MARKED FOR DEATH

“What if we went to the police and we didn’t tell them anything about what happened with Rachel?” Brynn asks carefully. “What if we just told them what’s going on now and that somebody is obviously threatening us?”

“How long do you think it’s going to take them to figure out that what’s going on now has something to do with something that happened in the past?” Fiona asks. “Specifically when we were in college?”

“If Cassie would just call us back…You did leave her a message on her cell phone voice mail, right?”

“Three. Cassie said she was going to take off, remember?” Fiona goes on. “And she told Alec the same thing.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s safe.”

“No, but we both know there’s no reason for us to start panicking until we know for sure something’s happened to—”

“Stop!” Brynn holds up a hand to cut her off. “Don’t even say it.”

Brynn hugs herself, still quaking from her latest bout with nausea, which has everything to do with what she found inside the parcel left by her front door.

There was an identical one at Fiona’s door.

Both packages contained framed copies of their sorority composite picture from ten years ago.

Four smiling faces are circled in thick black marker: Brynn’s, Fiona’s, Cassie’s and Tildy’s.

And both Cassie’s and Tildy’s are crossed out with an ominous, blood-redX …

Books by Wendy Corsi Staub

DEARLY BELOVED

FADE TO BLACK

ALL THE WAY HOME

THE LAST TO KNOW

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

SHE LOVES ME NOT

KISS HER GOODBYE

LULLABY AND GOODNIGHT

THE FINAL VICTIM

MOST LIKELY TO DIE

DON’T SCREAM

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

Don’t Scream

Wendy Corsi Staub

ZEBRA BOOKS

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

www.kensingtonbooks.com

Dedicated in loving memory of my grandfather,

Samuel J. Ricotta (April 1915–May 2006)

and in honor of my grandmother, Sara J. Ricotta.

And for Mark, Morgan, and Brody.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Carolyn MacNeil and Officer Michael McCarthy of the Boston Police Department, who patiently answered countless questions about murder and mayhem. Any errors in police procedural are strictly my own. In addition, I owe a tremendous thank you to my editor, John Scognamiglio, and the staff at Kensington Books; to my agents, Laura Blake Peterson, Holly Frederick, and the staff at Curtis Brown, Ltd; to my publicists, Nancy Berland and Elizabeth Middaugh, as well as Kim Miller and the rest of the staff at Nancy Berland Public Relations.

Heartfelt thanks as well to Cathy Cadek and Laura Pennock and staff at Levy Home entertainment for their ongoing, enthusiastic support, and to Levy’s Sales Promotions team—Pam Nelson, Sarah Donaldson, Janet Krey, Emily Hixon, Devar Spight, Kathleen Koelbl, Justine Willis, Renna Thomas, and George Tyrrell—for making the K-mart/Levy Sizzling Summer Author Tour such fun! Thanks to Carol Fitzgerald, Sunil Kumar, and the staff at The Book Report Network; and to Rick and Patty Donovan, Phil Pelletier, and their staff at my favorite store, The Book Nook, in Dunkirk, N.Y. Finally, Mark Staub: I could never do any of it without your feedback and support every step of the way along every literary journey.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

PART IHAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR RACHEL

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

PART IIHAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR TILDY

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

PART IIIHAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR CASSIE

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART IVHAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR FIONA

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

PART VHAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR BRYNN

CHAPTER 22

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

September, ten years earlier

“…and I do solemnly swear that I will never ever tell another living soul what happened here tonight…”

“And I do solemnly swear that I will never ever tell another living soul what happened here tonight,” the female voices echo dutifully, none without a quaver.

Brynn’s is the most tremulous of all, barely audible even to her own ears. She prays Tildy won’t notice and single her out to repeat the pledge solo. If that happens…

What will I do?

WhatcanI do?

She’ll just have to go along with it, the way she’s gone along with all of this, right from the start. Against her better judgment, against her conscience, and, ultimately…

Against the law?

Tildy says no. Adamantly. She insists that they haven’t broken any laws.

“It’s not like we’ve murdered someone,” she hissed when Brynn balked at the proposed plan. “Anyone in our situation would do the exact same thing.”

Brynn highly doubts that, but she can’t bring herself to say it.

There was a time when Brynn Costello—apple of her daddy’s eye, valedictorian of her high school class, dean’s list candidate for her first four semesters at Stonebridge College, Zeta Delta Kappa pledge—would have stood up to all of them. Even Matilda Harrington.

So why didn’t you?

Why are you standing here in the woods in the middle of the night being sworn to secrecy?

This can’t really be happening. If anyone ever found out…

But nobody will find out.

They’re not going to tell.

Anyway, Tildy was right when she pointed out that what happened isn’t their fault.

Still…

I just want to get out of here, go back to the sorority house, and forget this ever happened.

Or, better yet, just go home.

Home.

Swept by a wave of nostalgia, Brynn swallows hard over a lump in her throat. She longs for worn oak floors, oval braided rugs, chintz slipcovers. The savory aroma of fresh-brewed coffee, and onions frying in olive oil. The radio in the background, sock-hop standards and sixties’ anthems of the local oldies station. Clutter, and laundry, and people coming and going…

Home.

But the seaside blue-collar household on Cape Cod is two hundred miles and a world away from the campus nestled in the Berkshires, the mountains of western Massachusetts.

And there’s no going back—not the way Brynn yearns to do.

Before her thoughts can meander down the fateful path that ultimately led to Stonebridge College, she’s dragged back to the present.

Tildy, apparently deciding their oath needs something more to make it official, solemnly declares, “So help me God.”

“So help me God,” the others obediently intone.

Not Brynn. She just moves her lips, refusing to invoke God. Not under these circumstances.

“Now we’ll sing the sorority song,” Tildy commands, lifting her hand to push her blonde hair back from her face. Her sorority bracelet, a silver rope of clasped rosebuds, glints in the moonlight. They’re all wearing them—including Rachel—and each is personalized with dangling silver initial charms.

Brynn manages to join the others in singing. The ingrained lyrics she secretly always considered embarrassingly hokey now seem bittersweet as she forces them past the lump in her throat.

We’ll always remember

That fateful September

We’ll never forget

The new sisters we met

We’ll face tomorrow together

In all kinds of weather

ZDK girls, now side by side

May travel far and wide

But wherever we roam

Sweet ZDK will be our home.

The sisters’ voices give way to the hushed nocturnal woodland descant: chirping crickets, a rushing creek, and the September breeze that gently rustles the maple boughs high above the clearing.

Then another sound reaches Brynn’s ears…

The faint, yet resonant crack of a branch splintering underfoot.

She clutches her friend Fiona’s arm, asking in a high-pitched whisper, “Did anyone hear that?”

“Hear what?” Tildy’s tone is sharp.

“Shhh!” Standing absolutely still, afraid to breathe, Brynn listens intently.

They all do.

There is nothing.

Nothing but the crickets, the creek, a gust stirring the leaves overhead. Just like before.

After a long, tense moment, Cassie says, “I don’t hear anything, Brynn.”

Brynn doesn’t either. Not now.

But someone is there.

She can feel it.

Someone is lurking in the shadows among the trees, listening.

Perhaps even watching…

And recognizing.

PART I

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR RACHEL

CHAPTER 1

September, present day

Cedar Crest, Massachusetts

It happened ten years ago this week, just after Labor Day, and just a few miles from here.

In fact, if one knows where to look, one can pinpoint up in the greenish-golden Berkshires backdrop, beyond the row of nineteenth-century rooftops, precisely the spot where it happened.

And I know where to look…because I was there. I know exactly what really happened that night, and it’s time that—

“Oh, excuse me!” The elderly woman is apologetic, having just rounded the corner from Second Street. “I didn’t mean to bump into you…I’m so sorry.”

She looks so familiar…

It takes just a split second for the memory to surface. Right, she used to be a cashier at the little deli down the block. The place that always had hazelnut decaf. Yes, and she was always so chatty.

What was her name? Mary? Molly?

What is she doing out at this hour? The sky is still dark in the west, and none of the businesses along Main Street are open yet.

Don’t panic. She probably doesn’t even recognize you. Just smile and say something casual…

“Oh, that’s all right, ma’am.”

Good. Now turn your back. Slowly, so that you don’t draw any more attention to yourself.

Good. Now get the heck out of here, before—

“Excuse me!”

Dammit! The old lady again.

What can she possibly want now?

“You must have dropped this when I bumped you.” With a gnarled, blue-veined hand, she proffers a white envelope.

“Oh…thank you.”

Could she have glanced at the address on the front before she handed it over? If she did, could she have recognized the recipient’s name?

“It’s going to be a nice day today.” She gestures at the glow in the eastern sky, above the mountain peaks. “We needed that rain, though, at this time of year.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Just nod. Be polite.

“Well…Enjoy the day.”

“I will.”But not as much as I’ll enjoy tomorrow. “You, too.”

With a cheerful wave, the woman turns and makes her way down the block.

The post office is just a few doors in the opposite direction. These last two envelopes—the ones to be delivered right here in town—must go out in this morning’s mail.

It’s important that they be mailed from here, so that the recipients will realize that the sender is nearby.

The timing is just as crucial. All four cards need to arrive at their destination tomorrow, on the anniversary.

The others went out first thing yesterday morning—one to Boston, one to Connecticut. That excursion was uneventful. It was raining, and there were no witnesses…

Unlike today.

Now isn’t the time to start taking chances. Not after months of painstakingly laying the groundwork. Not when it’s finally about to begin at last.

Millie.

That’s her name.

The post office can wait. The first pickup won’t be for at least another hour.

What a shame, Millie.

What a shame you weren’t more careful.

“Whoa, hang on there, kiddo!” Brynn Saddler swoops toward her barefoot toddler as he dashes across the front lawn toward the street.

“Hey, good catch, Mom!” Arnie, the mail carrier, calls from the sidewalk a few doors down leafy Tamarack Lane as Brynn lifts her squirming son into her arms.

“I’m getting enough practice…third time he’s made a run for it in the last five minutes!” Laughing, Brynn carries Jeremy back to the steps of their Craftsman bungalow, where they’ve been waiting for the school bus in the late summer sunshine.

This is Caleb’s first day of kindergarten at Cedar Crest Elementary; she’s been holding her breath and checking her watch for almost seven hours. She won’t relax until the moment he’s safely home again. But the whole process is bound to kick in again tomorrow morning…

And, she supposes, every morning until high school graduation. She can’t imagine ever getting used to sending her child off each morning with a wave, a kiss, and a fervent prayer that he’ll be safe until he’s home again.

Never mind her friend Fiona swearing that by next August, Brynn will be counting down the days until school begins—and maybe even looking for a job.

Fee isn’t exactly a doting mother. Not that she doesn’t love her only daughter. But given the option of spending her time with Ashley or at work, Fee would undoubtedly choose the latter, and always has. Her marriage ended because she couldn’t give her husband the second child he wanted.

No, not “couldn’t,”Brynn amends.Wouldn’t .

It isn’t that she believes Fee should have had another baby she didn’t want.

Just…

Well, lately, Brynn can identify with Fee’s ex, Patrick.

She wants another baby. Garth does not.

But it’s not going to destroy our marriage.

“Mommy,” Jeremy croons, and plants a wet kiss on her lips before she can stop him.

“Oh, no, sweetie…Mommy’s been sick.” She does her best to wipe off his mouth with the sleeve of her T-shirt.

Chances are, he’ll come down with strep throat anyway. It’s surprising he didn’t catch it when Caleb first became ill last week, as Brynn did. Thanks to antibiotics, they’re both on the mend; she’s been hoping to spare Jeremy.

“I love you.” Jeremy reaches up around her neck to yank her high brown ponytail with playful, and painful, affection.

“I love you too, baby.” She laughs even as she winces, knowing there will come a day when she’ll once again be able to wear her naturally wavy chestnut-colored hair loose around her shoulders. She’ll be able to wear earrings without worrying about tugs, or white shorts free of smudges from chubby, sticky little fingers.

But will she even want to?

She’s never been prone to fussing with hair, jewelry, and clothes. Her mother, Marie, used to say it was a good thing Brynn was naturally pretty, since she refused to primp. She always had her share of boyfriends, drawn to her wide-set brown eyes, long-waisted, willowy-looking athletic figure, and a generous length of wavy brown hair becomingly streaked lighter from the sun.

When she got to college, her sorority sister Tildy dubbed her W2, shorthand for Wash and Wear, because that was invariably the case with Brynn’s hair, face, clothes.

It still is—though on rare occasions, it might be nice not to look like a domestic refugee.

Sometimes she wonders if Garth is thinking the same thing when he walks in the door to find her in tattered jeans and sweatshirts, covered in flour or glitter glue.

But Brynn is having so much fun with her boys that she isn’t particularly anxious to reclaim her former unmaternal self, or the career she never got off the ground, or the hours of “me” time she sacrificed along this path.

Healthy children, a loving husband, a cozy antique house in a charming New England town…

She has everything she ever hoped for, everything her own mother had.

Did Brynn Costello Saddler ever really want anything more out of life?

She went to college, after all. But not necessarily with the single-minded goal of earning a degree and becoming something specific that she’d always yearned to be: a businesswoman, an artist, a doctor…

No, unlike her more ambitious friends, she was mainly at Stonebridge College because she couldn’t bear to be at home anymore.

After four years there, on the verge of being sprung into the world to either return home or start fresh somewhere else and make something of herself, she fell in love.

Dr. Garth Saddler was older, someone with whom she could recreate the domestic stability she’d had growing up, before her mother died and that world dissolved.

And here I am.

Me, living my life…

My mother’s life, too…

And it’s fulfilling.

And maybe I need to see it through for both of us.

“Hi! Hi!” Jeremy calls out, clambering off Brynn’s lap and waving frantically as the postal carrier arrives at the steps.

Brynn sees old Mr. Chase look up disapprovingly from the chrysanthemums he’s planting over by the driveway of his meticulous yard next door. He isn’t particularly fond of kids.

“Hi, buddy. Where’s your partner in crime today?” Arnie asks, sorting through a cluster of envelopes and catalogues in his hand.

“Caleb started kindergarten this morning, Arnie, can you believe it?” Brynn watches Jeremy bend over to study a big black ant parading along the sidewalk.

“Bug!” Jeremy shrieks. “Bug!”

“Jeremy, no.” Brynn reaches down to stop him before he can crush the ant with his bare foot. “The outdoors is the bug’s house, remember? We don’t hurt him when we’re visiting his house. That isn’t nice.”

“But if the bug visitsyour house, it’s a different story, eh, Mrs. Saddler?” Arnie asks with a wink as he hands her a stack of mail. He smashes a fist into his palm to mimic some hapless insect’s demise.

Brynn laughs. “Exactly.”

“So kindergarten already, huh?” Arnie asks. “Time sure flies, doesn’t it? Next thing you know, your kids will be all grown up and gone, like my girls are.”

“By then, I’ll probably be grateful for the peace and quiet.”

“No,” Arnie says with a sad smile, “you’ll wish these years back.”

And Brynn is wistful once again.

I want another baby.

Not necessarily a daughter, no matter what countless random strangers say.

“Going to try again for a girl?” people like to ask when they spot Brynn with her two boys in the supermarket, the library, the park. The worst offenders are mothers of pretty little blue-eyed blondes wearing frilly dresses and ribbons and bows—women who assume that any mother of two brown-haired, brown-eyed boys with perpetual juice mustaches and skinned knees must be secretly envious.

Not Brynn.

She grew up a tomboy with older brothers. As a ten-year-old she almost drowned trying to out-swim them in rough surf off the Cape. By high school she was a champion swimmer and beach lifeguard. She was also the only varsity cheerleader who implicitly understood football and basketball and would have preferred playing to bouncing around on the sidelines.

She’s perfectly comfortable living in an all-male household. In fact, having survived the overflowing Zeta Delta Kappa house back in her college days, she won’t complain if she never again shares a roof with another female.

So a third son would be just fine with her. Gender doesn’t matter, she just wants—no,longs for —another child.

She tried to convince Garth over the summer. Her husband’s initial response:If memory serves, you were the one who begged me to convince the doctor to tie your tubes after you delivered Jeremy .

She pointed out that she came up with that idea—which, thank God, the doctor refused to accommodate—mere moments after enduring a fourteen-hour labor, butbefore she cradled her second son in her arms.

“Bye! Bye!” Jeremy calls as Arnie heads back down the walk to continue his daily rounds.

“See you later, buddy. And don’t run toward the street again, okay? People drive like maniacs around here lately. You never know when someone is going to come barreling around a corner and…” Arnie once again slams his fist into his palm, shakes his head sadly, and asks Brynn, “Did you hear what happened to Millie Dubinski yesterday?”

“Millie Dubinski…Oh, you mean the lady who used to work at the deli?”

Arnie nods. “She was out for her early-morning walk, and some crazy driver ran her down. Poor thing had just stepped into the crosswalk on Fourth Street. Died on the spot.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. Hit and run. No witnesses. Probably some college kid.”

Brynn says nothing to that.

Arnie, like many Cedar Crest old-timers, has little patience for the five thousand Stonebridge College students who invade the town every September.

“So you stay away from the street, buddy,” Arnie warns Jeremy again with a grandfatherly pat on his head. “You hear?”

Jeremy replies, “Street! Bus!”

Arnie chuckles. “Your big brother should be along any second now.”

Yes, he should…But there’s still no sign of the bus.

Brynn waves to Arnie as he retreats down the walk toward the Chases’ house.

Then, keeping one eye on Jeremy as he plucks a fuzzy white dandelion from the grass, she flips through the stack of mail in her hand. Bill, bill, something from Cedar Crest Travel…?

Oh, right, that would be Garth’s plane ticket to Arizona for the sociology symposium next month.

What else? Bill, credit card offer, bill…

Hmm.

Coming to a larger white envelope that looks like it must contain a greeting card, Brynn sees that it’s for her.

But her name and address aren’t handwritten in ink. The envelope bears a printed label. It’s probably one of those time-share invitations, she decides, slipping her finger under the flap. Perpetually homesick for the sea, she was tempted to accept the one that came the other day—four inexpensive days at a beautiful oceanfront resort in Florida, and all they’d have had to do was listen to a sales pitch.

