worker identity. She had to get the real Jacqueline Jennings’s birth certificate, then use it to get her graduate school diploma, which she then parlayed into the school social worker certificate.”
Before anyone could respond, Homer pushed his way in. “What in the hell is going on around here?”
“I have no idea.” Skye wondered how many more people would try to crowd into her tiny office.
Homer claimed one of Jackie’s visitors’ chairs and turned it to face Skye. “Boyd called me at midnight and gave me some half-assed story about Jackie’s not being a real social worker and trying to kill you. I thought he was drunk, but I guess it must be true, because the superintendent is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to find someone else to blame for hiring her.”
“Yeah.” A baritone voice boomed from the doorway. “And guess who he’s got his beady little eyes on?” Charlie stomped in and took the last chair.
Skye looked around the room. “It’s really no one’s fault, or maybe it’s everyone’s fault.” Her office was beginning to look like the inside of a subway car during rush hour. She half expected people to start popping out of the desk drawers. “Dr. Wraige should have checked Jackie’s references and credentials. Homer and the other principals should have been more suspicious that she was always Johnny-on-the-spot, and I should have trusted my instincts that there was something off about her.”
“I didn’t hear everything you said to Boyd after we went back to the police station yesterday,” Simon said. “But I gather Jackie was responsible for all of the unfortunate events that have happened to you and the schools during the past couple of months?”
“Yes. She confessed everything to Wally before she went into surgery last night at the hospital. He said she thought she was dying.”
“What did she own up to?” May finished filling one carton with things from Jackie’s desk and started on another.
“Let’s see.” Skye closed her eyes and tried to put Jackie’s actions in order. “The first thing was slashing my tire and leaving me that note to make me think Mrs. Idell had done it. Maybe she was retaliating because I yelled at her for changing the locks on our office and taking my chair.”
“How about what happened to you at the haunted house?” Justin asked.
“Yes. She tried to scare me into quitting A Ghoul’s Night Out by leaving the bloody ax for me to find and blocking the bathroom door so I couldn’t escape. She also strung up the rope, hoping I’d injure myself and have to drop out, maybe even leave town.”
“She used me to try to scare you, too. Didn’t she?” Justin said, his expression guilty. “By having me tell you the story about the American Legion hall being haunted.”
“Yes, but there was no way for you to know that,” Skye reassured him. “The weird thing is, she said she wasn’t the one I heard crying. No one else was in the bathroom, so maybe I just imagined that part.”
“Or it was the ghost.” Justin grinned.
Everyone ignored him.
May said, “So Annette’s death was an accident.”
“Yes.” Skye’s expression was grim. “A series of unfortunate coincidences.” She sighed heavily. “Jackie was also the one who tried to run me over using Dr. Paine’s car—she claimed she was only trying to scare me into leaving town. But when those attempts didn’t work, she started poisoning my cookies, trying to make me so sick that I’d have to go on disability and be stuck at home.” Skye’s voice quavered, and she blinked back tears. “Gloria’s death was another accident.”
“I bet she planted the chemical bombs here at the high school, too,” Trixie exclaimed.
“Right you are. She wanted the principals to love her. She needed to be seen as the hero,” Skye clarified. “She was the one who steered the girls at the junior high to the Internet site that said getting pregnant would be cool, as well. My guess is she’s the one who changed the meeting time in order to get me into trouble. And I doubt she speaks Russian. We’ll have to reevaluate that poor boy.”
“What I don’t understand is why.” Simon wrinkled his brow. “Why did she do all that? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m sorry to say, in a twisted way, her actions do make sense.” Skye gave an uncomfortable laugh. “She thought she was entitled to my life, that it had been stolen from her.” After explaining what Jackie had told her about her background and her thought processes, Skye concluded with, “She is a classic case of narcissistic personality disorder.”
“You mean someone who is charming, but has no conscience?” Charlie asked.
“No. That’s a sociopath. A narcissist can win people over only in the short term. He or she can’t maintain the illusion of friendliness and caring for very long.” Skye struggled to explain, finally quoting the definition of narcissistic personality disorder from the
“In other words”—Homer snorted—“she can’t take criticism, takes advantage of the people around her, and thinks her shit doesn’t stink.”
“In a nutshell, yes,” Skye agreed. Trust Homer to cut to the chase. Then she muttered under her breath, “And since you usually believe only what you want to believe, you ate it right up.”
“But why?” Justin drew his brows together. “What caused her to be that way?”
Skye felt a twinge of concern. Maybe she shouldn’t have allowed the teenager to stay and hear all this. But since she had, she needed to try to help him understand.
“The closest I can figure is that all her life, Jackie felt like a nonentity—a blank slate—which is why she was so good at assuming other people’s identities. Then when the county clerk made the error with our birth certificates, she saw it as a sign. There had been a mistake. She wasn’t a nobody. She was Skye Denison. Which meant I had to disappear, so she could become the person she was meant to be.”
After what seemed like a thousand questions later, everyone left, and Skye breathed a sigh of relief. She was returning to her desk, hoping to get some work done, when Kurt slipped back into her office.
She turned toward him with a questioning look. “Forget something?”
He closed the door. “I need to tell you something before you hear it from Chief Boyd.”
“What?” Skye mentally raced through the possibilities.
“I’m not who you think I am.”
“You don’t say.” She was taken aback for a second, but recovered quickly and added, “You didn’t fool me for a minute with that small-town-reporter bit.” Okay, he had fooled her for way more than a minute, but he didn’t need to know that.
Kurt raised an eyebrow. “What gave me away?”
“For someone who supposedly wrote for a weekly newspaper, you were much too interested in hard news. Small-town reporters are more interested in the high school football team or who was drunk Saturday night than real crime.” Skye summed up her suspicions: “And then, there’s that honking big gun you were aiming at Jackie at the motor court yesterday afternoon.”
“Guess I’m not as good at being undercover as I thought I was.” Kurt’s smile was tentative.
Skye wasn’t distracted by his charisma. “So you were using me.”
“I’m sorry about that, but I had no choice.” All humor was gone from his handsome face, lines etching themselves around his mouth and eyes.
“I knew all that flirting was only an act.” Skye told herself she had no right to be upset about that. She was in love with Wally and didn’t want Kurt’s attentions. Still, she couldn’t help but add, “It’s not a big surprise that you weren’t really attracted to me.”
“That isn’t true.” Kurt cupped her chin in his palm. “I think you’re smart and fun and incredibly sexy.”
“Right.
“Just because most men like stick women who wouldn’t jiggle if you tied them to a paint mixer”—Kurt caressed her cheek with his thumb—“doesn’t mean that I do. I’m not most men.”
His blue eyes were mesmerizing, sending a ripple of awareness through her, but Skye forced herself to step away from him. “Yeah, well, we know who you aren’t. The question is, who are you?”
“I’m a private detective.” His fingers threaded through hers and stopped her from backing any farther away from him. “I was hired six months ago by the family of Veronica Vail to look into her death.”
