“Not necessarily as your parents,” Wyatt interjected as he glanced at Betty Cellamino. “If you’ll give us a chance, we’d like to be your friends. But it’s up to you.”
“I-I think I’d like to get to know both of you.” Leo stared directly at Lindsay. “But nobody will ever take Ma’s place. She’ll always be my mother.”
Intense pain and unbearable sadness enveloped Lindsay, but she bore it as best she could and even forced a fragile smile when she looked at her son. “Just being given a chance to be a part of your life is more than I’d ever expected.” It was all she could do not to reach out and grab him. Her arms ached to hold her child.
Betty Cellamino nudged Leo forward. Reluctantly, he held out his hand to Lindsay. She opened her arms. Leo hesitated. Betty gave him another nudge. He walked into Lindsay’s open embrace, his long, lean body stiff as a poker.
Lindsay hugged him. Briefly. But it was enough. For now.
When Leo stepped back, Wyatt wrapped his arm around her shoulders and held her close. When his lips brushed her temple, she sighed. After twenty long years, both the man she had always loved and their child were back in her life.
At eight-thirty West Coast time, Rachel placed a telephone call to her father’s old partner on the Portland Police Bureau. Charlie Young was now the chief of police, a man only a few years younger than her father would have been had he lived. The first few years after Rachel had moved to Tennessee with her mother after her father’s death, Charlie and his wife, Laraine, had kept in touch on a regular basis. Charlie had wanted to keep tabs on Rachel, his old friend’s only child. And despite the fact that her parents had divorced a few years before her father’s deadly heart attack, her mother and Laraine Young had remained good friends.
When she heard Charlie’s gravelly voice, the sound brought back memories from her teenage years when she had been like a daughter to the childless Youngs.
“Uncle Charlie, it’s Rachel.”
“Well, hello, girl. How are you?”
“I’m fine. How are you and Aunt Laraine?”
“Older, fatter, and grayer.” He chuckled.
“I-I’m thinking about coming to Portland for a visit.”
“Hmm…Coming back in July for the reunion at St. Elizabeth’s.”
“Probably, but I may come in before July.”
“You’ll stay here with us, of course. Laraine wouldn’t let you stay anywhere else.”
“I’d love to, but do you think you can put up with me for five or six weeks?”
“That long, huh?” He chuckled again. “Are you planning on taking a leave of absence or-”
“I’m on leave already,” she told him. “I was wounded in the line of duty a few weeks ago.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m getting there.”
“Then hop on the next plane and come on out here.”
“Uncle Charlie?”
“Yes?”
“I want to ask a favor.”
“Sure thing. What do you need?”
“I would like to take a look at the files from the Jake Marcott murder case.”
Charlie Young let out a long, low whistle. “Why do you want to do a thing like that? That case is colder than the polar ice cap.”
“Let’s just say that all this talk about a high-school reunion has brought back a lot of memories. Besides, I’ll need something to occupy my time while I’m there.”
“You’re not still pining away over that Marcott boy, are you? I’m sure your dad never told you that we found out a few not-so-pleasant things about that kid.”
“No, I’m not still pining away over Jake,” she assured her dad’s old partner. “And when I get to Portland, I want you to tell me all about those not-so-pleasant things you found out about him.”
Chapter 24
Portland, Oregon, June 2006
Nearly two weeks after Rachel spoke to Charlie Young, she arrived in Portland, the town where she had grown up. The City of Roses. Originally, she had thought she could just pick up and go, but she’d been wrong. First of all, her doctor had refused to allow her to travel until after her scheduled checkup, and then she’d had to okay leaving the state with her captain at the Huntsville Police Department. Odd how she’d done a complete turnaround about going back to Portland for the St. Lizzy’s reunion. When Aurora had called her back in March, she’d been totally uninterested. No way in hell. The past was better left there, along with all the memories, both good and bad.
Now, Aurora was dead.
An accident.
Or was it?
Haylie was dead, too.
A victim of a robbery gone bad.
Or was there more to her death than met the eye?
Those e-mails from Kristen and Lindsay had piqued Rachel’s curiosity, her law-enforcement training kicking in and making her ask a hundred and one unanswered questions about the deaths of two old friends. If she’d been smart, she’d have simply accepted both deaths for what they probably were, what the police in Portland and in New York City had accepted. But a niggling doubt in the back of her mind kept bothering her, kept eating away at her until she had known what she had to do. Go back to Portland, under the guise of a St. Lizzy’s alumna returning to the city for a long-overdue visit before the twenty-year class reunion.
Adding to the two untimely deaths of old classmates were the not-so-coincidental situations with Lindsay and Kristen. Lindsay had been attacked by an unknown assailant in her own apartment, and Kristen had been-and possibly still was being-stalked by some unknown person.
And what about those marred senior photographs? The dead women had each received one of the ruined invitations.
Rachel could not accept that two deaths, an attack, and a stalking, all of the victims her old friends, all four women connected to Jake Marcott and St. Lizzy’s, were mere coincidence. No, it didn’t wash. There was something wrong with the scenario, and her gut instincts told her that in some crazy way it had something to do with the reunion, with her group of friends from high school, and with Jake Marcott. He was the common denominator. A boy who had been loved and hated in equal measure. A boy who had been shot through the heart with an arrow-Cupid’s arrow-at their senior high Valentine’s Day dance.
She had arrived at PDX, Portland International Airport, and picked up her rental car yesterday. Then the twenty-minute drive through town had allowed her to see just how much had changed and yet how so many things remained the same. The Willamette River, which flows northward to the Columbia River, divided the city into east and west sides; the west side waterfront was the business section of town, with Northwest Twenty-third a trendy area with boutiques, shops, and restaurants. Where the Blitz brewery had existed, now the area was referred to as “The Pearl District” with trendy condos and lofts.
Uncle Charlie and Aunt Laraine now lived in a gorgeous new house in a new neighborhood. Uncle Charlie had been at work when she arrived, but Aunt Laraine had welcomed her with open arms and shown her to a guest bedroom and bath on the ground level.
“You’ll have your own key, of course,” Laraine had said. “And you can come and go as you please. There’s a side entrance and a kitchenette, too. We bought this place when Mother moved in with us.” Laraine had sighed heavily. “We lost Mother three years ago. But she lived a good life. She was eighty-nine.”
Despite how much she had wanted to go directly to Charlie’s office and get started with going through the old files on the Jake Marcott case, Rachel had spent the rest of the day with Laraine. But at dinner that evening-yesterday evening-she had brought up the subject with Charlie.
“Well, if you’re that determined, I suppose I don’t see what harm it’ll do for you to spend some time going through all the old records,” Charlie had said. “It’s been a cold case for nearly twenty years, so it’s not like you’re stepping on anybody’s toes. Plus it was your dad’s case, and you are a police officer.”