The Engagement Party, page 7
“Sierra . . . would you . . .” His fingers trailed over her back. “Please stop.”
Face it. The words echoed through her. Holding on to her anger only depleted the energy she needed to get through whatever lethal darkness lurked ahead. She stopped and turned to look at him. “What?”
“I didn’t tell you about Tyler coming to see me because I knew you’d worry.”
“You make me sound like a grandmother.”
He leaned against the wall with the handrail digging into his back. “You’re the one person I don’t want to disappoint yet I continually do it.”
She sucked at being pissed off. After a lifetime of listening to her practical parents talk about the things they wanted to do once they retired only to have those dreams derailed by her father’s colon cancer then her mother’s losing fight with the same, she’d vowed to appreciate the moments and the people who mattered. To be a caretaker, despite the potential downside, and a voice of reason. Mitch was the recipient of all that.
She sat down two steps from the third-floor landing. “Stop being a martyr. You’re not that bad.”
“And right on cue you’re defending me.” He shook his head. “I don’t deserve it, you know. Even I know I do things that rightly piss you off.”
“Amen to that.” If only she could hold on to the frustration for an extended period of time. “Did you know Tyler would be here?”
Mitch sat down next to her, squishing their bodies together on the narrow step. “I didn’t kill him.”
“I know that, you jackass.” Not having anywhere to hide or any room to shift and put some space between them, she balanced her head against the wall. “I’m trying to figure out if this Tyler guy has been following you around or if someone killed him and deposited him here for you to be blamed. Even though, scary enough, both of those things could be true.”
“He hasn’t called or tried to see me, that I know of, since that time at the copper refinery. I’m sorry I was an ass—”
“You were.” He always apologized. She wished he would stop inflicting the pain that required the groveling in the first place.
“—and hid that from you.” He knocked his leg against hers in the playful way he did things. “I really was trying to protect you . . . and maybe protect myself, too.”
There. “Was that so hard to admit?”
“Actually, yes.” He stared at his hands as he turned them over and back, rubbed them together. “I’ve spent years trying to forget and failing. Existing, eking out the smallest degree of stability. So, when Tyler tracked me down at work, my one place of peace . . .” He sighed. “I don’t know. The thought of opening the door and inviting him back into my life threw me. I’ve wanted to kill him for so long, and feared I would, but I swear someone beat me to it.”
Living with hate. The idea was so far off her radar she had trouble imagining it, but from his stark expression she could tell it cost him something to admit it.
She tried a joke even though this moment, this weekend, called for the opposite of amusement. “Let’s not lead with that last part when we talk to the police.”
“Forgiven?”
“Always.” Which she now believed would be her downfall.
He stood up and reached a hand down to her. “Onward and upward into the creepy attic.”
She accepted the help up, relishing the last few seconds before reality intruded. Her drumming heartbeat had nothing to do with love and everything to do with dread for the night ahead. “We’re calling this the third floor because attics are terrifying, and I’ve hit my maximum in the terror department today.”
“Fair enough.”
They got to the top and stepped into an open section. There was a makeshift sitting space at one end of what likely once was little more than a storage area that had been built out with drywall. The other end of the gabled room had two twin beds and a rocking chair. Practical rather than cozy and welcoming.
An overflow space with questionable ventilation and white walls . . . and hundreds of photos pinned and pasted on those walls and hanging from the ceiling.
Mitch’s smile collapsed. “What the hell?”
Sierra’s eyes refused to focus. All she could see was a sea of pictures. Most looked like copies or prints, not originals. Sierra picked out the same face of a woman in every single photo. Sometimes by herself and pensive but most times not. Some of her as a teen. Some from later years. Many of her laughing.
Mitch unpinned one photo. This one showed a teenage girl in a soccer uniform and included a caption about a regional award.
“Oh, shit.” He doubled over with his hands balanced on his knees. “I don’t . . . what is this?”
No, no, no. Nothing else. No more. Not one more horror. The words rose above the shock and slammed into Sierra.
She wanted to close her eyes and disappear. A scream begged to get out, but she swallowed it. Falling apart would put them in more danger. Then she looked at Mitch and saw the way his knees kept buckling as gulping breaths shook through him.
“This doesn’t make sense. I can’t . . .” He inhaled a few times before standing up.
Sierra brushed a soothing hand over his back. She wanted to tell him everything was going to be okay, but she couldn’t form the lie.
“Emily.” Mitch turned the paper over, studied it, then looked around the room. “They’re all photos of Emily.”
Another dead person from his past. More trauma he hadn’t processed. A new unwanted nightmare for her to share.
“Why would they be here? How are Emily and Tyler even connected?” Sierra had so many questions but those rose to the top.
“Me.” Mitch exhaled. “The only connection is me.”
Chapter Seventeen
Book Notes: Who Killed Emily?
When a woman goes missing suspicion first falls on those closest to the victim. Family. A boyfriend or former boyfriend, a teacher, or a neighbor. Someone from her inner circle. That boy she turned down for a date who might have been unstable and furious and wanted revenge.