Garth said no way. A nervous flier, he dreads the academic conferences he has to attend, other than the nearby Boston one last June, to which he drove.

Of course he vetoed the Florida resort. But maybe—

Brynn’s thought is interrupted by the unmistakable rumble of a large vehicle making the turn onto Tamarack Lane.

“The bus, Jeremy! Caleb’s home!” she announces with relief, the mail tossed aside onto the step, forgotten as she hurries toward the curb to greet her son at last.

“Here’s your mail, Ms. Fitzgerald.”

“Thanks, Emily.” Fiona doesn’t look up from her computer screen or miss a beat as her manicured fingers fly along the keyboard. “Just put it down. I’ll get to it in a second. And be ready to go FedEx this cover letter and the contract to James Bingham’s office in Boston in about five minutes.”

“James Bingham?”

“Hello? The new client? The one with the multimillion-dollar telecommunications company?”

The one who travels in the same Boston circles as Fiona’s friend Tildy, who introduced them in June…

The one who happens to be New England’s most eligible bachelor.

“Oh, right. The new client.” But Emily sounds as vacant as she probably looks.

Fiona opts not to glance up, knowing the visual evidence of Emily’s cluelessness will just irritate her further.

She sighs inwardly, wishing the damned building weren’t nonsmoking, because she desperately needs a cigarette.

Stress. This is what she gets for hiring a college sophomore as the new part-time office assistant at her public relations firm. Emily is a pale wisp of a girl whose personality leaves much to be desired. Still, she showed up for the interview ten minutes early and appropriately dressed—neither of which she has done since she started the job.

Fiona should have gone with someone more savvy, more professional…and older. At least, beyond school-age.

Right…like whom?

There’s not a large pool of applicants to choose from; Cedar Crest isn’t exactly crawling with upwardly mobile types. This is a college town—a tourist town as well during the summer, foliage, and ski seasons. The year-round population—mostly upper-middle-class families and a smattering of well-off retirees—provides precious few candidates willing to consider part-time clerical employment. And those whoare willing prefer to work for Stonebridge College, with its benefits, higher pay, and college calendar.

Fiona thinks wistfully of the lone exception: her former office manager, the folksy-yet-efficient Sharon. She moved to Albany at the end of August to be near her grandchildren and her newly divorced daughter, a choice Fiona quite vocally discouraged—and privately derided. The way Sharon went on and on about the tribulations facing her poor, poor daughter, you’d think raising a child and running a household without a man was a challenge equivalent to heading FEMA.

Expertly juggling single motherhood and a householdplus a full-time career, Fiona has little sympathy or patience for anyone who can’t seem to independently accomplish a fraction as much as she does in twice the time.

Which is precisely why the future isn’t looking particularly bright for halting, clueless Emily of the granola-crunchy wardrobe and limp, flyaway hair.

But I’ll worry about her later. Right now, there’s too much to do.

Fiona rereads the letter she just composed, hitsSAVE , thenPRINT , and closes the document. There. Done.

She notes the angle of the sun falling through the tall window beside her desk and realizes that it’s probably too late to eat lunch. Which is a shame, because she’s hungry. Breakfast was, as usual, black coffee chased by a sugar-free breath mint.

Oh, well, just a few more hours until dinner.

Maybe more than a few, she amends, remembering that Ashley has an after-school playdate with a friend whose mother is keeping her for dinner and bringing the girls to their gymnastics class afterward. So Fiona doesn’t have to be home until eight.

“Emily!” she calls, and swivels her leather desk chair toward the adjacent antique console. “Come here, please.”

Plucking the paper from the printer, she scans it briefly, signs it with a flourish, and clips it to the prepared contract.

“Emily!” she calls again, frustrated.

The girl appears, looking flustered, in the graceful doorway that once divided the pair of formal Victorian parlors that now are the reception area and Fiona’s office.

“Sorry…I was, uh, wiping up something I spilled.”

Fiona groans. “What was it? And where did it spill?”

Please let her say water…and on the floor by the Poland Spring cooler.

“Coffee…on my desk.”

Terrific.

“Did you get it on any papers?”

“Just a couple of pages of the Jackson proposal…I’m sure they’ll dry.”

Fiona exhales through puffed cheeks and forces herself to count to three. Then she thrusts the Bingham contract and cover letter at her assistant. “Here, take this over to Mail Boxes Etc. for FedEx delivery first thing in the morning. Then come right back and deal with your desk. You need to toss the Jackson proposal and print it out again.”

“The whole thing? But…Only a few pages got wet. That would be a waste of paper.”

This is what you get for hiring a tree hugger,Fiona tells herself, wondering why she didn’t consider membership in the campus environmentalist club as a red flag on Emily’s resume.

“You need to reprint the whole thing,” she snaps.

She swivels her chair to face her desk again as her assistant obediently retreats with the contract.

Today’s stack of mail is a few inches high, as usual. Fiona begins sorting it efficiently into piles: trade information, client queries, bills…personal?

Yes, personal.

She examines the large rectangular white envelope that looks like a greeting card or invitation. The printed label is addressed not to Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations, but to Ms. Fiona Fitzgerald. It’s postmarked right here in Cedar Crest.

That’s unusual. Her personal correspondence invariably goes to her home several blocks away from this converted Victorian office building on Main Street.

Then again, her home address has been unlisted, as a safety measure, ever since she got divorced and started dating again. A single woman just can’t be too careful these days.

Fiona is curious about the contents of the envelope—but not curious enough to interrupt sorting the remaining mail and open it. One doesn’t get as far as she has by being easily sidetracked from the task at hand.

Self-discipline. That’s what it’s all about.

Anyway, she’s seen enough junk mail disguised as personal correspondence that she should probably just toss the card into the garbage can unopened.

But she’ll probably open it. Later, when she has a chance. Just in case it really is a greeting card, or an invitation. Fiona doesn’t receive many of those these days, unless they’re business-related.

She was a shrewd negotiator in the divorce—she got their two-story, 2,000-square-foot Tudor home and all the furniture, plus the BMW, full custody of Ashley, and shared use of the vacation cabin up in the mountains.

Patrick got the Jeep, parental visitation rights…

And the friends.

She probably shouldn’t have been surprised that everyone in their old social circle—both husbands and wives—chose to align themselves with Pat. Her ex is easily the most affable guy in town—when it comes to everything and everyone but Fiona, that is.

Theirs was a bitter divorce. She had hoped they could at least be civil—as much for Ashley’s sake as for her own. This is a small town, she doesn’t care to have their marital disaster aired for public opinion. Yet even now, two years after the papers were signed, Pat has very little to say to her—and too much to say through the local grapevine.

The lines are clearly drawn, and it’s lonely on Fiona’s side.

Even her own parents are once again all but estranged from her. Staunch Catholics, they were devastated by her divorce and abandoned her in a time when she really could have used their support.

Oh, well. She still has Brynn, even if they don’t have a lot in common these days—or much time for each other.

That doesn’t matter. They’ll always be sisters—just bonded by friendship rather than by blood.

Or maybe a bit of both, Fiona thinks with a shudder, remembering that awful night.

“We’ll always remember…That fateful September…”

How often in the past decade has she been haunted by the opening lines to the Zeta Delta Kappa song?

Haunted, and taunted.

Maybe Brynn is, too. But they don’t talk about it.

Better to forget it ever happened and keep their friendship—their sisterhood—grounded in the present.

Yes, Fiona has Brynn. She has a flesh-and-blood sister, too: Deirdre—or Dee, as she was called before she shed the childhood nickname, along with her ties to Cedar Crest and just about everyone in it.

Deirdre might not possess Fiona’s type A energy, but she is literally Fiona’s other half—not just her identical twin but her mirror image. In genetic terms, that means the egg didn’t split until late in the embryonic stage. Any later, Fiona learned in a college biology class, and twins would be conjoined.

For practical purposes, “mirror image” means that Fiona is left-handed while Deirdre is right-handed; Fiona’s auburn hair naturally parts on the right, Deirdre’s on the left. They have the same petite, waiflike figure, the same whiter-than-white, unblemished complexion, the same slanty green eyes.

So close were they throughout their childhood that Fiona and Deirdre—Fee and Dee—might just as well have been literally joined at the hip.

Not anymore.

Fiona hasn’t seen her sister since she visited Deirdre at her home on St. John in the Virgin Islands to celebrate their twenty-ninth birthday almost a year ago.

“What are we going to do for our thirtieth?” Deirdre asked as they said good-bye at the airport. “How about an Alaskan cruise?”

Fiona countered with, “Why don’t you come to Cedar Crest and we’ll just drink a bottle of champagne, or two or three, together? I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”

“You know I can’t plan that far ahead.”

“Youcan, Dee…You just don’t like to.”

“Exactly. Anyway, Antoinette will want to be with me on my birthday.”

“So bring her,” Fiona suggested, as though her sister bringing her lesbian lover for a hometown visit is an everyday event.

“Yeah, Mom and Dad would love that.”

“Are you kidding? You think I’m planning on celebrating my birthday—ourbirthday—withthem? They won’t even have to know you’re in town. You’d stay with me.”

“Well, considering they told me never to darken their doorstep again, you know I wouldn’t stay withthem .”

“Does that mean I should go ahead and buy you a ticket? You and Antoinette?”

“I can’t plan that now, Fee. I probably won’t even know until the day before what I feel like doing for my thirtieth birthday.”

Thirty!

Another looming milestone for Fiona.

One Brynn is facing as well. And within the next month, too. Even Matilda.

And Rachel…

Rachel would have been thirty this year, too. In fact…

Fiona’s eyes automatically go to her desk calendar.

Today,she realizes, startled by the coincidence.Today would have been Rachel’s thirtieth birthday.

Yes, she’s positive about the date. It’s indelibly imprinted on her brain.

Rachel Lorent was born on September 7th…the same day she died.

“What’s that, baby?”

“Hmm?” Cassandra Ashford looks up to see her fiancé watching her with interest.

She quickly tucks the greeting card and its envelope into the new issue ofEssence, which arrived in the same batch of mail she picked up on their way into the condo just now.

Alec Bennett tilts his head. “You have a secret admirer or something?”

“A secret admirer?” Cassie forces a laugh as she shoves the magazine into her brown leather tote bag, still slung over her shoulder. “Why would you say that?”

“Because you just hid that card in your magazine, that’s why. And now you’re trying to hide the magazine in your bag.” He reaches across the breakfast bar to playfully tug at the bag. “Is there something in there that you don’t want me to see?”

“No!” she says quickly—too quickly—and pulls away.

Alec raises an eyebrow and thoughtfully rubs his neatly trimmed black goatee. “Really.”

“Really.” Cassie kicks off her white leather shoes and walks barefoot across the beige-colored carpet toward her bedroom, still carrying her bag.

“Where are you going?”

“To take a shower.”

“I thought we were going out for Italian.”

“We are. I want to get cleaned up first.”

“Good, then I can catch the beginning of the Red Sox game.”

His secret admirer suspicions apparently forgotten, Alec heads for her living room and the portable TV that is perched almost as an afterthought on an end table.

Before Alec came along, it was barely used. When she wasn’t working around the clock on her medical residency in pediatrics, Cassie was content to spend her meager free time riding her beloved horse, Marshmallow, boarded at a nearby barn.

Or, of course, catching up on much-needed sleep.

Alec, who will be bringing his 42-inch plasma screen television when he moves into her condo after their November wedding, is a televised-sports fanatic. Most of the time, that’s fine with Cassie. He’s a successful podiatrist who has a lot more time on his hands than she does. Television keeps him busy while she’s finishing her last year of residency at the hospital in Danbury.

Almost one more year to go on that…and less than three months now until they walk down the aisle. If Cassie had her way, the nuptials would wait until next fall. But Alec is anxious to wed—an unusual quality in most men she’s encountered.

He sounds too good to be true—for God’s sake, don’t let him get away,Tildy advised last spring after he proposed, when Cassie confessed her ambiguity about getting married so soon.

Tildy.

Cassie has to call her right away.

In the white-carpeted master bedroom, she closes the door behind her, and, after a moment’s hesitation, presses the knob button to lock it. Not that she expects Alec to barge in; he respects her privacy.

The bedroom is shadowy. She left the blinds drawn this morning in her haste to get to the hospital for early rounds. She debates opening them now to let in some late-day sun, but decides against it. It’ll be dark outside in an hour or so—and they’re leaving the house anyway.

She does turn on a lamp, but oddly the splash of light does little to warm the room.

As Cassie hangs her tote bag on the white iron bedpost, she glances from the sunny yellow and white patchwork quilt to her framed art posters to the antique bookcase brimming with well-worn childhood favorites.

Why does she feel so skittish in her own room, among familiar belongings?

Because I’m scared, that’s why.

Finding that card in the mail—like she needed a reminder that today is September 7th—has put all sorts of crazy thoughts into her head.

Now, as she takes the cordless phone from its cradle on the nightstand, she finds herself looking over her shoulder, almost as if…

As if someone might be here with her, watching her?

Yeah, right. She’s alone in the bedroom, and Alec is way on the opposite end of the condo.

You’re not thinking about Alec, are you? You’re thinking about some nameless, faceless stranger.

Someone who knows…

What nobody can possibly know.

Unless one of the others told.

But we swore each other to secrecy.

Cassie refuses to consider that any one of her friends—hersisters —could possibly have broken that solemn vow made a decade ago tonight.

Yes, just as she refuses, absolutelyrefuses, to check under the bed and behind the slats in the louvered closet door.

Frightened little girls do things like that. Especially frightened little girls whose big brothers warn them incessantly about the lurking bogeyman.

But Cassie’s a grown woman now—a doctor, for God’s sake.

Shaking her head at her folly, she takes the phone into the bathroom and closes that door, too. Then, just to be safe, she turns on the shower. The sound of the water will drown out her voice, should her fiancé decide to eavesdrop.

Which he won’t.Alec will be safely ensconced in front of the Red Sox game for however long she takes to get ready for dinner.

She presses the familiar series of touch-tone numbers. The phone rings once on the other end, and again. And then again.

Come on, pick up, Tildy…Where are you?

The machine picks up with a lengthy greeting. Not surprising. Tildy always did like to hear herself talk.

Waiting for the outgoing message to give way to a beep, Cassie gazes into the mirror above the sink. She looks the same as she always does at the end of a workday: a touch of makeup to accentuate her fine bone structure and mocha complexion, her hair in neat cornrows that hang well below her shoulders, her only jewelry a pair of simple gold post earrings, and, of course, her diamond engagement ring.

Her mahogany eyes are different tonight, though.

I look like I’ve just seen the bogeyman,she notes, staring at herself as the fog from the shower rolls in from the edges of the mirror.

Or maybe, I’ve just heard from him.

“Hey, it’s Cassie…Listen, you need to call me, please, as soon as you get this message. I have to talk to you…”

Matilda Harrington quickly presses a button on the answering machine.

“Message…deleted…” a computerized voice informs her.

Tildy turns and walks briskly from the den, an alcove on one end of the living room, toward the back of the town house.

Her eyes shift briefly, as always, to the gilt-framed oil painting in the hall.

The only formal Harrington family portrait that was ever done—or ever will be. The canvas is illuminated from the arc of gallery lighting positioned directly above. It casts the four faces—father, mother, daughter, son—in a soft, almost ethereal glow.

Tildy has a vague memory of sitting for the portrait at her family’s Beacon Hill mansion, where Daddy still lives.

She remembers how little baby Jonathan kept spitting up as usual, and her mother had to repeatedly hand him to the nanny to be cleaned up.

And how she got to sit on her father’s knee for hours, and how the artist commented that she was such a good little girl, never fidgeting or complaining.

Tildy’s mother said something like, “Oh, Daddy’s Little Girl would be content to just sit there on his lap forever.”

She sounded somewhat wistful about that, Tildy remembers. For a long time afterward, she thought that must have been because Mother regretted that Daddy was usually much too busy with his real estate empire to spend much time with his family.

But later—much later, years after the plane crash that killed Mother and Jonathan—Daddy mentioned that her mother was often jealous.

“She always thought you loved me more than you loved her, Matilda.”

That’s because I did, Tildy thought matter-of-factly, and without guilt.

Distraught as she was to lose her mother and baby brother so suddenly and violently, she remembers how relieved she was that it wasn’t Jason Harrington who died that awful night.

Daddy was her favorite, the one she always worried about; the one who traveled all over the world on business, usually on his private jet.

Ironic, then, that it was Mother and Jonathan who were killed, along with Daddy’s pilot, when the jet went down in a snowstorm near Baltimore. That night, Tildy was back home in Beacon Hill with Lena, her nanny; Daddy was at a business dinner with his protégé and closest friend, Tildy’s godfather, Troy Allerson.

It wasn’t even snowing in Boston that night. Tildy’s biggest worries were that she’d lose a hand of Old Maid to Lena, and that her father wouldn’t make it back home in time to tuck her in, though he’d promised he’d try.

But she wasn’t worried about her mother and brother, even though she knew little Jonathan was very sick with some kind of degenerative disease. That was nothing new; he had been ailing since birth. Her mother took him to specialists all over the country; they were on their way to Johns Hopkins on that particular trip.

Tildy won Old Maid. She always did. She didn’t realize back then that Lena always let her win.

But Daddy never made it home to tuck her in.

She woke, late, to find him sitting on her bed in her darkened room, sobbing. He held her close and he told her that Mother and Jonathan were gone. He promised her that he would always take care of her.

“But you’re never home, Daddy,” Tildy cried.

“That will change now, baby. You’ll see.”

And it did.

Daddy’s Girl. That’s Matilda Harrington, to this day.

The heels of her Dior pumps click across the hardwood floor of the hall and into the dining room, where they encounter the antique area rug that once belonged to French royalty, and then to American royalty. It had been passed down through the Kennedy family, and one of the cousins gave it to Daddy, who later agreed that it would look beautiful in Tildy’s dining room.

The swinging door to the kitchen is propped open, as always, with a cast iron pineapple-shaped doorstop, also antique. Troy bought it at auction and gave it to her as a housewarming gift.

