The Engagement Party, page 1
Dedication
For all those who learned the hard way that unexpected and terrible things can happen in beautiful places
Epigraph
Sometimes victimhood seemed inevitable. And sometimes it seemed like the best thing that could happen to a girl. Once you were dead, you could be loved forever. Once you were dead, no one asked if you had fought back hard enough, if you hadn’t really wanted it after all.
—Sarah Marshall, “The End of Evil,” The Believer
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One: Book Notes: Lost and Found
Chapter Two: Sierra
Chapter Three: Alex
Chapter Four: Sierra
Chapter Five: Book Notes: Who Was Emily?
Chapter Six: Ruthie
Chapter Seven: Sierra
Chapter Eight: Alex
Chapter Nine: Sierra
Chapter Ten: Ruthie
Chapter Eleven: Book Notes: The Game
Chapter Twelve: Sierra
Chapter Thirteen: Alex
Chapter Fourteen: Ruthie
Chapter Fifteen: Alex
Chapter Sixteen: Sierra
Chapter Seventeen: Book Notes: Who Killed Emily?
Chapter Eighteen: Ruthie
Chapter Nineteen: Book Notes: Emily’s Diary
Chapter Twenty: Sierra
Chapter Twenty-One: Alex
Chapter Twenty-Two: Sierra
Chapter Twenty-Three: Book Notes: New Suspect Acquired
Chapter Twenty-Four: Alex
Chapter Twenty-Five: Ruthie
Chapter Twenty-Six: Sierra
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Ruthie
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Sierra
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Alex
Chapter Thirty: Ruthie
Chapter Thirty-One: Book Notes: Emily’s Friends
Chapter Thirty-Two: Sierra
Chapter Thirty-Three: Ruthie
Chapter Thirty-Four: Alex
Chapter Thirty-Five: Ruthie
Chapter Thirty-Six: Book Notes: Did Brendan Clarke Take the Fall?
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Sierra
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Alex
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Sierra
Chapter Forty: Alex
Chapter Forty-One: Ruthie
Chapter Forty-Two: Book Notes: Those Searching for the Truth
Chapter Forty-Three: Sierra
Chapter Forty-Four: Alex
Chapter Forty-Five: Sierra
Chapter Forty-Six: Alex
Chapter Forty-Seven: Book Notes: Those Left Behind
Chapter Forty-Eight: Ruthie
Chapter Forty-Nine: Alex
Chapter Fifty: Sierra
Chapter Fifty-One: Ruthie
Chapter Fifty-Two: Alex
Chapter Fifty-Three: Ruthie
Chapter Fifty-Four: Sierra
Chapter Fifty-Five: Alex
Chapter Fifty-Six: Ruthie
Chapter Fifty-Seven: Sierra
Chapter Fifty-Eight: Alex
Chapter Fifty-Nine: Sierra
Chapter Sixty: Alex
Chapter Sixty-One: Ruthie
Chapter Sixty-Two: Ruthie
Chapter Sixty-Three: Sierra
Chapter Sixty-Four: Alex
Chapter Sixty-Five: Sierra
Chapter Sixty-Six: Ruthie
Chapter Sixty-Seven: Alex
Chapter Sixty-Eight: Sierra
Chapter Sixty-Nine: Ruthie
Chapter Seventy: Sierra
Chapter Seventy-One: Book Notes: The Painful Truth
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Darby Kane
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Book Notes: Lost and Found
Emily Hunt disappeared on the Saturday of graduation weekend. No one noticed until Sunday afternoon.
A blonde with big brown eyes and a deep, soulful laugh that lit up her face wasn’t the type to blend in. The recent college grad dreamed of becoming an investigative reporter, of breaking big stories, getting awards, and doing splashy interviews. Even ignoring her questionable talent, she lacked the patience and drive it would take to survive years of mind-numbing, day-to-day plodding, stockpiles of phone calls and messages, and notoriously unreliable pay. Now, none of that mattered.
Local police and college officials rushed to grab microphones at the press conference and blame alcohol for Emily’s disappearance. Men decked out in business suits and uniforms shook their heads as they lectured the public about the dangerous mix of binge drinking and too much partying on college campuses.
In the span of a few hours, Emily morphed from a young woman with promise to a cautionary tale. The quick pivot to “this is why we don’t allow fraternities and sororities on campus” by the college’s president ignored the fact neither institution played a role in her being missing.
By not showing up at her parents’ planned celebration lunch, Emily had forfeited the presumption of innocence in her own disappearance. Did you see her dress the other night? She seemed out of control at the party. I tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen. The whispers carried more than a hint of reprimand. But a simple continuum between a fixed point where Emily made smart choices and one in which she invited tragedy didn’t exist no matter how determined people were to bend and twist her story to make it fit.
The rumored explanations for her failure to sleep in her own bed that weekend overlooked the obvious details. Her car hadn’t moved from the school parking lot. Her upended purse sat at the bottom of the steps of the campus’s Museum of Art. Her abandoned cell phone with the newly cracked screen rested a few feet away.
