He won’t be,she tells herself,when he finds out that I know more than I’m telling .

  “Let me get you some water.”

  She nods. Closes her eyes.

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  “Brynn?”

  Garth is here. In the room. He kneels by her chair and takes her into his arms. She can feel his stubbly beard against her temple, can smell the leather of his jacket.

  “Garth—” She’s clinging to him, crying again. Huge, heaving, shuddering sobs. “I need to talk to you alone.”

  The lower-reservoir jogging path through Central Park is crowded at this hour on a sunny October Sunday, but Isaac pays little attention to the others.

  His thoughts are consumed not just by what happened ten years ago, but by all that has transpired in the past few weeks.

  Three times, Isaac was tempted to spill the whole story. First to Brynn, then to Kylah, then to Detective Hiles.

  All of it…including the secret Rachel confessed to him when he called to wish her Happy Birthday just hours before she disappeared.

  Three times, he refrained.

  But he keeps going over and over it in his head. The memory of that day, Rachel’s twentieth birthday, is as fresh as the conversation he had this morning with Kylah over an article in the SundayTimes .

  Sitting in his new midtown office that day ten years ago, he sang “Happy Birthday” to Rachel the minute she answered the phone.

  The other end of the line was silent when he finished…until she suddenly burst into tears.

  He figured she was just a little emotional because, as she put it, he was the only person in her life who always remembered her birthday. Even her flaky mother had been known to forget.

  So, to lighten the mood, Isaac teased, “Wow, I figured my voice might be a little flat, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

  She didn’t laugh. “I have to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone, Isaac.”

  “All right.”

  “No, I mean you have to swear you won’t tell. Do you swear to God?”

  “I swear to God.” He clutched the phone, wondering what it could be only briefly before the likely answer came to him.

  He figured she was dropping out of school—she had threatened to do that a few times over the years. She wanted to go to Europe and study music, or hang out in the East Village and compose songs, or…

  She had a hundred different plans.

  Some even involved him—” Let’s join the Peace Corps together,” or “Why don’t we open a great burger joint somewhere?”

  None of those plans, however, involved the bombshell she was about to drop.

  “Is there anything else?” Garth asks, looking at his wife.Really looking at her, feeling as though he’s seeing her for the first time in years.

  Feeling as though he’s seeing a total stranger.

  Brynn’s bloodshot eyes are sunken into raw, red craters. Her face is blotchy, her ponytail bedraggled, sweatshirt cuffs damp as though she used them to wipe her nose.

  “Anything else?” she echoes. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, is there anything else you need to tell me while we’re alone in here?”

  For the first time since he got here, her eyes flash a sign of life. “No,” she says curtly. “That’s everything.”

  Garth rakes a hand through his hair. “How could you not have said anything about this for all these years?”

  “Because it wasn’t up to me. I swore that I wouldn’t.”

  “Some silly sorority oath? You can’t be serious, Brynn. Somebody’s life was hanging in the balance. Your friend’s life.”

  “You don’t understand. I didn’t think that it was at the time. I thought she was dead. By the time we realized she—or her body—wasn’t in the woods anymore, it was too late to say anything. We had already pretended we didn’t know anything about it.”

  “So you just decided to go on pretending. Even to me.”

  She nods, still looking him in the eye, her chin lifted—but quavering slightly. “It was all we could do, Garth.”

  “You could have gone to the cops at some point.”

  “At which point? And if I had gone, it would have incriminated my friends, too.”

  “Even if not the cops, then…You could have told me,” he says through a clenched jaw, shaking his head.

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Because of the oath. I know.”

  “No, not just that. Because…I was afraid of how you’d react.”

  With an ache in his gut, he says, “You should have told me anyway.”

  “It would have been different, maybe, if you weren’t right here, in this world. If you were someone I had met in some other place, someone who had never heard of Rachel Lorent. But you knew her, you taught her in class, you searched for her. How could I tell you?”

  “How could younot tell me?” he returns, shaking his head.

