A Deadly Reunion

All characters in this publication are
fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is
purely coincidental.

A Deadly Reunion

Copyright © 2015 Odette C. Bell

A Deadly Reunion was previously published
under the title An Unlucky Reunion.

Cover art photos: sexy detective woman
holding gun silhouette © STYLEPICS, A group of men © Iurii,
Mountain lake © muha04, and ancient map of the world © javarman.
Licensed from Depositphotos.

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A Deadly
Reunion

EPISODE ONE

CHAPTER 1

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel
as I stared at the road signs before me. I had my phone set to GPS,
but the gobbledygook instructions it suggested had already seen me
drive into a field, a forest, and a freaking quarry. This town was
so backwater even the modern age shied away from mapping it.

I craned my neck, narrowed my eyes, and
crept forward in my hire car. I was half on the verge, the tires
crunching over the grass and rock. I needn’t have worried about
obstructing the flow of traffic though, as there were no other
vehicles around.

The road was dead. Because the town was
dead. In fact, it had never been alive.

Wetlake City.

The place I’d grown up and promptly escaped
from once I had landed a driver’s license and my first pay
check.

Well, now I was back.

Reluctantly.

Really, really reluctantly.

My family had long since moved away from
this place, and I had no good reason to visit the scene of my
uneventful childhood. I had a bad reason though. A rotten one.

A high school reunion.

I took my hand off the wheel for a second
and flattened it against my head, pushing my shoulder-length
mousy-brown hair out of my eyes.

“Oh man,” I whimpered, blasting another
breath up and against my face.

I hated high school. I’d hated it when I’d
had the displeasure of attending, and I still hated it now, all
these years later.

Yet I was still going to my reunion. Why?
Because my mother had convinced me to go, of course. She’d tried
regaling me with stories of how much she’d enjoyed her own reunions
over the years, and when that hadn’t worked, she’d appealed to my
job instead.

“Just think of all the people you can watch
and lives you can observe,” she’d said. “Now’s your chance to find
out if the popular kids in school made it or crashed and burned.
You’ll be able to study their successes and failures for your
fabulous books! You’re always going on about how you’re over high
school, well now it’s your chance to prove it.”

I’d tried to ignore her advice, but she’d
won out. In typical motherly style, she’d appealed to my ego while
offering a challenge. I did spend a lot of time talking and writing
about how much I’d grown out of high school and grown up in the
process.

I had a successful string of self-help
romance books on the market. In them, I often harped on about how
important it was to move on from your past.

Now was my chance to prove I could do that
myself. Hence the hire car and the cynicism.

It took me a long time, but I found the
right street. Wetlake was up in the mountains, near a lake – a wet
one, funnily enough – and the city was like a damn rabbit warren of
tracks and winding woodland roads.

With a bit of luck and a couple of foggy
memories, I located my motel.

I pulled up into the car park, and took my
time before I yanked up the park brake and opened my door.

I took a sobering moment to stare at the
motel before me.

Drab, styled in shades of “70s brick
cladding and brown, plastic window frames, it was an eyesore.
Though I could have afforded to stay in better style, I’d booked
late, and this was the only place in town with any vacancies.

Narrowing my gaze as I took in the ugliness
that was the Lake Motel, I actually let out a snarl. A quiet and
private one.

Whispering to myself to “come on,” I flipped
the button under the dash to open the trunk. Taking angry, forceful
steps, I grabbed my luggage and dumped it on the gravel.

Before I could muster the courage to find
the front desk to rustle up my keys, I paused again.

This time something caught my eye.

Heels. Sparkly ones. Knock offs too, if I
was any judge.

Following the sparkle up to the legs, body,
and face, I found myself frowning as something slowly clicked into
place.

The woman who had caught my attention was
wearing a seriously tight-fitting black dress that was pulled up on
one side, and she had a small designer bag dangling off her
shoulder, likely another knock off.

Yet it wasn’t the clothes and their
trademark-infringing origins that got to me, neither was it the
sultry, dancer-like walk.

It was the hair.

The blinding blond hair that was backcombed
and had so much body you would have been forgiven for thinking it
belonged in an “80s music video.

A name came to my lips and pushed its way
out in a harsh whisper, “Nancy.”

Holy crap. The chick in the knock-off heels
had to be Nancy Harrison. The most popular girl in my senior class.
Voted most likely to succeed, she’d been the Prom Queen too. She’d
ruled the roost. She’d gone out with Denver and Thorne Scott –
Wetlake High’s hottest brothers. She’d also spent her reign
torturing me and the other kids who had never fitted in.

Wow.

Before I could do anything radical – like
running over to ask Nancy whether a lifetime of stilettos had
caused permanent skeletal damage – a car pulled up beside me. I
glanced to the side automatically, and then I stopped.

Well gosh darn.

Denver Scott.

The Denver Scott.