“A pineapple?” she asked dubiously.

Troy told her that in Colonial times, wealthy hostesses kept their dining room doors closed so their guests could only anticipate the luscious food being prepared in the kitchen. When the elaborate, sumptuous platters were ceremoniously presented—topped with precious, expensive pineapples—the guests were duly impressed.

Now, according to Troy, the fruit symbolizes elegant hospitality.

Tildy decided it would be ironically fitting to use the doorstop in her own dining room—where, incidentally, the door to the kitchen is always kept open. She doesn’t cook, though she did just install professional-grade chef’s appliances.

A few more tapping footsteps across the newly lain stone floor of the just renovated—and yet-to-be-used—kitchen, and Tildy reaches the rear French door.

As she emerges into the twilight, she notes that the night is warm, much too warm to light the living room fireplace.

She hesitates on the brick patio, gazing across the small, stockade-fenced yard toward the woodpile in the far corner neatly covered by a blue tarp. She could lay a small fire—just a couple of logs and some kindling.

But what if one of her Back Bay neighbors smells the wood smoke and asks her about it?

So what? That’s not going to prove anything.

Still…better to avoid the slightest chance of arousing suspicion.

Tildy returns to the kitchen. This is her favorite room in the Victorian-era Commonwealth Avenue town house, which she’s spent three years renovating from top to bottom. She spared no expense, and barely put a dent in her trust fund, as she pointed out to Daddy when he mentioned that she’ll never get back out of the house what she’s put into it.

“Who says I’m selling it?” she retorted.

“You will when you meet someone and settle down.”

“I am settled,” she informed him, neglecting to add that she’s already metsomeone .

Pacing, she considers her next move—even as she appreciates the aesthetics of the recently completed room.

The stunning floor is made of flat stone imported from Provence; the countertops are gray granite, the sleek new appliances stainless and black. The only splash of color in the monochromatic room is the bouquet of red tulips in a vase beside the stainless steel double sink.

Tulips. Out of season, and as out of place in her cool modern decor as that loser Ray Wilmington is in her life. But he can’t seem to take a hint.

“Did you get my flowers?” he asked this morning, showing up beside her desk at the nonprofit organization where they both work—Tildy, because it’s something to do and the minuscule salary is inconsequential; Ray, because he fervently believes in the cause.

“Yes, I got them, thank you.” She offered a brief, closed-lip smile.

“I saw those red tulips and of course I thought of you.”

She couldn’t help but wonder why. She’s not Dutch, she never wears red, and, anyway, what business does he have thinking of her?

Shenever thinks of him.

That is, she neverthought of him until the flowers arrived.

Well, she can fix that.

With a haughty toss of her flaxen hair, she marches over to the counter, wraps a fist around the red petals, and pulls the flowers from their vase. Turning on the faucet and the garbage disposal, she feeds the tulips down the sink drain stem by stem, satisfied by the subterranean rumbling as they’re devoured.

Then she grabs the vase—stock florist-shop glass, not even crystal—and deposits it into the empty rolling garbage bin concealed behind a white cabinet door. It makes a satisfying shattering sound as it smashes against the bottom.

Perfect.

Now that all reminders of Ray Wilmington have been obliterated from her house, she can focus again on the matter at hand.

She turns the front burner of the gas stove onHIGH , producing a satisfying orange-blue flame. Then she takes wood-handled barbecue tongs from a drawer.

She reaches into the pocket of her navy blazer, which, according to dorky Ray, exactly matches her eyes. Can’t argue with that.

And she didn’t.

Compliments, she’ll accept.

She removes from her pocket the envelope she took out of her mailbox when she got home, and, after a moment’s thought, opens the flap. She wants to give the card a final once-over.

It’s as generic as a greeting card can get: a cluster of primary-colored balloons against a white background beneath the words “Happy Birthday” in gold script.

Inside, letters clipped from newspaper headlines spell out the words “TO ME,” and beneath that, “XOXOXOXO, R.”

She signed everything that way.

It stood for“Hugs and Kisses, Rachel.”

Oh, hell…

Tildy might have known this could happen—that the dark secret from her past could resurface someday.

But when year after year went by, the memory of that night fading like a photo left out in the sun, she pushed the possibility from her mind with increasing ease.

Okay, Rachel…So you’ve come back to haunt me.

Well, guess what? I don’t get spooked that easily.

The tongs steady in her hand, Tildy extends the card over the open flame and thoughtfully watches it burn.

CHAPTER 2

Just minutes ago, Brynn was lamenting the fact that Thursday is Garth’s late night on campus; he has a class until nine o’clock and often stays on campus for hours afterward, doing research in the library and his office there.

A sociology professor whose concentration is the study of death and dying, he’s been working for a few years on a book. The den at home was littered with macabre research materials until recently. Brynn asked him to move it all to his campus office after she caught Caleb browsing through a gruesome book on the forensics of death.

The downside of having Garth move most of his research away from home is that it takes him away, too.

Too bad, Brynn was thinking just now, that her husband couldn’t be here to hear Caleb’s happy kindergarten chatter. As he plowed through his favorite meal of macaroni and cheese with ketchup, her older son regaled her with breathless details about snack time, potty time, lunchtime, nap time, construction-paper art time…

Waiting to share a more adult meal with her husband later, Brynn sat with her children at the table in her pretty blue and yellow kitchen. She was multitasking as usual: listening to Caleb’s ongoing account of his first day, overseeing Jeremy in his booster seat, and opening the day’s mail.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO ME.

XOXOXOXO, R

She actually gasped aloud when she read it, dropping the card on the table like a red-hot coal. Then she snatched it up again…as if it mattered. Even if the boys could read cursive, they wouldn’t understand the seemingly innocuous message.

Nor would Garth, if he stumbles across the card—which he won’t, because she plans to hide it, just as she’s hidden the dark truth about Rachel all these years.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?” Caleb asks as she reaches for the phone.

She stammers some kind of reply, her thoughts reeling.

Her hands shaking so badly she can barely hit the right buttons on the dial, she can only thinkthank God, thank God, thank God Garth isn’t here.

Her husband doesn’t know what happened that night.

Nobody knows.

Nobody but her three sorority sisters who were there.

Or so Brynn always tried to convince herself, despite the nagging memory of that twig snapping in the forest.

Was somebody really spying on them?

Did—does—somebody know?

As Alec pulls into the parking lot of her condo complex after a quick dinner at Mama Rossi’s, Cassie cradles on her lap the still-warm foil-wrapped package that contains her barely touched lasagna.

She’d have been content to leave it behind on the plate, but Alec insisted that she bring it back.

“I’ll eat it later, baby,” he told her, “as a midnight snack.”

Now she debates whether or not to tell him she’d rather be alone tonight. She could just come right out and say it—that she’s tired, and she has to be up early, and she’d rather he didn’t stay over.

Then again, maybe she shouldn’t be alone. Maybe she’s too spooked by that card she got in the mail. Maybe she’d feel more comfortable with Alec there, just in case…

Well, in case the bogeyman shows up.

She smiles faintly, remembering how Marcus used to torment her with bogeyman tales when they were kids, still living at home.

That was before they were both enrolled in fancy Connecticut boarding schools located well over an hour from their home in the city, and more than two hours from each other.

She was eleven when her parents sent her away. After that, she saw them and her beloved big brother only on holiday breaks and the occasional long weekend.

Summers were spent at sleepaway camp, which was fine with Cassie, actually. There were lots of horses at camp, and she would always rather ride than do anything else in the world.

She still feels that way.

“Alec,” she says abruptly, “I think you should sleep at your place tonight. I’ve got an early day tomorrow and…I’m just beat.”

He’s silent for a moment, busy steering into a spot in front of her building. Then he says, “Okay, baby, no problem.”

Her momentary relief that he didn’t argue is followed quickly by regret that he didn’t argue.

If he did, she would relent.

Because, looking up at the dark windows of her condo—she didn’t leave lights on; why didn’t she leave lights on?—she doesn’t want to venture inside alone.

Just in case she finds that she isn’t. Alone, that is.

“Do you want me to walk you in?” Alec asks, but he doesn’t shift the car intoPARK .

He thinks I’m going to say no. He probably senses that I just need some solitude.

Her fiancé likes to brag that he’s getting pretty good at reading her moods. “By the time we walk down the aisle, I’ll be able to read your mind,” he often says lately.

But he isn’t reading it right now.

If he was, he’d come inside with her, and he’d turn on all the lights and look under the bed and inside all the closets.

Well, I don’t need him for that. I can take care of myself.

“No, you can go,” Cassie tells him. “Thanks for dinner.”

“See you tomorrow?”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“Friday,” he says, as if that’s all the answer she had in mind.

Oh. Right. He said “see you tomorrow” not because it’s any special occasion, but because they see each other every day now.

That’s what people do when they’re getting married. And after they’re married.

They see each other every day for the rest of their lives.

Till death do us part,Cassandra thinks, and suppresses an involuntary shudder as she plants a light kiss on her fiancé’s cheek and walks slowly up the path toward her darkened condo.

And so it’s begun.

I only wish I could be in four places at once tonight.

Yes, it would be a pleasure to personally witness their reactions to the day’s mail—to see the looks on their faces now that they know the secret isn’t theirs alone.

Listening to them is the next best thing.

The bugs have been in place for a long time now, in anticipation of today.

At first it was titillating to eavesdrop on even the most inane conversations: Fiona barking orders, Brynn reading to her children, Cassandra unenthusiastically planning her wedding, and Tildy…

Ah, Tildy’s private life yielded the most interesting gem of all.

Still, even that became tiresome after awhile.

It was all just mind-numbing chatter.

But not anymore.

“Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations.”

Brynn is momentarily caught off guard by the unfamiliar voice. She was expecting Fee’s longtime office manager. Then she remembers that Sharon moved away last week—thus “abandoning” Fiona, as Fee so dramatically put it.

“Is…Is Fiona there?” she manages to get out to whoever just answered the phone.

“May I ask who’s calling, please?”

She clears her throat, but her voice still comes out sounding strangled. “Tell her it’s Brynn.”

“Brenda?”

“Brynn!”

“One moment.”

She flashes a reassuring smile at her sons, both of whom have stopped eating and are watching her worriedly.

“It’s okay, guys…Mommy just has to make a quick call, that’s all. I’ll be right with you.”

“Ketchup!” Jeremy bangs the table with his fists.

She is hurriedly squirting another dollop on his already oozing-red macaroni when the voice comes back on the line. “Ms. Fitzgerald said to take a message and she’ll call you back.”

“The message is pick up the Godda—the gosh-darned phone right now!” Brynn says through clenched teeth.

There’s a pause.

“Excuse me?”

“Look, tell her it’s an extreme emergency and I need to speak to her immediately.”

“All right, I’ll tell her. Can I have a number where she can reach you?”

“No, you can’t, because I’m not hanging up! Please tell her to pick up right now.”

The girl hesitates.

Realizing Fiona has already put the fear of God in her new employee, Brynn softens her tone to say, “Listen, I will take full blame for this. Just tell her I need to talk to her. Please.”

“Hang on.”

Pacing the kitchen, Brynn absently glances from the sink full of dirty dishes to the steaks thawing on the white laminate countertop to the cheery blue welcome mat askew on the hardwood floor beside the door leading out to the deck.

The orange prescription bottles on the windowsill momentarily trigger her consciousness. Both she and Caleb are due for another dose of antibiotics. She’d better not forget.

Then there’s a click on the line, and Fiona asks crisply, “What’s going on, Brynn? I’m in the middle of—”

“Whatever it is, this is more important,” she cuts in, furtively taking the phone into the dining room.

“I doubt that. I’ve got a really important new client on the other line, so make it snappy.”

“Mommy!” Jeremy protests from the kitchen.

“I’ll be right back, boys. Caleb, sing to him!”

Ever obedient, her older son obliges with a singsong,“A-B-C-D-E-F-G…”

“What’s this about, Brynn? Emily said it was a life-or-death emergency. I hear the kids in the background so I’m assuming you’re not calling me to dash over and save one of them.”

Yeah, right. Fiona is the last person she’d call in that situation.

“Listen,” she says in a whisper, “it’s about Rachel.”

Silence.

Brynn can hear Caleb singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in the kitchen.

Then…

“Did you sayRachel? ”

“Yes.”

“Rachel Lorent?” Fiona’s voice is as hushed as Brynn’s.

“Right.”

“I know, today’s her birthday. I was thinking about her earlier, actually, and—”

“Fee, I just got a card. In the mail. From Rachel, supposedly.”

No response.

“Fee?”

“Hang on a second.”

Brynn pokes her head into the kitchen, to make sure the boys are okay.

Caleb has progressed to “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” obviously moving right along through his musical repertoire. Jeremy is wearing most of his macaroni and cheese, the rest scattered on the hardwood floor beside the overturned bowl.

Fiona curses softly in Brynn’s ear.

“What?”

“Me, too. I got one, too.”

“Got what?”

“A card. In the mail. As soon as you said it, I remembered there was an envelope—I was too busy to open it earlier, but…My God, Brynn, what’s going on? Is this some kind of sick joke?”

“Played by who?”

Fiona takes a moment to answer. “Tildy? Or Cassie?” she asks, and exhales audibly, the way she does when she’s puffing on a cigarette. Which she probably is. Sitting right beneath theNO SMOKING sign above her desk.

“You honestly believe that either of them would think this is the least bit funny?”

“No. Of course not. Anyway, it was postmarked in Cedar Crest, so…”

“I know. Fee, I have to ask you…Did you ever tell anyone?”

“Are you kidding me? No. Did you?”

Brynn’s “No!” is as decisive as Fiona’s, but her friend asks, “Are you sure? Not even Garth?”

“I didn’t tell Garth. What about Pat?” she returns.

“Do you honestly think I would violate a sorority oath forhim? ” Fiona’s tone is laced with disdain.

“One of the others must have, then.”

“Right, Tildy or Cassie must have told someone, and whoever it was probably thought it would be funny to play this sick trick on us.”

“I don’t know…” Brynn examines the card again. “This looks real. This is how Rachel signed everything.”

“Rachel’s dead, Brynn. It can’t be real.”

“No, I know, but…If it was somebody else, somebody Tildy or Cassie told, then how would that person know about theX s andO s?”

“I don’t know…Lucky guess? Rachel sent a message from beyond the grave? I mean, what do you want me to say here, Brynn?”

I want you to say you did it yourself…that you sent me the card, thinking it would be funny, and now that you know I’m all freaked out about it, you can’t figure out how to get out of it.

But Fiona doesn’t say any of that.

She asks, “When was the last time you talked to Tildy or Cassie?”

“Tildy, not in over a year. I spoke to Cassie when she got engaged last spring. How about you?”

“Me? I don’t keep in touch with anyone lately. If you didn’t live here in town I’d probably have lost you, too.” She is more matter-of-fact than apologetic.

“I think we need to see them as soon as possible, Fee.”

“See them? How are we going to do that? I’m too busy to go anywhere, and Tildy’s in Boston and Cassie’s in Rhode Island.”

“Connecticut. Listen, we’ll have to meet somewhere in between and discuss this. All four of us, together.”

She can hear Fiona tapping keys.

“Just so you know, my schedule is crammed full for the next week,” she informs Brynn, obviously having brought up her electronic calendar.

“Make room.” Brynn’s voice is hoarse, and not from the strep throat. “This is bad, Fee. Really bad.”

“It’s probably just a joke.”

No, it’s not.

Brynn can feel it.

The past has caught up to them at last, just as she always feared it would.

The Zeta Delta Kappa house is brightly lit on this September night. Several windows are cracked open and music spills through the screens to mingle with the spirited chatter from the group of girls hanging out on the front steps.

They’re talking about courses they’re taking and guys they’re dating and the upcoming rush. Every trite word they’ve said for the past hour and a half has been clearly audible from this shadowy bench in the deserted park across the street.

The Zeta sisters have no idea that someone is eavesdropping tonight.

Watching.

Remembering.

Really, all that has changed in ten years are the names, the faces, and the voices.

Flash back ten years and a day, and Rachel could easily have been among the girls on the steps, gossiping, laughing.

Flash back just ten years, though—ten years ago this night and…

No more Rachel.

Across the street, the screen door creaks open.

“Come on, girls, let’s call it a night.”

That’s the housemother’s voice. Sara “Puffy” Trovato, still sounding exactly the same after all this time.

Still bantering, the girls gradually disperse into the house. Finally, the door closes behind the last pair. The porch lamps are turned off.

All is still.

It’s easy to picture the girls retreating to their rooms now to finish course assignments, read magazines, watch TV, or check e-mail. Eventually, one by one, they’ll change into their pajamas, turn out the lights, climb into bed.

Chances are, they’ve all heard of Rachel Lorent. They might be aware that this is the tenth anniversary of her disappearance.

Maybe, as they lie in the dark, the current Zeta sisters are even secretly worried that something will happen to one of them.

Maybe they should be.

CHAPTER 3

“Whoa!” Garth, dressed in khakis and a cream-colored T-shirt under a lightweight brown blazer, stops short in the doorway. “Brynn, I didn’t know we were having company at breakfast this morning!”

Startled, she looks up from the pancake she’s about to flip on the hot skillet.

Oh. Her husband is just teasing, of course. The only other occupants of the kitchen are their two sons.

Brynn manages a faint smile as Garth feigns confusion, asking, “Who is that big schoolboy at the table? And where’s Caleb?”

“Daddy! It’s me!” Caleb, dressed in a button-down and khakis, his hair neatly slicked to one side, pipes up proudly. “I’m the big schoolboy!”

Wide-eyed, Garth says, “No, you can’t possibly be Caleb. He’s just a little guy, like this.” He ruffles Jeremy’s hair.

“It is me, Daddy. Really!” Caleb shoots a glance at Brynn, one that says, Poor Daddy is clueless!

Normally she gets a kick out of playing along with Garth’s antics, but today, she simply doesn’t have the energy or inclination for anything beyond the basic requirements. It was all she could do to get the boys dressed and hurriedly go through the motions of taking a shower herself, not even bothering to blow-dry her hair. She’ll regret it later when she tries to get a comb through the still-damp waves hanging loosely around her face.