  But he knows how. He knows all about shameful secrets; about caustic guilt and consternation that eat away at you, making it difficult to look your spouse in the eye when you think she might somehow read your thoughts; making it impossible to sleep at night.

  With her. Without her.

  “I’m sorry, Garth.”

  Yes. She is. Profound remorse is vividly etched on her face.

  “I know.”

  I’m sorry too, Brynn. So, so sorry.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  “Whatever happens, I’ll stand by you,” Garth says hurriedly. “I promise, Brynn. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she chokes out.

  Garth bends over and squeezes her fiercely, wishing he could hold on as tight to life as they knew it.

  Because he can feel it slipping away.

  Then another knock on the door, and one of the detectives pokes his head in.

  “Excuse me, folks, but there’s someone here who needs to speak to you.”

  The door opens wider and a tall, bearded African-American man strides past the detective and flashes his badge. “Sergeant Quincy Hiles. I’m with the Boston P.D.”

  “I’m pregnant, Isaac.”

  Those words have haunted him for ten years.

  Even now, they reverberate through his body with every pounding footfall as he moves faster still along the path.

  No longer is he jogging—he’s running now, full speed ahead, sprinting past everyone else on the path…trying to escape.

  But he never can.

  “I’m pregnant, Isaac.”

  Rachel choked it out through tears, and, at first, he wasn’t even sure he heard her right.

  But then she repeated it—I’m pregnant—loudly and clearly.

  An unspoken question—his, of course, the logical one to ask—hung silently between them for a long moment.

  Finally, he found his voice.

  “What are you going to do, Rach?” That, of course, wasn’t the question.

  But it was a good one.

  Her answer was prompt…But he could hear the uncertainty in her voice. “Have it. Raise it.”

  “Where? How?”

  “I don’t know…But I’m definitely going to have this baby. Even if I have to drop out of school. Which I will have to do, because how else can I do this? And, of course, my parents are going to freak out if I’m a single mom without a college degree.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Yes, they will.”

  She was right.

  They would. For two people who went through marriages faster than they did checkbooks, Rachel’s parents were surprisingly conservative, and they were very big on academics and education.

  “Maybe I’ll just take off,” she said wistfully.

  “Take off? You can’t do that. You mean…like, just go?”

  “Yes. I can have the baby somewhere far away…on my own—”

  “Alone?”

  She didn’t reply to that.

  Instead, she said, “I need you, Isaac. I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do. Please…Can you come up here tomorrow?”

  Of course he said yes.

  Then she said, “Hang on a second,” and he heard her talking to someone on the other end of the line.

  She came back on and said, “Um, I have to go. Someone needs to use the phone.”

  Someone always needed to use the phone in a houseful of sorority girls in the days before cell phones were ubiquitous.

  So that was the end of his final conversation with Rachel.

  At the time, he figured his big question—the crucial one—could wait until he could hear the answer in person.

  But, of course, she disappeared before he could get up there to ask:Am I the baby’s father?

  For the second time today, the familiar, shameful details spew from Brynn’s lips, propelled by a decade’s worth of pent-up angst.

  Brynn can’t help but feel like a bottle of champagne kept tightly corked for ten years, then violently shaken and abruptly released.

  The Boston detective and his partner, a pretty blonde, sit and listen. They nod and occasionally ask questions. Still staunchly beside her, Garth keeps his arm tightly around her shoulders.

  But she isn’t leaning on him.

  Somehow, she’s sitting straight and tall. It’s almost as if, in purging herself of the guilty burden, she’s made room for some long-suppressed inner core of fortitude to expand.

  Only when she’s told them everything she possibly can—right up to and including Fiona’s furtive plan to leave town for her birthday—does she finally sag against Garth’s arm and the back of the chair, utterly spent.

  Quincy Hiles rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Is there anything else, Mrs. Saddler?”

  “No, sir. There’s nothing else.”

  Nothing other than the fact that I’m pregnant, and my husband doesn’t know. But I think I’ve spilled enough secrets for one day.

  “I have a question.”

  Brynn looks at Garth in surprise. He avoids her gaze.

