“Can’t you cancel them? It’s not like you’re playing hooky.” Brynn returns to the stove and sees that the orange cheese powder has clumped over the surface of the macaroni.

  “Me? Play hooky? I’ve never done that in my life.”

  Attempting to stir the mixture into a more palatable concoction, Brynn points out, “I seem to remember you cutting classes to hang out with Pat.”

  Fiona’s eyes darken at the mere mention of her ex-husband. “That was school. This is work. I can’t just not show up.”

  “Someone died, Fiona.”

  “Yeah, I know that, Brynn.” Her tone is sharp. She slaps her hands on the table and pushes back her chair abruptly. “I’ve got to get back to—”

  A blast from the doorbell cuts her off.

  “There’s Cassie,” Brynn says, and hurries to open the door.

  Emerging from his office building onto Lexington Avenue, Isaac sees the drenching downpour and groans inwardly.

  He should have looked out the window before heading out to get lunch.

  Should he go back up and grab an umbrella, or just make a run to the deli around the corner on Forty-Sixth?

  He’s debating when his cell phone suddenly vibrates in his pocket.

  He flips it open, checks the caller ID window, and immediately recognizes the area code and exchange.

  Cedar Crest.

  His heart starts to pound.

  Heart racing, he steps away from the group of chatty smokers standing beneath the overhang above the entrance, keeping dry as they puff away.

  “Hello?”

  “Isaac? Oh, my goodness…I’m so glad I got you. I thought you should know…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Matilda Harrington. She’s just been killed,” Puffy Trovato, the Zeta Delta Kappa housemother, announces breathlessly in his ear.

  “We’ve got to tell the police,” Brynn announces, again.

  She’s been saying it for an hour, at least, since the moment Cassie arrived.

  And every time Brynn says it, Fiona vehemently disagrees.

  She does again now, so loudly that Brynn shushes her with yet another, “Shh! Jeremy’s sleeping.”

  Fiona would like nothing better than to get the hell out of here, but she can’t just walk away from this intense powwow at the Saddlers’ kitchen table.

  The moment she does, Brynn will probably call the cops and tell them everything.

  Shealready called them, actually, after she found the dead cardinal in her kitchen this morning. They apparently believe it was some kind of prank.

  It wasn’t, of course.

  And when Brynn spoke up about the bird, and the cops, Fiona’s blood ran cold.

  Still, she said nothing about the rose.

  She probably wouldn’t have, regardless of whether Cassie immediately spoke up to announce that someone had left a recording of the sorority song on her voice mail.

  “Did you tell anyone about it?” Fiona asked sharply, and was relieved when Cassie shook her head.

  “What about you, Fee? Did anything strange happen to you?” Brynn asked, but still, Fiona didn’t mention the rose.

  And the more time that goes by, the more difficult it will be to bring it up.

  So she should do it now…

  Or she shouldn’t do it at all.

  She isn’t entirely sure why she’s unwilling…other than because it might push Brynn over the edge if she thinks all three of them have been targeted by the same person who murdered Tildy.

  “I just don’t get it. How can you believe we shouldn’t report this, Fiona?” Brynn asks now, her voice almost shrill.

  Fiona takes perverse pleasure in saying, “Shh! Jeremy’s sleeping.”

  “This isn’t like the birthday cards,” Cassie speaks up quietly after a pause. “It’s different now. Somebody’sdead .”

  Fiona can tell that Brynn’s paranoia is really starting to sway Cassie.

  When Cassie walked in here, haggard and emotional, she kept looking over her shoulder as if she thought she was being followed. Now, she seems weary as well; she keeps yawning, and the bags beneath her eyes indicate she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in awhile.

  “Maybe what happened to Tildy has nothing to do with this—with us,” Fiona points out stubbornly, and, all right, perhaps foolishly. Still, she goes on, “Maybe it was some random thing, a serial killer, a robbery—”

  “It was herbirthday, Fiona.” Brynn’s tone is contained now, but she looks as though she’s on the verge of hysteria. “It has everything to do with us. And Rachel.”

  “Do you think Rachel did it? Is that what you’re saying?”

  There’s a moment of silence.

  Then Brynn replies, “Yes, I do, all right? I think Rachel did it.”

