The Complete Colony Series. Lisa Jackson

rhymes?” Renee repeated, clearly skeptical. “I don’t remember that about her.”

      “Me neither,” Becca said.

      “It was all flirty Jessie bullshit, anyway.” Jarrett looked impatient. “That naughty boy stuff. We just said she came on to every guy at this table.”

      Evangeline’s jaw set and her fingers clasped Zeke’s in a death grip.

      Hudson exhaled and looked as if he’d rather be anywhere than in this room with his so-called friends. “The way I remember it, a lot of you guys came on to her. Perception. Hard to know who’s scamming who sometimes.”

      “Oh, come on, Walker.” The Third was pissed, his face flushed, his eyes bright with challenge. “It had to be killing you, the way she acted. That the reason you had that fight? Because of us?”

      “Yeah,” Hudson said with a cynical smile. “It’s all about you, Delacroix.”

      “What the fuck was it about, then?”

      Hudson grimaced. “I don’t know. She picked the fight with me. I told the cops—McNally—the same thing then. Jessie was edgy and distracted, and she wanted to fight. You all heard most of it. When we went to my place, it was more of the same.”

      “She thought there was another girl in your life,” Tamara guessed.

      “She was sixteen,” Hudson said. “She thought a lot of things.”

      “Maybe there was someone else?” Evangeline suggested.

      “McNally thought you might have killed her,” Scott reminded Hudson. He grabbed a bottle of red wine and Becca watched the liquid fill his glass, glinting bloodlike under the hanging lights. “Wasn’t his theory that you killed her after you found out she was sleeping with…someone else?”

      “McNally was obsessed, grasping at straws, trying to make a homicide out of a missing persons case, trying to pin it on one of us,” Hudson said, sounding sick to the back teeth of the whole thing. “God knows. Maybe it was a homicide.”

      “And you think one of us did it?” Scott gazed at him belligerently.

      “No.”

      “But he thought you murdered her?” Renee asked her brother. “Now that I really don’t remember.”

      “It wasn’t ruled a homicide,” Becca interjected. “They had no body.”

      “But McNally had a hard-on about it,” Glenn interjected. “Hell, that guy was a head case.”

      “And they’ve got a body now. Whether it’s Jessie’s or not, we’re going back through it again…” The Third said on a sigh.

      “Well, I don’t think that’s Jessie. I think she just ran away. She said she was unhappy,” Evangeline reminded them. “And that she had to leave.”

      “She said she had to leave?” Becca asked.

      “Yeah, like she knew something.” Vangie swept back blond strands from her face. “She was like that, y’know? Like Tamara said. She knew things. She had some kind of ESP or whatever you want to call it. But it was weird. Creepy. When she said she had to leave, I believed her.”

      “What exactly did she say?” Renee asked.

      “She said ‘I’ve got to get out of here before something bad happens,’ or something like that.”

      “You never told us that,” The Third said with mild reproof. “When we were all being grilled.”

      “Well, it was something like that,” Evangeline declared, flushing. “She and Hudson weren’t getting along. Maybe that was it.”

      All eyes turned to Hudson and he agreed, “Jessie had things on her mind.”

      “Like what?” Scott asked.

      “I don’t know. There was definitely something driving her.”

      Renee looked at her brother and Becca got the sense she was calculating something, like whether to reveal some kind of information or keep it to herself. In the end, she said, “I’ve got some leads to follow. I’m heading to the beach. Maybe we should meet up again in a couple of weeks…”

      “Let’s wait on that for a while,” The Third said. He was about to say something more but hesitated as a waiter slid through the door and picked up some of the dirty dishes, then slipped out again. Then he said, “You know McNally’s going to be back, hounding us.”

      “No way. He’s gotta be retired by now.” Scott shook his head. “It’ll be someone else.”

      “Guys like him never retire. And he can’t be that old. But the point is: so what? He can’t do anything to us now. We just need to all keep cool. McNally, or somebody like him, is going to start asking questions again. Any inconsistency—any—will just make it worse. But, hey…here we are again.” He lifted his glass in a toast and everyone followed suit, albeit slowly, as no one knew where this was going. “We’re friends. We need to see more of each other and put this Jessie Brentwood thing to bed. There’s nothing to worry about.”

      “So much for all of us saying something about Jessie,” Tamara said, disgusted.

      That much was true. The meeting and Renee’s idea that they should all disclose something personal about Jessie was falling apart. Becca tasted some of the hors d’oeuvres and sipped at a glass of white wine while listening to several different conversations buzzing around her. Scott was bragging up Blue Ocean, his new restaurant at the beach, though, it seemed, Glenn wasn’t as excited about the venture as his partner. Glenn groused that the restaurant in Lincoln City was still a work in progress while Scott waved off his concerns, stating only that the menu had to be adjusted; it was too “sophisticated” for the beach crowd. Mitch complained that he was overworked and Jarrett, a commercial real estate salesman, wasn’t happy with the economy. Underneath all the idle chitchat there was something more, a restless uneasiness, and Becca knew it was Jessie—her memories, her ghost—haunting each of them.

      The Third kept up his mantra that they should all keep seeing each other, though they all knew that it wouldn’t happen. Without a class reunion or a funeral, or the discovery of bones in the maze at St. Elizabeth’s, members of their high school clique wouldn’t search each other out.

      Tamara worked at keeping up a conversation with a more and more taciturn Hudson. Becca felt Renee’s eyes on her once or twice and wondered if and when she would tell everyone about her brief affair with Hudson after high school. Maybe they already knew, though they sure didn’t act like it.

      Zeke moved toward Hudson for some conversation as they all got up from the table, but Becca couldn’t overhear as Mitch engaged her while they walked toward the door.

      “Kind of a weird way for all of us to finally get together again,” he said, holding open the door of the private room.

      “I guess we’ll know more after the bones are tested.”

      “How long have you been a widow?”

      “Oh…a while…not that long…” She didn’t want to go into that right now. The last thing she wanted to think about was Ben.

      “My divorce from Sherri was finalized two years ago.”

      The Third and Jarrett caught up to them and Becca saw the amusement in their eyes at Mitch’s less than sophisticated attempts to get to know her. She was bugged at all of them—and herself, too.

      She didn’t want to talk to any of them, well, except for Hudson, but she wasn’t going to linger around and try to catch his attention. If he’d wanted to see her in the past sixteen years, he damned well could have picked up the phone. Which he hadn’t. She made her way through the foyer and pushed her way outside where the air was heavy and moist, the parking lot dim, with even fewer cars than before. As she stepped off the curb, she sank