As the hours rolled on, pontificating gave way to panic. Before sunset on Monday night, they formed a search party. The “they” included the official cadre who’d engaged in enraged finger-wagging about Emily’s partying and the supposed “friends” who barely knew her yet spilled half-truths disguised as secrets in exchange for less than five minutes of fame and attention. Within hours, a couple in their sixties who happened to be boating in the area found Emily’s body. There she was, four miles from campus, partially clothed and tangled in weeds in the New Meadows River.
She’d been twenty-two for nineteen days and a college graduate for one afternoon.
The water cleansed her crisis-manufactured guilt. Her role shifted again, this time from the cause of her own demise to beloved victim, forever enshrined as young and beautiful. Her personality locked in place, waiting for the passage of time to polish and mute every flaw into oblivion.
Her death turned out to be a horrible beginning to a winding and tragic tale rather than an ending. Not an accident. Not a result of alcohol. A murder.
The saddest part? None of this would have happened if she’d gotten into Amherst as she’d dreamed.
Chapter Two
Sierra
Sierra Prescott groaned when she stepped in her office and saw the unshuffled stacks of bids, bills, and invoices swamping her desk. If she squinted she could almost make out the glass that held down the important scraps of paper, like her computer password.
Screw privacy issues. Her business partner, Mitch Andersen, insisted on swapping out intricate strings of numbers, letters, random capitals, and nonsense symbols every month. He was a safety guy. Thirty-five going on living in a bunker. He worried about everything. He could find a tiny hint of potential trouble in every bit of fantastic news. Then again, with his background being skeptical wasn’t a surprise. It was a survival mechanism.
She’d been out in the field, on a landscaping job for the new boutique hotel in Rockport, for nine days. It would take another five for the ache in her knees to subside. So, she switched to desk work. Clearly not a great decision.
“Mitch?” She shouted his name into the empty office suite.
Because it was Sunday, rational people remained at home, playing with their kids and puppies, and enjoying this thing called a weekend. Not that she or Mitch had any needy creatures in their care. Both were single. Both lived alone. Both worked too much. Neither of them bothered to file a piece of paper until the threat of being buried alive in a pile of overdue bills overcame them.
“Hey.” Mitch appeared in the doorway. As usual, he wrapped up his entire greeting with that one word.
He wore jeans and a zip-up sweater to fight the cooling September winds. His brown hair had that ruffled, don’t-own-a-mirror look. He was a handsome-without-trying type. A mix of boy next door and hot single dad on the playground. His lazy smile kicked up on one side without any emotion or lightness behind it. Not that he was a psychopath, but he’d been raised by one and had learned early how to navigate a series of emotional land mines.
Sierra picked up the crumpled postcard by her foot and held it in the air. “Is this garbage or part of some basketball game you were playing, using the trash can?”
“Garbage.”
His tone actually said problem. Intrigued, she unrolled the paper to find an invitation addressed to Mitchell Andersen with a handwritten note on the side.
We expect you to be here. —W
She didn’t have to ask who W was. Though she’d only talked to him on the phone, she knew all about Will Mayer. Mitch’s college friend, or one of them. Part of a supposedly unbreakable group of friends that shattered one spring, twelve years ago. A topic Mitch rarely discussed.
“Will’s g
“Uh-huh.”
“I wonder if her parents actually named her Ruthie or Ruth.” Mitch didn’t say a word, so Sierra kept talking. “Weirdly, it’s a printed invite to an informal get-together happening in three weeks. A call would have made more sense, but the event is clearly low-key.” She pointed at the card. “Says so right here.”
“I don’t know Ruthie.”
“You’re a few seconds behind here, and I’m guessing that’s on purpose.” The more painful the conversation became, the more determined she was to push through it. Not for any reason other than getting together with old friends should matter to Mitch even though he was trying mighty hard to prove it didn’t.
He leaned against the doorframe. “I can’t go.”
“Right.” She glanced around, taking in the paperwork carnage. “I know the office looks like we got hit by a cyclone, but it’s manageable. I can—”
“I don’t want to go.”
There it was. Finally. Only took him a bunch of cryptic sentences to get there. “That’s a different answer.”
He shrugged but didn’t leave the room.
“You haven’t been back to Maine since . . .” Well, shit. She’d meant to avoid this topic. “Uh . . . college graduation.”
His smile looked genuine this time. “Subtle.”
“Sorry.” She’d intended to sidestep the two subjects guaranteed to make Mitch’s mood dive and his sarcasm spike, but she’d managed to crash right into one. Biting humor was his go-to avoidance move. She’d taken exactly one online psychology class, so she knew these things.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, but this event isn’t about what happened back then. It’s an engagement party.” She tried to make the occasion sound fun but was pretty sure she’d failed. “Maybe it would be good to replace a terrible memory with a good one.”
“Have you ever found revisiting the past to be a positive thing?”
“Well, no, but . . . Okay, no. But it’s possible you might need to go back?” She winced as she said the words.
“You think I haven’t moved on.”