  “Because…?”

  Cassie answers the question. “Because we left her in the woods to die.”

  “Not the three of us,” Fiona says. “Wethought she was already dead. We weretold she was already dead. If she wasn’t, and Tildy lied, well, then, maybe Tildy got what was coming to her—” Wow, that’s harsh, even to her own ears. “But the rest of us didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “We still left her there, Fee.” Brynn is adamant. “That was wrong.”

  “Not as wrong as if she were alive. I’m so damned sick of going around and around about this!”

  “So am I,” Cassie agrees.

  “Then let’s just drop it. We all know that wethought we were leaving a body, and that someone would find it.”

  “Well,we know, but how would Rachel know that?” Brynn asks. “How would she know Tildy lied to us—if she did lie?”

  “Maybe she was listening.” Fiona can’t quite keep the sarcasm from her voice.

  “I doubt that.” Cassie shakes her head. “The chances of her even being alive after a fall like that, let alone conscious, with all she had to drink—”

  “So you’re saying that for all Rachel knows, we were as responsible as Tildy was.”

  “I’m not saying Rachel knows anything because I truly think Rachel died that night.” Fiona’s words are far more decisive than she feels inside, but someone has to be in charge now that Tildy’s gone.

  And gone forever.

  Whatever happens from here on in is up to the three of them.

  It can be up to me alone, if I play this right,Fiona thinks.

  “The police are probably never going to connect Tildy’s death with what happened to Rachel,” Cassie says slowly, “or with us, unless we tell them.”

  “Which we can’t do,” Fiona responds firmly. “Something like that will destroy all our lives.”

  Including yours, Brynn. You just have no idea to what extent.

  “We have to do it anyway,” Brynn says, just as firmly, oblivious to the fact that Tildy had other secrets. Secrets that had nothing to do with Rachel and the sorority.

  “We don’t ‘have to’ do anything,” Fiona tells her, longing to get off this frustrating carousel.

  “We have to tell the police about this, if for no other reason than that whoever killed Tildy might be coming after us.”

  “Maybe not after Fiona,” Cassie points out. “I mean, nothing strange turned up on her voice mail or in her house last night.”

  Brynn turns to Fiona. “Are you sure? Youdid sleep at home last night, right?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I know you had a date…in Boston,” Brynn adds suddenly. Thoughtfully. “You know…I completely forgot that you were in Boston last night, Fee.”

  Wide-eyed, Cassie is looking from Brynn to Fiona. “You were in Boston? So you really were throwing Tildy a surprise party after all? Because Lena acted like—”

  “Surprise party? What are you talking about? I was at the Red Sox game with one of my clients.”

  “You didn’t give Tildy a surprise party?”

  “If I did, don’t you think I’d have said something to you by now?”

  Cassie falls into a troubled silence again, but she’s furiously chewing her bottom lip.

  “So you went straight home after the game, right?”

  Fiona forces herself to maintain eye contact with Brynn. “Right. After the game—and dinner at a Japanese restaurant.”

  And really, what happened after that is none of your business.

  “What about your mail?” Brynn persists. “Did you check it when you got home?”

  “Yes, I checked it.”

  And she did. When she stopped home this morning to shower and change just before heading to the office…which is where she found the bloody rose and her nice, orderly world turned upside down and inside out.

  “Look.” She glances from Brynn to Cassie and back again. “I know you’re both shaken up by this. So am I. But I honestly don’t think we’re in any kind of actual danger. And I think the best thing we can do right now is just sit tight.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.” Cassie leans back in her chair, arms folded across her chest, expression gaunt as she looks at her friends. “Your birthdays aren’t coming up next weekend.”

  According to the municipal department, the garbage cans on and around Matilda Harrington’s block haven’t been emptied in the last twenty-four hours.

  About to pull out of the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot long after dusk, Quincy answers his phone and is promptly informed that none of the trash receptacles in the area has yielded a discarded bouquet of red roses.

  So, unless someone walked off with them…

  “Which could have happened,” Deb protests, seated in the passenger’s seat of the sedan, tearing a sip hole in the plastic lid of yet another cup of black coffee.

  “You’re saying you believe he was telling the truth?” Quincy closes his cell phone and tucks it back into his pocket, then takes a quick, soothing swig from his own his own take-out cup.

