An oath is an oath, Brynn.”

There’s a pause.

“I know. I’ll see you tomorrow at one.”

Tomorrow.

At one.

That’s going to take some juggling to arrange, but it has to be done.

There’s no way I’m going to miss this.

Four so-called sisters, together again at last.

The precious bond of trust, stretched thin across the span of years, is on the verge of snapping.

They’re wondering, now, who among them might have violated the sacred vow.

They’re wondering whether carefully sealed closet doors are about to be thrown open, brittle, decade-old bones tumbling out.

Ah, ladies…if you only knew.

One moment, Rachel was there, clutching the almost-empty mason jar.

The next, she was precariously close to the brink of

The Prom, laughing hysterically about something.

Or maybe she was crying.

It was hard to tell; she was incoherent.

All four of them warned her to get away from the edge.

And all four watched as she lost her footing and fell.

Unlike the champagne cork, she didn’t sail out over the edge of the cliff. No, she rolled off, grasping helplessly, her terrified screams punctuated by a horrible thrashing descent, curtailed abruptly with a sickening thud far below.

Fiona lives still in the house she and Pat bought during their marriage: a vintage 1920s Tudor tucked into a quiet, winding side street in Cedar Crest.

“Don’t you want to sell it and start fresh in a place where there are no memories?” Brynn asked, after the divorce.

“Trust me, there are no real memories here.”

No meaningful ones, anyway—good, bad, or even trivial, day-to-day stuff. As far as she’s concerned, everything about her marriage was behind her the moment they signed the separation papers. The house itself was always just a roof over their heads and a façade behind which they could carry on the charade of marriage and family life.

The mountain cabin is even less meaningful. They bought it just a few months before the split—Fiona more as an investment, and Pat because he wanted to actually use the place. As far as she knows, he rarely goes up there—and she never does. They keep the key under the doormat, and Fiona has more than once urged Brynn and Garth to use it as an escape. Mostly because she doesn’t want Pat to think he has sole dibs.

“Leave the kids and take a second honeymoon,” she tells the Saddlers every so often. God knows they could stand a break.

But they keep protesting that they don’t have anyplace where they can leave their kids, and Fiona isn’t about to offer to watch them for a weekend.

“Why don’t you ever go up, Fee?” Brynn wanted to know once.

“Because I like my creature comforts. I’m not the rough-it type.”

Brynn laughed. “No, you’re definitely not.”

Now, as Fiona stands in the master bedroom taking off the suit she wore to the office, she admires the Waverly floral wallpaper, coordinating draperies and area rug; the white iron bed she bought at an estate sale in Lenox, along with an antique dressing table, bureau, and wardrobe.

The first thing she did after Pat left was strip off all the old striped wallpaper, rip up the carpeting, and get rid of the bedroom suite they had bought with their wedding money.

She gave that to Sharon, who was thrilled with all those polished cherry Ethan Allen pieces.

Of course, they didn’t fit in the small rectangular bedroom of her ranch house, so she put the armoire in the living room to hold her television and all those Hummel figurines she collected, and used one of the nightstands as an end table. Fiona privately thought it looked out of place beneath a stack of paperback romance novels and a ten-dollar Wal-Mart lamp, positioned beside the sagging orange and brown plaid couch.

When Sharon moved in with her daughter last month, she offered the furniture back to Fiona, who told her to go ahead and sell it at her tag sale. In the end, Sharon reported, it was hauled away by a young family in a battered pickup truck, who had paid for it mainly in ones and fives.

Fiona found some satisfaction in knowing that those people, who could never afford new furniture, were enjoying her luxurious bedroom suite.

She found much more satisfaction in mentioning that to Patrick and watching him turn purple with fury.

“There was nothing in the divorce agreement that specified what I had to do with the furniture I got in the settlement,” she pointed out. “If you thought there should have been, you should have spoken up to your attorney. Oh, wait, I forgot…Legal issues aren’t exactly your strong suit.”

That, of course, alluded to the fact that he flunked out of law school not long after they were married. She had no idea he was even struggling, though she should probably have guessed.

When he came home and told her, she walked right out the door, with no intention of ever going back.

Fate intervened by way of a positive pregnancy test.

Oh, well. At least she wasn’t stuck with Patrick Hagan forever.

