As he held the door to the hotel open for her, she said, “I’ll consider your offer in the morning as well as Devlin’s.” She sounded all business, those intimate moments in the café long forgotten.
“Don’t accept his until you hear my offer.” He liked a challenge and now didn’t want to lose the hotel he hadn’t even considered buying before today.
“What will you do with the Crenshaw?” she asked without looking at him as she entered the hotel and he followed.
Clearly, he hadn’t gotten that far. “Truthfully? I haven’t considered that part.” She shot him a suspicious look. “But I am serious. I will make an offer.” What he would do with the place, he couldn’t imagine at this point. Tearing down the building seemed criminal, but to make it viable would require more than money. It would require a commitment he wasn’t sure he wanted to make. Nor did he think it was what Casey wanted.
“I get the feeling you want to see the hotel demolished,” he said, studying her as they entered the main hall and stopped, neither seeming anxious to go any farther.
She glanced away as if she didn’t want to talk about her reasons for needing the hotel gone. “Why would I care?”
The sound of laughter and raised voices erupted from the staff wing. Casey headed for the stairs quickly as if hoping to avoid all of it. He followed, wondering if he should warn her about what he’d found. Not just the notebook and what was written in it, but about the missing young women mentioned in Anna’s journals.
If Casey knew what he’d uncovered during his research, how would she take it? Maybe she already knew about the disappearances. Did they have anything to do with Megan’s death? Either way, most of the suspects could be in the hotel before the night was over.
They’d reached their floor, and he’d pushed open his door across the hall from hers to retrieve her suitcase for her. They’d left so quickly, she hadn’t taken it earlier.
“Thank you for dinner,” she said as she took the suitcase handle from him, their fingers brushing. He could see that she felt the electricity. But she had done her best not to show it. “Good night.” She sounded tired as she headed across the hall.
“Thanks for not having me arrested. I enjoyed dinner. You’re not at all what I expected.” He hadn’t meant to say that last part. It had just come out.
Casey stopped to look back at him. “If you got your information from my grandmother’s journals, then I’m not surprised. Or if you got it from the locals. I’m sure neither version is entirely true.”
He said nothing, thinking how she was more than he’d expected, since the first time he’d heard about Casey Crenshaw, it hadn’t been from her grandmother. Nor had it been in the least bit flattering. Megan had described Casey as an ugly, spoiled, brainless brat. Casey was beautiful and far from brainless. He could see now how Megan would have been intimidated by Casey, making her dislike her all the more.
As Casey disappeared into her room, he noticed what he’d missed. A note tacked on his door. Meet down at the firepit. You won’t want to miss the first night’s festivities. Bring Casey.
He chuckled at that. Like he could get Casey to do anything she didn’t want to. But as he stared at the note, he didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone in the hotel, either.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you aren’t going?” Jen demanded when she’d stopped by the Sleepy Pine Motel on the edge of town to pick up her best friend and former coworker.
Shirley Langer mugged a face at her. “I’m not going to some stupid murder reunion. What do you think I am, crazy?” Shirley managed the motel along the two-lane that ran through Buckhorn. She had an apartment in the back and a life even duller than Jen’s own.
“You can’t not go,” Jen persisted. “Didn’t you read the invitation? Everyone will think that you killed her.”
“I don’t care.” Shirley had turned on the No Vacancy sign hours ago when a busload of tourists had rented all the rooms. Now she wandered back to her apartment, Jen at her heels. With luck, no one would need her assistance until they checked out in the morning.
Shirley opened the refrigerator and took out a beer, handing it automatically to Jen before getting one for herself. “I just want to have a beer, put my feet up and watch something mindless on television. I don’t need any more drama in my life. I certainly don’t need a murder-ghost reunion.”
Jen cracked open her beer and plopped down on the opposite end of Shirley’s sagging couch.
“Lars doesn’t want you to go. Is that the problem?” Jen said. Shirley’s boyfriend—and she used the word loosely—Lars was a point of contention between them. “He has no right to tell you what to do. He needs to put a ring on it before he starts—”
Shirley scoffed. “He doesn’t even know about the invitation. I didn’t tell him before I threw it away. Anyway, I don’t do what he tells me to do unless I want to. Even if he left Tina tomorrow, which he’s not going to do until the baby is born and he can prove it is another man’s kid, I’m not sure I want him.”
It was a small town. Jen’s cousin Tina Mullen was Lars’s live-in former girlfriend who was pregnant with, Lars swore, someone else’s child. “Oh, please, you and your drama.” She had it up to her eyeballs with this lovers’ triangle. Jen wasn’t even sure Tina wanted Lars. It would serve him right to lose both of them.
Shirley turned on the television and cranked down the volume as she took a sip of her beer.
“You have to go with me,”