Emily, a college student full of energy and life, didn’t have any obvious enemies. That meant everyone, from known predators in the area to loved ones, fell under suspicion. Everyone who knew her and many who didn’t demanded answers. They craved a simple, easily packaged explanation that provided quick closure. One that confirmed this murder was about Emily only and they were safe in their homes and on their streets. A solution that allowed them to treat the violence as an aberration and sink back into their lives after shedding a few tears for the loss of a young life.
A group of uncomfortable bedfellows, consisting of law enforcement, concerned citizens, and online true crime warriors, dissected the lives of every man who had known or come in contact with Emily. Her father, Phillip, didn’t escape scrutiny. Each hour away from the family home, including those unaccounted for during graduation weekend, came under suspicion. His usual schedule consisted of day trips to New York City and longer trips to other cities “for work.”
Clocking all those business hours backfired on him. Phillip’s much-touted work ethic boomeranged into a haunting misdirection of Did her dad kill her? and What happened behind those closed doors? until a zealous podcaster overstepped and physically followed Phillip. This podcaster found Phillip’s mistress and their secret two-year-old daughter in the Upper West Side brownstone he owned in the city. The second family and additional property Emily’s mother never knew about.
Phillip’s reputation disintegrated into a sinkhole of name-calling after that. Online sleuths launched wild accusations and shifted his life to center stage on every gossip site. His marriage imploded into a fiery wreck of a divorce that raged on for years after Emily’s death.
Emily never knew about her father’s fall from grace but every mention of her parents both in the news and in whispers around town to this day start with a reference to the couple’s murdered daughter.
While that fiasco raged, the police quickly ruled out Emily’s younger brothers, who were out of school and seen all over the hotel and town of Brunswick with their mother during the weekend Emily vanished. Law enforcement then turned to interrogating friends and former boyfriends. Not a quick undertaking because Emily’s friend circle turned out to be wide. It included people who thought they were friends and actual friends. High school friends, many of whom she abandoned for college friends, as well as obligatory through-other-old-money-families friends.
Emily dated but not with an intensity that ever suggested she’d found the one or even fell in love. Her taste in young men others might find odd intrigued law enforcement. Television analysts obsessed with archaic diligence about what they viewed as Emily’s overactive sex life. How she dated but never found a real boyfriend or potential husband, as if that were the only reason a woman would go to college.
The pundits and self-proclaimed experts debated for hours about how, without her, some of her partners might be considered incels—part of an online subculture of misogynists who are unable find a romantic partner or are “involuntarily celibate” and sometimes violent.
These talking heads all ignored the reality that the young men she dated, even after the inevitable breakups, didn’t hate her. They stumbled over themselves to go into graphic detail about the sex and how much she loved to “do it” in public places, mere feet away from anyone who might notice. She made them popular just by being seen with them.
One guy stuck out. A loner with a tragic past reminiscent of great literature. Once the police learned about him they dug in.
Chapter Eighteen
Ruthie
Ruthie jammed her finger against the number keypad of her cell, trying to make something happen. When that didn’t work, she scanned her apps. “There has to be a way to get a signal out.”
Kitchen cabinet doors banged around her as Will rummaged through the shelves in his usual half-assed fashion when doing a task he didn’t want to do. He’d barely looked around inside, then thud. “We find the jammer then we can make the calls.”
She heard his voice. Normal. Watching him now, she saw the engineer at work. Methodical. Logical. No panic.
Depleted and terrified, sure someone with a knife or some other equally lethal weapon spied on them as they moved around the main floor, Ruthie didn’t understand his sense of calm. She balanced her hip against the counter. “You’re not shaken or confused.”
He switched to staring at the lower cabinets. “I’m trying to find this—”
“There’s a dead man in a car fifty feet away from us.” Screw the jammer and his friends and her ridiculous plan of coming to an isolated island for this weekend.
Will crouched down and balanced on the balls of his feet as he opened another set of cabinet doors and performed a cursory inspection. “It’s farther than that.”
Talk about missing the point. Unless the nonsense was on purpose. “Tell me what’s going on in that supposedly beautiful mind of yours. You know none of what’s happening makes any sense, right?”
He stood up and stared at her. Didn’t make a move or try to quiet her pulsing nerves. She wanted to write his flat reaction off as some sort of defense mechanism, but this was who he was. He viewed himself as stable and dependable. To her, he came off as unemotional and indifferent.
A dead body should produce a reaction. Maybe not screaming but a noise of some sort. “Well?”
“Mitch wouldn’t kill anyone.”
Not what she expected but she did have a response for that one. “Wrong. You heard him say he wanted the dead guy dead.”
She hadn’t dreamed that part. The sound of Mitch’s voice played over and over in her head. He didn’t doubt his ability to take another life, and neither did she. Chalk it up to a dysfunctional upbringing, a hideous monster of a mother, or a general lack of affection. The end result was the same. Mitch was odd. As far as she could tell the best thing about him was Sierra, and he failed to recognize what he had there or how she evened him out.