She divorced him the moment her business was comfortably established, and immediately reclaimed her maiden name.

It isn’t that she’s particularly eager to be associated with her estranged parents in any way, but it was better than keeping Hagan. Besides, she likes the alliteration. Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations…It really flows quite nicely.

Things have a way of falling into place.

These days, Pat takes Ashley to dinner at least once a week and she spends every other weekend with him, from after school on Friday afternoons until eleven on Sunday mornings. Fiona insisted he have her back that early so that she can take Ashley to noon mass with her. Pat was raised Catholic, too, but he hasn’t gone to church in years.

Fiona stopped going, too, for awhile, after they got married. She stayed away from the church until—

She stops the jarring wisp of thought before it can balloon into a full-fledged recollection.

No, she doesn’t like to think about that.

The sins of the past belong in the past. You can’t change them.

All you can do is go to mass every Sunday, and pray for forgiveness.

She still attends Saint Vincent’s Church, the parish where she and Deirdre made their First Communions. But she diligently avoids the ten o’clock mass her parents have attended for thirty-some years. She doesn’t like to see them unless absolutely necessary; nor does she want Ashley to spend time with them, knowing they’re apt to fill her ears with self-righteous garbage—most likely about the sins of her mother and aunt.

Back in her college days, Fee all but wrote off her parents when they disowned her twin sister.

She softened a bit after Ashley was born, though—in part because she was desperately lonely, but mostly because she needed someone to watch Ashley so she could begin working as a freelance PR consultant for a small local agency. She and Pat couldn’t afford childcare and her mother was willing to acquiesce, free of charge.

That worked out for awhile. Then Fiona got divorced—in her parents’ eyes, a crime as serious as Deirdre’s homosexuality—and it was all over. Just as well. She certainly doesn’t need anyone looking over her shoulder these days.

Hearing a car’s tires crunching on the gravel driveway below her bedroom window, Fiona quickly pulls on a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt from the hook behind the closet door. She hurries down the stairs just as Ashley, giggling about something her father is saying, is opening the door.

With her dark hair and eyes, porcelain skin, and lanky figure, Fiona’s daughter looks so much like her father. Acts like him, too, with her increasingly lackadaisical attitude. Sometimes, Fiona just can’t relate to her daughter—and sometimes, she secretly, ashamedly, even resents her.

“Hi, Mom! Guess what? We went to Applebee’s! I love Applebee’s! So does Dad!”

Fiona hates Applebee’s.

“That’s great, Ash.” She musters a thin smile for her daughter, conscious of Pat looming on the other side of the threshold. He hasn’t been invited to cross it since the divorce.

Fiona flicks a lighter over a cigarette—both because she wants one and because Pat is a militant antismoker. She turns her head to blow a stream of smoke well away from her daughter’s face and asks, “Listen, did you feed your goldfish this morning?”

“I forgot.”

“Again?” Fiona’s jaw tightens. She’s so much like her father. “You really need to learn how to be more responsible. Can you please go down and feed it?”

“Right this second?”

“Right this second.”

“Okay.”

Ashley won the goldfish at a carnival Pat took her to last spring. She brought it home, sickly looking, in a plastic sandwich baggy, and informed Fiona that she had already named it Bubbles La Rue.

She then begged to keep it here, rather than at Pat’s place, saying her father might forget to feed it. Fiona agreed, on the condition that she keep the bowl in the basement playroom, and secretly assuming the fish would last all of a day or two. A week at most.

Somehow, like a philodendron that mysteriously thrives without regular watering, the stubborn creature has hung in there ever since, despite Ashley’s sporadic care.

“See you tomorrow morning, Daddy.” Ashley stretches on her tiptoes to kiss her father.

“See you tomorrow morning, Princess.”

Only when Ashley is skipping away does Fiona look at Pat. He’s already turned on his heel, about to leave.

“Wait a second.” She doesn’t say his name. She hasn’t, in conversation, since their marriage ended. There’s something too intimate, too cordial, about addressing someone by name.

He turns back. “Yeah?” He casts a disdainful look at the lit cigarette in her hand.

“Cynthia Reynolds called right after I got home about fifteen minutes ago.”

Pat waits silently for her to go on, standing on the brick doorstep, his black eyes expressionless and fixed on hers. Clearly, he knows who Cynthia Reynolds is.