  Herbal tea. He made the permanent switch from coffee awhile back.

  Predictably, his last partner, Don Kopacynski, gave him a hell of a time about it. Quincy didn’t bother to tell him that coffee aggravates his irritable bowel syndrome. He figured Kopacynski would have had a field day with that added information.

  Deb, to her credit, has so far refrained from commenting on Quincy’s food-and-beverage choices.

  “Sure,” she says with a shrug, “Wilmington could be telling the truth. He might have tossed the bouquet like he said, and then someone could have walked by the garbage can, seen a beautiful bouquet of red roses, and taken it.”

  “Not beautiful. Wilted. And, theoretically, sure, that could have happened. But it didn’t. This guy is hiding something.”

  “Your gut instinct again?”

  “Exactly.”

  At least now he has something a little more solid to go on, though not enough to make an arrest.

  They’ve just spent the last few hours interviewing Matilda Harrington’s—and Ray Wilmington’s—coworkers at the nonprofit headquarters where they worked. Mike is still over there, wrapping things up.

  The descriptions of Ray Wilmington were almost cliché, at least in Quincy’s line of work. The guy is “quiet,” “a loner,” “keeps to himself.”

  He is also, everyone agreed, infatuated with Matilda Harrington, much to her coworkers’ amusement—and her own ill-concealed dismay.

  That she didn’t welcome Ray’s awkward advances was common knowledge around the office. Yet nobody seemed to know any details about her love life, and she didn’t bring a date to her party.

  Her date book, confiscated from her home, reveals little information that might shed any light on her dating habits.

  The daily notations, all made in pencil from last June on, are pretty straightforward: work-related appointments, arrangements she was making for her birthday party, personal errands and reminders.

  There is only one cryptic entry…

  And it’s for next weekend.

  The initialsG.S. are jotted on all three pages in Tildy’s unmistakable handwriting.

  In ink.

  That alone sets the entry apart.

  Why not in pencil, like the other entries?

  Who is G.S.?

  And who sent those roses that were found inside her house? They were ordered from a busy Back Bay florist shop weeks ago, paid for in cash. The clerk thought a woman had ordered them, but couldn’t be sure.

  Still pondering that, Quincy shifts intoDRIVE and pulls out of the parking lot, heading back toward headquarters. They’ve got a ton of paperwork to do before they can call it a night. So much for the Red Sox game.

  “So we’ll keep Wilmington for further questioning, right?” Deb asks from behind a cloud of steam as she blows on her coffee.

  “For as long as we can. In the meantime—”

  Quincy is interrupted by his ringing cell phone again.

  He pulls it out and flips it open with a glance at the caller ID window. Crime Scene Investigation Unit.

  “Yeah?”

  Without preamble, the efficient voice on the line informs him, “We opened that gift-wrapped box, Hiles. Are you ready for this?”

  Cassie called a security company from her cell phone on her way back to Danbury from Brynn’s, and they promised to send someone over to her condo within a few hours.

  True to their word, they sent a locksmith and an alarm installer, who are now both hard at work as Cassie sits on the couch and sips a cup of hot tea Alec forced on her.

  Of course he and Cassie’s parents were here when she got home, along with Marcus and Reenie.

  Their momentary relief at seeing her immediately gave way to a barrage of questions, but Cassie headed them off with the news about Tildy.

  They were instantly somber. Her mother cried.

  Somewhere in her own anguished fog, Cassie found herself wondering, mean-spiritedly, if Regina Ashford’s tears were for Cassie’s—and Tildy’s family’s—loss, or for her own. Now she won’t be able to introduce Matilda Harrington to her constituents at the wedding.

  Regina pulled herself together while Marcus and Reenie stepped out to use their cell phones, and Alec and Cassie’s father were in the next room notifying the police that Cassie had turned up safe and sound. Sniffling, wiping her eyes, Regina promptly started to ask questions again.

  “Mother, please, not now. I can’t talk about anything right now.” Cassie’s emotional exhaustion was genuine.

  For once, Regina listened.

  So Tildy’s death is, for Cassandra…well, certainly not ablessing . But it has offered her a temporary reprieve from explaining why she really disappeared for twenty-four hours.