She was about to dole out cold cereal when Caleb reminded her that last night she promised them pancakes this morning. Right. That was before she opened her mail and her world turned upside down.

But mommy guilt set in and here she is, dishing up a hot breakfast when all she wants to do is crawl back into bed and hide.

“No way,” Garth is persisting as he takes down a mug and pours himself a cup of coffee. “You can’t be Caleb.”

“Yes way! I go to school now, remember?” Caleb asks earnestly.

Brynn flips another pancake and sees that the bottom is scorched. She turns down the burner, then looks over her shoulder and sighs in dismay.

In his booster seat, Jeremy is finger painting the table with maple syrup.

Oblivious to the mess, Garth scratches his head, studying his older son. “Hmm…can it be?”

“Mommy! Tell him!”

“It really is Caleb, Daddy,” Brynn obliges as she grabs a sponge from the sink and descends on Jeremy’s sticky masterpiece. “He’s in kindergarten now, remember? He rides the bus and everything.”

Yes, and thanks to his mom, he’s got exactly five minutes to finish his breakfast before he has to be down at the bus stop.

Brynn, who wakes with the sun daily and never bothers to set an alarm, overslept. She’s been scrambling to catch up for the last forty-five minutes.

What a way to start the second day of school…

And Caleb’s imminent departure is the least of her worries today.

“Did you want pancakes?” she asks Garth, realizing she’s scorched three of the four on the skillet.

“Do youhave pancakes?”

“I was making these for you, but…” She shrugs and indicates the smoking pan. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’ll just stick with coffee. I’ve got to take off a few pounds anyway.”

No, he doesn’t.

Tall and lean, with hair and eyes the warm shade of a well-loved baseball mitt, Garth Saddler looks the same as he did the first time Brynn laid eyes on him.

Not that she recalls much about their first official connection. It wasn’t love at first sight, or even remote interest at first sight. She walked into the lecture hall on the first day of her final semester at Stonebridge, and there he was, standing quite unremarkably down in front, passing out copies of the syllabus.

He had a professorial beard back then, obscuring enough of his handsome face that it took awhile for Brynn to notice him.Really notice him.

It was Tildy who pointed out his masculine appeal one brisk day as they were crossing the campus and spotted him jogging past. “Look, there’s Dr. Saddler. Wow, how hot is he?”

Brynn checked him out and saw that her sorority sister had a point. He looked a lot different with his muscular legs bared in running shorts, his sweat-dampened hair standing on end, than he did buttoned-up and intellectual in front of the class.

“I have him for that morbid Soc course I’m taking,” she told Tildy.

“‘Death and Dying’? I took it last semester. It was awesome. And so is he.”

It wasn’t long afterward that Brynn realized Garth Saddler was, indeed, pretty awesome. She even got the feeling the attraction was mutual.

But he didn’t ask her out until the semester was over and she had her diploma in hand.

That, he told her, would have violated the rules.

“College rules?” she asked.

“No, mine.”

She didn’t expect to fall in love with him that first night. Nor did she plan to stay on in Cedar Crest that summer instead of returning home to the Cape.

But she did stay.

Not just for the summer. For…

Ever.

Things just fell into place for them, and she never looked back.

She worked nights as a desk clerk at the Amble On Inn nearby. So much for her newly minted bachelor’s degree in English. And so much for returning home to the Cape.

Any potential postgraduation plans she had in mind—and she didn’t have many—evaporated the moment Garth told her he loved her and wanted her to stay. By the time the fall semester began, she had moved into his apartment just off campus.

“Do you think things are happening too fast between us?” she asked him, more than once. Just to be sure this was all as much his idea as it was hers.

“No,” he said, but she wondered if he meant it.

Sometimes, he seemed taken aback at the way their lives had melded so swiftly and completely. But she never doubted that he loved her, or that she loved him. They belonged together.

They were married in July, a little over a year into their relationship.

When the Amble On Inn abruptly shut down that fall, Garth found her a secretarial job in the registrar’s office.

She quit that when Caleb came along eighteen months later, followed by Jeremy.

And the years have flown by, and here I am.

Hereweare.

Living happily ever after…

Until now.

No, don’t start thinking that way,she warns herself, watching Garth stir Splenda into his coffee, and Caleb munching his pancakes, and Jeremy licking maple syrup from his fingers. Everything is going to be fine.

Which is precisely the same thing she assured herself fifteen years ago, when a routine X-ray showed a suspicious shadow on her mother’s lung.

Mom didn’t even smoke and Dad gave it up years ago, so it couldn’t be cancer…

But itwas cancer.

Well, Brynn wasn’t going to let it rob her of her mother…

But it did, in the space of a few months.

It robbed her as well of the jovial, loving family man who loved chocolate with nuts, the Red Sox, doo-wop music, and his wife and children. Not in that order.

Her father’s heart and soul died with her mother, leaving in his outer shell a brooding, often-angry stranger. The house was silent and dusty, the fridge filled with expired condiments, no dairy or fresh vegetables.

That stage lasted only a few months, and was replaced with one that was, in Brynn’s opinion, far more disturbing.

At first, though, she was grateful whenever Sue Learner, her mother’s longtime friend from her women’s bowling league, came around with the proverbial casseroles and condolences. Sue was a former nurse practitioner; she had a nurturing, maternal air that Brynn welcomed. She poured out her grief to Sue, along with a flood of adolescent angst.

She finally figured out that Sue was hanging around the house not to comfort her late friend’s motherless children, but to seduce their widowed father.

Mom could never convince Daddy to go bowling, but somehow, Sue did. One of Brynn’s friends spotted them together late one night at Lucky Lanes. Brynn didn’t believe it, but she questioned her father—and he confessed.

That bombshell struck Brynn about twenty-four hours before he threw a far more explosive one: he was getting remarried. To Sue.

“It’s what your mother would want,” he said—so often that Brynn wondered if he was trying to convince himself.

Personally, she doubted her mother had drawn her last breath fervently hoping that her good friend would move into her house, and her bed, before the granite slab was even laid over her grave.

Brynn, who, until that tumultuous loss, had wondered how she would ever go away to college without becoming terribly homesick, lived for the day when she could leave.

Once she did, she rarely looked back.

“Are you okay, Brynn?” Garth asks, and she looks up to see him watching her over the rim of his coffee cup.

“Fine. Just tired.” For emphasis, she tacks on a yawn that starts out forced, but winds up the real thing.

“You didn’t sleep well?”

She shakes her head at the understatement. But then, Garth wouldn’t know she tossed and turned all night behind their closed master bedroom door.

A lifelong insomniac, he rarely joins her in bed before dawn. Some nights—like last night—he stays on campus working on his book until the wee hours. Others, he doesn’t reach the bedroom at all, presumably sitting up in the den either writing or watching television, occasionally snoozing in his easy chair there when she emerges in the morning.

Early in their marriage, Brynn got up often to check on Garth or coax him to bed. Whenever he obliged, she felt like she was trying to sleep alongside a restless animal desperate to escape its cage. She gave up, years ago, the notion of climbing into bed beside her husband every night.

“I guess it’s not surprising that you couldn’t get much sleep last night. After all, yesterday was a major milestone.” Garth tilts his head toward Caleb.

“Definitely a milestone,” she agrees.And not just in the way you think.

Last night, she should have climbed into bed warmed by the afterglow of her son’s big, successful day.

Instead, she was tormented by visions that jabbed like icy fingers into her consciousness, keeping sleep at bay, forcing her to relive in horrifying detail the unthinkable events that unfolded exactly a decade before…

It was Brynn who unwittingly set things in motion.

“Did you notice how bummed Rachel was at dinner tonight?” she asked Fee as they left the library at dusk after a scant ninety minutes of studying.

“Not really,” Fiona returned predictably, her thoughts most likely on her boyfriend—or herself. “Why?”

“She just seemed down, even when Puffy brought out the cake and we were all singing‘Happy Birthday’to her.”

Puffy Trovato was the sorority housemother, a warm, maternal woman whose nickname came from her round physique. Nobody knew her real name, and she didn’t seem to mind.

Her specialty was triple-layer Devil’s Food Cake topped with whipped-cream frosting and a spray of fresh red roses—the sorority flower. She made it for every one of the sisters’ birthdays, serving it up with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and a maternal bear hug.

Then everyone would serenade the guest of honor, first with the birthday song, then with the official sorority song.

Tonight, watching Rachel pick at her cake before pushing the plate away and leaving the table, Brynn wanted to ask if everything was okay. Petite Rachel, with her free-spirited gypsy style and easy smile, was usually the most upbeat, laid-back sister in the house. Last year on her birthday, she stood on her chair and laughingly conducted theHappy Birthdaychorus, then followed that up with a hammy, operatic solo of her own.

Rachel, pursuing a bachelor of fine arts degree, had been taking voice lessons since childhood. She had a vague ambition to one day have a career on a concert stage; she just hadn’t decided whether it should be at the Met, backed by a full orchestra, or at the Garden, backed by electric guitars.

“Maybe Rach is just feeling old, leaving her teens behind,” Brynn decided, and Fiona rolled her eyes.

“Oh, as if. Who wants to be stuck in their teens? I can’t wait to turn legal so I can officially hang out at the Rat with Pat.”

The Rat, of course, was short for The Rathskeller, the off-campus pub where Fiona’s older boyfriend tended bar. Her fake ID was useless here in town, where the locals had known her since she was born.

“I hate to break it to you, but legal’s going to take awhile,” Brynn informed her friend. “You’ve got to turn twenty before you can turn twenty-one, remember?”

“When I do, though, I’m throwing myself one hell of a birthday party at the Rat. And I know just who I’m inviting, too.”

“Already?”

“Yup, because by that time, graduation will be right around the corner and I’m going to be networking every chance I get.”

Accustomed to retrieving conversations that had been commandeered and steered off course by the self-centered Fiona, Brynn prodded, “In the meantime, what are we going to do about Rachel? Her birthday is today, and so far it seems to suck.”

“Well…I’ve got a bottle of decent champagne Pat gave me last weekend to celebrate the new semester.”

“You didn’t drink it with him?”

“Nah, he only drinks beer and bourbon. Come on, let’s go find Tildy and Cassie and surprise Rach with a little party.”

“At the sorority house?”

“Uh-uh, then we’d have to invite everyone else.” Fiona was currently feuding with more than one of their fellow sisters, as usual.

Anyway, the five of them were the closest, ironically because of how their birthdays fell. For some reason, the college systematically grouped incoming freshmen into dorms based on when they were born. Brynn, Fiona, Tildy, and Cassie all had October birthdays. Living in close quarters on the same hall, they formed a quick, intimate bond long before they pledged the same sorority.

Rachel, whose birthday was a month earlier, lived at the opposite end of the hall, but latched on to their foursome because, as she put it, “All those September Virgos down at my end are too conservative and unemotional. You Libras are much more easy-going and social.”

Brynn often popped up to point out that she was actually a Scorpio, born on the twenty-ninth. But Rachel, who was into astrology, told her she had more Libra traits—and that strong-willed control-freak Fiona had more Scorpio ones.

“We’ll do this party for Rachel up at the Prom,” Fiona said in her usual case-closed way.

The Prom was local shorthand for promontory, and referred to an enormous, flat rock outcropping high in

the woods above the campus. Secluded despite relatively easy access via a winding trail, the sweeping vista plus a cluster of makeshift log benches made the

Prom a favorite Stonebridge party spot.

“Just so you know, I’m going to invite my sister, too, if she’s around when we get back to the house,”

Fiona added.

Brynn said nothing to that. She knew that Tildy was getting annoyed about Deirdre’s continued presence in the sorority house, and she wouldn’t be welcome tonight. She had been staying with Fee for over a week now, trying to get her life together after being thrown out of their parents’ house.

Luckily, Dee wasn’t hanging around that night to join the party and further complicate matters.

Only the five sorority sisters slipped out of the house and headed up the trail, armed with flashlights, the champagne, a portable CD player, and jackets or sweaters to ward off the autumn chill.

They gossiped and giggled as they ascended, four of them unaware that the fifth had concealed something lethal beneath her silver-gray and cardinal-red sorority sweater—and that when the night drew to its grim conclusion, only four Zeta Delta Kappa sisters would descend.

“Matilda Harrington,” Tildy says crisply into the telephone receiver.

“Good morning, gorgeous,” a low voice croons.

She quickly looks around to see if anyone is in earshot of her cubicle, lamenting as always the fact that her position as special events manager at the nonprofit doesn’t even warrant walls that reach all the way to the ceiling.

At least the coast is relatively clear this morning. It’s just past nine; most people aren’t at their desks yet. No sign of the perpetually lurking Ray Wilmington, even.

“Hey, there, gorgeous yourself,” she says, low, into the receiver. She pushes aside the yellow legal pad containing the guest list and RSVPs for her thirtieth birthday party in a few weeks. Plenty of time to go through those later. “When did you leave?”

“Oh, around three or so. I kissed you good-bye but you were snoring blissfully.”

That would be thanks to the tranquilizer Tildy had popped shortly before he showed up unexpectedly on her doorstep. Had she known he was coming, she’d have foregone the pill and relied on him instead to provide a distraction from…

FromHappy Birthday…to me.

Tildy didn’t tell him about it, of course. That, or the drugs that were necessary when she grasped the full, horrifying implication of the greeting card.

Renewed uneasiness threads its way through her even as she protests lightly into the phone, “Hey, I don’t snore!”

“Oh, but you do. Delicate little snores, like a kitten taking a nap in the sun.”

If Ray said something like that, Tildy would immediately roll her blue eyes.

Funny how the difference in whether a flirtatious line comes across as hopelessly sappy or infinitely sexy lies in the speaker himself.

“So listen…What are you doing for lunch?” Tildy asks throatily, after casting another furtive glance around the office.

“You,” is his satisfying reply.

Smiling, she hangs up a moment later, then belatedly opens her date book to make sure today’s noon slot is free.

It isn’t.

She simply erases her lunch tasting meeting with the caterer who’s doing her birthday party. That can wait until tomorrow or the day after, she thinks, bending over the page to blow away the shreds of pink eraser.

Life has been so much easier ever since Tildy took to writing her appointments in pencil—a necessity when you’re living an active love life strictly on short notice.

She’s flipping through her Rolodex in search of the caterer’s phone number to cancel their lunch when a long shadow falls over her desk.

Ray Wilmington.

She knows it must be him before she even looks up to find his gaunt, black-bearded Abe Lincolnesque presence looming above her.

“What up?” he asks.

She snorts—aloud—at the ludicrous gangsta greeting spilling from the wimpiest, most white-bread human in all of Boston.

“God bless you,” he says politely.

She doesn’t bother to inform him that it wasn’t a sneeze, but a snort. Of laughter. At him.

“How are the tulips holding up, Matilda?”

Ah, the tulips.

She debates telling him that they wilted and she had to throw them away.

No, he might then decide to send her another bouquet.

Her desire to avoid that scenario is based less on the futile expense to his limited budget than it is on the inconvenience to her.

She’d have to go through the motions of thanking him again, and risk clogging the disposal with all those stems, or cutting herself on the shards of another useless glass vase.

Much less complicated to simply say, “The tulips are fine,” and resume her Rolodex perusal.

“Did your lunch meeting cancel on you?” Ray asks, and she sees that he’s peering over her shoulder at the newly erased twelve o’clock slot in her date book. “Because if you’re suddenly free, I know a great little place—”

“I’m not free,” she interrupts curtly, wishing he would just get lost.

“Then how about tomorrow?”

Presumptuous is the perfect adjective for Ray Wilmington, from his investigative interest in the details of her life to his assumption that she might be willing to share a precious free moment of it with the likes of him.

It isn’t just his looks that are off-putting—although Tildy’s certainly not the least bit drawn to him. He’s tall and dark, yes…though thehandsome is conspicuously missing. Put a stovepipe hat on top of his prematurely thinning hair, and he really would be a dead ringer for old Honest Abe.

Abe Lincoln would hardly be Tildy’s type.

Especially if Abe was making a pitiful salary and living at home with his mother in Dedham.

But it’s more that Ray’s blatant interest in her, which began right from the day he started at work here in July, gives her the creeps. Her well-honed inner radar interprets him more as a potential stalker than potential suitor.

Ignoring his query about tomorrow, she tells him pointedly, “I’ve got some phone calls to make,” as she lifts the phone receiver again.

“All right, Waltzing Matilda.” Ray emits a self-satisfied chuckle at his own cleverness, apparently assuming he’s the first person ever to call her that. “I guess I’ll see you later, then.”

God, I hope not,she thinks grimly, dialing the caterer.

CHAPTER 4

Cedar Crest is divided into neighborhoods, each with its own distinct character.

On the outskirts of town, closest to the highway exit, is the ubiquitous commercial strip lined with fast food restaurants, chain hotels, supermarkets, discount stores like Wal-Mart and Target.

Then there’s Stonebridge campus itself, a forested, self-contained enclave connected by a series of winding paths that meander past brick dormitories and academic buildings, a new sports facility, sprawling athletic fields.

Adjacent to the campus is a grid of old streets with two-and three-story homes. Once, they were upper-middle-class family residences; today, most are student housing with bikes and furniture on porches, doors and windows perpetually ajar. Most could use a fresh coat of paint, a handyman, and some yard work. Those in best repair display Greek letters beneath the eaves.

Today’s middle class resides on the opposite end of town, where winding streets like Tamarack Lane reflect architecture from the first half of the twentieth century: primarily Tudor and Arts and Crafts. Here, yards are well kept. Late summer perennials are in bloom, local election signs are already springing up on lawns sprinkled with the season’s first fallen leaves. SUVs and station wagons sit in driveways. There are wooden backyard swing sets and domed curbside mailboxes.

Both residential areas are dotted with churches, parks, and playgrounds; they’re bridged by the central business district, with Main Street running its length. Stores and restaurants spill onto the perpendicular numbered streets along the way.

There are no chains here, but plenty of locally owned bars, sub and pizza shops, and coffeehouses that cater to the college crowd. Those—along with a Laundromat, a coffee shop, and shops that sell books and postcards, T-shirts and Stonebridge memorabilia—are clustered on the north end, closest to campus.