  “Yes, Mr. Saddler?”

  “Did my wife commit a crime ten years ago when she left her friend’s body in the woods?”

  “No.” That unequivocal answer from Hiles catches Brynn off guard.

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  “Yes. And you didn’t even technically commit a crime if you thought your friend was alive, as long as you didn’t push her over the edge.”

  “Isn’t there a Good Samaritan law or something?”

  For the first time, Quincy bares a smile. “In Massachusetts? You mean, like on that last episode ofSeinfeld? People ask me all the time, and that’s how I know the answer off the top of my head. It’s against the law to harm another person, but the law doesn’t require you tohelp another person.”

  Tears fill Brynn’s eyes once again. But this time, sheer relief mixes with her grief over her lost friends.

  If only they had known…

  Maybe Tildy and Fiona would still be alive.

  CHAPTER 21

  Fiona’s shaken parents opted to break with tradition and avoid a wake or funeral home visitation.

  Her funeral itself is held at Saint Vincent’s Church on a blustery October morning that feels more like late November. The sky hangs low and black over Cedar Crest, spitting sheets of horizontal rain on the throng of mourners huddled beneath useless umbrellas.

  The press has been swarming ever since Fiona’s murder was linked to Matilda Harrington’s, and of course Rachel’s disappearance has been dredged up all over again amid much public speculation that she, too, fell victim to the same fate ten years ago.

  The authorities haven’t released the details surrounding either murder scene, but the media has created sensational headlines just the same:

  THE SORORITY SISTER MURDERS. THE BIRTHDAY-GIRL KILLER.

  Detectives Quincy Hiles, Mike Connelly, and Deb Jackson have all but taken up permanent residence in Cedar Crest. With Ray Wilmington dead and the apparent sorority connection, Troy Allerson has been back-burnered as a potential suspect. Particularly since he was on a well-documented Washington trip when Fiona Fitzgerald was murdered in Cedar Crest.

  Apparently, his affair with Matilda Harrington was an unfortunate coincidence—and one that is destined to stay hidden, at least for the time being.

  Cassie Ashford’s apparent disappearance has yet to materialize in the press or be publicly linked to the murders of her sorority sisters. Mike and Deb spoke to her fiancé, her parents, and her brother, all of whom remain convinced she had cold feet about her upcoming wedding and ran off. They all cited several e-mails they received well beyond the day of her birthday as evidence of her well-being.

  Maybe they’re right.

  Quincy doubts it. Anyone can send e-mail if they can get into someone’s account. And it’s next to impossible to trace at this level, though he’s got someone on that.

  For now, unless Cassie—or her body, or at least a trail of evidence—turns up, there’s nothing he can do for her or her family.

  Quincy despises that feeling of helplessness. It keeps him up nights. After too many of those, absorbed in the case, he’s gone back to drinking coffee. But it’s killing him; he can feel it eating away at his guts. Literally.

  Saint Vincent’s is packed to standing room only. In the front pew on one side of the altar are Fiona Fitzgerald’s parents, drawn and stoic. It’s no secret around town that there’s been no love lost between them and their daughter.

  Make thatdaughters . Fiona’s identical twin, Deirdre, also estranged from their parents, sits in the front pew on the opposite side of the altar. Throughout the service she keeps a steadying arm around her niece, Ashley, whose pitiful sobs echo through the church whenever the organ falls silent. Fiona’s ex-husband, Pat, flanks Ashley’s other side, with Brynn and Garth Saddler seated a row behind.

  She’s a wreck, Brynn Saddler—and predictably so.

  Because she’s lost her best friend…

  And because she’s afraid she’s next.

  The public doesn’t realize that, though. Nobody other than those involved in the investigation has been privy to the tale Brynn revealed about Rachel that night ten years ago. To them, the murders are somewhat random; any Zeta Delta Kappa sister, or even any woman celebrating a thirtieth birthday, might be a potential victim.

  No one is aware of the chilling fact that is obvious to Quincy’s team: that the killer is picking off a finite group, one by one.