A Deadly Reunion (10 page)

Denver appeared to think it was
something.

The more I thought about the situation, the
less I could convince myself it was nothing. So I didn’t like the
idea of Thorne trying to dismiss it so readily.

“But what about the message on the back?
What about the pinholes in the yearbook photo? What about the blue
pins I’ve been finding everywhere?”

“I’m sure they’re just a coincidence. And I
can guarantee you that that postcard is probably just some jealous
old schoolmate fooling around.” Thorne walked up to the door and
opened it, and all the while, he offered me the kindest of
smiles.

I didn’t smile back.

“
But what about the... the... Kill
Board?”

“Kill Board?”

“
Denver said that in the school there had
been a pin board with James Wood’s yearbook photo attached to it
and then an excerpt from a Times magazine interview. Doesn’t the
fact that I’ve been finding all those pins around mean something?
And what about my... success?” I asked uncomfortably. “James was a
bloody millionaire; he was clearly the most successful person to
have graduated from our class. What happens if the killer is going
through people that are successful? What happens if I’m
next?”

“Like I said, I’m sure it’s all fine. I will
look into this. I will keep an eye on you. I will do everything by
the book. Patti, you don’t have to be stressed by this.”

Stressed? Was he serious? I was going
nuts.

“But Denver thought—” I began.

“I’m sure Denver thinks a lot of things, but
this isn’t his jurisdiction. This is a Wetlake Police case. And we
know more than enough to get this solved.”

I really wanted to point out that only just
that morning he’d told me there was hardly any crime in Wetlake,
and he spent most of his time plucking lost tourists out of the
ranges.

I wasn’t that rude though. Instead, I let
him lead me out to the front desk.

I stood there while he had a conversation
with the other officer, and then Thorne walked me out to his car.
“I’ll take you back to your motel, and I’ll have a look around
while I’m there.”

I nodded at him silently.

I didn’t want to go back to the motel. I
wanted to go home. I wanted to get out of Wetlake right now. In
fact, as Thorne drove me home, I genuinely considered whether that
would be the best plan. Then again, would I just take some wrong
turn down a winding, dark track only to have a set of bright
headlights zip in behind me? Would the murderer jump gleefully out
of the car and do away with me in the silent woods?

Jesus, any more of this and I could go
insane. I was a self-help writer, so I already had a developed
imagination, and I could easily let it run away with me.

Far from offering me any assurance, I found
the ride home with Thorne to be a thoroughly awkward one.

I didn’t want anyone to chat to me about the
old days, and I certainly didn’t want to talk about the reunion. I
just wanted to feel safe again.

We arrived at the motel around five o’clock.
Even though it was late summer, there were already long shadows
pooling in from the forest behind.

I could hear the bugs and crickets and the
chirps of the birds as they played in the gutter and over the
grass.

It should have been peaceful.

Yesterday had been cold and blustery; today
was beautiful. It wasn’t too hot, and there was a gentle breeze and
some nice warm sunshine to filter through your clothes and warm
your back.

I loved days like this. My ideal night would
have involved a picnic in the woods followed by a short, twilight
walk.

Well, that would have been my ideal night;
now I could only think of murderers running around rampant with
chainsaws and guns and knives and old postcards of me with no pants
on.

I closed my hands around my face, blinking
hard into my fingers as I forced a breath.

I wasn’t exactly on the verge of tears, but
with a push, you could get me there pretty quick.

I was freaked out. I was usually a calm
person, but the body in the roses and the postcard on the toilet
had burned up calm.

“You can head into your room while I check
out back.” Thorne nodded at me and flashed me yet another one of
those smiles.

I tried to look friendly in return, but I
couldn’t quite manage it.

With a short wave, he left me and headed out
behind the motel. His boots crunched over the gravel and then
thumped softly over the grass as he walked confidently and quickly
away.

I watched him go. As I did, I instantly
shuddered from the nerves escaping over my back. I felt
exposed.