Fiona didn’t, when she called. Not right away. It took her a moment to realize that she’s the mother of one of Ashley’s friends.

For some reason, it bothers her that Pat knows that detail. Then again, he has plenty of time and attention for Ashley and her friends and their parents. What else does he have to do?

“She’s taking Meg to the mall tomorrow for lunch at the new Rainforest Cafe,” Fiona tells him in the brisk tone she uses with Emily at work, “then to see some new Disney movie. She invited Ashley to join them.”

In the next room, an eavesdropping Ashley squeals with joy.

“Ashley! Go feed your fish,” Fiona commands.

“But I can go, right?” she calls. “With Meg and her mom?”

Fiona looks at Pat.

“Saturdays are my days with her,” he growls in a low voice.

“You can go with Meg,” Fiona calls back to her daughter. “Go feed your fish.”

She hears the basement door open, and Ashley’s footsteps skipping down the stairs.

Fiona looks her glaring ex in the eye and exhales a stream of smoke in his direction. “She really wants to go.”

Pat curses and waves away the smoke. “Don’t you think it should have been my decision? Especially since she was supposed to be spending the day with me?”

“You’re the one who always wants her to make lots of friends and be social. You know how much she likes Meg. And anyway, if you don’t want her to go shopping with her friend tomorrow, you can go ahead and be the one to tell her and break her heart, and then call the mom back and break Meg’s heart, too.”

Pat scowls.

She can tell there’s a lot he wants to say.

But he calls, “Good night, Ashley, honey! I’ll pick you up in the morning!” in the sweet Daddy voice he uses with their daughter.

So different from the deadly cold tone he uses with Fiona.

He turns and storms away without a good-bye.

Good riddance to you, too.

She kicks the door closed with a resounding slam.

Life would be so much simpler, she thinks as she moves through the living room, smoking, straightening throw pillows that don’t need it, if she and Pat didn’t have a child together.

Then she could have made a clean break, picked up and moved out of town after the divorce.

Yes, Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations would be in the heart of Manhattan if not for the relocation clause in the divorce settlement, which states that neither she nor Pat can move beyond a fifty-mile radius of Cedar Crest without reopening their case.

She isn’t about to do that, especially now that she’s worked so hard to become a success. Why should Pat reap the benefits in any way?

So, she’s stuck here for at least another ten years. At least they have only one child, thank goodness. Thanks to me.

By the time Ashley is in college, she’ll be pushing forty.

Another milestone.

But the pivotal one is right around the corner: she’ll turn thirty next month.

And Rachel…

Rachel would have turned thirty yesterday.

Would have?

Brynn wasn’t so sure those two words were accurate.

Now Fiona tries the phrase without them—Rachel turned thirty yesterday—and a chill slithers down her spine.

She watched Rachel Lorent fall to her death ten years ago last night…

Or did she?

It was Tildy who immediately made her way down to the spot where Rachel had fallen, clutching a flashlight whose beam bobbed eerily in the night. The rest of them clung to each other above, sobbing helplessly and hopelessly.

It was Tildy who felt their friend’s—their sister’s—neck for a pulse, and found none.

And it was Tildy who tearfully left Rachel at the base of the cliff exactly where she had fallen, on a thick bed of pine needles a few feet away from a stone marker at the edge of the hiking trail.

Back at the top, Tildy was visibly shaken, trembling violently.

They all were.

But after they had cried hysterically, and pulled themselves together—the others considerably more quickly than Brynn—Tildy declared that they couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.

“Are you crazy?” Brynn protested. “We can’t just leave her there. We have to go call the police.”

“And tell them what?”

“That it was an accident,” Brynn choked out in her grief, “that Rachel was drunk out of her mind, and we warned her. We tried to stop her.”

“But we didn’t stop her,” Tildy pointed out. “And now she’s dead. And we’re involved. Look what happened to the Sigs, and nobody even died.”

Sigma Tau was a fraternity whose chapter at a neighboring college was investigated for hazing last fall after a sophomore pledge landed in the hospital with severe alcohol poisoning. In the end, he suffered permanent brain damage, the Sigs had their charter revoked, and several of their officers were still facing charges in a lawsuit.

“That could happen to the four of us in a heartbeat,” Tildy warned them. “Cassie, can you imagine what your parents would say if you were arrested?”

