From the Shadows (Buckhorn, Montana #2) - B.J. Daniels Page 0,29

to the new owner.”

“But you’re taking part in the festivities, right?” Jen said, her focus still on Casey.

Festivities? “No, I’m just picking up a few things of my grandmother’s, selling the place and leaving. Like I said, it will be up to the new owner as to how long you all can stay.”

“What? You have to take part in the reunion,” Jason said, reaching into a cooler to get another beer and toss one to Devlin. “You’re a part of all this, just like the rest of us.”

Claude hadn’t spoken until now. He’d been staring into the fire but clearly following the conversation. “We haven’t even talked about Megan yet.” He brushed a lock of surfer-blond hair back from his forehead and looked at each of them around the campfire. He was like her, younger than the rest. Megan had called him the boy genius, but when she’d said it, there was mocking in her tone. He hadn’t looked like a medical genius. He looked like the surfers at the beach back in California.

“That is why we’re here, right?” Claude asked. “To talk about Megan?”

“That and an excuse to drink,” Jason said and laughed. Clearly, he’d already had a few. “I’m thinking games, truth or dare, and how about a Saturday night reenactment—just like old times?”

Casey felt as if he’d hit her in the chest with a baseball bat. “You can’t be serious.” She couldn’t imagine anything worse.

“Who gets to die this time?” Jen asked, as if getting into the chilling suggestion.

“No one’s going to die,” Shirley said as she took the wine bottle from Jen and took a gulp.

Claude was shaking his head. “I didn’t sign up for fun and games. I thought we were going to deal with our feelings about Megan and the effect she had on us.”

Gone was the party atmosphere from earlier, as if a gust of wind had blown it away. The campfire flickered.

“‘Feelings’?” Jason said, scoffing. “You can’t be serious. We all know how we felt about her.”

“I think what Claude is getting at is that it’s high time we got to say out loud here in this place how we felt about Megan,” Benjamin said. “What better place than among people who also hated her?”

“Except not everyone did. Right, Jason?” Claude said, glaring across the campfire at him.

“If you think I’m going to wax poetic about her, you’re wrong,” Jason said, sounding petulant. “You think you were the only one she twisted into a pretzel?” He shook his head and took a gulp of his beer.

“Go ahead, Claude. You should go first since you were her first,” Jen said with a chuckle. “But she wasn’t your first, was she.” The last was tinged with bitterness.

The doctor’s jaw tightened as he looked into the fire. “We all let Megan manipulate us. Why did we do that?” He shook his head. “We have only ourselves to blame for not standing up to her. She’s still manipulating us, or we wouldn’t be here.”

The group let out a roar of dissent, Jen’s voice rising above the others. “Come on. She was a miserable bitch who enjoyed making the rest of us miserable. Stand up to her?” She scoffed. “She would have made us pay, and we all knew it.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Shirley said and looked at the ground again as if embarrassed to be speaking of the dead. “We probably shouldn’t even be talking about her like this. If she’s really still here...”

“What? Her ghost?” Benjamin demanded. “Megan’s gone. She isn’t here. So admit it. No one here was sorry when she died.”

“She didn’t die,” Jen said. “She was murdered.”

Casey couldn’t help being surprised at how vicious they all sounded. It must have shown on her expression, because Jen said, “What, Casey? You thought you were the only one who hated her? Nothing could protect any of us from Megan. Isn’t that really why we all came back? To show her that we all survived and she didn’t.”

“Casey could have gone to her grandmother,” Patience said quietly.

“No, she couldn’t,” Finn said. “Megan was at the hotel because her father had asked his friend Anna to see what she could do with her.”

“You know this how?” Patience demanded while Casey cringed that he was taking up for her.

“Anna left a journal,” Finn said. Casey could see how reluctant he was to explain all this because it would seem as if he were taking up for her—which he was.

She quickly interrupted. “My grandmother couldn’t do anything with