Chapter 15
“Kyle was arrested two days ago,” Annie huffed out between pants. “And you’re telling me you haven’t spoken to Nico since?”
Jogging along beside her, Lexie savored the feel of the dirt beneath her sneakers, the crisp, pre-dawn air filling her lungs. It had been weeks since they’d done this, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d needed it.
“I’m embarrassed,” she admitted, keeping pace as she pulled her beanie a little further down over her ears.
“Of what? Kyle?”
“Of Kyle. The fact that I married him and what that says about me. Mostly I hate that Nico saw me like that, all messy and broken. God, I wish I knew what he was thinking.”
The bruises on her neck had all but faded, but her humiliation over the whole thing hadn’t. She’d been avoiding Nico’s calls, dodging him whenever she happened to see him around town, even once dropping down on all fours to hide behind the bar when he came in to work looking for her, earning a disapproving frown from Wade—who’d blessedly lied through his teeth for her. It was ridiculous, she knew, but she simply wasn’t ready to face him.
“I can tell you what he’s thinking,” Annie said, rounding a bend as they continued their ascent up one of the many mountain walking tracks surrounding the cove. “He’s wishing you’d get over yourself and call him back already.”
“No, that’s what you’re thinking,” Lexie corrected.
“How many messages has he left you?”
“At last count—four.”
“Ha,” Annie cackled. “I rest my case.”
“I just . . . I don’t know where we go from here. It’s so messed up,” Lexie said. “How can I date the cop who could be about to charge my husband with murder? And what if he doesn’t even see me that way anymore, now that he’s had time to think about all this? What if he’s only calling because he feels sorry for me? I swear, if he tries steering me toward some kind of therapist for battered women, I’ll die.”
“Would you listen to yourself?” Annie gave her a light shove. “You sound crazy.”
“Maybe I am. It’d be the one and only thing my mother ever gave me.”
“First of all, forget that bitch. Second, whether you’re embarrassed, crazy, or both, you can still be those things from underneath the sexy boy in blue, so will you stop spiraling and call him before some other woman sinks her fingernails into his back.”
“Dude.” Lexie gave her a sidelong glance. “Why are you so thirsty lately? Is Paul not doing his due diligence?”
She’d meant it as a joke, even winking for dramatic effect, but soon regretted asking when she saw the tension spreading across Annie’s face.
“Not lately, if you must know,” she said stiffly.
“Oh.” Lexie silently processed that. Just over a week ago, Annie had voiced her concerns about Paul possibly cheating on her. Now this?
“He’s been super busy at work, traveling all the time,” Annie said. Her voice was strained with worry. “They’re rolling out this new system, and a lot of companies are needing more hands-on support. He’s leaving for Toronto this morning. New York next week.”
“Uh-huh.” Paul was some kind of high-end tech consultant, the specifics of which had eluded Lexie for years, but she was fairly certain he wasn’t inundated with opportunities to meet other women. Or so she’d assumed. “And with him away all the time things are getting . . . cold?”
“Frigid,” Annie said, stopping on a flat to twine her fingers atop her head and catch her breath. Lexie followed suit. “It’s like we’ve forgotten how to be passionate, you know? We’ve become that couple who eat dinner together in silence, sit and watch television until we can’t keep our eyes open, then crawl into bed, switch off our lamps, and say, ‘Goodnight, honey.’ ” She shuddered. “Makes my skin crawl. Reminds me too much of my own parents.”
“What if you took some time off from work and went with him sometime?” Lexie suggested. “Make an adventure out of it. Try to relight the fire, so to speak.”
Annie’s eyebrows twisted in thought. “You think Wade would go for that?”
Lexie shrugged. “I could always use the extra shifts. I’m sure the casuals could pick up whatever I couldn’t cover. You should ask him.”
“Yeah. I will.”
Now that they’d reached a lull in the conversation, Lexie felt compelled to voice something that had been weighing heavily on her mind for days, even before all the stuff with Kyle. It probably wasn’t the right time, what with Annie’s personal life potentially going up in flames, but she needed to talk to someone about it. She needed her best friend. There was no one else around to interrupt or overhear. It might be the best opportunity she’d get.
“Hey, can I ask you something weird?”
Annie began stretching her legs. “Shoot.”
“Well, you remember how . . . uninhibited you were in your youth?”
“Are you implying that I’m no longer youthful?” she asked with a wry tilt of her head.
Ignoring the question with a smile, Lexie continued, “Did you ever do something you deeply regretted? Like something you wish you could forget?”
Annie thought about it. “Trying to get Mr. Norris to make out with me at prom wasn’t my finest moment.”
Lexie’s face twisted. “Agreed. You almost got him fired.”