I recognized him immediately. Of course I
did. I’d only spent the majority of English class scribbling out
his likeness on the back of my pencil case.

If Nancy had been the undisputed queen of
Wetlake High, then Denver was her king. A freaking handsome one
too.

Not wanting to be caught staring at the guy,
I neatened my luggage and then mucked around in the trunk as I
surreptitiously shot Denver a long, calculating look.

He was wearing a suit. Though it fitted him
well, it was a little too tight around the neck and pulled to the
left a bit. It was also a fairly run-of-the-mill style, and while
the fabric looked sturdy, it clearly wasn’t from Milan or
Paris.

Tucking my hair behind my ears, I reached
into my trunk and muscled my suitcase out. As I straightened, I
shot him another careful glance.

He was bigger – which wasn’t so much of a
surprise considering I hadn’t seen him since our senior year.
Denver had filled out though, grown up, and now had his fair share
of fine wrinkles around his eyes and tucked in at the edges of his
mouth. If the dim light coming in from the room in front of us
didn’t deceive me, he also had a few flecks of gray glinting out
from behind his ears.

This made me smile. I’d met too many men
who’d rolled out of bed at the tender age of twenty-five, only to
shriek at the mirror when it had dared to show them their first
hint of gray.

Some fellas didn’t handle aging well.

Some did. Denver appeared to be managing the
first wrinkles and greys of his creeping maturity in style. Though
he was hardly that old at the tender age of thirty, the point was,
he certainly wasn’t eighteen anymore.

Before I could continue my in-depth analysis
of the man, he hefted a single bag off the seat beside him, slammed
his door, and walked off.

While I craned my neck to watch, he marched
quickly across the scant lawn beyond the car park and ducked into
the main office.

I stood there a moment, pushing my teeth
into my lips, and then I hefted my luggage and followed.

Far from being angry at the prospect of my
impending school reunion anymore, I was now intrigued.

Clearly, my mother had been right. As long
as I could keep a level head and remember I wasn’t actually in high
school anymore, this could be a lot of fun. I hadn’t seen any of
these people for years. Who knew where their lives had taken them
or if they’d even made it out of Wetlake?

And far more importantly, who knew if Denver
Scott was single?

Chuckling and muttering to myself that I was
a very bad girl, I got my keys, found my room, and turned in for
the night.

Tomorrow the fun would begin. Before it
could, I had to remind myself of one thing.

I wasn’t the same spotty, goofy teenager
anymore.

I’d changed.

It was time to show Wetlake how much.

I got up that morning ready to go. I didn’t
even have to wait for my phone’s alarm to go off; I woke up with a
start, my mind spinning.

It was the day of the reunion.

I was excited. I had no earthly reason to be
so, but I couldn’t deny the twist of nerves spiraling its way
around my stomach.

I wanted to see how people had turned
out.

I wanted to see if they’d changed, or if I’d
been the only one to go off to reinvent myself completely.

Jumping out of bed and not caring that I
sent the blankets tumbling onto the floor, I padded over to my open
suitcase and pulled out the black dress I was going to wear. It had
a decent neckline – nothing X-rated, but not something that would
be passed around a nunnery either. I had a pair of sensible, but
still fashionable, low, suede heels, and a pair of sheer stockings
to match. I also had a nice woven cashmere shawl to top it all off.
It was going to be cold out there, after all.

Though I tried to forget most of my life in
Wetlake, I remembered the cold.

This place was freezing. Even in summer it
was liable to sudden snowstorms and winds that could lift the hairs
on a Scotsman’s legs.

I also knew the reunion was being held on
the lawn just outside the school, hence the sensible shoes,
stockings, and shawl. I didn’t want to freeze my ass off while
engaging in stilted conversation with people I hadn’t seen since
fourth-period chemistry class.

Picking up my dress and flattening it to my
chest as I caught my reflection in the mirrors covering the
built-in wardrobe, I cast a calculating gaze over my
appearance.

I wasn’t classically beautiful, but neither
was I a lump of unloved clay. I was somewhere in the middle. Which
was exactly where you wanted to be.

Feeling satisfied with my choice of outfits,
I wandered into the bathroom and started to brush my hair. Once I
was done, I patted my fingers across my eyebrows, giving them a
careful look as I reached for the tweezers.

Just as my hand hovered over them, I
stopped.

I heard something from outside. There was a
small window lodged high into the wall. It was right above the
toilet, and it was open just a crack. It’d been like that when I’d
come into the room, and I’d left it that way, figuring management
rightly demanded their bathrooms have aeration.

Well, now it was letting in the low mumble
of a voice.

I couldn’t understand what was being said –
the thick bathroom wall was in the way – but I could pick out
something.

The tone.

It was an angry one. Fraught even.

I started to frown, and I turned towards the
window.

I stared at it and took a step forward.

As I did, the voice stopped.

Just as I turned back to the mirror,
tweezers still in hand, the voice started up again.

It was angrier than before.