I straightened up. Taking a small step away
from the squad car, I turned around in a circle and checked the
motel, the car park, and the grounds. While I certainly didn’t see
any ax men wielding bloody blades and running my way, there were a
few cars and a couple of people dotted here and there.

I stared at them all warily in turn. My back
was an itchy, hot mess, and I had such a nervous feeling curdling
through my stomach that I was likely seconds from being sick.

Every single movement, from the flight of
the birds to the scamper of insects, made me jerk with
surprise.

When I heard footfall crunching over the
gravel towards me, I could have fallen over and fainted from
fright.

When I turned, that fright dried up almost
immediately.

Denver Scott.

He had his hands in his pockets and a glum
but still stern look on his face. He nodded as he made his way
towards me. “Is everything fine?”

I looked at him and didn’t answer.

He locked me in that cold and professional
gaze. “I’m not expecting a trite response, Patti; it’s a genuine
question. Are they doing everything they can? Do they have any
leads? Where are you going to stay tonight?”

Boom, boom, boom. Denver fired his questions
my way like shots from a gun.

I did not intend to dodge them, but I didn’t
exactly have good answers in response.

In fact, at the words “where are you going
to stay tonight?” I suddenly felt a great deal sicker. I even had
to clamp a hand flat onto my stomach.

“It’s not safe to stay here,” he said
simply. He wasn’t pulling any punches. He wasn’t pretending
everything was okay.

“We need to treat this threat as if it’s
real. I’ve made some calls. I have a friend who runs the B&B in
the middle of town, and though she says she is always full, I know
for a fact she has a spare room out the back. We can make it
discreet and tell her not to let anyone know you’re staying
there.”

“
Can’t I just...” I began.

“Go home? Yes, you can. It is a possibility,
but I don’t suggest you travel alone. We don’t have enough
information on this case, and until we do, we can’t make any
assumptions. Assumptions can get people killed,” he answered
blankly.

There he went again, not pulling a single
punch. Talking to Denver made everything seem deadly serious, and
it sucked any lasting warmth out of my belly, replacing it with
frigid, cold paranoia and a sense of impending doom.

Yet at least he seemed...
honest.

He wasn’t lying, and he wasn’t hiding behind
attempts to comfort me.

I knew the secret of a great romance was to
balance two facts: practicality and imagination. If you didn’t have
any imagination, then your romance would be passionless. The mind
was so important to the body that you couldn’t divorce the two and
expect to stay married. Yet practicality was just as important. You
had to know the kinds of things that put relationships under
stress, and you couldn’t gloss over them with wishes, hopes, and
fancies that there were no problems between soul mates. You had to
appreciate trends and have a good hold over statistics. Know what
is likely to occur in most situations, and you can chart a surer
path to your goal.

Well right now Denver was being practical,
and I appreciated that more than anything else. It almost made me
capable of forgiving him for being a world-class jerk.

“What do you want to do? Do you want to
leave or stay?”

“What’s safer?”

“I can’t tell you conclusively at this
stage. But I can tell you that whatever you choose, we can find
ways to make it safer. Our goal is to secure you until we know
enough to measure the actual risk in this situation.”

“
But won’t the killer... strike again? I
mean, if I stay here...” I trailed off, lost in that horrible
thought.

“You will be perfectly fine.”

I turned to see Thorne walking towards
me.

He was shooting daggers at his brother while
fixing me with nothing but charm and smiles.

“I thought I told you not to interfere with
this case?” Thorne snapped at his brother.

“I’m not interfering. I respect your
jurisdiction. I’m not attempting any investigation. I’m simply
talking to Patti and appraising her of her options as I see
them.”

Well guess what? You don’t have to. We’ve
figured out what happened,” Thorne nodded at me calmly.

What...?

“You have?” Denver narrowed his eyes in a
snap.

“You might do it slow at the FBI, but we do
it right in Wetlake,” Thorne quipped easily.

