Paranoid(29)

“What?”

She pointed. “The box?”

“Oh.” He flushed, zipped the pack. “Lucas needs a new mouse for his computer. I had one, so I told him I’d bring it.”

That didn’t sound quite right, but Dylan added, “He’s got another one ordered. He’s just borrowing this one until it gets here. No big deal.” And he was out the door.

No big deal.

She wondered, but let it go.

*

The trip to Lila’s house took less than twenty minutes. She’d let Harper, who had gotten her license just two months earlier, drive, and her daughter tended to be a lead foot.

Which ran in the family. Still, her fingers had curled over the armrest for most of the ride.

With a little difficulty, Harper parked on the street in front of Lila and Charles Ryder’s house, a three-storied Victorian built on the steep hillside in the late 1880s. The house had been home to the Ryder family for generations and was the very house where Cade and his brothers had grown up, the place where his mother had died.

Rachel hated it.

“Let’s go,” she said. As she glanced up at the turret with its 360 view of the city, a flash of memory came to her, of sneaking up the stairs to that small private space with Cade. No one had been home at the time. Through the windows, the lights of the town had glimmered to the dark expanse of the river. Her throat closed as she thought of the way he’d kissed her that night, the way her heartbeat had pounded in her ears, the warmth of his breath against her nape, the tingle of her skin as they’d tumbled to the floor and the breathless feeling of elation that had followed their lovemaking.

All shattered when, six weeks later, she’d learned she was pregnant.

Now, she took the keys from her daughter, then gathered her bag, with her laptop tucked inside, as her kids piled out and walked up the series of stairs leading to the sharply gabled Victorian with its wraparound porch and sweeping view of the town and river.

The front door opened before she could push the bell, and Lila stepped onto the porch, a white cat streaking out behind her. “Oh, crap! Sammy! You get back in here!” But the cat was long gone, slinking from the porch and into the surrounding shrubbery. “Fine,” Lila muttered, visibly irritated. She turned back to Rachel. Her usual smile was missing, but as always she was dressed as if she expected to meet a prospective real estate client: heels, expensive slacks, a long tunic, and bracelets that jangled over her wrist. She gave a quick hug to both Harper and Dylan and said, “Lucas is upstairs in his room with a friend. Why don’t you go on in?”

The kids shot inside and were hurrying up a sweeping staircase when Lila pulled the door shut behind them, trapping Rachel on the porch. “Can you believe it?” Lila asked, obviously distressed. “Violet? Dead? I mean murdered?” She was shaking her head, her big eyes as cloudy as the day. “Who would do anything like that?” She blinked, then reached into the pocket of her slim gray slacks, retrieving a single cigarette and lighter. “I shouldn’t, I know. I quit years ago, but . . . Violet.” She lit up quickly and drew a deep breath before saying in a cloud of smoke, “I just don’t get it. Why would anyone . . . ?”

“I don’t know.”

She thought for a moment, waving the smoke away as if the odor wouldn’t cling to her tunic or hair. “I just saw her, y’know? She’d come into the real estate office, supposedly interested in property near the river, but the real reason was to let me know that no matter how much I harassed her, she wasn’t going to be a part of . . . this.” Lila motioned to the bay window of the living room, where the reunion committee was meeting. “Not only did she refuse to be a part of the planning committee, she made it clear that she wasn’t even going to attend the reunion.”

“Did she say why?”

“Oh yeah.” She took another pull on the cigarette, again shooed the smoke away. “High school ‘is over.’” Lila made air quotes. “Like she thought we were all going to relive our days at Edgewater High.”

“Well . . . some people would.”

“The idea was just to catch up with old friends,” Lila snapped. “But she thought I was ‘harassing’ her into coming.”

“Did you? Harass her?”

“No, Rach. Of course not!” She rolled her eyes, then added, “I just kind of, you know, ‘urged’ her to be a part of it and maybe she felt pressured, but really?” She let out a sigh and glanced over the rooftops of the houses lower on the hillside to stare at the darkening waters of the Columbia. “I guess we’ll have to . . . oh, you know, include her in the remembrance table.”

That was where Lila went? Dismissing Violet to discuss the reunion and the table for classmates who had died?

Another drag, then Lila dropped her cigarette and crushed it, kicked the butt swiftly under the rail and into the bushes flanking the porch. “I don’t suppose the police have any idea who would do something like this . . . ?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Rachel said quickly. As a cop’s daughter and wife, she’d learned to keep her mouth shut. Even if she was no longer married to Cade, her lips were sealed.

“Oh, right . . . Well, maybe Mercedes will know something. She’s probably got sources in the sheriff’s department. I know she’s already got a junior reporter on the story.”