“Like I said, not my finest moment. That the kind of thing you’re talking about?”
“Not really. I mean something dangerous. Something . . . destructive.”
All humor gone like a candle blown out, Annie stood straight and narrowed her eyes. “Where is this coming from?”
“Nowhere, just—” Lexie searched for the right words. Had she made a mistake bringing it up? Her throat felt dry, and her palms were sweaty. She’d always known that someday she would tell Annie the truth, she just hadn’t realized it would be today. “We were in senior year when you moved here, right? And you had a whole life in the city you left behind?”
“I’d call it more of a forced relocation on my part, but yeah, sure, I had friends and stuff. Of course.”
“Well, I had a former life too. I just never told you much about it because . . .” Lexie sighed. “I was ashamed. I wanted to pretend none of it ever happened, and you were such a whirlwind, and you came into my life at just the right time, you made it easy to forget.” She walked a small circle, caught off guard by the tears building in her eyes. Coming back around to face Annie, she said, “Look, the truth is, I’m not the ‘good girl’ you think I am. I’ve done things. I’ve . . . hurt people.”
“Okay, babe, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
“Isabelle.”
“You killed her?”
“What? No.” Lexie shook her head, choosing not to address the absurdity of Annie’s assumption. “I was friends with her, before you came here. I was friends with her, Darcy Walsh, and—” She couldn’t finish.
“And who?”
Lexie licked her lips. “Sara Riley.”
It took Annie a few seconds, but comprehension eventually flickered. “As in crazy old George Riley’s daughter? The one who went missing?”
“She didn’t just go missing. She was murdered.”
“Oh my god.” Annie’s recoil was the natural reaction to hearing such an awful thing. “How?”
Lexie paused to consider how to start such a long story. “We were young,” she eventually said. “And stupid. In high school we used to go out to parties together, tell our parents we were sleeping at each other’s houses, then get our boyfriends to drive us around. For a long time, it was just the three of us. Me, Darcy, and Isabelle. We were close. One day at school, we invited Sara to sit with us, and that’s when the trouble started. We felt sorry for her. Everyone knew she didn’t have the best home life, and she was so quiet and shy. We didn’t realize what she was capable of until it was too late.” Lexie licked her lips. “Anyway, we took her out, gave her a taste of freedom, but it was like we’d given a shark its first drop of blood. She was drinking, doing a lot of drugs, sleeping around, pushing the limits way further than we ever did. She was out of control.”
Deciding she couldn’t stand anymore, Lexie planted her butt on the nearest log and continued. “This one night, we snuck off the island to a big college party on the mainland. It was fun, but when it came time to leave, Sara refused to come back with us. She was drunk, of course.” She shook her head, annoyed even now. “After hours of chasing her around trying to convince her to get in the car, she eventually took off with some guy. We figured she’d have herself a good time, sleep it off, and we’d come get her in the morning, but when we got there the next day, we couldn’t find her. We stayed as long as we could, searched everywhere.” Lexie felt her eyes go distant as she remembered how her heart had pounded that day, the worry she’d felt, the guilt. She shook her head, letting a tear spring loose. “We called everyone we could think of, but we never saw her again. She never came home. Her parents called the police, and she was reported a missing person.”
Annie didn’t respond, just waited.
“Things were never the same after the night she went missing,” Lexie sniffed. “Sara’s parents isolated themselves in that old farmhouse. Darcy, Isabelle, and I, we drifted. Then you came to town, I started going out with Kyle, got married.” She shrugged. “I left it all in the past. At least, I thought I had—” Lexie’s voice cracked. “A while ago, we heard a rumor that she’d been killed. Stabbed to death by a man in Boston.”
Annie’s face had gone white. Lexie couldn’t stand the sight of it, knowing it was she who’d caused it, so she stood and turned away.
“We never confirmed it,” Lexie said. “Her name was never reported publicly and her parents hated us all enough to keep us in the dark, but that’s what some friends on the mainland said they’d heard happened to her. Now Isabelle ends up dead, the same way? It’s just odd.”
“What are you—are you saying their deaths are connected?”
“I don’t know, but Darcy came to see me the other day and she thinks they are, and it’s just freaked me out.” Lexie pulled her beanie off her suddenly too-warm head and ran a hand through her hair. “I know all fingers are pointing at Kyle as the one who killed Isabelle, but I just can’t help thinking maybe they’re all wrong. What if the person who killed her is still out there? What if—” She hated regurgitating Darcy’s craziness, but it had to be said. “What if the same person who killed Sara, killed Isabelle too? What if it’s the same psycho who killed them both? We were all friends. What if I’m on some kind of radical hit list?”
