learned how to keep things to himself.
But he’d never stopped believing one of the Preppy Pricks, or several working together, were responsible for Jessie Brentwood’s disappearance and death. Maybe there were some guys involved outside of their core group, too; Mac had certainly harassed others who were also friends or acquaintances of Jessie. But the Preppy Pricks were at the top of his list. He’d made their lives hellish twenty years ago; he could admit it now. He’d been twenty-five, full of his own self-importance; brash, cocky, and a real pain in the ass. But he couldn’t break them. Hadn’t been able to poke holes in their stories. And he’d ended up being the laughingstock of the police department. He’d damned near been demoted from missing persons to some nondescript desk job. It had taken years to become a respected homicide detective, and even to this day some of his superiors regarded him with a baleful eye and most of his partners left him as soon as they could. The Jezebel Brentwood case—his obsession with it—had put its stamp on him.
And now…her bones had been discovered.
If they were Jessie’s. And he believed with all his heart that they were. His headlights reflected on the wet, crumbling pavement and reflected off the eyes of a lumbering racoon that scuttled into the surrounding shrubbery skirting the abandoned school’s main entrance.
Checking his feelings, Mac expected to experience some kind of satisfied “I told you so” building up inside. Maybe there was a little of that, but mostly he sensed his curiosity about the case, a long-slumbering beast, stir from its resting place and lift a nose to the wind.
He pulled onto the highway running through the canyons that carved the west hills of Portland where tall firs flanked the road and elegant homes from the early 1900s were cut into the steep hillsides.
What had happened to Jessie? he wondered. A prank gone bad? A lovers’ quarrel that had escalated out of control? An accident? Or was it murder? The cold, calculated snuffing out of a pretty girl’s life.
Bile rose in his throat, the way it always did when he was dealing with the abuse or death of the young. Of the innocent. Though, from what he knew about Jessie Brentwood, she was older than her years and far from innocent…an intriguing underage woman who was as manipulating as she’d been alluring. One of those females who knew intrinsically all of her attributes, how to use those wide hazel eyes and turned-up smile to get what she wanted, even if it meant playing with fire.
And he asked himself the question that everyone else seemed consumed with: Why was he so fascinated with this case? A simple missing persons case, they’d all said. Why did Mac care about this one so much?
He still had no answer. Maybe he’d been a little in love, a little in lust, with the beautiful, mysterious girl he’d never met. He’d handled dozens of cases where kids disappeared, but this one was different. She was different. He’d followed all the leads he could, dreamed about her, even. Fantasized about her, for God’s sake, and he’d taken a lot of heat for it. At the time his friends on the force thought he’d gone around the bend. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway. He was an up-and-coming hotshot detective who was obsessed by a ghost.
In retrospect, maybe they hadn’t been that far off the mark.
Now, twenty years later, a single father working homicide, Mac knew he’d definitely mellowed. He didn’t really want this case now. Old wounds. And problems.
But those Preppy Pricks were still out there. He wondered how they felt, knowing Jessie’s body had been discovered. One, or several of them, must be sweating bullets now.
Mac smiled thinly. Well, maybe this was the way it should be after all. Him, heading up a homicide case, a cold case that put all the smug bastards on the hot seat.
It was sounding better by the minute.
Becca set the newspaper on the coffee table and sank back on the couch, still staring at the folded pages as if they were Satan’s diary. She felt cold inside and out. What was this? What did it mean?
Ringo circled her feet, tail down, a soft, nearly inaudible growl emanating from his throat.
“Stop it, there’s nothing out there,” she said softly, as much to soothe her own jangled nerves as to calm the dog.
Jessie Brentwood had disappeared twenty years earlier when she’d been sixteen and a student at St. Elizabeth’s, the private Catholic school that had gone co-ed only a few years before. Becca had attended St. Elizabeth’s, too, though she was a year behind Jessie, a freshman. But she’d been friends with Jessie’s crowd, and she remembered all too well how she’d secretly yearned for Jessie’s boyfriend, Hudson Walker, with his dark, longish hair, slow, easy smile, and cowboy drawl. He’d been different from the others, a boy who seemed a tad older somehow, one with a cynical sense of humor and a distance to him that had made him all the more interesting. It was as if he’d known everyone for what they were, had seen through their teenaged façades, and had been amused by all their foolish antics.
Or maybe she’d just fantasized that he’d been more mature and intelligent and innately sexy than his peers. All she knew now was that she’d been crazy in love with him and had hidden it for years.
But that changed, didn’t it? Once Jessie was gone…then you made your move. You, Becca, were as calculating as she was.
Oh, God…
Becca pressed her palm into her flushed cheek, embarrassed and guilty anew, aware that she’d used Jessie’s disappearance and Hudson’s confusion and grief to her own advantage. Sure, it had been much later, after Hudson and Becca were out of high school and Jessie had been missing for years, but Becca now knew her own motives had not been pure. She’d been in love with Hudson. And when the opportunity arose for her to have her shining moment with him, she’d grabbed it with both hands and had vowed never to let go.
How foolish it all seemed now and yet, after all the years that had passed, over twenty since she’d first laid eyes upon him, those old feelings could rise to the surface in an instant. She’d read somewhere that first love never truly disappeared, that it always lay just under the surface, lingering there, waiting, like dry tinder that only needed the touch of a match, a spark, to ignite.
Did she still feel some of that? She hoped not. She hoped her first love was long behind her.
Yet she couldn’t stop thinking about Jessie. And Hudson. And her schoolgirl infatuation that she’d believed was true love. She’d harbored her feelings for years, then had seized her chance to make fantasy a reality.
It had been the summer after high school for Becca; the summer after his first year of college for Hudson when opportunity knocked. She’d ostensibly “run into him” one hot evening, although she’d driven by his parents’ home enough times to learn Hudson’s schedule and then had followed him to Dino’s, a pizzeria that had popped up that year, a place frequented by teenagers and the newly graduated.
Hudson had been meeting Zeke St. John at the pizzeria, as it turned out, and when Becca blithely swept through the swinging doors, she’d managed to hide her disappointment that Hudson wasn’t alone behind a bright smile. Zeke and Hudson had been friends in high school and apparently still were, Becca assumed, although she learned later that the friendship was barely on life support.
But when she sailed inside the pizzeria that evening, she only knew that she wanted to connect with Hudson. Her pulse ran light and fast, and though her grin was wide, she was trembling a bit. If she wasn’t careful her lips would quiver in a kind of excited fear, and she couldn’t have that.
