“Casey not coming back out?” Jason asked, a smirk on his handsome face.
“She’s had enough for one day,” Finn said.
“But not you.” Jason handed him a beer.
The talk around the campfire was hushed as the cold night hunkered just outside the flames. Patience was visiting with Jen and Shirley. Claude and Benjamin stood apart, both silent. Devlin stayed close to the cooler full of beer, looking sour and still upset. Clearly Jason wanted a party, but he wasn’t getting it.
“Claude, you should have brought your guitar,” Jason said.
“I don’t play anymore.”
The tension was as thick as the smoke rising into the air. As Finn looked around the group, he realized that Casey wasn’t the only one he had to keep an eye on. Jason was at the top of that list. He’d seen the tension between him and Casey. She’d tried to hide her dislike of the man, but, given what Megan had told him and what he’d read in Anna’s journal, he already had a pretty good idea why she couldn’t stand Jason.
There’d been something sparking between Casey and Jason before he’d hooked up with Megan and doused that spark before it ever had a chance. Megan, of course, had told a slightly different story, saying that Jason had begged her to save him from Casey, who he said had a schoolgirl crush on him. According to her journal entry, Anna had seen something entirely different but had been caught in the middle.
But Finn suspected Jason, at least, was still interested in Casey. He just wasn’t sure what that interest was.
“So you dated Megan?” Patience asked.
He nodded. “Just for a few months before she came out here.”
“Now you’re looking for her killer,” Jason said. “How’s that going?”
Finn smiled and took a sip of his beer. He pretended he’d never heard of these people and wasn’t biased, but he’d already learned about them from Megan’s phone calls and Anna’s journals. There’d been a time when he would have trusted Megan’s word about what was going on at the Crenshaw. But no longer. He’d known about the ugly side of her that struck out when she wasn’t happy. He’d heard enough around the campfire tonight to leave little doubt. Megan had gone after Casey because she’d been young and vulnerable.
He thought of Megan’s phone calls complaining about the way she was being treated. He remembered her contempt for the owner’s granddaughter, who she said was snotty and always tattling on her. Another lie. He’d felt guilty all these years because he hadn’t helped Megan. He’d thought she was the victim even before she was murdered. He’d put her on a pedestal, making her into someone who’d never existed—and certainly not someone to look up to, let alone love.
Finn still wanted to find her killer, but for Casey and her grandmother, just as he’d told Casey. He tried to imagine what could have happened to push one of those people around the fire into bludgeoning her to death from behind. Had Megan trusted the person? Was that why she’d turned her back on her killer? Or had they sneaked up on her?
“I think it’s time to play truth or dare,” Jason announced. There was a general groan around the fire. “Let’s start with Patience. A truth or a dare?”
Finn listened as the game moved through the group. He suspected none of them would tell the truth. Just as he suspected things had heated up over the weeks that awful summer before boiling over that night in the woods.
The lack of evidence still bothered him. Head wounds bled. The killer should have had blood all over him or her. The marshal had speculated that the person could have thrown the murder weapon into the nearby creek and then rinsed off the blood and buried the stained clothing in the rocky shoreline along the creek, since no bloody clothing was found in the area.
Had the killing been planned? Or was it spur of the moment? There were plenty of rocks around. He realized as he studied those around the fire that it was easier to think of the killer as a male. A man was stronger and taller and more likely to take a rock to someone’s head. According to the books he’d read, women were more apt to push the intended victim down a flight of stairs or resort to poison. But not always.
Casey had been the number one suspect because she’d had a very vocal and angry argument with Megan away from the campfire in the trees that night. Megan’s body was later discovered in those same woods.
She was still a suspect. He couldn’t imagine something like that hanging over his head. Another reason Finn wanted to find the killer. What confused him was Casey’s reaction earlier. She really didn’t seem to care if the killer was ever caught. More than that, she seemed almost discouraging when he’d told her his plan.
Until this moment, he hadn’t considered that she might have something to hide. He should have. She’d been coming to the hotel every summer for years—until the murder. That summer, when she was sixteen, was the last summer she would spend here with her grandmother. He’d thought she had just outgrown summers in Montana.
But what if she hadn’t returned until now because she knew something about Megan’s death, something she’d been hiding all these years? Was she protecting herself? Or someone else? His first thought was her grandmother.
What if it had been someone from the staff that she’d covered for out of