“That wasn’t . . .” Will made a strangled sound. “I don’t have an explanation for the car, but Mitch wouldn’t lure Tyler here and put us all at risk.”
She secretly hoped some stellar, unassailable argument would pop out of Will’s mouth next, but he didn’t continue until she glared at him.
“Even if Mitch did plan ahead once he knew the address for our party and put the wrecked car on the island, he couldn’t go out to the garage and kill a guy without us knowing.”
Not nearly as stellar as she’d hoped. Engaging in timeline subterfuge didn’t convince her at all. “Very rational.”
“I mean, sure, we split up to get settled in our rooms and that sort of thing, but Sierra was with him. You can’t believe she’s in on this.” Will’s voice became more animated. “Right? Why would she?”
Ruthie welcomed the reaction. Any reaction. “He could have killed this Tyler guy earlier then dumped the car here for the big unveiling today.”
Will rolled his eyes. Stared at the ceiling. Generally, pulled out every male frustration gesture guaranteed to piss her off.
He delivered one last sigh. “Listen to what you’re saying, hon.”
“The name is Ruthie.”
He ignored her and trampled right over the reminder about her hatred for pet names. “If he wanted to kill Tyler, then why not do it back at home and bury the body? Mitch is on construction sites all the time and could hide any number of crimes. Putting a body where someone would find it, where he’s temporarily staying, points the finger right at him.”
A little too dismissive but not wrong, so she rolled with it. “Who would want to frame Mitch? Could all of this, the notes specifically, have something to do with Emily?”
“What?” Will shifted his feet. Took small steps without going anywhere. Not pacing, exactly, but only because there wasn’t a lot of room between the kitchen island and the stove to move. “Why would you ask that?”
Nervous. That was new. He usually pivoted away from conversations that required him to feel something. This time he let the anxiety creep in and overtake him.
Her plan for this weekend had been all but obliterated by the need to survive it, but she hadn’t forgotten her original goals. “Think about those notes. They suggest someone in this house is hiding something very big.”
“They don’t mention Emily.”
He’d switched to denial. Not the first time he’d done that since they’d known each other. Every time she’d broached the topic of Emily, he threw up an emotional stop sign. She hadn’t made one inch of progress on that front.
Now wasn’t the best time but this fake engagement would never progress to an unwanted marriage, so she had to take her shots when she could. “I know you don’t like talking about her, but—”
Any thought of diving into the subject vanished at the sound of the side door opening. Cassie and Alex came in from their outside search. A second later heavy footsteps pounded on the stairs. Sierra jogged down with Mitch lumbering behind her.
“Photos.” Sierra sounded out of breath. Her eyes were huge and haunted. “Maybe a hundred of them. They were plastered all over the third floor.”
Sierra dropped at least a dozen pictures on the kitchen island. Spread them out to investigate further. They all gathered around, but Ruthie didn’t need to lean in close. She knew what the photos were, or more accurately, who was in them. Emily. Young Emily. Emily closer to the time of her death. All Emily.
Will’s head shot up and he pinned Ruthie with his gaze. “How did you know all of this was about Emily?”
Not all but some. “I didn’t.”
But Ruthie could tell he didn’t believe her.
Maybe he really was as smart as people said.
Chapter Nineteen
Book Notes: Emily’s Diary
It’s not often you get to hear from the victim once she’s dead. Emily’s diary provided that insight. Her parents fought to get the writings back. To bury them. Made every argument about privacy and irrelevancy and, when those failed, insisted to the public the diary didn’t exist.
The contents were leaked to the press within four days of her death. The murder of a pretty college graduate in a place where that sort of thing rarely happened, where she should have been safe with her parents right there in the same town, proved too explosive to contain.
The pages of handwritten scrawl expressed a yearning for a change she doesn’t define or explain and has no idea how to make happen. Emily seesawed between wanting her parents’ approval and judging every belief they held. Not really an uncommon occurrence in a young twenty-something. The age called for wonder and exploration, for bucking against trends and the binds of upbringing. For believing you knew so much when you had experienced so little.
In many ways, the diary highlighted how similar Emily was to her peers. She had friends and the usual squabbles. She gossiped and got angry. She daydreamed and hoped for bigger things. None of that helped the investigation. The lack of flowery language or pages about nasty relationship breakups or bad dates left the police floundering . . . until they focused in on what the diary did say.
She mentioned many young men. Those she targeted for her Emily upgrade. They were categorized and described, as if she’d performed surveillance on them. Covert sightings. Ratings. Pro and con lists about choosing one over another. Rumors and histories about each. When she did pick one, pages outlining what they did together in excruciating detail, both sexually and otherwise, followed by plans on how to end each informal relationship on a positive note and move on to a new target.
The game she played made the grown men investigating her death squirm. Male college students engaged in this sort of behavior all the time, keeping scorecards about the women they had sex with and passing the information around for laughs. Doing so might be considered boorish or even disgusting, depending on how secretive the information stayed, but forgivable in a boys will be boys way. Stumbling over a young woman maneuvering the same path horrified every adult who knew.
