LITMIR.BIZ

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      Becca knew as much. The Star was a local paper; not exactly the big time that Renee had always talked up years before. Even in high school, Renee Walker had ambitions that had been far reaching, a lot farther reaching than the circulation of a second-rate newspaper.

      “She’s already talked to the kids who found the body, even though their parents were cautioned by the police. But you know her, she gets what she wants.”

      Except that dream job.

      “Anyway, Renee’s been doing some follow-up. She wants us all to get together at Blue Note on Thursday.”

      “The restaurant? Why?” The request seemed to come out of left field.

      “To find out if anyone can remember anything that might help identify the bones.”

      “You mean if they’re Jessie’s.”

      “Well, yeah, that would be the first supposition.”

      Becca wasn’t sure getting the old gang together because of a shallow grave and remains up at the school was such a good idea, but she said, “Okay.”

      “Scott and Glenn own Blue Note. It’s in Raleigh Hills. I’ve got the address…” He rattled off the street address and she remembered the area in the west hills, only a few minutes’ drive through a tunnel and into the heart of Portland.

      “Scott Pascal and Glenn Stafford own a restaurant together?” she asked, thinking of two of the boys she’d known at St. Elizabeth’s. She hadn’t heard that they’d gone into business together and she didn’t recall them being particularly good friends in school, but that had been a long time ago. Things change. And business partners didn’t necessarily make the best friends or bedfellows.

      “Not just Blue Note. They have another restaurant in Lincoln City, I think.”

      “I wouldn’t have guessed,” she said. But then I wouldn’t have guessed that you would call me after all this time, or that a body that could be Jessie’s would be discovered at the school…

      “Renee wants everyone to meet Thursday after work, around seven, if they can make it.” Becca heard a bit of hesitation in his voice, as if he was second-guessing his sister’s plan.

      “I can be there.”

      “Good.”

      “Is it?”

      Again a bit of hesitation, then he said, “Who knows? Renee seems to think none of us have gotten over it.”

      “‘It’ being Jessie’s disappearance.”

      “Yeah.”

      Have you? Becca wondered and doubted it.

      Hudson added, “She thinks there’s maybe some course of action we should take to find out if it’s Jessie.”

      “Like going to the police?” Becca said dryly.

      “The police weren’t exactly our friends,” Hudson agreed.

      Becca leaned back against the couch and glanced out the living room window. The night was dark. Thick. Rain still ran down the windowpanes. Absently she rubbed Ringo’s furry head and thought back. The police had subjected them all to hours of interrogation in the wake of Jessie’s disappearance. The guys had suffered the brunt of the authorities’ scrutiny, but the girls had been interviewed as well. Though the general consensus at the school and police department had been that Jessie had run away again, there’d been one cop who’d insisted she was murdered and he put Hudson and the guys in their group through the wringer, interrogating them over and over again until The Third’s father, a Portland lawyer who owned several buildings near the waterfront, had threatened to sue the department for harassment. The cop had backed off a little, or so it had seemed, but Becca had felt that he’d had a personal vendetta to fulfill.

      Between Christopher Delacroix Junior’s threats, lack of evidence, and a missing body, the case had gone stone cold.

      “I’ll see you Thursday,” Hudson said, breaking into Becca’s reverie.

      “Will Tamara be there?”

      “Think so.”

      “Good. Hey, before you hang up, what was that cop’s name? The one who wouldn’t believe Jessie ran away?”

      “Sam McNally,” Hudson said, a distinct chill to his voice.

      “Mac,” Becca said, remembering. Though the cop, only about ten years older than the kids he was interrogating, had mostly left her alone, he’d haunted their days and nights long after Jessie disappeared. “So now do you think he was right? About Jessie being murdered?”

      “I don’t know.” He was terse. Suddenly distant again. “I sure as hell hope not.”

      “But if she’s still alive…where’s she been all this time?”

      “Somewhere else.”

      “Yeah…”

      “I’ve got to call a few more people, see if they’ll join us.”

      “Okay.”

      He hesitated a second, then said, “Good talking to you, Becca,” and hung up.

      Becca carefully replaced the phone. “Good talking to you, too,” she said softly to the empty room.

      Chapter Three

      Hudson glanced around the stable, checking the horses one last time. They were all in their stalls, settling in for the night, nothing disturbed, nothing as it shouldn’t be. He snapped out the overhead light, shut the door, and dashed, head bent, across the expanse of gravel that separated the barn, stable, and machine shed from the house. The security lights gave a bluish tint to the night and overhead, through the rain, he thought he spied an owl soar into the higher branches of the old willow tree that he and his sister used to climb.

      “Come on, Renee, don’t be a chicken,” he’d called to her and she, never one to turn down a dare, had struggled up the interlaced branches that he’d scaled with ease. It had pissed her off that her brother, her younger brother by nearly four minutes, was stronger and more athletic than she could hope to be.

      But she’d been smart.

      Had sailed through school while he’d been uninterested in classroom assignments, at least until college. She’d proudly waited for each report card to arrive in the mail and had beamed as their mother had seen the row of As next to the subject matter. Hudson had done all right, though he hadn’t really given a crap, except for the comments by the teachers. “Doesn’t work to his potential” or “Tests well, but doesn’t apply himself in the classroom” or his favorite, “Isn’t a team player.” Yeah, well. That much was as true today as it had been when his mother had read the remarks aloud in the old kitchen, some twenty-five years earlier.

      Tonight, as he ran past, the willow was devoid of leaves and the owl moved to better shelter, flying through the open hay loft window to his perch high in the rafters of the barn, a structure that had been in the Walker family for over a hundred years. Hudson passed the tree and another memory sizzled through his brain, one filled with heat and passion and only the slightest worry that he and Becca would get caught making love beneath the lush, drooping branches and canopy of fluttering leaves. God, he’d had it bad for her.

      Maybe worse than you had it for Jessie?

      He hurried up the back walk and onto the porch, shaking drops from his hair, as a cloudburst released more slanting rain that battered the old shingles of the roof and gurgled down the gutters. He didn’t want to think about Jessie and hoped to hell that those bones found at the school weren’t hers, that she was living somewhere far away and was still as intriguing and mysterious as she’d always been.

      But his gut told him differently.

      He stepped into the house and it felt oddly empty tonight,

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