A Deadly Reunion (17 page)

“
Thought you might meet someone nasty on
the road. Yeah, I get it, sweetie. We’re all a little jumpy in
town. I just...” she trailed off and swallowed loudly, “can’t
believe someone could be doing this in Wetlake and to our reunion
class. This was meant to be a time to get together, but
instead—”

“I’m so sorry, Annabelle, I know you
probably put your heart and soul into organizing this,” I
commiserated as I did up my seat belt and felt some much needed
sorrow for someone other than myself.

This reunion and its horrible aftermath
hadn’t just affected me; the whole town and every guest that had
traveled here were all swept up in it too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She acted like a true friend.

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

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

“Oh dear,” I joked.

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

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

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

So yes, everything was complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

If I walked away from Thorne, that was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy.

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

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

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

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

There was an edge to it.

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

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

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

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