The Perfect Coed (Oak Grove Mysteries Book 1) by Judy Alter Read Free Book Online Page B

liked the same things, dated the same kind of guys, had a real picnic all through that part of college.” She hesitated. “Then she fell for a creep.”
    “A creep?” Jordan asked.
    “Yeah. He did drugs, and he started Shelley on them, and I lost her. Lost her like we’d never been friends. I wasn’t any Goody Two-Shoes, but I knew how wrong it was. Shelley’d just brush me off when I’d try to talk to her, and pretty soon we weren’t talking at all. We just sort of lived in the same space without being together. And I hated it, I really hated it. She was one of the few people I’d loved in my life or who’d ever loved me, and I lost her.
    “And then I came home one day, and there she was, curled up on the bathroom floor like a newborn baby. Clutching herself. I never knew if she died in pain, but I hoped not. They… they wouldn’t talk to me about it.”
    “There was an investigation, and you were questioned?” Jordan asked. It wasn’t a question on his part, and Susan knew he already knew all about it… except her version.
    “Yeah. I had to go to police headquarters and testify, and they grilled me about having given her the cocaine. I told them to go after the creep, but they were convinced they could at least charge me with possession or whatever. Maybe it was just how my head was right then. Finally they said it was an OD, and I was supposed to just wipe it out of my life like it never happened.”
    “Was Missy Jackson doing drugs?”
    Susan saw the connection he was making, and she flared in anger. “I have no idea! If she was, I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t do drugs back then, and I don’t have anything to do with them now.”
    “Most people…,” Jordan began tentatively, then seemed to gain speed, “go through life without ever being associated with a suspicious death. You now have been associated with two.”
    Susan reached her boiling point. “You want to add my mother, who committed suicide when I was four?” she roared.
    Jake came and took her in his arms. “Dirk,” he said, “I think you’ve got all you’re going to get here today. Would you just let yourself out the front door?”
    Jordan left without another word, and Jake stood holding a trembling Susan for a long time. Susan never ate her steak that night. She threw down two fingers of bourbon, straight, and fell into bed.
    Jake grilled himself a steak and enjoyed a good, if lonely, meal. Then he went in, gently undressed Susan, and finally crawled into bed next to her.
    Susan woke in the middle of the night, Jake’s arms protectively around her. “Jake?”
    When he didn’t respond, she yelled, “Jake!”
    “What is it?” He came sleepily to consciousness. “You hear something?”
    “Who reported Missy Jackson missing to your office?” Susan demanded.
    “What? You woke me up to ask that?”
    “It’s important,” she insisted. “The roommate wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t call the girl’s parents. So it wasn’t Brandy Perkins. Who was it?”
    He shook his head. “I haven’t any idea. I’ll check the log in the morning. Can we go back to sleep now?”
    She was wide awake, and she knew she couldn’t go back to sleep. When Jake turned his back to her, she reached over him and began slowly to stroke him, starting at his chest and working her way down. Finally, he turned toward her. “Damn! Will you never let a man sleep?”
    Afterward, they both slept soundly.

Chapter Four
    Missy Jackson’s parents came to the campus early in the morning for the memorial service to be held later in the day.
    Jake met with them before he took them downtown to talk with Dirk Jordan. “I… I hope you know how truly upset we all are here at the university,” he said as he ushered them into his office.
    Mrs. Jackson’s face was tear-stained, her eyes red and puffy. Her husband was sullen, angry, and bewildered.
    “If she had died in an automobile accident,” Mrs. Jackson sobbed, “we could accept it as