Keeping to the shadows, she walked around the corner of the cloister to the gardens, where a hundred-year-old maze of laurel, photinïa, and arborvitae crowded the dark sky and hid the moon.
It was a place to hide.
A place to avoid the people she didn’t want to see.
A place to figure out how to find her pride.
Coward, she thought, but wasn’t about to risk her shot at a scholarship and graduating with honors because of that dweeb Eric. God, why had she been so foolish, so damned desperate for a date, to invite him? She’d known enough about Eric to realize he relished his role of class clown at Washington High and yet, determined to go with a date, she’d invited the oaf to the dance. Now she was embarrassed as hell. It would have been better to come single. For the love of God, she should have known better. She was a levelheaded girl, the daughter of a cop, for God’s sake, and if not a straight-A student, then consistently on the honor roll.
But in her own way, she was as much of a moron as Eric.
Because of Jake.
Always Jake.
Though no one knew it. She fingered the locket at her throat, the one she always wore, the one no one had ever guessed held not only tiny pictures of her mother and father, now divorced, but of Jake as well…hidden behind the little heart cutout of her father.
And Jake, she knew, didn’t even know she was alive.
How long had she been in love with him? Three years? Four? Since eighth grade at St. Madeline’s?
She’d dreamed of him and told no one about her secret fantasies, not even her best friends, Kristen and Lindsay. Because she couldn’t. Lindsay had dated Jake for two years and once they’d broken up, he’d turned to Kristen, never once looking at Rachel, his friend, the girl who tutored him when he was failing. The girl who befriended his younger sister, Bella. The girl who took care of his dog when he went hunting. Good old reliable Rachel, who had covered for him when he’d been in the accident over Christmas vacation that had ended Ian Powers’s life.
She hadn’t really lied to anyone. Not really. She just hadn’t admitted to seeing Jake earlier that night.
You’re a fool, Rachel, she told herself as she marched toward the maze, a great place to hide, a spot where neither Eric Connolly nor anyone else who mattered would find her.
Kicking off her high heels, she sighed. She’d never had much use for killer shoes, and she didn’t care that the hem of her dress was dragging along the grass. Too bad. Her mother would be furious, of course; though the dress was a hand-me-down, it was still good and could be used again.
Tough!
What she wouldn’t give for her sweats and running shoes. She would be so out of here!
And go where, Rach?
She heard her mother’s tired voice as if the woman were walking right next to her instead of pulling a double shift at a local diner.
You can’t run from your problems.
Rachel turned into the maze, past a statue of the Madonna with her arms stretched and palms turned upward, as if to cradle the next poor soul to pass.
Rachel kept right on walking.
She had to think ahead. Of her future. One definitely without Jake. She had big plans. And nothing, not even her feelings for Jake, was going to stop her.
Kristen headed toward the center of St. Elizabeth’s campus, the garden area where a deep, frigid labyrinth of trimmed laurel hedges, pruned trees, benches, and statues separated the school grounds from the convent and chapel where the nuns lived and prayed. Fog was beginning to rise, causing the light from the moon to reflect oddly, as if the silvery orb were fuzzy with some otherworldly halo.
The temperature dropped.
The wind picked up.
Kristen’s skin crawled as she passed the weird gargoyles of the topiary and the walls of foliage. Her premonition about something bad about to happen hadn’t left her. She turned a corner and darkness suddenly consumed her as she met a dead end. Far in the distance, the music stopped, the background noise of drums and guitars fading into silence.
Where was she going?
Why was she exploring this maze tonight?
She heard a footstep behind her.
She wasn’t alone.
Her heart trip-hammered.
Ffftttt!
Something sizzled through the night.
And then a gasp, a strangled cry, like a wounded animal, a gurgling, primal groan.
She jumped backward.
What the hell was that?
Her blood turned to ice. She started running along the grassy pathways, guided by the eerie light of the moon. Her high heels fell off, but she raced barefoot, barreling down blind alleys, bouncing off prickly bushes. Don’t panic! Don’t panic! Don’t panic!
But she was already frantic, leaves and branches tearing at her arms, her hair falling around her face, her heart pounding out a terrified cadence.
Where was the sound coming from?
She careened around another sharp corner, stubbed her toe on the end of a bench, and yelped as she hurtled through the maze. It was too dark to see the lights from the school—the hedge was too high to peer over—but she kept running. In circles? Toward the center of the labyrinth? Or out of the damned maze?
Blood was oozing from her toe, through the ripped nylon of her panty hose.
Run! Run! Run! Get help!
She tore around a sharp corner just as a scream of pure terror ripped through the shivering shrubbery.
Her heart froze.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, her stomach wrenching.
In the weird moon glow she spied Jake Marcott, his body pinned to the trunk of the gnarled oak at the very center of the maze. His face was white, his eyes wide. A crimson stain covered the ruffled shirt of his tux, a thick arrow at its center. Blood dripped from the corners of Jake’s mouth and his head hung forward at an impossible angle, his dead eyes wide and staring.
Kristen took a step forward. This was a joke…a sick, awful, twisted joke. Jake couldn’t be…he wasn’t…“Oh, no…oh, no…”
Lindsay Farrell, her hands covered in blood, her dress splattered and stained, was crumpled at Jake’s feet. Her hair had fallen out of its pins, the long, dark coils curling at her bare shoulders. She lifted her head, her eyes filled with tears that streaked her face with black mascara.
“Why?” she cried as the sounds of shouts and frantic, thundering feet echoed through Kristen’s brain.
Help is coming. Maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe Jake can be saved! Maybe he isn’t dead yet!
She started to run to him, but Lindsay, her face twisted in fury, forced herself clumsily to her feet and barred her path.
“Why, Kristen?” Lindsay demanded again, her voice a razor-sharp whisper, her face twisted in fury and pain. “Why did you kill him?”
Chapter 1
Portland, Oregon, March 2006
“So, I’m stuck, is that what you’re saying?” Kristen balanced her cell phone between her ear and shoulder as she leaned back in her desk chair and felt a headache coming on. Though time was definitely running out, she’d held out hope that her friend Aurora had found someone else to be in charge of the damned twenty-year reunion. “No one’s willing to take over the job?”
“You were the valedictorian.