Hell, no. He hadn’t moved an inch. He didn’t date, kept most people on the acquaintance and easy-to-drop superficial level, and restricted his deep friendship circle to exactly one—her.
He liked and trusted her. She was in love with him. End of sad story.
Romance or not, she wanted more for him. If not with her, fine. She’d muddle through, but he’d been dealt a really shitty hand in life. The kind of personal history that would break most people, and she feared he was moving closer to broken-and-unfixable as the years ticked by.
“You can see your friends. Remember the good times.” He looked less convinced the longer she droned on, but that’s what she did. When she wanted to win him over she tended to clobber him with arguments until he either let her win or he walked away in a grumbling haze of profanity. She had no idea which way this time would go. “Go celebrate Will and this Ruthie person then report back on what she’s like because I’m nosy. I’m betting she’s a blonde and wealthy. Have you seen photos? Is she?”
“I don’t want to remember anything about that time of my life.”
She sighed at him. “You can’t ignore four years of your life because of . . .”
His eyebrow lifted. “A murder?”
Well, shit. She’d done it again. She’d taken that damn psych class thinking she could support him. She wanted her money back. “Okay. Yeah, I can’t imagine what that was like for you or what it’s still like. I also can’t imagine college since I didn’t go, but the party feels monumental. Adult. Like, you need to reconnect with these people who shaped so much of who you are so you can move on.”
He exhaled long and loud in a you’re-never-going-to-shut-up-about-this-otherwise way. “Come with me. The invitation says it’s for two. If I’m going, I’m not going alone.”
She flipped the card around a few times before she saw the additional handwriting at the bottom about a guest. “Huh. I missed that part.”
“And I vowed never to step foot in Maine again, so we’re even.”
Right. That. The impact of the moment hit her. Her rah-rah support ignored his distress and ran right over his trauma, and she never meant to do either.
“You know what? Ignore me. I wasn’t thinking about . . .” The right words abandoned her. She didn’t want to mention murder or police, so she just stopped talking.
He shrugged again. “We’re going. Pack a sweater and whatever weapon makes you feel safe at night. My experience is you’ll need both.”
Chapter Three
Alex
The same invitation Alex threw out two days ago either crawled out of the garbage can and leapt back onto the kitchen counter or, worse, his wife had found it. Seeing their names, Alexander and Cassandra Greene, on it made him twitchy.
He held up the postcard, catching her attention across the granite-topped kitchen island. “I dumped this in the garbage for a reason.”
“And I fished it back out.”
He exhaled, hoping to find the necessary patience to get through this conversation. “Attending this party would be a huge mistake, which—see my previous comment—explains why I tossed out the invite.”
“Your concern is noted. I noted it yesterday morning when you made the same argument.”
Cassie meant before they left for the law office around eight. The same office suite they shared in a refurbished bank in downtown Providence. It housed their newly formed eighteen-person firm. Bound together in life and in business . . . and by a more-than-decade-old secret that ruined everything.
He stepped around the island and grabbed her arm. “Please listen to me.”
She shrugged him off, almost dropping the pan of stir-fried vegetables she held. “Hey!”
“Sorry, but I’m not joking about this.”
He loved her. That was his burden because most days he also hated her.
The physical attraction, once all-encompassing, had leveled off to more of a simmer with occasional flare-ups of madness. Love watered down by time and secrets that proved heavier to carry each year.
She was still stunning. Put-together, tall and lean, with a short brunette bob. She walked into a room and owned it because she led with confidence. She’d grown up poor, hungry, and scared and fought for a different life. Mapped out every milestone well in advance and ruthlessly stuck to her schedule out of a fear that any deviation could send her back to the trailer park and an upbringing she despised.
Their daughter, Zara, arrived four years after they graduated from law school, exactly on the timeline Cassie had set out for their lives before they even left undergrad. Marriage. One pregnancy. No time off from the legal ladder climb.
Cassie had vowed to set them up in their own firm, be their own bosses, before Zara started kindergarten. Their daughter was a few months shy of four, which meant Cassie had hit every life goal target on time or early, as if she held complete control over the entire universe.
Their daughter was one of the reasons Alex wanted to move forward and never look back. She needed them, so he tried to reason with Cassie again. “You know that going to Maine can only end badly.”
“That’s not a very romantic way to talk about the place where we met.”
Bowdoin College. It had been his dream school until graduation weekend, when it became a nightmare.
“We got out and we need to stay away.” They’d escaped. Not everyone in their group had been that lucky. “Smart people avoid situations that can blow up and fuck them over.”
“Did you read that in a book?”
Her personality shifted to cold and detached whenever he had the nerve to disagree with her or say anything that threatened to tangle up her well-laid plans.
“How can you be so calm about this?” he asked, needing to understand.
Some of the tension ran out of her shoulders and her voice grew softer, more coaxing. “It’s a small get-together with some of our oldest and dearest friends.”
Flirting. It was her fallback move. Smile at him the right way. Walk toward him, leaving no doubt what his reward would be if he was a very good boy.
He wished he didn’t love her—or fear her—as much as he did.