The southern end is home to banks and realtors, cafés and pharmacies, a children’s clothing store, a couple of small markets, a yoga studio.

Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations is here, on the ground floor of a turreted mustard-yellow Victorian mansion that’s been converted to office space.

Brynn makes the fifteen-minute walk over from the bus stop, pushing Jeremy’s collapsible canvas umbrella stroller in the cool September sunshine.

“Come on, little guy, let’s go visit Auntie Fee,” she says with false cheer, and unstraps Jeremy from his stroller.

“No!”

“Yes.”

“No!” Jeremy squirms in her arms.

She’s forced to haul him up the wooden front steps, leaving the stroller behind. Well, if anyone wants to steal it, they’re welcome to it. It’s definitely the worse for wear after carting first Caleb, then Jeremy, around town.

Brynn really should pick up another one at Target before this one gives out altogether. But money is tight this month.

This month?

When isn’t it tight?

Well, it was less tight when they were a two-person household living on two incomes as opposed to a four-person household trying to make it on one.

She supposes she could always put Jeremy in day care and get some kind of job…

But she doesn’t want to do that. She wants to stay at home, fully available, the kind of mothershe had.

Except that I’ll live to see my children graduate high school, and college, and get married, and have children of their own…

She wants to witness the big milestones just as she’s been able to witness the little ones: first steps, first words, first teeth…

I just want to be their mom. And Garth’s wife. That’s all I really need to be.

Which is good, because that’s all I am. And I love my life just the way it is…

There’s just something about being in Fiona’s presence that makes her a little self-conscious about the decidedly domestic path she’s chosen.

She crosses the porch with a still-protesting Jeremy on her hip, wondering if maybe she should have called first, instead of just barging in here.

Glancing at her watch, she notes that Fee will most certainly be in the office at this hour. She’s in the office at just about any waking hour—including some hours that the rest of the world may not necessarily count aswaking .

“Shh, Jeremy.”

Opening one of the tall double entrance doors, Brynn steps into the dim hall that was once a grand foyer. High ceilings, ornate moldings, and a sweeping staircase bear testimony to the building’s past; several closed, placard-bearing doors to its present.

“It’s dark,” Jeremy informs her in a small voice.

“I know, it’s okay. See? Here we are.” Opening the door fronted by Fiona’s name, she steps into one-half of the former double parlor. It’s easy to picture the tall, double-hung windows, hardwood floors, and marble fireplace looking exactly the same in the late-1800s. The reception area, like Fee’s adjacent office, is tastefully decorated with nineteenth-century reproduction wallpaper and fabrics, and antique furnishings.

A skinny blonde looks up from the tall potted fern she’s watering beside one of the two windows.

“Hi, I’m Brynn, a friend of Fiona’s.”

“Oh…hi.” The girl looks so uncertain that Brynn knows immediately that her days here are numbered.

Fee has absolutely no patience for indecision.

That’s why Sharon, who, during their college years had been the private secretary for the dean at Stonebridge, was the perfect office manager for her. The older woman doesn’t have a wishy-washy bone in her body. If she likes you, you know it on sight. Same thing if she doesn’t like you. Brynn, she always liked, and the feeling is mutual.

Toying with the watering can, the new girl asks, “You don’t have an appointment…do you?”

Brynn shakes her head, feeling almost sorry for the girl. She’s painfully skinny and inappropriately dressed in a gauze skirt and thick, flat sandals. Her long forehead and plain, egg-shaped face are unnecessarily accentuated by straight, wispy, straw-colored hair parted in the middle.

“I need a cup,” Jeremy announces, eyeing the Poland Spring cooler.

“Is it all right if I get him a drink of water?” Brynn asks.

Again, the girl is riddled with incertitude.

Brynn shifts Jeremy to her other hip and fills a paper cup anyway.

He takes a big gulp, squirms, and demands, “I want to get down.”

“No, Mommy’s going to hold you,” she tells him firmly, acutely aware of the stained glass lamp and porcelain bowl of potpourri on a nearby table.

I shouldn’t have brought him,she realizes, and on the heels of that thought,but I had no choice.

What she wouldn’t give to have a doting grandma nearby, as most of her friends do. But her father and stepmother are a world away in every sense, and Garth’s parents are retired in Florida. For Brynn, getting out of the house without one or both the kids is an impossible weekday challenge.

She hands her son the empty paper cup to play with and decides she’d better get down to business before Jeremy’s limited patience runs its course.

“You must be Fiona’s new assistant,” she tells the girl.

“That’s right.”

“What was your name again?” Brynn prods, fully aware that she never said.

She isn’t rude…just young. And clueless.

You poor thing,she thinks sadly.Fiona’s going to eat you alive.

“Oh, I’m Emily.” Of that, at least, she seems certain.

“Nice to meet you. So is Fiona here?”

“I’m not supposed to disturb her unless it’s an emergency.”

“Is she alone in there?”

Emily nods. “But—”

Brynn starts for Fee’s closed door.

“No, wait—”

“It’s okay,” Brynn tells her, as she reaches for the knob with the hand that isn’t wrapped around Jeremy. “You’re not disturbing her. I am.”

Settling into a booth in the Cedar Crest Coffee Shop on the northern end of Main Street, Isaac Halpern accepts the laminated menu from a pretty student waitress. She blatantly checks him out.

With his traditional good looks—clean-cut dark hair and blue eyes, a strong, but not too strong, nose, and a tall frame that’s both lean and muscular—he does get his share of attention from women.

Especially back home in Manhattan, where straight, single, successful men are as valuable a commodity as rent-controlled real estate.

“Know what you want?” the waitress asks with a toss of her long black hair.

“I haven’t even looked at the menu yet.”

She shrugs. “Most people already know.”

“Just give me a minute, okay?” he asks, and she drifts away.

The menu is stained with brownish splashes and there is a grain of dried rice plastered to the laminate. Terrific.

Holding it gingerly, Isaac scans the lengthy list of offerings beneath the heading:

Breakfast Served 24 Hours

Eggs, omelets, French Toast, pancakes, bagels, cereal, fruit, sides of anything you can imagine…

Pretty much the same menu as in any diner back in New York, but at less than half the price for everything. Pretty much the same setup, too—long counter along one wall, a row of booths along the other. Most of those are empty, and only a few of the stools at the counter are occupied.

But this is a college town; this place is ten times busier at two in the morning after the bars close than it is now.

Just a stone’s throw from here is the Zeta Delta Kappa house, its gray shingles freshly painted this semester with red trim. Those are the official sorority colors, the red representing the sorority mascot, which is the cardinal.

Why a cardinal?Isaac asked Rachel once, when she was poring over her secret sorority notebook, cramming for the pledge quiz.Why not something more exotic, like a pink flamingo, or a peacock?

Because cardinals stand out more than anything else, and they’re cheerful, and they’re everywhere,she replied with her usual Rachel decisiveness.When was the last time you looked out the window and saw a pink flamingo? There’s nothing better than spotting a beautiful, cheerful splotch of red in the trees on a gray winter morning.

There hasn’t been a gray winter morning since she said it that Isaac hasn’t searched—to no avail—for a cardinal.

“Did you decide?”

He looks up. The waitress is back already, pad poised, hair still hanging around her face. Shouldn’t she be wearing a hairnet, or a ponytail, or something? That she isn’t doesn’t bode well for the cuisine.

Yeah, he should tell her he changed his mind and get out of here.

Instead, he hears himself say, “I’ll just have a Western Omelet and whole-grain toast. And coffee.”

He isn’t the least bit hungry, but he’s here; he should eat.

And whyareyou here?

Not here in the coffee shop; here in Cedar Crest.

I’m here because…

Because…

God, I shouldn’t be here. What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I keep coming back here every September?

This was a bad, impulsive idea.

Not the first in his life, though, and it surely won’t be his last.

All because of her.

Rachel.

The waitress departs. As if on cue, his cell phone begins to vibrate in the back pocket of his jeans; he hurriedly grabs it and flips it open. The number displayed in the caller ID box is a familiar one.

“Hey,” a female voice says. “It’s me.”

“Hey. How’s San Francisco?”

“Foggy. How’s New York?”

He hesitates.

“Sunny,” he says, because it was supposed to be; he caught the local weather forecast on Z100 before leaving for Massachusetts.

“Did you remember to feed Smoochy this morning?”

The cat. Damn.

“Yes,” he lies.

That tabby is so fat he can probably survive off his own body fat for weeks. Still, Isaac should have remembered to feed him. If anything happens to the cat, Kylah will be heartbroken. And furious with him. Particularly when she finds out her pet’s well-being was sacrificed for this little annual expedition to New England.

No, notwhen .

Not evenif .

She won’t find out. She’s safely on the West Coast, he’ll be home in New York before she is, and the world’s fattest feline will be fine.

“I miss you,” she says with a sigh.

“I miss you, too. How’s the conference going?”

“You know. Same as they always go. It’s all a big blur of name tags and handouts and bad food and watered-down drinks. I can’t wait to get home tomorrow. Don’t forget—my flight gets in at six and I’m coming straight home, so…”

“I’ll be there.”

And he will. Because he can’t stay here in Cedar Crest indefinitely.

But he’ll be back again.

And again, and again…

For as long as it takes.

About to protest the abrupt intrusion, Fiona looks up from her desk to see not the hapless Emily, but Brynn, framed in the open doorway.

Her heart sinks.

She isn’t in the mood. True, she was just sitting here, craving a cigarette and brooding about the very thing Brynn is undoubtedly here to discuss, but…

But I don’t want to talk about it. Not yet. Not until I’ve decided how I’m going to approach this whole mess.

Looks like she doesn’t have a choice, though.

“Hey.” Fiona stands and feigns an affectionate smile at Jeremy, whose lower face appears to be covered in some kind of sticky sludge. Lovely. “What are you guys doing here?”

Brynn just sends her a level look and closes the door behind herself just as Emily pops up, hovering nervously and looking apologetic.

I’ve got to get rid of her,Fiona thinks wearily.I’ll fire her first chance I get…

And replace her with whom?

“Listen, we need to talk about this thing,” Brynn is saying in a low voice.

“Did you get ahold of them?” Fiona asks.

Of course Brynn knows who she’s talking about. Cassie and Tildy.

“No, I couldn’t.” She sinks onto the visitor’s chair beside the desk with Jeremy on her lap.

“Did you try?”

Brynn shakes her head.

“Brynn, you said you’d call them last night.”

“I know I did, but by the time I got the kids ready for bed, Garth was home, and—”

“You didn’t tellhim, did you?”

“Are youkidding me?”

“Shh.” Fiona frowns and nods at the closed door, beyond which Emily could presumably be eavesdropping, though she sincerely doubts it.

That would take initiative and, as far as she can tell, her assistant doesn’t possess a blessed ounce of it.

Nor, apparently, does Brynn. She said she would call the others.

Figures. Well, you learned long ago that if you want something done right…You do it yourself.

“I’m just making sure you weren’t tempted to tell Garth,” Fiona says in a low voice. “I mean, he had Rachel in class, and he was in that faculty search party, so I thought maybe you figured—”

“Well, I didn’t say anything.You didn’t tell anyone, did you?” Brynn whispers.

“No.” Fiona ignores the slightest twinge in the vicinity of her conscience. “Who am I going to tell?”

“Jeremy, no!” Brynn unpries her son’s fingers from the fringed lampshade beside the chair.

He protests loudly as she removes several strands of maroon thread that are plastered to his sticky hands.

“Sorry, Fee.”

She nods, not about to say that it’s okay. Because it isn’t.

Brynn should know better than to come barging into her office first thing in the morning—or anytime, for that matter—particularly with a toddler in tow.

Anyway, this isn’t the time or place to discuss what happened in the past…ten years ago, or yesterday.

Then her friend looks up at her with those big puppy dog eyes of hers and says, “I’m scared, Fee.”

Fiona’s irritation dribbles away.

So am I,she wants to admit.

“The more I think about it, the more I’m sure it’s just Tildy or Cassie playing a stupid and totally unfunny joke,” she assures Brynn instead.

“Really?”

No.

“I mean, who else can it possibly be?” she asks Brynn, but her attention is focused on Jeremy, reaching for the tall Lladro figurine on her desk.

It depicts a mother and child; Deirdre sent it from Spain as a gift for Fee’s first Mother’s Day.

Fiona was stuck at home with a newborn at the time. For her, the beautiful porcelain figure was less a testament to new motherhood than it was a symbol of her lost freedom.

She had never been to Europe then. Saddled with a baby and a husband whose salary barely covered the rent, she probably never would get there…or so she believed at the time.

She pulls the Lladro slightly closer to herself, out of Jeremy’s grasp.

Brynn doesn’t seem to notice.

“I can think of someone else it can be,” she says, and Fiona’s heart skips a beat.

“Who?”

“Think about it, Fee.”

“Iam thinking about it. Who are you talking about, Brynn?”

“Rachel,” comes the unanticipated reply, just as Jeremy grasps the figurine and drops it onto the hardwood floor, where it shatters deafeningly.

The Dave Matthews Band was on the portable CD player, drowning out the night sounds.

“Go for it, Fee!” Tildy commanded and Fiona, standing on the crest of The Prom, facing the lights of

Cedar Crest in dazzling array below, popped the champagne bottle with two thumbs. The cork shot out into oblivion; then they heard the faint rustle of its landing in the thicket far below.

“Woo-hoo!” Tildy reached to take the bottle from her.

“Um, shouldn’t Rachel have the first sip?” Brynn spoke up. “Since she’s the birthday girl?”

“Oh, that’s okay.” Rachel reached into her sweater. “I’ve got something better.”

She produced a pint-sized mason jar.

“What’s that?”

“Grain alcohol.” Unscrewing the lid, Rachel took a swig, made a face, and offered the jar to the others. “Who wants some?”

“Are you kidding?” Tildy wrinkled her cosmetically perfected nose. “Where’d you get that? Somebody’s disgusting bathtub?”

“No, from my stepbrother, over the summer.”

“Which stepbrother?” Fiona asked. Rachel’s family was a blend of full-, half-, and step-siblings as well as former and present stepfathers and stepmothers.

“Which one do you think? I’ve only got two steps, and Joshua is only in fourth grade.”

That would leave the older stepbrother, whose father had married her mother briefly a few years ago. Their parents had long since gone their separate ways, but Rachel was still close to him. He had graduated last May from Morgantown University in West Virginia; now he was living and working in New York. The sorority sisters were planning a road trip to Manhattan later in the fall, and Rachel said they could stay with him.

“So where did your brother get grain alcohol?” Cassie asked, after a delicate sip from the champagne bottle.

“Where else? This came straight from the mountains of West Virginny.”

“Hey, Rach, that hillbilly twang is about as believable as your fake English accent,” Fiona told her.

“Yeah, but at least it’s a lot better than her fake Southern drawl,” Brynn put in teasingly.

“Hey, my drawl was pretty good,” Rachel protested. “That guy I met in the Rat the other night believed me when I said I was from Mississippi.”

“Yeah, up until you told him your name was Scarlett,” Tildy said with a snort.

“You guys were in the Rat the other night?” Fiona asked.

They exchanged guilty glances.

“Sorry, Fee,” Brynn said. “You were working that night anyway.”

“Whatever. Just because I can’t set foot in there until I’m twenty-one doesn’t mean you all have to stay away.”

But she didn’t sound as though she meant it.

And she added a bit sharply, “Just don’t go in there when Pat’s tending bar. He knows you’re underage. He can get busted if he lets you stay.”

Somebody changed the subject to the upcoming Rush Week before anyone could point out that Pat had seen them there and looked the other way, plenty of times.

Fiona had some funny hang-ups about being the lone townie among them. It wasn’t easy for her to watch the rest of them hit the popular local bars with their fake IDs.

“Sure you guys don’t want any? It’s homemade.” Rachel brandished the jar of grain alcohol as though she was proudly referring to a tray of decadent brownies.

Still no takers.

Rachel shrugged and swigged, going about it almost grimly when she thought nobody was paying much attention.

But they were—each of the four, in her own way.

They all noticed there was something off about Rachel that night. As the night wore on, her voice vacillated between somber and shrill, but she didn’t really say much of anything.

Nothing that would strike any of them, later, as having shed light on her strange mood.

“You’d better go easy on that stuff,” advised Cassie, who took her pre-med studies seriously. “You’re so petite, Rach—you can’t handle that much. It can make you sick.”

“It’s my party, and I’ll barf if I want to,” Rachel sang to the tune of the old Leslie Gore song.

They all laughed…at first.

But their amusement faded as the four of them passed around the bottle of champagne while Rachel guzzled the contents of the mason jar, clearly hell-bent on getting trashed.

There was no joy in it; it was clear to them even then that this was no celebration.

Something was troubling their friend.

Brynn even pulled her aside and asked her, at one point, what was wrong.

“If I could tell you, I would, Brynnie. But I can’t.”

And sweet, pretty Rachel Lorent carried her secret to her death that night…or so they all believed.

Cassie’s cell phone rings a few minutes after she turns it on, just as she slips behind the wheel of her car in the hospital parking lot.

It’s probably Alec. She left him a message earlier saying that he shouldn’t come over tonight; that she feels as though she’s coming down with something.

He’ll probably insist on coming anyway, with chicken soup or ginger ale or flowers. That’s the kind of guy he is.

A great guy.

And I don’t deserve him,Cassie tells herself, not for the first time.

Why is she consumed by a familiar urge to drive straight to the barn, climb on her horse, and gallop off as fast as she dares…?

Where? Where would you go?

Anyplace other than here, in my life.

Because it doesn’tfeellike my life.

She reluctantly presses theSEND button on her ringing phone.

“Cassie?”

It’s a female voice. Unfamiliar…

But only in that first instant.

“Hello? Are you there?” the caller asks, and Cassie realizes, with a quickening pulse, just who it is.

“Brynn?”

“Oh, youare there. I heard a click a second ago and I thought you’d hung up.”

“No, I’m here.”

“Can you talk? I mean…you know…Is anyone around?”

At her furtive words and hushed tone, Cassie understands why she must be calling.