I felt sick, surprised, and a little like I
was being taken for a ride.

How could Thorne have possibly solved the
case already? He’d barely been gone for five minutes. What could he
have done in that time?

“I went and chatted to the guy in the front
office. He saw some kids playing out back of your room, and by the
sounds of it, it was at the same time you were taking a shower. Now
the kids in question are boisterous, but harmless. They are always
hanging out back of the motel because there’s easy mountain bike
tracks up to the ranges from there.”

“And?” Denver prompted immediately. “How
does that solve the case?”

“I don’t know what they teach you at the
FBI, but over here we always lean towards the simplest answer
first. Before you put ideas into Patti’s head that somebody’s after
her, let’s face facts. I know those kids get up to pranks; hell,
everybody in Wetlake does. I also know they go to Wetlake High, and
they’ve already been messing with Annabelle’s reunion. They
spray-painted her decorations, sent out false invites, and
appropriated a bunch of old yearbooks. She’s been down at the
station complaining about it endlessly for the past several
weeks.”

“
But... why would they have a postcard of
me without any pants on from the football game? And why would they
cut out a photo of me from my yearbook, and why would they write
such a creepy message?” I flapped a hand on my chest as I asked my
questions. It was the only thing I could do to center myself. I
desperately wanted to believe Thorne, but the practical side of my
personality just couldn’t let me. Situations like this weren’t
about trust or belief; they were about preparing yourself and being
intelligent.

Denver Scott might be a jerk, but I was
starting to worry that Thorne was a little too carefree.

“Oh, they’ve been playing with the reunion
guests since they got here. Annabelle’s complained that she’s seen
multiple desecrated yearbooks, as she put it, spread all over town.
Spray-painted, cut out, crude mustaches drawn over everyone. As for
your postcard, well, Annabelle kind of had a few of those printed
up too. Not that I’m meant to tell you this, but she planned to do
a bit of a slideshow for you on the final night of the reunion.
Show everybody how far you’d come, that kind of thing.”

My mouth slowly dropped open. It would have
been comical had it not been entirely serious.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Denver
snapped. “We need to be careful here.”

“We don’t need to do anything. You need to
butt out. I know police procedure. We can’t go around over
estimating threat. And you’re right; I know it doesn’t prove
anything. But I’m trying to do the decent thing here by reassuring
Patti that it’s probably nothing. That being said, we are going to
continue to look into it, of course we are. But there’s no point in
you getting worried, Patti, and hopping on out of town,” Thorne
nodded my way, “when it’s likely this is nothing at all.”

“What about the blue pins?” I asked rather
meekly.

“I asked reception, and they’ve got a whole
box of them. The kid showed me. They use them to pin up leaflets
and messages. Well, they threw a bunch of old ones out recently,
and the raccoons dug around in the trash. The kid said they’d been
picking up newspapers, magazines, shower caps, and you name it for
weeks. Clearly, they hadn’t been able to get all the pins out of
the grass. So I think we can discount that.”

Denver didn’t say anything, and neither did
I. I simply didn’t know what to add.

I really wanted to believe Thorne, but I
unashamedly needed more proof. While I could appreciate what he was
doing for me, I just needed to be told what was really going on
here.

“I see,” Denver answered, “considering what
you’re dealing with, I hardly consider this a convincing
story.”

Ouch.

Thorne’s expression soured. His usually
ruddy cheeks became pale as his eyebrows drew down and darkened his
gaze. “Thank you for your opinion, but it’s just that – an opinion.
Do I need to remind you again that you have absolutely no authority
in this situation and that your observations mean nothing?”

“No, but you can go ahead anyway. And I’m
going to go ahead and point out to you that authority or not, and
jurisdiction aside, you need to treat a threat like this seriously.
I don’t care if you came up with what you think is a good
explanation; you act as if the threat has not been neutralized
anyway, because the cost of you getting this wrong is too
high.”