“I didn’t send it,” she called down. “I had nothing to do with this...reunion.”
Jason looked surprised before his gaze shifted to the right of her. She caught the scent of hotel soap on Finn’s skin as he joined her. “But you brought a friend? I thought it was only going to be the staff and you.”
“I got an invitation, too,” Finn said and shrugged.
“That’s strange. But whoever planned this must have wanted you here for some reason,” Jason said.
“I thought the same thing,” Finn agreed.
“That means you must have known Megan.” Jason turned at the sound of other people entering the hotel. He called back to them, “Casey said we could take our old rooms along the staff wing,” as if she’d really said that.
Casey shot Finn a look. “You knew Megan?”
CHAPTER FIVE
DR. CLAUDE DRAKE had been thinking of little else but Megan since getting his invitation to the reunion. The day after it arrived, he’d had an early-morning surgery. While he’d made a perfectly clean incision in the anesthetized patient on the table, he’d admitted that as successful as he’d become, Megan had still ruined his life.
Just like the incision he’d made in this patient’s flesh, he’d carried the scars Megan had inflicted. That was what the shrink had told him and his parents, anyway. He’d come home a different teenager than the boy genius who’d begged his parents to let him go to Montana for the summer before he had to start medical school. A boy wonder, he’d breezed through college by the time most teens his age were graduating from high school. He’d just wanted one summer before medical school to be like other teens his age.
Then he’d met Megan and ended up working in an old haunted hotel—until her murder.
His parents and the shrink were right. He was scarred. But they never really knew how much. He’d shared only a little of his experience with the psychiatrist. Even as he did, he could tell the doctor didn’t believe that one teenage girl one summer in Montana could destroy his self-worth so easily. Then again, the shrink and his parents had never met Megan.
He’d finished the surgery and left the closing to a subordinate. The invitation was in his pocket. He hadn’t let it out of his sight since he’d received it. He’d wondered if the others would come. Why would they? Megan had been a poison she’d injected into each of them, preying on their weaknesses and then using those weaknesses against them. She’d gone for the jugular and hadn’t spared any of them. It was no wonder one of them had finally snapped and killed her.
As he’d stripped off his mask and gloves, he’d considered how many lies he would have to tell to secretly return to Buckhorn and the hotel for this reunion. He’d put off deciding until almost too late. Fortunately, he had his own jet, and Buckhorn wasn’t that far from the Billings airport. If he rented a car, he could get there in plenty of time.
But he’d have to lie about where he was going and why. Even though he’d excelled in medical school and was the youngest head of surgery at the hospital, he felt as if his parents were constantly watching him in fear that he was far from okay. They would see the reunion as him regressing. Or worse.
As he’d changed into street clothes, he called his office. “I have a four-day conference coming up. Please reschedule any appointments.”
He’d thought about calling his soon-to-be ex-wife but decided to text her instead. The reunion would fall on the same weekend he was supposed to meet with his lawyer and sign the papers ending their marriage. He didn’t feel up to arguing about it. That was why he couldn’t tell her about the invitation. Or that he was going. Megan had been his kryptonite. Crystal was the only person who knew firsthand the damage Megan had done.
If Crystal still loved him at all, she would beg him not to go back to Buckhorn, back to the Crenshaw, for any reason, especially this one. As he saw the hotel rise out of the horizon ahead of his rental car, he wished he’d loved his ex enough to have let her talk him out of coming here.
CASEY COULDN’T BELIEVE this was happening. The nightmare just kept getting worse. A murder reunion? Someone had sent out these ridiculous invitations, and now everyone was showing up here, intending to stay in the hotel?
“You can’t—” Belatedly, she remembered that there was no place to stay in town. The closest other accommodations were a hundred miles away. As desperately as she wanted to, she couldn’t turn them all away this late in the day when there probably wouldn’t be rooms in the next town, either. She told herself it was just for one night. She’d put an end to this first thing in the morning.
Jason was calling greetings to the others on the floor below her. “You do realize that the hotel isn’t open to guests?” she called down to him before this could go any further.
“That’s what makes it so creepy cool,” he replied, as if he was still a teen. “Don’t worry. Everyone knows we have to make do for ourselves. It’s all going to be great.” He glanced back toward the rear entrance to the hotel again. “Hey, Claude. Or should I call you Doc?” Then Jason disappeared from view.
She turned to Finn again. “You knew Megan?”
“Let’s get out of here,” he said quickly. “I promise I’ll tell you everything. We’ll go to the café and get something to eat.”
“You have to be kidding if you think I’m going anywhere with you.”
“I’m hungry, and we both have to eat, and I could use the company. I’ve been eating alone for months. Also, I can tell you aren’t
