Kate opened the box to two tiny guardian angel necklaces, with their names engraved.
One charm was battered and charred, the other was glistening.
* * * * *
Don’t miss USA TODAY bestselling author Rick Mofina’s newest pulse-pounding thriller, Their Last Secret…
Some mistakes can never be forgotten—or forgiven.
Janie Klassyn was only fourteen years old when she made the blood pact with her friends. She could never imagine she was setting in motion the horrifying crime that would tear her peaceful prairie town apart.
Twenty years later in California, school counselor Emma Grant struggles to keep her past buried. But when she finds a note on her car threatening to reveal her secret, it becomes harder to keep up the deception. Even her teenage stepdaughter suspects that Emma is hiding something. Now, with her celebrated true-crime author husband digging into a decades-old murder case for his next book, and a suspicious accident involving someone who’s been following her, the perfect life Emma’s built is crumbling, forcing her to take desperate steps to save it…
Keep reading for a sneak peek of Their Last Secret.
CHAPTER 1
Eternity, Manitoba
2000
Waiting to die. Or dying to get out.
Those seemed like your only choices when fate had dumped you in a small, prairie town where nothing happened and your secret torment burned like a lit fuse.
That’s how it was for Janie, Nikki and Marie, best friends born in and, as Nikki said, condemned to, Eternity.
The rest of civilization was at least a two-hour drive east in the metropolis of Winnipeg. Saskatchewan was about an hour west. Nothing to see there but the sky and land so flat you’d think you were driving to the edge of the world.
Drive south for about an hour and you’d see rolling hills, or what some people called mountains, until you came to the North Dakota border. If you really wanted to push things, you could spend a day getting to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
If you were Janie, Nikki and Marie, growing up in Eternity, there was nowhere to go. You were a prisoner, yearning for something, anything, to happen.
They’d all just turned fourteen in the previous months. It was the summer that preceded high school. A fact they were pondering on another scorching day while they considered things to do as they walked through town.
The Windflower Mall was out because last month the clerks at the drug mart had suspected Nikki of shoplifting eyeliner. They couldn’t prove it because she’d deftly dropped the evidence in an old lady’s bag. Still, security called police. Nikki wasn’t charged but they took her fingerprints and her picture, and under some law or rule, banned her from the building for six months. Nikki took it as both a badge of honor and an affront that stoked the rage forever bubbling under her skin. For as long as Janie and Marie had known her, Nikki seemed to be at war with the world, carrying a deep, invisible wound.
“They can ban me for all my life—I don’t care,” Nikki said. “We see the same people at the food court, nothing to do there but laugh at seniors, Hutterites and cripples.”
Besides, Nikki boasted, she’d stolen enough makeup from that place to last years and she piled it on to create the mask she hid behind. With her quickly maturing body, she looked older than Janie and Marie, who believed her claim that she was no longer a virgin.
After Nikki’s father died when she was younger, her mother, who was a cashier at Eternity Market Mart, began drinking and gambling, running up massive debts until she couldn’t pay the bills. She met a man named Telforde, a contract painter at the bar, and they moved in with him. That was her family. Nikki smoked, drank her mother’s alcohol, read dark books and listened to bands like Exact a Toll and Kill Me Now.
As for Marie, she had beautiful skin and soft brown eyes. She was a smart-dumb girl, a genius at math and science but always missing the obvious in real life. She was self-conscious about being a little heavy. A few years ago, her little brother, Pike, had choked on a piece of apple when the family was having a picnic by the creek. He died right in front of her. Marie felt safest with Janie and Nikki. They allowed her to love NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys and maintain her crush on one of the Hanson brothers. She was always humming “MMMBop,” because Pike had loved it.
Janie’s battle with zits didn’t detract from her almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones. Of the three girls, Janie’s personality was the sweetest. She loved French fries, Coke, ice-cream and Elton John. She liked all kinds of music, even—to Nikki’s horror—country. But the weird thing was all three of them loved one particular song, an old one, “Ring of Fire.” They sang it together, belting out the chorus because for each of them something was burning inside.
The girls had known each other all their lives and while Janie was not sure what she wanted to do with hers, she was resolute in her desire to one day get as far away from Eternity as possible. To move someplace like New York, London or Paris. She was already working on her dream by saving her babysitting money.
Janie and her friends were determined to leave this town for their own painful reasons. But today, they just wanted to escape boredom.
“We haven’t been to the cemetery in a while,” Nikki suggested, once more forgetting about Marie, not seeing the hurt in her eyes.
Nikki liked counting the graves, guessing how people had died. Once she jumped into a freshly dug grave and lay in it for a while. “It’s cold in here.” Janie and Marie had to help her climb out.
It was during the last time they’d gone to the cemetery and Nikki was doing her Empress of the Dark thing when Marie couldn’t take it anymore.
“I hate it when you do this