“Yes,” she says reluctantly. “I can talk.”

“Did you get one, too?”

Cassie’s heart erupts in a wild pounding.

“Yes,” she says simply.

So it wasn’t just me.

“So did Fiona.”

Then what about Tildy?

Maybe I have a voice mail from her,Cassie thinks—though there wasn’t one the last time she checked, on her lunch break.

“Listen, we’re meeting at one tomorrow afternoon, near Springfield, to talk about it. Can you be there?”

“Who’s meeting?”

“Me, Fee, Tildy…and you.”

“You talked to Tildy?”

“Fiona did. She tracked her down at work.”

“So she got one, too? Tildy?”

And why didn’t she call me back last night?

“All four of us did. Can you be there tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? No, I can’t—”

“You’re working?”

At her hesitation, Brynn says firmly, “Cassie, you have to come.”

“But—”

“You have to.”

Brynn is right.

Cassie dutifully writes down the directions to the meeting place.

“You haven’t told anyone about…” Brynn hesitates.

“Come on, do you really have to ask that? We took an oath, remember?”

“I remember. But that was ten years ago.”

“An oath is an oath, Brynn.”

There’s a pause.

“I know. I’ll see you tomorrow at one.”

Tomorrow.

At one.

That’s going to take some juggling to arrange, but it has to be done.

There’s no way I’m going to miss this.

Four so-called sisters, together again at last.

The precious bond of trust, stretched thin across the span of years, is on the verge of snapping.

They’re wondering, now, who among them might have violated the sacred vow.

They’re wondering whether carefully sealed closet doors are about to be thrown open, brittle, decade-old bones tumbling out.

Ah, ladies…if you only knew.

One moment, Rachel was there, clutching the almost-empty mason jar.

The next, she was precariously close to the brink of

The Prom, laughing hysterically about something.

Or maybe she was crying.

It was hard to tell; she was incoherent.

All four of them warned her to get away from the edge.

And all four watched as she lost her footing and fell.

Unlike the champagne cork, she didn’t sail out over the edge of the cliff. No, she rolled off, grasping helplessly, her terrified screams punctuated by a horrible thrashing descent, curtailed abruptly with a sickening thud far below.

Fiona lives still in the house she and Pat bought during their marriage: a vintage 1920s Tudor tucked into a quiet, winding side street in Cedar Crest.

“Don’t you want to sell it and start fresh in a place where there are no memories?” Brynn asked, after the divorce.

“Trust me, there are no real memories here.”

No meaningful ones, anyway—good, bad, or even trivial, day-to-day stuff. As far as she’s concerned, everything about her marriage was behind her the moment they signed the separation papers. The house itself was always just a roof over their heads and a façade behind which they could carry on the charade of marriage and family life.

The mountain cabin is even less meaningful. They bought it just a few months before the split—Fiona more as an investment, and Pat because he wanted to actually use the place. As far as she knows, he rarely goes up there—and she never does. They keep the key under the doormat, and Fiona has more than once urged Brynn and Garth to use it as an escape. Mostly because she doesn’t want Pat to think he has sole dibs.

“Leave the kids and take a second honeymoon,” she tells the Saddlers every so often. God knows they could stand a break.

But they keep protesting that they don’t have anyplace where they can leave their kids, and Fiona isn’t about to offer to watch them for a weekend.

“Why don’t you ever go up, Fee?” Brynn wanted to know once.

“Because I like my creature comforts. I’m not the rough-it type.”

Brynn laughed. “No, you’re definitely not.”

Now, as Fiona stands in the master bedroom taking off the suit she wore to the office, she admires the Waverly floral wallpaper, coordinating draperies and area rug; the white iron bed she bought at an estate sale in Lenox, along with an antique dressing table, bureau, and wardrobe.

The first thing she did after Pat left was strip off all the old striped wallpaper, rip up the carpeting, and get rid of the bedroom suite they had bought with their wedding money.

She gave that to Sharon, who was thrilled with all those polished cherry Ethan Allen pieces.

Of course, they didn’t fit in the small rectangular bedroom of her ranch house, so she put the armoire in the living room to hold her television and all those Hummel figurines she collected, and used one of the nightstands as an end table. Fiona privately thought it looked out of place beneath a stack of paperback romance novels and a ten-dollar Wal-Mart lamp, positioned beside the sagging orange and brown plaid couch.

When Sharon moved in with her daughter last month, she offered the furniture back to Fiona, who told her to go ahead and sell it at her tag sale. In the end, Sharon reported, it was hauled away by a young family in a battered pickup truck, who had paid for it mainly in ones and fives.

Fiona found some satisfaction in knowing that those people, who could never afford new furniture, were enjoying her luxurious bedroom suite.

She found much more satisfaction in mentioning that to Patrick and watching him turn purple with fury.

“There was nothing in the divorce agreement that specified what I had to do with the furniture I got in the settlement,” she pointed out. “If you thought there should have been, you should have spoken up to your attorney. Oh, wait, I forgot…Legal issues aren’t exactly your strong suit.”

That, of course, alluded to the fact that he flunked out of law school not long after they were married. She had no idea he was even struggling, though she should probably have guessed.

When he came home and told her, she walked right out the door, with no intention of ever going back.

Fate intervened by way of a positive pregnancy test.

Oh, well. At least she wasn’t stuck with Patrick Hagan forever.

She divorced him the moment her business was comfortably established, and immediately reclaimed her maiden name.

It isn’t that she’s particularly eager to be associated with her estranged parents in any way, but it was better than keeping Hagan. Besides, she likes the alliteration.Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations …It really flows quite nicely.

Things have a way of falling into place.

These days, Pat takes Ashley to dinner at least once a week and she spends every other weekend with him, from after school on Friday afternoons until eleven on Sunday mornings. Fiona insisted he have her back that early so that she can take Ashley to noon mass with her. Pat was raised Catholic, too, but he hasn’t gone to church in years.

Fiona stopped going, too, for awhile, after they got married. She stayed away from the church until—

She stops the jarring wisp of thought before it can balloon into a full-fledged recollection.

No, she doesn’t like to think aboutthat .

The sins of the past belong in the past. You can’t change them.

All you can do is go to mass every Sunday, and pray for forgiveness.

She still attends Saint Vincent’s Church, the parish where she and Deirdre made their First Communions. But she diligently avoids the ten o’clock mass her parents have attended for thirty-some years. She doesn’t like to see them unless absolutely necessary; nor does she want Ashley to spend time with them, knowing they’re apt to fill her ears with self-righteous garbage—most likely about the sins of her mother and aunt.

Back in her college days, Fee all but wrote off her parents when they disowned her twin sister.

She softened a bit after Ashley was born, though—in part because she was desperately lonely, but mostly because she needed someone to watch Ashley so she could begin working as a freelance PR consultant for a small local agency. She and Pat couldn’t afford childcare and her mother was willing to acquiesce, free of charge.

That worked out for awhile. Then Fiona got divorced—in her parents’ eyes, a crime as serious as Deirdre’s homosexuality—and it was all over. Just as well. She certainly doesn’t need anyone looking over her shoulder these days.

Hearing a car’s tires crunching on the gravel driveway below her bedroom window, Fiona quickly pulls on a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt from the hook behind the closet door. She hurries down the stairs just as Ashley, giggling about something her father is saying, is opening the door.

With her dark hair and eyes, porcelain skin, and lanky figure, Fiona’s daughter looks so much like her father. Acts like him, too, with her increasingly lackadaisical attitude. Sometimes, Fiona just can’t relate to her daughter—and sometimes, she secretly, ashamedly, even resents her.

“Hi, Mom! Guess what? We went to Applebee’s! I love Applebee’s! So does Dad!”

Fiona hates Applebee’s.

“That’s great, Ash.” She musters a thin smile for her daughter, conscious of Pat looming on the other side of the threshold. He hasn’t been invited to cross it since the divorce.

Fiona flicks a lighter over a cigarette—both because she wants one and because Pat is a militant antismoker. She turns her head to blow a stream of smoke well away from her daughter’s face and asks, “Listen, did you feed your goldfish this morning?”

“I forgot.”

“Again?” Fiona’s jaw tightens. She’s so much like her father. “You really need to learn how to be more responsible. Can you please go down and feed it?”

“Right this second?”

“Right this second.”

“Okay.”

Ashley won the goldfish at a carnival Pat took her to last spring. She brought it home, sickly looking, in a plastic sandwich baggy, and informed Fiona that she had already named it Bubbles La Rue.

She then begged to keep it here, rather than at Pat’s place, saying her father might forget to feed it. Fiona agreed, on the condition that she keep the bowl in the basement playroom, and secretly assuming the fish would last all of a day or two. A week at most.

Somehow, like a philodendron that mysteriously thrives without regular watering, the stubborn creature has hung in there ever since, despite Ashley’s sporadic care.

“See you tomorrow morning, Daddy.” Ashley stretches on her tiptoes to kiss her father.

“See you tomorrow morning, Princess.”

Only when Ashley is skipping away does Fiona look at Pat. He’s already turned on his heel, about to leave.

“Wait a second.” She doesn’t say his name. She hasn’t, in conversation, since their marriage ended. There’s something too intimate, too cordial, about addressing someone by name.

He turns back. “Yeah?” He casts a disdainful look at the lit cigarette in her hand.

“Cynthia Reynolds called right after I got home about fifteen minutes ago.”

Pat waits silently for her to go on, standing on the brick doorstep, his black eyes expressionless and fixed on hers. Clearly, he knows who Cynthia Reynolds is.

Fiona didn’t, when she called. Not right away. It took her a moment to realize that she’s the mother of one of Ashley’s friends.

For some reason, it bothers her that Pat knows that detail. Then again, he has plenty of time and attention for Ashley and her friends and their parents. What else does he have to do?

“She’s taking Meg to the mall tomorrow for lunch at the new Rainforest Cafe,” Fiona tells him in the brisk tone she uses with Emily at work, “then to see some new Disney movie. She invited Ashley to join them.”

In the next room, an eavesdropping Ashley squeals with joy.

“Ashley! Go feed your fish,” Fiona commands.

“But I can go, right?” she calls. “With Meg and her mom?”

Fiona looks at Pat.

“Saturdays are my days with her,” he growls in a low voice.

“You can go with Meg,” Fiona calls back to her daughter. “Go feed your fish.”

She hears the basement door open, and Ashley’s footsteps skipping down the stairs.

Fiona looks her glaring ex in the eye and exhales a stream of smoke in his direction. “She really wants to go.”

Pat curses and waves away the smoke. “Don’t you think it should have been my decision? Especially since she was supposed to be spending the day withme? ”

“You’re the one who always wants her to make lots of friends and be social. You know how much she likes Meg. And anyway, if you don’t want her to go shopping with her friend tomorrow,you can go ahead and be the one to tell her and break her heart, and then call the mom back and break Meg’s heart, too.”

Pat scowls.

She can tell there’s a lot he wants to say.

But he calls, “Good night, Ashley, honey! I’ll pick you up in the morning!” in the sweet Daddy voice he uses with their daughter.

So different from the deadly cold tone he uses with Fiona.

He turns and storms away without a good-bye.

Good riddance to you, too.

She kicks the door closed with a resounding slam.

Life would be so much simpler, she thinks as she moves through the living room, smoking, straightening throw pillows that don’t need it, if she and Pat didn’t have a child together.

Then she could have made a clean break, picked up and moved out of town after the divorce.

Yes, Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations would be in the heart of Manhattan if not for the relocation clause in the divorce settlement, which states that neither she nor Pat can move beyond a fifty-mile radius of Cedar Crest without reopening their case.

She isn’t about to do that, especially now that she’s worked so hard to become a success. Why should Pat reap the benefits in any way?

So, she’s stuck here for at least another ten years. At least they have only one child, thank goodness.Thanks to me.

By the time Ashley is in college, she’ll be pushing forty.

Another milestone.

But the pivotal one is right around the corner: she’ll turn thirty next month.

And Rachel…

Rachel would have turned thirty yesterday.

Would have?

Brynn wasn’t so sure those two words were accurate.

Now Fiona tries the phrase without them—Rachel turned thirty yesterday—and a chill slithers down her spine.

She watched Rachel Lorent fall to her death ten years ago last night…

Or did she?

It was Tildy who immediately made her way down to the spot where Rachel had fallen, clutching a flashlight whose beam bobbed eerily in the night. The rest of them clung to each other above, sobbing helplessly and hopelessly.

It was Tildy who felt their friend’s—their sister’s—neck for a pulse, and found none.

And it was Tildy who tearfully left Rachel at the base of the cliff exactly where she had fallen, on a thick bed of pine needles a few feet away from a stone marker at the edge of the hiking trail.

Back at the top, Tildy was visibly shaken, trembling violently.

They all were.

But after they had cried hysterically, and pulled themselves together—the others considerably more quickly than Brynn—Tildy declared that they couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.

“Are you crazy?” Brynn protested. “We can’t just leave her there. We have to go call the police.”

“And tell them what?”

“That it was an accident,” Brynn choked out in her grief, “that Rachel was drunk out of her mind, and we warned her. We tried to stop her.”

“But we didn’t stop her,” Tildy pointed out. “And now she’s dead. And we’re involved. Look what happened to the Sigs, and nobody even died.”

Sigma Tau was a fraternity whose chapter at a neighboring college was investigated for hazing last fall after a sophomore pledge landed in the hospital with severe alcohol poisoning. In the end, he suffered permanent brain damage, the Sigs had their charter revoked, and several of their officers were still facing charges in a lawsuit.

“That could happen to the four of us in a heartbeat,” Tildy warned them. “Cassie, can you imagine what your parents would say if you were arrested?”

Cassie, the daughter of a high-powered New York politician mother and a neurosurgeon father, looked as though she was going to faint.

They all knew about her notoriously perfectionist parents. The Ashfords were let down enough when a learning disability, undiagnosed until her senior year at a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, prevented Cassie from earning Ivy League grades and attending their alma mater as her brother did.

Trouble with the law would put them over the edge.

“What about you, Brynn?” Tildy went on. “You’re here on a full academic scholarship. Do you actually think the college will let you stay if you’re involved in something this scandalous?”

Brynn was silent. The answer was obvious.

“What about you, Fee? You’re a local. You know everyone in town. And what about your parents? Look what they did to your sister last year when she came out and the whole town was gossiping about it. What do you think they’ll do if your name is dragged through the local press in connection with something like this?”

“I don’t want to think about that,” Fiona said grimly. “None of us can afford to get involved. This would ruin our lives.”

“Not to mention destroy the sorority,” declared its loyal president. “We owe it to our sisters to keep this quiet.”

“But we didn’t do anything wrong, Tildy. We didn’t force Rachel to drink, like the Sigs forced that pledge,” Brynn protested.

“Says who?” Tildy asked.

“What do you mean? Of course the four of us will stand up for ourselves and say we’re innocent.”

“Those Sig guys claimed the same thing. Who believed them?”

“That was different. They were hazing.”

“Do you think anyone will really care about the details, Brynn?” Cassie spoke up at last, sounding almost frantic. “All they’ll see is a bunch of underage sorority girls drinking in the woods.”

“My God, Rachel is dead!” Brynn cried. “We can’t just leave her here in the woods. Isn’t that against the law?”

“No,” Tildy said firmly. “It isn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s not like we’ve murdered someone.”

“But leaving her here is wrong,” Brynn said in desperation. “Maybe it’s not against the law—which it might actually be—but it’s wrong.”

“Brynn, there’s nothing we can do for her now,” Fiona said gently.

“Rachel would never want us to incriminate ourselves,” Tildy added. “We have to leave her. Anyone in our situation would do the exact same thing.”

Brynn shook her head miserably, unconvinced.

“Look, somebody will find her as soon as the sun comes up, which is”—Tildy checked her watch with almost preternatural calm—“a few hours from now. We all know that hikers are out on that trail every single morning, right? And she’s lying right there on the path. Nobody could possibly miss her. She’ll be found, and the police will assume that she wandered up here alone, drunk…and fell.”

“I don’t know…” Even Cassie looked uncertain. “Why would she come up into the woods alone?”

“She was acting strangely all day yesterday,” Tildy said. “Brynn noticed it, and so did I, and I bet other people did, too.”

“I did,” Cassie said.

“So did I, definitely,” Fiona agreed, and Brynn shot her a look.

Fiona shrugged.

Clearly, it was three against one.

“Look, nobody knows we were up here with her tonight, right?” Tildy asked. “You guys didn’t tell anyone where you were going?”

All three shook their heads.

And swore each other to secrecy.

And the next morning waited uneasily for the news that Rachel’s body had been found in the woods below The Prom.

It never came.

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Rachel Lorent had vanished into thin air. On the morning after her twentieth birthday, her bed in her room at the sorority house hadn’t been slept in, she never showed up for classes…in short, she was never heard from again.

The campus was in a turmoil. Faculty and students formed search teams that walked shoulder to shoulder over acres of ground, searching.

They found nothing.

A few days after Rachel’s mother had filed a Missing Person’s Report and fliers bearing her smiling face had gone up all over campus, Brynn, Fiona, Cassie, and Tildy walked silently up the trail to the spot where she had landed, dead.

It was empty. Not even a sign that Rachel had ever been there.

How was that possible?

As Tildy had said, there was no way anyone passing along could have missed her body on the path…and there was no way, with the beautiful late-summer weather, that the trail hadn’t been traveled in all that time. Anyway, the searchers had repeatedly covered this ground in the past few days.

Maybe wild animals dragged her away that first night and devoured her remains, a fate too horrible for any of them to envision.

For months afterward, they held their collective breath, expecting some sign of their lost sister to turn up…perhaps a disembodied limb found deep in the woods, or a shred of clothing, or even the mason jar…

But nothing ever did.

Rachel Lorent had never been heard from again.

Or had she?

CHAPTER 5

It was Fiona who selected the meeting place: Glenview Springhouse, an elegant eighteenth-century country inn not far from where the Mass Pike and Interstate 91 converge. It’s centrally located for all of them: a little over an hour west of Boston, ninety minutes north of Danbury, and almost an hour east of Cedar Crest.

It makes sense for Brynn and Fiona to go together. Fee insists on driving, though Brynn offered.

