From the Shadows (Buckhorn, Montana #2) - B.J. Daniels Page 0,25
of character for her. But one of the others? She could believe that. They probably had nothing better to do.
Or maybe one of them had an agenda. Nothing good, of that she was sure. She’d had no desire to attend. Did she care if she looked guilty?
“Excuse me,” her assistant had said as she’d stuck her head in the door. “They’re ready for you downstairs.”
“Thank you.” The editor of one of the leading women’s magazines in the country, Patience wasn’t easily intimidated anymore like she’d been ten years ago when she’d been nothing more than one of the hotel staff.
She’d tossed the invitation into the trash and risen from her desk. She’d said goodbye to Megan ten years ago. She saw no reason to repeat herself.
Pushing out the door of her office, Patience had smiled to herself at the thought of the staff huddled around the campfire again behind the hotel telling ghost stories. Did they really think they could call up Megan’s ghost? What then? Ask her who’d killed her?
Or was it more about assuaging their guilt? None of them had stood up to Megan even as they’d watched her tear apart one staff member after another. They’d been a bunch of cowards, afraid they’d be next.
If they were looking for absolution, good luck finding it. They were all guilty, herself included. But Casey Crenshaw the most. She could have gone to her grandmother. She could have stopped it. If anyone was to blame for what had happened, it was Casey and her grandmother.
Megan and her mind games, she’d thought as she’d headed to Paste-Up. Megan had spared no one, except Ben, who she’d simply pretended didn’t exist, and Patience, whom she fawned over like she was her pet. Patience had smiled bitterly at the memory. Megan had known better than to try to torment her. Instead, she’d made the rest of the staff mistrust Patience and treat her as an outcast by simply sparing her alone.
Oh, yes, Megan loved mind games. Right until she took her last breath.
* * *
ACROSS THE HALL, Finn was pulling on a hoodie sweatshirt, his door still open. “If you give me time to change, I’ll go with you,” Casey called.
He looked up in surprise and maybe concern.
She hurriedly closed the door before her good sense returned—or he could talk her out of it. She had to face them at some point. As tired as she was, she wanted to get it over with. Would they all show up? Had they all arrived?
She could imagine the speculation down there around the campfire. Like her and Finn, they would wonder who’d sent out the invitations and why. By now Jason would have told them that Casey denied doing it. But would they believe him?
Her fingers trembled as she dressed. She pictured each of them—Ben, Claude, Devlin, Jason, Shirley, Jen and Patience—as they’d been as teens and wondered if they’d changed as much as she felt she had. Why did she fear that one of them had been waiting for ten years for her to return here?
Clothes changed, she grabbed a jacket and left her room.
Finn stood in the hallway waiting for her, his door closed. “You sure about this?”
She nodded, lifting her chin in almost defiance as she locked her door, then checked it, still wondering why it had come open earlier. She felt scared and more than a little paranoid. But she wasn’t sixteen anymore. The woman she’d become could do this.
He gave her a look like one her grandmother would have, as if proud of her for facing her demons. It made her want to laugh. She was trembling in her sneakers. But then Finn had no idea what she’d been hiding all these years.
They took the staff stairs at the back, just as she’d done as a kid. She’d spent one summer looking for secret passages. She knew they had to exist in the rambling hotel, but the back stairs were the closest she had come to finding any.
The moment she and Finn stepped outside, she smelled the pine smoke and was hit with the memory of the night Jason took her into the pines after everyone else had left the fire for the night.
“You all right?” Finn asked.
She nodded. She hadn’t realized that she’d stopped and now stood staring at the dark silhouettes standing around the orange crackling blaze fifty yards away just inside the trees at the foot of the mountain.