“Wait, hold on.” Annie raised her hands like she was struggling to keep up with the conversation. “If that’s true, then why would whoever did this wait so long to come after Isabelle?”
“I know it sounds insane,” Lexie replied, choosing to omit the other piece of information they’d heard through the grapevine, which was that Sara’s killer was apparently convicted and sent to prison, because just like the disturbing details of her death, she had no way of knowing if it was true, since the names were never revealed publicly. Telling Annie would only prompt her to think she was being ridiculous, as Lexie had thought of Darcy.
The term mass hysteria rolled through her mind. Maybe she really was crazy.
“What did you mean?” Annie asked, caution coating her tone. “When you said you’ve hurt people?”
“Not directly,” Lexie assured her. “I suppose it’s more that I feel responsible for what happened to Sara. I think—I know—that it was my fault, at least in part.”
Annie’s exhale was long and loud. “Why haven’t you ever told me any of this?”
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Guess I just couldn’t risk losing you too.”
Seconds ticked by. Lexie became fidgety, waiting for Annie to scold her or judge her or run away screaming. She turned to find that her lips had quirked up on one side. “You’re a prize idiot, you know that?” she said. “To think that I’d abandon you over a stupid mistake you made when you were a teenager.”
Relief swamped Lexie so powerfully that she felt her whole body sag. “That’s it?”
“What else is there? Come here.” Annie came to wrap her arms tight around her. “I get how awful you must feel about the whole thing, but it sounds like that girl had her own stuff going on long before you came along. I mean, all you did was take her to a party, right?”
“Right.”
“So, if you took me out to a party, and I ended up chugging six beers then dancing half-naked on the tailgate of a truck to ”Jesse’s Girl,” would that be your fault too?”
“I did feel somewhat responsible for that, yes,” Lexie said, fondly recalling the first time she and Annie had spent time together outside of school. It was supposed to be a quiet gathering at the lookout, but Annie being Annie, she’d made it her mission to liven things up and introduce herself to the island in a big way.
Annie grabbed her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Every decision I made that night was my own. Yeah, it turned out messy, but it was also one of the best nights of my life. The point is, you can’t control what people choose to do with their lives, Lex. Sara was troubled, clearly, and yeah, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to lead her astray, but”—she smiled, all warm and understanding—“you were a kid. Kids don’t think. You gotta let it go.”
“You could be right.”
“I am right,” she said, pinning Lexie with hard eyes. “And that’s the last time you ever keep me in the dark, got it? It’s not good keeping secrets. It gives you premature crow’s feet.”
Lexie squinted.
“Yeah, see, there they are.”
“Shut up!” Lexie swatted away the hand that was pointing out her supposed wrinkles and laughed. “Seriously, though, what do you think?”
Annie knew exactly what Lexie was asking without her having to spell it out. Did she believe that Kyle was a killer?
“I think we just need to sit tight and let the cops handle it,” she said. “I mean, what are you going to do, show up there and tell them to let him go because you think the real killer might actually be some ghost from your past coming back to haunt you?”
Hearing it said like that, it did sound ludicrous.
Lexie nodded, agreeing to leave it up to the authorities to sort out and try not to worry.
The remainder of their run was much more lighthearted. They didn’t talk any more about murder or their guy problems, instead choosing to enjoy each other’s company and chat about happier topics, like the amazing weather and if Vikki would ever give poor Seth a chance. By the time they made it back to their cars—having sprinted the last mile—they were both out of breath.
Lexie guzzled some water, then felt her phone vibrating in her pocket.
“Hey, Paul,” she greeted, intentionally letting Annie know her husband was on the other end. “What’s up?”
“Hey, Lex. You guys back from your run yet?”
“Just in the parking lot. Why?”
“I need to borrow your key to Rusty’s,” he said, sounding mildly exasperated. “The Wi-fi is acting up. Wade asked me to come take a look at it this morning but he’s not here, and I’m going to miss my flight if I leave it any later. I’d call him, but I don’t want to wake him if he’s sleeping off a late night.”
“Oh, okay, sure. Give me five minutes. I’ll come meet you.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Clicking off, Lexie caught Annie up.
“Why would he ask to borrow your key and not mine?” she asked.
Lexie chuckled. “Where is your key?”
Instantly, Annie’s face took on the comedic look of a person trying really hard to remember where they left something important.
“That’s why,” Lexie said.
“Hey, it’s not my fault Wade won’t cut me another one.”
“That’s because you’ve lost two already. Why won’t you just add it to your car key like a normal person?”
“I don’t like the way it jingles when I drive.”
“Alright, whatever,” Lexie replied. “I’ll see you later.”
“Call Nico!” Annie called from her open window as the two of them set off on their alternate routes.
Lexie rolled her eyes.