“I can’t leave the office until noon, and I’ve got to get back for a three forty-five appointment,” was her reasoning.

Brynn pointed out that they would get there and back in the same amount of time regardless of who drove.

Fee didn’t dispute that, but Brynn could tell she wanted to…And she would have been right.

The speedometer of Fiona’s silver BMW quickly rises to eighty as they leave Cedar Crest, and never falls until they pull off the exit.

“You drive like the car was just catapulted out of a cannon. You know that, don’t you?” Brynn pulls her cell phone out of her purse as Fiona stops at a light and quickly snaps down the visor mirror to check her reflection.

“Of course I know that. I can’t afford to tool along taking in the sights. Who are you calling?”

“Garth.” She pauses, about to hitSEND . “Why?”

“Why are you calling him?”

“To see how the boys are doing.”

“Already?” Fiona’s tone smoothly melds amusement with disapproval.

Brynn shrugs and dials anyway, needing the connection to her life back home. Especially now, when she’s about to come face-to-face with the past.

She told her husband the truth about today’s getaway, in a sense, saying she and Fiona are meeting two old sorority sisters for lunch near Springfield.

She just didn’t tell him why.

Nor did he ask.

He merely told her he was glad she was taking some weekend time to do something for herself for a change.

She felt guilty that he was so sweet about it, and about the money she’ll be spending on a fancy lunch they can’t really afford.

“Hey, it’s me. How are the boys?” she asks when Garth cheerfully answers the phone.

“They’re good. Where are you?”

“Just about to get to the restaurant.”

“That was fast.”

“You have no idea,” she says wryly. “What are the boys doing? Did you remember to give Caleb his antibiotics? Did they eat lunch?”

She glances at Fiona, who is looking in the mirror. Her lips are pursed to apply more lipstick, but probably would be anyway.

“I’m making lunch now, yes on the medicine, and they’re on the couch watchingDora the Explorer .”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

She made Garth promise he wouldn’t stick the kids in front of the television all day.

“It’s just to keep them out from underfoot while I make lunch.”

She wonders what he can possibly be making that’s so involved it might take longer than a minute or two, but doesn’t ask. She would if Fiona wasn’t sitting beside her in silent disapproval.

“You know the boys like the crusts cut off their bread if you’re making sandwiches, don’t you?”

He pauses just long enough for her to realize that, somehow, he doesn’t know that.

“I know.”

She smiles faintly. “Just making sure.”

“Listen, have fun,” Garth says before they hang up, as the light changes and Fiona guns the engine to hurtle them on toward the inn.

“I will.”

No, she won’t.

“Tell the girls I said hello.”

“I will.”

No, she won’t.

He knows Tildy and Cassie, of course, just as he knew Rachel. He had them in class during their days at Stonebridge. Both Tildy and Cassie popped in and out of Brynn’s life in the early years of her marriage, before the boys came along and everyone drifted.

But today isn’t about catching up on each other’s families, jobs, lives.

It’s about something Brynn isn’t yet prepared to dredge from the murky depths of her memory.

But it’s too late to back out now, even if she dared suggest that to Fiona.

She and Fee haven’t spoken much during the drive—and not at all about the birthday cards, or Rachel, or the past. Or, thank goodness, the expensive Lladro figurine Jeremy demolished in Fiona’s office yesterday, which Brynn offered to pay for, and was grateful when Fiona refused. She knew it would probably cost more than a mortgage payment, and she and Garth are having a hard enough time making those lately.

Fee spent much of the last hour on her cell phone with clients, in as blatant disregard of the mandatory hands-free headset tossed carelessly on the backseat as she is the posted speed limit.

At least she didn’t smoke.

Well, not after the first cigarette she was already puffing on when she pulled into the Saddlers’ driveway.

Brynn asked her not to smoke in the car.

“I can roll down the window.”

“It still bothers me. I get nauseous, and you don’t want me to vomit all over your car, do you?”

Obviously, Fiona did not.

Glenview Springhouse is a sprawling, white clapboard house. Judging by the rambling architectural style, Brynn concludes it’s probably been added on to repeatedly over the years. The restaurant entrance is off to one side, in a wing that consists mainly of a glassed-in atrium.

Here we go,Brynn thinks, still clenching her cell phone in a hand that remains white-knuckled even now that her speed-demon friend has stopped the car.

She can’t help but wonder what she’s doing here.

She should be home in Cedar Crest, eating peanut butter sandwiches—no crusts—with the boys, and nagging Garth about fixing the plastic towel bar in the bathroom that dropped off the tile wall again this morning.

That’s her life, not this…this…

This nightmare.

“Do you think they’re here?” she asks as Fiona pulls into an empty spot and turns off the engine.

“Tildy definitely is.” Fee indicates a gleaming red Ferrari 612 Scaglietti parked nearby.

“That’s her car? How do you know?” Brynn asks uneasily, remembering Fiona claimed earlier that she hasn’t seen Matilda in years, either.

Claimed?

So you think she was lying about that?

Why would she?

Her thoughts awhirl with paranoia and suspicion, Brynn can’t seem to look her friend in the eye.

No matter. Fee is too busy looking herself in the eye, focused again on the visor mirror as she says matter-of-factly, “I don’t know it’s Tildy’s for sure. But that’s a quarter-of-a-million-dollar car, and I’m willing to bet it’s hers. It’s her style.”

Brynn, noting that she herself failed to discern said quarter-of-a-million-dollar car from the red Hyundai parked next to it, is mired in a familiar sense of being well out of her league.

When she first met the infinitely astute Fiona, Brynn marveled that a girl who grew up in a blue-collar Cedar Crest household could possibly be so worldly.

Brynn has long since accepted that it’s no accident. Driven by ambition long before she was voted Most Likely to Succeed at Saint Vincent’s High, Fee shed her local roots like a worn housecoat.

She’d have gone away to college if her parents could have afforded it; instead, she used local connections and worked her way through Stonebridge. By the time she was asked to pledge Zeta Delta Kappa, no one outside her closest circle of friends even realized she was a townie.

She seemed to have everything, even back then: brains, ambition, friends, a great wardrobe—and one of the hottest boyfriends around.

Four years older than Fee when she began her freshman year, Pat was a law student at Stonebridge by day and a bartender by night. Plenty of girls were drawn to his affable personality and striking good looks. Black Irish, Fiona used to say, with his shock of dark hair and sooty lashes that fringed coal-colored eyes.

Pat was from New York—Brooklyn. He was going to be a big-shot lawyer. Fiona often spoke of how they would move to Manhattan, where she would work for some top PR firm.

But Pat never made it to the Bar, thanks in large part to the bar: the Rat, where he worked.

It was obvious that Pat preferred doling out drinks and socializing to studying law. Obvious, that is, to all but single-minded Fiona, so in love with Pat that she saw only what she wanted to see.

Brynn supposes their relationship boiled down to plain-old chemistry: a wild, mutual attraction that struck at first sight, lingered for a few years, and wore off soon after the wedding.

They had been married a few months when Pat flunked out of law school.

Stunned, Fiona turned up on Brynn’s doorstep late that blustery night, saying she had left him.

“I don’t belong with some loser dropout. I deserve a lot better than that.”

The next morning she woke up, ran straight to the bathroom to vomit, and miserably asked Brynn to run over to CVS to pick up a pregnancy test.

Ashley was born eight months later.

To appease his wife—and support her and his new daughter—Pat landed a job with a couple of sleazy divorce attorneys up in Pittsfield, working as a paralegal. He continued to tend bar at the Rat at night and on weekends, but spent every spare moment with Ashley.

He still does. He’s a devoted daddy—even Fiona will give him that.

Pat longed for a second child.

Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations was born the September Ashley entered preschool, and there was no looking back. Fee might not be working in a fancy, high-profile New York PR firm, but she was running a thriving business. One that unfortunately propelled her spiraling marriage right into the ground.

Brynn often wonders whether her friend ever has regrets—and whether she occasionally she envies the Saddlers’ stable lives.

Probably not.

Now, watching her friend check her teeth for lipstick, then snap the visor mirror back into place, she asks, “What do you think they’re going to say about all of this?”

They, of course, are the two sorority sisters presumably waiting inside.

“Only one way to find out. Come on.”

Reluctantly, Brynn climbs out of the car and follows Fiona on wobbly legs.

It’s too late in the season for summer vacationers and too early for foliage spectators, yet the inn’s large dining room is fairly crowded this first weekend after Labor Day. The round tables, draped in rich amber linen and centered with flickering candles and fresh autumn-hued flowers, are occupied mainly by couples and retirees.

Matilda Harrington is the lone occupant of a round table for four. She had asked the hostess to move her twice before deciding this was as private a location as possible, in a relatively secluded corner beside a tall, lace-curtained window.

Tildy sips her chilled white wine and takes in the Colonial ambience: the low-beamed ceiling, white-painted woodwork, gleaming, dark hardwood floors. Windows on three walls open onto profuse perennial gardens in brilliant, late-summer bloom and, beyond, a verdant woodland backdrop sure to be ablaze with color in another couple of weeks.

Glenview Springhouse would be the perfect place to spend a romantic birthday weekend, considering that she can’t appear in public with the man in her life. Not as a couple, anyway.

Just last night, she made the mistake of saying,“I’m so sick of sneaking around that I’m starting to think I don’t care who finds out .”

His eyes darkened so swiftly at that remark that she wished she could take it back. He grew quiet and left soon afterward, saying he had to get home.

Healways has to get home.

What Tildy wouldn’t give to spend just one night—the entire night—in his arms.

I deserve that,she concludes.And this would be the perfect place .

She’ll have to pick up an inn brochure on the way out, so she can show it to him. With enough advance notice, maybe he’ll be able to swing it.

“After all,” she’ll tell him, “I’m only turning thirty once in my life. I want to celebrate it privately, with you.”

She’s beginning to wish she had never planned the big party. She booked the date—the night before her birthday—at the Imperial Ballroom at the Park Plaza Hotel a few months ago.

Spotting her sorority sisters approaching the table with the hostess, Tildy lowers her wineglass. Maybe she should have invited them to the party, she thinks—but only for a split second.

No, she shouldn’t have. They’re not a part of her life now. They wouldn’t fit in.

Brynn, she hasn’t seen in years. Tildy notes, reluctantly, that her former sorority sister hasn’t lost her fresh-faced, wholesome prettiness, nor her willowy figure.

But the cut of her dark blazer is all wrong, and she’s wearing it over a pair of Gap khakis, with flat brown loafers of all things.

Tildy herself is appropriately dressed in Ralph Lauren Black Label, perfect for a Saturday luncheon in the country. Fresh from the salon, her hair is newly cut in sophisticated layers that fall to her shoulders.

Brynn’s is still long, pulled back in a simple ponytail, and she’s got on precious little makeup.

With some eyeliner, a flattering haircut, and stylish clothes, Tildy thinks, she’d be a knockout.

As it is, she just looks so…small-town New England. Like someone’s wife, someone’s mom. All of which, Tildy reminds herself, she is.

But she doesn’t have to look the part, for God’s sake.

Jealous, are you?an annoying little voice pipes up.

Certainly not. Not of Brynn’s looks, anyway.

And not of anything else. Not anymore.

Ah, there’s Fiona. She hasn’t changed much since she was in Boston in June, when Tildy introduced her to her old boarding-school friend James Bingham over an elegant seafood dinner at Aura.

Her well-cut trim charcoal designer suit is a little businesslike for Tildy’s taste. Still, it’s expensive, fashionable, and becoming, and her legs look fabulous in the above-the-knee pencil-slim skirt and tall-heeled pumps. Her jewelry is gold and tastefully expensive.

Her painstaking assessment sliding north, Tildy notes that Fee’s hair is twisted from its sleek right part into its usual smooth auburn chignon, her porcelain skin is flawless as ever, and her green eyes are expertly highlighted with a smoky shadow.

She looks good,she thinks grudgingly.But not better than I do.

Standing, Tildy takes turns air-kissing both their cheeks and notices that Brynn’s eyes are suspiciously bright.

“You’re not going to cry, for God’s sake, are you?” she asks lightly as they pull out chairs.

Rather, she intends it to come out lightly, a quip among old friends.

Instead, she sounds bitchy, even to her own ears.

“I’m trying not to.” Brynn studies her cloth napkin as she spreads it in her lap. “I’m just a little emotional about…everything.”

“You always were,” Fiona comments with a hint of affection, and gives her shoulder a pat. But, looking at Tildy across Brynn’s bowed head, she smirks, just a little.

“Andyou never were,” Tildy can’t help but comment, as she lifts her glass again in a silent, and not necessarily approving, toast to Fiona.

“I never was what? Emotional?” Fiona shrugs and picks up the leather-bound wine list. “To my credit, no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t a lot of things Brynn was. Is that Chardonnay you’re drinking?”

“Pinot Grigio.”

Fiona flags a passing waiter; not theirs. “I’d like a glass of the Bouchard Père & Fils Puligny-Montrachet. Brynn?”

She looks up. “Oh…Just an iced tea, please. With lemon.”

“Oh, come on, Brynn, live a little,” Tildy urges. “At least have a glass of wine with us.”

Brynn shakes her head. “I’m just getting over strep throat and I’m still on antibiotics. I’ll be the designated driver.”

“I don’t think so,” Fiona says briskly, and turns to Tildy. “Have you heard from Cassandra?”

“She left me a message this morning.” And one last night, as well. Tildy screened both calls.

“What did she say?”

“Just that she’ll be here. She must have hit traffic. Did you know she’s getting married to some guy in November?”

“She e-mailed us both when she got engaged,” Brynn says. “I called her to say congratulations and catch up. She told me about her fiancé…She said they met at the hospital where she’s doing her residency. He’s a doctor, right? A podiatrist or something?”

“I think so.” Tildy idly inspects her manicure.

“She said you met him when they came to Boston for a Red Sox game this summer. What’s he like?”

Tildy wonders if Brynn really cares, or is just trying to keep the conversation afloat until Cassie arrives and they can get down to business.

Fiona is busy pulling her Blackberry from her pocket and flipping it open under the table, checking for e-mail.

“Alex? He’s nice enough,” Tildy says briefly. She can think of nothing to add other than, “Good-looking, too.”

“Oh, it’sAlex? ” Brynn asks. “I thought it was Alec.”

Hmm. Maybe it is. Tildy makes a mental note to pay more attention next time Cassie mentions him.

Fiona tucks her phone back into her pocket and casts a glance over each shoulder before asking Tildy in a low voice, “So, what did you think when you got that birthday card in the mail?”

“To be honest? I thought one of you had a sick sense of humor.”

“It wasn’t us,” Brynn tells her definitively. “And Cassie swears it wasn’t her. So unless it was you—”

“It wasn’t me. Please!” Tildy rolls her eyes.

“Well, then, who the heck do you think it could have been?”

Hmm, Brynn seems to have a bit more spunk than she ever did back in college, Tildy notes with some satisfaction. Good for her.

“I don’t know what to think,” she replies evenly, and fights the urge to pick up her wineglass again. She doesn’t want them to think she’s drinking to calm herself.

And anyway, she’d better keep her wits about her, or this could go very badly.

Fifteen minutes after watching Brynn and Fiona climb out of the BMW and walk into the restaurant, Cassie is still sitting in her Toyota parked at the far end of the parking lot.

She’s got to go in.

Either that, or just drive away.

But she can’t just sit here indefinitely, mulling things over.

I shouldn’t have come at all.

Really, there’s so much she could be—should be—doing instead, with every free moment she’s not working at the hospital. She has to finalize the reception menu. Meet again with the seamstress who’s doing the final alterations on her wedding gown. Give Alec’s sister the final guest list for next month’s shower, which she was supposed to have completed weeks ago.

“Go ahead and invite anyone you want,” Tammy urged her. “Neighbors, distant relatives, old college pals…I’m serious, I’ve got plenty of room.”

Cassie suspects that her future sister-in-law is as eager to be graciously accommodating as she is to show off her newly built 7,000-square-foot brick Colonial facing the Long Island Sound.

“Someday, we’ll have a spread like this, baby,” Alec said when they walked through it for the first time last month. “You and me and our five beautiful kids. They can each have their own room.”

“Fivekids?” Cassie laughed nervously.

“You’re right, let’s go for six. I don’t like odd numbers. And we’ll put up a big stable for Marshmallow, and you can ride him whenever you want, every day if you want.”

“Ride him where?”

“On our beautiful property. We’ll have a few acres, lots of trees, a water view, white picket fence, the whole nine yards.”

White picket might as well be barbed wire, she found herself thinking illogically, as her fiancé pulled her in for a kiss.

She tried to relax and let him kiss her, but she couldn’t.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

He gave her a long look and was about to question her further when his sister stuck her head in and told them dinner was ready.

How much longer can I go on pretending everything is fine?Cassie asks herself now, resting her head against the steering wheel.

She had enough to worry about before this whole Rachel thing reared its ugly head the other day. Between her medical residency and her wedding plans, she’s barely had time to digest what that birthday card might signify.

All she knows is that her life is finally thrashing out of control like a wild stallion.

And she has two choices.

She can either tightly take hold of the reins while there’s still time…

Or she can close her eyes, allow fate to toss her wherever it may, and pray for a safe landing.

There she goes at last, heading tentatively up the wide brick steps and disappearing into Glenview Springhouse.

For God’s sake, it took Cassandra Ashford long enough to get out of the damned car.

In contrast, it takes no time at all to furtively dart from the silver BMW to the red Ferrari to the blue Toyota and slip a white envelope beneath the driver’s side windshield wiper on each.

There you go, ladies. A nice little surprise for all of you…

Especially Matilda.

She’ll look at it with confusion, and certainly with disdain, and, perhaps, ultimately, with dread.

That’s the point.

At the very least, she and the others will come to realize that they aren’t alone here at this secluded inn in the woods.

That, in fact, after this they can never really be sure they’re alone anywhere.

CHAPTER 6

“Daddy!”

About to settle into his desk chair at the computer, Garth bolts back to the living room at the blood-curdling shriek.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” He skids to a stop in the doorway. Both the boys are sitting calmly on their little wooden stools pulled up to the cluttered coffee table, where he left them just a moment ago.

