From the Shadows (Buckhorn, Montana #2) - B.J. Daniels Page 0,19

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,” Jen whined. “I need you there. Think of it as a weekend away. But also you might meet the man of your dreams.”

Shirley laughed, looking at her with utter disbelief. “You mean one of the staff who is probably a murderer?”

“Still better than Lars.”

“Away for a weekend? I can see the hotel across the highway from my front window,” Shirley cried. “That’s not my idea of a weekend retreat, to go to an abandoned hotel with Megan’s ghost sneaking around every corner.” She shook her head and shivered.

Jen still wasn’t giving up. “Didn’t you say one time that you wished you could be a guest in the hotel instead of work there?”

“That was before the summer I worked with Megan.” She took a gulp of her beer. “You have to admit, this reunion sounds...stupid. Why would you want to go? How do you know that the killer won’t be there? We’ve always known it had to be one of us.”

Jen considered that for a moment. “We all had good reason to hate Megan and want her...gone. Who do you think did it?”

Shirley shook her head. She’d put it out of her mind, thinking she would never see those people again. “What makes you think I didn’t do it?”

* * *

ONCE IN HER ROOM, Casey thought she’d feel better, but Finn was just across the hall, and when she looked out the window, she could see people standing around the campfire glowing in the growing darkness. That alone brought back a firestorm of memories, most of them bad.

She counted those gathered around the fire. Five. That meant two hadn’t come. At least not yet. She closed the drapes and turned away, her thoughts boomeranging back to Finn. She wasn’t sure what to make of him. Would she get an offer on the hotel from him in the morning?

There’d been a couple of times during dinner that she’d thought he might be flirting with her. Clearly, he was a man who’d made his fortune by going after what he wanted. But what did he want with her hotel? Or was he after something else?

The thought surprised and unnerved her. She wasn’t what he’d expected? There was something about him having so