Dark Hearts. Sharon Sala

the wide set of his shoulders beneath his coat, the dark brown Stetson on his head, and struggled with the urge to run. Then he reached the front and turned to face the crowd, and she lifted her chin and stared back, waiting for him to see her.

      Sam looked out across the room, meeting gaze after gaze, waiting until each person looked away before moving on to the next. Then he saw the woman at the back of the room. Stunned by her presence, he was the first to turn his gaze elsewhere.

      Then Trey began to speak, saving him.

      “All of you know my brother, Sam. He owns Ranger Investigations in Atlanta, and he’s come home to help me find a killer, which is also why you’re here. You’re going to help us find him, too.”

      “What makes you think it’s a man?” Will Porter asked.

      “Because Dick Phillips was over six feet tall and weighed two hundred and five pounds, and there are precious few women anywhere in the world who could lift that much dead weight and hang it from the rafters of a barn.”

      Will flushed. “Yes, of course. I didn’t think,” he mumbled.

      “Well, I have thought,” Trey said. “I’ve done nothing but think ever since this nightmare began, and this is what I know. Something happened the night of your high school graduation. I believe Connie and Betsy and their boyfriends Dick and Paul witnessed a crime, and we think it had to do with at least one of your classmates, because police found a bloody tassel in Paul Jackson’s pocket the night of the wreck, and it didn’t belong to him or anyone else in the car. Theirs were all accounted for. My mother dreamed about seeing a dead body, but she never saw a face. I believe they wrecked because they were trying to get back to Mystic to tell what they saw. I know they were going too fast when the car left the road, and the logical explanation for driving so recklessly was because they were being chased.”

      “Or the fact that they were drunk,” someone muttered.

      “Oh, yes, we know that, but that doesn’t explain the bloody tassel. It’s being tested for DNA, by the way.”

      People were beginning to shift nervously in their seats, which was exactly what Sam had been waiting for.

      “One of you knows something, and your silence has aided a killer in getting away with murder...three times for sure, and maybe a fourth back then. Is that how you want to be remembered? Talk to me, damn it!”

      Lainey stood up, holding the diaries against her chest.

      “My mother is gone, but her words are not. She kept diaries. I have them, starting from when she was nine all the way through her first year of college.”

      Sam saw her lips moving, but he couldn’t focus on what she was saying for looking at the desolation in her eyes.

      “Is there anything in there that you think would help us?” Trey asked.

      “A couple of things, I think. I’ll leave them with you, of course, as long as I can have them back at some point. The first thing that caught my attention was her writing about gossip flying through the school about cheating on tests. I teach history at the University of West Virginia, so I’m aware that’s an ongoing issue, but according to my mother’s entries, it pertained to the senior class specifically.”

      Sam shifted focus. “Was it true? Was someone cheating?”

      The room was silent.

      “She mentioned names,” Lainey said, and just like that the room erupted.