She looked at him openmouthed. “Was this true?”
“She was in a wreck, and according to the news reports, the other girl had been driving her car, had taken the keys and insisted on driving, even though she was drunk. There were two other girls passed out in the back. Why would you think she’d tell me if it wasn’t true?”
“Seriously? For sympathy, as an excuse for her behavior.”
Jason sighed. “She’d been getting death threats before she came out here. She didn’t tell anyone but was glad when her parents sent her away from San Francisco. When she got here, though, she was still scared and miserable and didn’t feel safe. Then things started happening, she said. Someone started stalking her. She couldn’t sleep or eat toward the end.”
Jen laughed. “She sure hid all of that well while she was busy terrorizing the rest of us. You really don’t believe any of this, do you?” she asked, getting anxious to return to the fire. “A friend of a friend came to work here to kill her? That sounds like bull.”
He shrugged. “Well, she was right, wasn’t she? She’s dead. Someone killed her. Truthfully? I didn’t believe her. I felt just like you do. Until she was murdered. Now I think there might have been something to it. She really thought that one of you was after her.”
Jen scoffed again. “I think she just pushed one of us too far.” She glanced back at the campfire and shook her head, bored with the conversation. Megan was dead, and she wasn’t sorry. She let her thoughts return to Claude. She felt injured by his snub, and now that she’d gotten past the tears, she was angry. Who did he think he was? He’d been glad enough to fall into her arms that first night ten years ago. Just because he was now some famous doctor—
“I thought I could do this,” Jason said, interrupting her thoughts. “But—” he met her gaze “—I might lose it.”
“You might? We all might.”
“Especially whoever killed her,” he said.
It was getting colder and darker in the pines. She realized that she’d finished the beer Jason had brought her and now chucked it into the woods. She preferred the second cheap bottle of wine she had in her car. She thought about going to get it. Or maybe she would just leave for the night. She wasn’t sure if she would be back, though.
A sick part of her wanted to give Claude another chance.
“I’m cold. I’m going back to the fire,” she said to Jason and touched his arm. “Thanks for getting me out of there.” He nodded mutely. She could see that he was still lost in his memories, but there was nothing more she could say without hurting his feelings. He’d brought her back here to talk about Megan. Of course he had. She knew it shouldn’t, but it hurt her feelings that he hadn’t even tried to make a pass at her.
“Be careful,” Jason called after her, as if he thought there might be something in these woods she had to fear.
Jen laughed to herself as she headed toward the warmth of the campfire. She wasn’t the one who needed to be careful.
CASEY FELT IT the moment she stepped into her room. That sense that something was wrong. She’d turned up the heat earlier. Spring in Montana often teased. One day the temperatures would leap, only to fall just as rapidly come nightfall because Buckhorn was in the mountains.
A numbing cold breeze curled around her neck, sending a chill through her like the one she’d experienced earlier coming up the stairs.
But that wasn’t all that had stopped her just inside the door. At first she didn’t know what had sent her heart plummeting and made her freeze in midstep.
Nothing looked amiss, and yet she sensed it. Someone had been in her room. She smelled the scent still in the air. Megan’s perfume. Megan’s signature perfume was so distinctive that Casey would never forget it.
“She’s dead,” she whispered to herself. “She isn’t wearing perfume where she is.” Casey closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Don’t let her get to you,” Anna had said ten years ago. “Be the better person. You need to learn to deal with this sort of thing. Someday this experience will serve you well.”
Opening her eyes and letting out the held breath, Casey wanted to laugh. She’d let her imagination run away with her. No one had come into her room. Hadn’t they all been down at the campfire? She tried to remember. People often would walk into the woods to pee after too many beers. But one of them could have doubled back to the hotel. Or come to her room while she and Finn were talking at the back door.
The wind blew the drapes aside. She rushed to the window to close it and shut out the cold night air, recalling that it had been locked when she’d left earlier. She was sure of it.
That was when she saw it out of the corner of her eye and felt her stomach knot. She turned slowly to look into the bathroom to the words written in lipstick on the mirror.
I know what you did
The letters were half scrawled, poorly shaped. But with a shudder, she knew exactly what the person wanted.
A confession.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AS FINN CAME out the back door of the hotel again, he studied the figures silhouetted against the firelight at the edge of the woods. He’d felt the tension around the fire earlier. It was as if everyone was trying too hard to get into the party mood, while all the time knowing that there was a probable killer among them.
He’d read the marshal’s report on the murder. No one else had been seen in the
