LITMIR.BIZ

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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 hit SEND. “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 watching Dora 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

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