Cassie, the daughter of a high-powered New York politician mother and a neurosurgeon father, looked as though she was going to faint.

They all knew about her notoriously perfectionist parents. The Ashfords were let down enough when a learning disability, undiagnosed until her senior year at a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, prevented Cassie from earning Ivy League grades and attending their alma mater as her brother did.

Trouble with the law would put them over the edge.

“What about you, Brynn?” Tildy went on. “You’re here on a full academic scholarship. Do you actually think the college will let you stay if you’re involved in something this scandalous?”

Brynn was silent. The answer was obvious.

“What about you, Fee? You’re a local. You know everyone in town. And what about your parents? Look what they did to your sister last year when she came out and the whole town was gossiping about it. What do you think they’ll do if your name is dragged through the local press in connection with something like this?”

“I don’t want to think about that,” Fiona said grimly. “None of us can afford to get involved. This would ruin our lives.”

“Not to mention destroy the sorority,” declared its loyal president. “We owe it to our sisters to keep this quiet.”

“But we didn’t do anything wrong, Tildy. We didn’t force Rachel to drink, like the Sigs forced that pledge,” Brynn protested.

“Says who?” Tildy asked.

“What do you mean? Of course the four of us will stand up for ourselves and say we’re innocent.”

“Those Sig guys claimed the same thing. Who believed them?”

“That was different. They were hazing.”

“Do you think anyone will really care about the details, Brynn?” Cassie spoke up at last, sounding almost frantic. “All they’ll see is a bunch of underage sorority girls drinking in the woods.”

“My God, Rachel is dead!” Brynn cried. “We can’t just leave her here in the woods. Isn’t that against the law?”

“No,” Tildy said firmly. “It isn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s not like we’ve murdered someone.”

“But leaving her here is wrong,” Brynn said in desperation. “Maybe it’s not against the law—which it might actually be—but it’s wrong.”

“Brynn, there’s nothing we can do for her now,” Fiona said gently.

“Rachel would never want us to incriminate ourselves,” Tildy added. “We have to leave her. Anyone in our situation would do the exact same thing.”

Brynn shook her head miserably, unconvinced.

“Look, somebody will find her as soon as the sun comes up, which is”—Tildy checked her watch with almost preternatural calm—“a few hours from now. We all know that hikers are out on that trail every single morning, right? And she’s lying right there on the path. Nobody could possibly miss her. She’ll be found, and the police will assume that she wandered up here alone, drunk…and fell.”

“I don’t know…” Even Cassie looked uncertain. “Why would she come up into the woods alone?”

“She was acting strangely all day yesterday,” Tildy said. “Brynn noticed it, and so did I, and I bet other people did, too.”

“I did,” Cassie said.

“So did I, definitely,” Fiona agreed, and Brynn shot her a look.

Fiona shrugged.

Clearly, it was three against one.

“Look, nobody knows we were up here with her tonight, right?” Tildy asked. “You guys didn’t tell anyone where you were going?”

All three shook their heads.

And swore each other to secrecy.

And the next morning waited uneasily for the news that Rachel’s body had been found in the woods below The Prom.

It never came.

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Rachel Lorent had vanished into thin air. On the morning after her twentieth birthday, her bed in her room at the sorority house hadn’t been slept in, she never showed up for classes…in short, she was never heard from again.

The campus was in a turmoil. Faculty and students formed search teams that walked shoulder to shoulder over acres of ground, searching.

They found nothing.

A few days after Rachel’s mother had filed a Missing Person’s Report and fliers bearing her smiling face had gone up all over campus, Brynn, Fiona, Cassie, and Tildy walked silently up the trail to the spot where she had landed, dead.

It was empty. Not even a sign that Rachel had ever been there.

How was that possible?

As Tildy had said, there was no way anyone passing along could have missed her body on the path…and there was no way, with the beautiful late-summer weather, that the trail hadn’t been traveled in all that time. Anyway, the searchers had repeatedly covered this ground in the past few days.

Maybe wild animals dragged her away that first night and devoured her remains, a fate too horrible for any of them to envision.

For months afterward, they held their collective breath, expecting some sign of their lost sister to turn up…perhaps a disembodied limb found deep in the woods, or a shred of clothing, or even the mason jar…

But nothing ever did.

Rachel Lorent had never been heard from again.

Or had she?