Paranoid(12)

“Nothing.” A lie. But Nowak didn’t call him out.

This wasn’t good.

Dredging up the horror of the past would only cause more trouble.

And Rachel would be devastated. She already had anxiety issues and, well, maybe even more than that. Fuck, he thought. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! The byline indicated that Mercedes Pope, one of Rachel’s former classmates, had written the article. In it both Nathan Moretti and Lila Ryder had been quoted, two more “friends.” Nathan had been Luke’s friend and fellow athlete while Lila, well, she had dated Luke, ended up having his kid. She’d also gone to the Sea View cannery with Rachel that night. Now, of course, in a bizarre twist of fate, Lila was his damned stepmother.

This town was just too damned small.

“Somethin’ wrong?” Mendoza asked, looking up from the baseball scores, but Cade didn’t bother answering, just strode out of the lunchroom and headed back to his desk. He hadn’t noted the significance of the date this morning, but he was sure as hell that Rachel had.

He wondered if she had known about the article.

Maybe.

But probably not.

And she wasn’t quoted in the piece.

Mercedes Pope had been at the cannery that night as well. Now she owned part of the newspaper her grandfather had founded some fifty years earlier. And, it seemed, had decided to dredge up the ice-cold case now.

“Great,” Cade said aloud. “Just . . . great.”

Rachel had never gotten over the trauma of Luke’s death. “Damn it all to hell.”

His phone buzzed as he made his way back to his desk. He glanced at the screen.

Kayleigh’s number came into view.

Shit, no.

His jaw tightened and he clicked the message off before reading it.

Not now.

The day had already started off on the wrong foot.

But the good news?

It wasn’t yet eight in the morning.

There was a damned good chance things would only get worse.

*

Rachel kicked off her shoes on the back porch, then stepped inside the kitchen and dropped the bakery sack on the counter. A fresh pot of coffee was already brewing, thanks to autoperk. She tapped on each kid’s door, calling through the panels, “Time to get up. C’mon, ‘rise and shine,’” using the same time-worn phrase her mother had a quarter of a century earlier to motivate Rachel and Luke from their beds. It worked about as well today as it had then. “Move it! We don’t want to be late.”

A groan from Harper’s room.

Nothing emanating from Dylan’s.

No surprise there.

Upstairs, she showered and changed, pushed her hair into a high ponytail and dabbed on lipstick and mascara before hesitating at the bathroom mirror and eyeing her reflection. She should bring up the missing drugs with the kids. Actually she had to, she thought, and opened the cabinet to retrieve the bottle before slipping it into her pocket. Then she trundled down to the first floor, where she discovered Harper, eyes at half-mast, standing at the kitchen counter.

“Doughnut in the bag,” Rachel said, pointing to the white sack. “Juice in the fridge.”

“Just coffee.”

“You drink coffee?” Dumbfounded, Rachel eyed her daughter. “Since when?”

“I dunno. A while.”

This was news to Rachel.

Harper yawned. “Three more days of it and then a cleanse.”

“A cleanse? Like a diet?” Rachel skewered her daughter with a glare as she found two coffee cups in the cupboard. She eyed Harper’s slim frame and said, “You don’t need to diet,” as she poured from the glass carafe.

“It’s not to lose weight, Mom.”

Was there just the hint of a know-it-all sneer in her daughter’s voice?

Great.

“It’s healthy.” Harper reached across the counter and into the cupboard for the sugar bowl, found a teaspoon in the drawer, then shoveled three spoonfuls into her cup. In the refrigerator she found a carton of hazelnut creamer, then added a thick stream into her cup and searched the refrigerator again. “Don’t we have any syrup? Oh, wait, here it is.” She extracted a brown plastic bottle and squirted two thick blobs of chocolate into her concoction.

Rachel’s stomach turned over. “So . . . what’s in this cleanse?”

“Lots of good stuff.” Harper looked around the kitchen countertop, found her phone on the counter, then added, “Like, y’know, lots of juices . . . Tea maybe, fresh stuff, no sugar . . . y’know to detox your body.”

Rachel frowned at her daughter’s cup, now filled with enough sugar to cause a diabetic coma. “Now you’ve got toxins?”

Harper made a sound of disgust. As if her mother were the most stupid woman in the world. “Everybody does,” she said and took a sip of her coffee, scowled, and found the sugar bowl again. Another heaping teaspoonful went into her cup.

“You could always take up sports again.” Harper had been a track star just a year earlier, one of the fastest runners at Edgewater High, but as her interest in boys had increased, her dedication to the team had waned and this year she hadn’t bothered with track. No amount of talking had convinced her otherwise.

Rachel said, “If you don’t want the doughnut, we’ve got granola and yogurt or eggs or just the whites or fruit or multigrain bread for toast.”