“There’s crust on his bread!” Caleb explains, one eye trained on the television, where SpongeBob Squarepants is doing a little dance.

Oops. Brynn did say he was supposed to cut off the crust.

“Crust!” Jeremy bellows like someone in the throes of physical torture. “Yucky!”

“Cut that out, Jeremy. Crust is good for you.”

“No crust!”

“Okay, okay, stop shouting.” Garth reaches past a tall stack of magazines and a taller one of unpaid bills to retrieve the paper plate containing the peanut butter sandwich he just made.

“There’s crust on mine, too, Daddy.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll cut it off.” Picking up Caleb’s sandwich as well, he retreats back to the kitchen, where this morning’s cereal boxes still litter the white countertop, along with plentiful toast crumbs.

He promised Brynn he’d clean up everything and load the dishwasher with the cereal bowls, milk-soggy and still in the sink.

“Just go get ready for your lunch,” he urged her, as she surveyed the messy kitchen.

She protested, but only for a moment. When she emerged from the bedroom a half hour later, she looked like her old self again—in khakis and a nice blazer rather than the T-shirts and raggy-hemmed faded jeans she favored most days.

Her old self, as in the person she used to be, before the boys came along.

She smiled when he complimented her. Then he caught her looking at the mess he hadn’t yet touched.

“Don’t worry, I’m on it,” he promised. “You just go have fun.”

“I will. But…” She shook her head.

“What’s wrong?”

“That superglue didn’t hold. The towel bar just dropped off the bathroom wall again. Can you fix it?”

He sighed. “Yeah, I’ll fix it.”

“Soon? Because I don’t want one of the boys to get hurt.”

How, exactly, she thought one of the boys could get hurt by a missing towel bar was, and still is, beyond him.

Yet Garth knows better than to argue with illogical maternal logic. He never wins.

“You go have fun with the girls, and forget about everything here. I’ll hold down the fort.”

“I hate to leave.”

“It’s only for a few hours, and you never go anywhere. Enjoy it.”

“I am kind of looking forward to a change of scenery,” she admitted. “In fact, I was thinking maybe one weekend in October, we could take a ride to the Cape to see my father.”

“I don’t know…It’s such a long drive for just two days, between Friday-night traffic and Sunday-night traffic.”

“We could go on Columbus Day weekend.”

“Isn’t that when I’m in Arizona?”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

“Why don’t you go anyway,” he suggested, “with the boys?”

He expected her to accuse him of not wanting to see her family, as she has before. But, surprisingly, all she said was, “Maybe I will.”

Good. She should. Her father and stepmother will want to see her and the boys…And Garth is well aware that they’d just as soon do it without him around.

There’s never been much love lost between him and his father-in-law. Joe Costello is an old-fashioned, blue-collar guy who wasn’t thrilled when his only daughter shacked up with her professor the summer after graduation. That she went on to marry him and settle down on the opposite end of the state didn’t help matters as much as one might expect.

Joe and his wife are civil enough these days, but Garth is never entirely comfortable in their presence—nor are they in his.

Brynn’s father frequently likes to point out that he’s just “a regular guy”—as opposed to Garth, who ostensibly is not.

“I don’t get all that professor talk,” he remarks pointedly whenever Garth uses a word containing more than three syllables. “Can you say that again in plain English?”

No, Garth isn’t anxious to visit the Cape anytime soon. Let Brynn go with the boys, and explain that he’s off somewhere indulging in “professor talk.”

“Daddy?”

Right, the sandwiches.

“Coming, guys.”

He opens the silverware drawer and roots around. Butter knife, steak knife, paring knife, meat cleaver…Don’t they have a regular old bread knife?

“I’m hungry!” Jeremy whines from the next room.

“You’ll have to be patient,” Garth calls back, and decides his youngest child is spoiled rotten.

Maybe that’s what happens when you’re the baby of the family. He wouldn’t know. He’s an only child, and his parents were older, and far from doting.

Brynn dotes.

Nothing wrong with that; she adores the boys. So does Garth, for that matter.

But…Motherhood is Brynn’s life. To the extent that she’s actually suggested—more than once—that they have another baby.

Garth laughed…until he realized she was dead serious.

Brynn cried when he ruled it out.

He often relents when she cries, but not about this. Their little house is already overflowing, they can’t afford to move; they can’t afford another child, period. Money is too tight.

She didn’t see it that way.

“Daddy!”

“I’ve got it!” Garth swiftly hacks through eight slabs of Wonder Bread crust with a butter knife, drops it among the dirty dishes in the sink, and returns the sandwiches to the boys.

Caleb, still glued to the television, doesn’t acknowledge him, just reaches for a sandwich and chews, robotic, fixated on SpongeBob.

Jeremy, however, breaks into a baby-toothed grin and announces, “No crust! Yay! I love Daddy!”

Garth’s heart melts. Maybe he’s not spoiled rotten after all.

But they definitely are not having another child. No way.

The phone rings before he can return to his work. It’s Maggie, a mom down the street, wanting to set up a playdate with Jeremy and her son, Zack.

“That’s Brynn’s department,” Garth tells her. “I’ll have her get back to you.”

“Where is she?”

“Out to lunch with some old friends.”

“Lucky her,” Maggie says. “If you have trouble holding down the fort, feel free to drop the boys here to play with mine.”

Garth, who resents the implication that he’s incapable of holding down the fort, tells her that won’t be necessary.

At last he returns to the den, a former sunroom with tall windows on three walls, adjacent to the living room.

It’s warm in here, the midday sun causing a greenhouse effect through the row of southern-exposure windows. Garth uses the old-fashioned hand cranks to open all of them, as well as the tree-shaded north-facing ones on the opposite wall. Instantly, a cross-breeze wafts into the room.

There. Much better.

He settles once again at his large desk, the broad wooden top entirely obscured by research books—though no more “gruesome” ones, in keeping with his promise to Brynn—along with stacks upon stacks of papers and notes, plus his desktop computer components.

The computer is on its last legs, but of course they can’t afford a new one. It takes a few full minutes for the antiquated system to boot up.

As he waits, Garth stares at a framed photo of himself with Brynn, snapped just before their wedding. She framed it for him as a gift that first Christmas together, when their newlywed budget was too strained for extravagances.

Which it has been ever since. Last Christmas they didn’t even exchange gifts with each other, opting instead to ensure that Santa could bring the boys most of what they asked for.

Garth tilts the frame to reduce the glare of the sun streaming through the windows, gazing at his wife’s image.

Look at her. She’s so different now.

It isn’t that she’s aged, exactly. The picture was taken just eight years ago when she was in her early twenties; she still hasn’t chronologically, or physically, left that youthful decade behind.

But the Brynn in the picture exudes carefree joy, and her attention is focused solely on her husband-to-be. That’s how it always was back then—so different from now.

When was the last time she looked at him like that? As though she was really noticing him?

It’s been a long, long time.

Definitely not since Jeremy came along.

She looks at the boys that way, though.

Garth often catches her staring at one or the other of their sons, utterly captivated by their most mundane actions…or, sometimes, it seems, by their mere existence.

But in this long-ago moment captured on film, she’s looking only at Garth.

And Garth is looking at the camera.

More specifically, at the woman holding the camera.

How well he remembers that day spent wandering around the autumn arts-and-crafts festival in town, one that was attended by the locals as well as by college students and alumni.

How well he remembers the irony thatshe, of all people, would offer to take a picture of him with Brynn that day.

“Okay, smile,” she said casually, aiming the lens.

Does she still remember that day? Does she remember what happened the night before, when Brynn was working the overnight shift at the Amble On Inn?

And if she remembers…Will she keep her promise never to tell Brynn their secret?

You’d better not tell,he warns her silently.

Not about what happened years ago…or about the sordid past revisited not so long ago at all.

Fiona immediately spies a familiar figure at the table as she reenters the dining room. Lithe, exotic Cassandra Ashford, wearing a coral sweater that’s striking against her mocha complexion, now occupies the fourth chair.

“Cassie! Good, you’re here.” Fiona pauses to give her old friend a quick hug before sliding back into her seat. “Where have you been?”

“I…I had a little trouble finding this place.”

“And where the heck haveyou been?”

Fiona looks up to find Tildy gazing intently at her from across the table, chin resting in her propped hand.

“In the ladies’ room,” she lies smoothly.

“No, you weren’t. You were outside sneaking a smoke and checking your cell phone.”

Fiona shrugs. “Guilty as charged…since that apparently is a crime?”

“Cassie, I almost forgot, let’s see your engagement ring!” Brynn cuts in brightly.

“Oh, that’s right, congratulations on that,” Fiona tells her.

She can’t help but notice that Cassie isn’t exactly a gushing bride-to-be as she obligingly extends her left hand. Her smile is stiff, and she’s having trouble answering basic questions about the wedding.

Either she’s been utterly derailed by this impromptu sorority reunion and the strange birthday card that triggered it, or she isn’t thrilled about getting married.

Maybe it’s both,Fiona concludes.

The waiter arrives to take Cassie’s drink order—club soda with lime—and to recite the daily specials.

“Are you ready to order?”

They look at each other.

Typically, Tildy decides, without asking, that they are. “I’d like the escargot to start,” she says promptly, “and then the warm duck club sandwich.”

“Shouldn’t we at least let Cassie look at the menu?” Brynn protests.

“Oh, I’m fine. Do you have a chicken Caesar salad?” Cassie asks the waiter, who nods. “I’ll have that.”

That’s probably not what she wanted, Fiona concludes, watching Cassie as Brynn is ordering a burger.

She’s as low-maintenance as ever; she didn’t want to make us wait while she looked at the menu.

Unlike high-maintenance me.

When it’s her turn, Fiona quizzes the waiter at length about the ceviche and the sorrel salad before deciding on the wild mushroom tart.

“What?” she asks, catching Tildy giving her another look.

“Some things never change,” Tildy comments with a smug shake of her head.

“Like…?”

“Like being in a restaurant with you. Have you ever just walked into a place and ordered something off the cuff?”

“No, because when I do get a chance to eat, I like to make sure things are going to turn out to be exactly the way I want them. Otherwise it’s all just a big waste of time.”

Ostensibly, Fiona is talking about food. But she could be discussing life in general. Or her failed marriage.

She waits for the waiter to retreat before clearing her throat as a prelude to her announcement: “So, Brynn thinks Rachel is still alive.”

Three jaws drop simultaneously.

“Why doyou look so stunned?” Fiona asks Brynn. “You’re the one who said it in the first place.”

“Yeah, but…I didn’t think you were just going to throw it out there like that.”

“How can Rachel still be alive?”

Fiona shrugs at Cassie’s bewildered question and asks pointedly, “What doyou think, Tildy?”

Matilda Harrington seems to have no qualms about looking her in the eye as she responds, “She isn’t alive. I checked her myself that night.”

Which, of course, means nothing.

It wouldn’t be the first time Tildy carried on a lying charade right under their noses.

But when it comes tothat illicit situation, Fiona concludes that it’s better for everyone involved to let some bygones be bygones, rather than go dredging up every last secret from the sisters’ shared past.

Because what Brynn doesn’t know can’t hurt her.

At least, I hope not,Fiona thinks uneasily.

To Tildy, she says, “All we have is your word that Rachel didn’t have a pulse when you climbed down there.”

“‘All’you have?” Tildy echoes. “What else do you need? You know my word is worth more than…well, more than…”

“More than you are?” Cassie supplies. “I mean financially.”

Tildy responds with a tight little smile.

“So…the oath,” Fiona says thoughtfully. “I guess that’s what this is all about in the first place, isn’t it? We gave each other our word that we wouldn’t tell a soul what happened that night. But obviously, somebody did.”

Silence as that sinks in.

Then Tildy commandeers the conversation. “So then, of the three of you sitting at this table, whose word is completely worthless?”

“There arefour of us at this table, Tildy,” Brynn points out.

“Do you really thinkI told? You’re forgetting that I was the one who had to convince the rest of you to do what was best for our sisters.”

“Rachel was our sister.” Brynn’s jaw is set firmly. “Was leaving her there in the woods best for her?”

“You mean leaving herbody there,” Tildy clarifies. “We had nothing to do with her death itself. We didn’t cause it or even contribute to the cause. She drank her own disgusting grain alcohol; it’s not like we gave it to her, or pushed her off that rock.”

Tildy pauses to let that sink in.

Then she continues, “Look, we all know Rachel was responsible for her own actions that night. We tried to stop her, for God’s sake. But who would have believed we were entirely innocent after what happened to the Sigmas? That night, we did what was best forall of the sisters, not just the four of us. That was my biggest priority. I was the sorority president, remember? I took my oath more seriously than anyone else. I wouldn’t break it.”

“I honestly don’t think any of us would,” Cassie speaks up. She looks from Fiona to Brynn. “Look, I’m a doctor. That was a hell of a fall. Do you honestly think…what? That Rachel was really alive down there, and Tildy lied about it? You believe that Rachel got up after that fall and walked away—and now she’s back to torment the rest of us?”

Her words hang in the air, punctuated by ambient restaurant sounds: silver clinking against china, murmured conversations, classical music.

“It’s either that,” Brynn says quietly after a long moment, “or one of us told somebody what happened.”

Fiona looks around the table. “Anyone want to come clean on that?”

More silence.

“I didn’t think so,” she mutters, reaching for her purse, and her cigarettes, before remembering that she can’t smoke here.

“This is ridiculous.” Tildy pushes back her chair. “I’m not sitting here while the three of you accuse me of something so heinous, after all I’ve done for all of you.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Cassie protests.

“No,you’re not,” Tildy concedes, taking her leather Hermes bag from the back of her chair and slinging the strap over her shoulder. “Theyare.”

“We’re not accusing you, either.” Brynn touches Tildy’s arm, and looks to Fiona for agreement.

As irked by Brynn’s benevolent attitude as she is by Tildy’s self-righteous outrage, Fiona merely shrugs.

“We’re just trying to figure out who could have sent those cards, and why,” Brynn goes on, turning back to Tildy, “and how they could have known what happened.”

“Maybe theydidn’t know,” Cassie suggests, and is promptly on the receiving end of three blank stares.

“What do you mean?” Fee asks.

“Maybe whoever sent the cards just knew that Rachel disappeared on her birthday ten years ago, and that she was our friend. It was all over the news at the time, remember?”

“Remember?” Fiona echoes, thinking back to the media blitz that followed that terrible night. “Is there anything about any of it that we can possibly ever forget?”

Rachel’s pretty face was plastered everywhere, fromThe Today Show to the evening news, from the front page of all the New York tabloids toPeople magazine.

Impressive coverage. The case held certain elements of mass appeal: a beautiful coed from a privileged family had vanished without a trace, and on her birthday, no less. People ate that stuff up.

Always have, always will.

In the past decade, other beautiful young women have mysteriously disappeared, just as Rachel did.

Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, Natalie Holloway…

Sometimes, their stories have happy endings. Others conclude tragically. But even recovered remains bring closure.

There was no closure for the Lorent family. There were no remains to bury in the family plot on Long Island.

Eventually, rumblings began to surface in the media, just as there were rumors on campus, that Rachel had simply run off somewhere on her own. Gradually, her story faded from the public eye.

Of course, she was resurrected in the local press on the first few anniversaries of her disappearance, and when her father died of cancer a couple of years ago, and whenever a similarly high-profile case came along. But for the most part, it was over.

For everyone but Rachel’s family…

And the four of us…

And whoever sent the cards.

“So, if that’s the case—if the cards came from someone who knew about Rachel from the news, and not what really happened,” Brynn says slowly, absorbing Cassie’s theory, “then maybe it’s just some sicko who remembers reading about it in the press, and the four of us aren’t the only ones who got them.”

“What do you mean?” Fiona asks impatiently.

“Maybe some of her other friends got the cards, too,” Cassie says.

Brynn nods. “We need to find out.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“We aren’t,” Fiona firmly informs both Cassie and Brynn, noticing that Tildy has remained conspicuously silent through their speculation, though she’s made no further move to leave.

“Don’t you think we should know whether this is strictly about the four of us, and somebody possibly knowing what happened that night?” Brynn asks.

“I’d love to find out, but we can’t go around looking up the Zetas and asking questions without making ourselves look suspicious.”

“I disagree.”

Fiona shakes her head at Brynn’s stubborn expression. “You want to start calling people and saying we all got cards from Rachel, and did they get them, too?”

“Not flat out, but—”

“No, Fee is right,” Tildy pipes up at last. “We don’t need anyone thinking we might know something about Rachel. Not even now, after all these years. The best thing we can do about all this is keep quiet.”

“But—”

Brynn’s protest is interrupted by the waiter returning with a loaded tray.

They wait in silence as he places their meals before them. As soon as he departs, Fiona says, “Let’s assume that whoever sent those cards knows what we did that night. What do you think she—or he—is going to do about it?”

“Blackmail us.” Tildy’s answer is immediate.

Fiona had been thinking the same thing.

“What if it’s Rachel?” Brynn asks, her meal still untouched, like the others’. “You think she’d want to blackmail us?”

“It can’t be Rachel, Brynn,” Cassie insists. “How did she survive? Where has she been all these years? Why did she disappear?”

“I don’t know!” Brynn squeezes her fingertips against her temples. “It doesn’t make sense, but I can’t think of anything else that does, either.”

“Blackmail makes sense,” Fiona admits.

“So should we go to the police, then?”

“No,” the other three answer Brynn’s question in decisive unison.

“So we should just…what, then? Sit around waiting for something else to happen? Wait for someone to blackmail us? Or…worse?”

Nobody answers that.

You would expect Fiona to be the first to emerge from the inn, with Brynn dogging her heels, but that’s not how it happens.

No, it’s Matilda Harrington who steps out onto the porch less than an hour after Cassie’s arrival, unaware that she’s being watched from the stand of trees alongside the parking lot.

She looks straight ahead through huge designer sunglasses as she strides toward her Ferrari as though she can’t wait to get in and drive away.

Already clutching her keys, she unlocks the door with the remote when she’s still a few yards away. She slips behind the wheel, closes the door, starts the engine…