Letâs get this thing going good.â
Kendall moved across the wet grass. âIsnât there a burn ban?â she said, half kidding.
âYou going to arrest us?â Steven said, winking at his son.
Cody remained mute, but the flicker in his eyes indicated heâd understood the irony of his dadâs comment.
âI might have to,â she said.
Steven poked the fire and put out his hand to push Cody back a step. âFull plate today?â
âBarring a catastrophe with the committee at lunch, it wonât be a long day,â Kendall said. The reunion was a week from Saturday at the Gold Mountain Golf Club in Bremerton.
As far as Kendall was concerned, the next nine days couldnât pass quickly enough.
âWeâve got it handled, babe,â Steven said, giving her a short kiss.
âYou smell like smoke,â she said.
Steven grinned. âYou smell beautiful.â
Cody set a nest of grapevines at the edge of the fire pit.
âBe careful, Cody.â The boy nodded and Kendall kissed him.
Steven patted their son on the shoulder. âHeâs good.â
Codyâs autism was fickle, cruelly so. Sometimes heâd speak plainly, even spontaneously. Not that day.
Kendall climbed into her white SUV and started to back down the driveway, Cody and Steven looking smaller and smaller as she pulled away.
She hadnât mentioned to Steven what sheâd read about Tori and she knew the reason why. Tori was connected to a part of her past that sheâd just as soon never revisit. She knew sheâd have to say something eventually. Once it broke that their old high school friend was the wife of the murder victim, Toriâs name would surely find its way to the pages of the Lighthouse , the local paper.
She could feel her heart rate quicken and willed herself to relax. This was a stressor she didnât need. She thought of a note on the back of a card that had come through the mail when the save-the-date and early head count cards went out six months prior. It too had bothered her. It made her a little paranoid. She hated even admitting to that kind of feeling. It was only eleven words.
I KNOW EVERYTHING. SEE YOU THERE. ITâLL BE LIKE OLD TIMES.
Just what did the sender mean? And to which committee member had it been directed?
Kendall wasnât sure if the card was a threat or just someoneâs idea of a joke. She didnât tell anyoneânot Sheriff McCray, not Josh, not even Stevenâthat sheâd taken the card to the crime lab and processed it herself. No fingerprints but her own. No postmark. No identifier whatsoever. Later, she pored through the stack of cards to see if it had come in an envelope that sheâd misplaced somehow, but she came up empty handed.
She wondered how that card got to her if it hadnât been mailed. She also wondered if it was related to the Kinkoâs e-mail.
THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.
Earlier that same morning, a very tired Lainie OâNeal stared at the void of her computer screen. French roast coffee perfumed the confines of her home office, the second bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment sheâd rented for five years on Seattleâs Queen Anne Hill. She watched her Siamese fighting fish, Rusty, blow bubbles on the surface of the brandy snifter that was his home. It was just before 7:00 A.M., and she had time to polish a chapter of a book that sheâd been working onâwith renewed vigorâsince the Seattle P-I shuttered its newsroom after more than a century of being the ânewspapermanâs newspaper.â Sheâd dreamed that a book would get her out of the endeavor that was killing her with each fifty-word nugget she had to write. She was a âcontent providerâ for a number of travel websites. She was literally writing for food, each word, one bite at a time. On a good day she pounded out twenty-five of the inane little travel tips that the freelance employer