Small Town Secrets

by Allie Harrison

  Perhaps there had been a guy who performed even worse than he did, someone she threatened to expose. He could still hear that high-pitched sneer: wait until I tell all your friends what a loser you are. That you can’t even get it up unless I use my mouth…

  She had that power over people. She’d laugh and threaten, then sashay off. She’d run her tongue over her lips and make every guy in class horny with need to get within five feet of her. Mac closed his eyes and thought of that hour with her, parked in the same place where she’d later died. After two kisses, he’d been ready to leave. He’d even started his truck.

  Then she’d said, “Wait, let me show you something…”

  And he hadn’t been able to leave for another hour. She’d used her mouth to get his plumbing in working order while he sat there with his eyes closed and thought of other girls. That had been the only way. He told his father he never would have handed over his class ring to her. After all, he’d only received it two weeks before. Even in his memory, he wasn’t certain he would have told her no. It seemed no one ever could.

  When he awoke with sunlight in his eyes, he was laying on the notebooks, the list of names smeared with his drool. And a dream of Marston’s Tunnel fading.

  Chapter Nine

  Tuesday

  Neither Lizzy nor Tony were tired. It was a bit early to open, but they decided to put their energy to good use. She made pumpkin spice coffee. And the tea of the day was called Fall Fruit and Spice, a nice blend of apples and cinnamon. Within a short time, with the two of them working together, the bakery air was filled with the rich aromas of bread, coffee, and spice. Lizzy made her well-known pastry pretzels, pastry in the shape of pretzels sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar or drizzled with white laced icing.

  Doing something with her hands—shaping the pretzels—calmed her mind.

  “How are you doing?” Tony asked. “You were up all night. I can handle this if you want to get some sleep.”

  Lizzy took a deep breath. “No. I’m not too tired. Besides, I need to be here. I need to keep busy and enjoy a nice cup of tea. Can you stay today? I plan to talk to Stan and tell him we can always be friends, but there won’t be anything more.”

  “Are you worried he’ll take it badly? I mean, am I going to have to defend you?”

  She chuckled. “I don’t… No, I don’t think so. Besides, thanks to Kelly Mattis, I think every woman in town has taken some sort of self-defense class, including me. Dad made sure of that, remember?”

  “I remember thinking all the dads in town must have gotten together and made it a priority for every girl in our class after that.”

  “Not that I expect to have to use any of it on Stan, which is a good thing since I’m not sure I remember much of it.” She paused and sighed. “I really don’t know what to expect with him. Like you said, he’s always so nice. I admit I really didn’t think about it until you said something, but it’s like he’s almost too polite, which might be why I don’t feel any spark for him. It’s like everything I say, he just smiles and says, ‘Whatever you want, Lizzy.’ I have the feeling when I tell him I won’t be dating him anymore, he’ll just smile and say that same thing.”

  Tony shrugged. “Maybe. I’m here for you no matter what.”

  “Thanks,” she said, wishing she knew how she actually felt. It was an odd combination of dread and relief. The truth was she should never have agreed to start seeing Stan in the first place. She’d never been interested and never felt any interest—in anyone.

  Then Mac had sauntered into her bakery. And whatever had fallen asleep inside her was awake and hungry. For him.

  Damn him.

  ****

  While Lizzy and Tony served coffee and pie and breakfast to their regulars, Mac sat in an empty office in the Mossy Point Consolidated High School staring at a computer screen. It was times like this he was grateful for technology. Someone had had the foresight to put photos onto computer discs for safekeeping. And while whoever had been in charge of the yearbook ten years ago might have only used a few photos per page, every picture taken, either by the yearbook staff or donated by others throughout his junior and senior years, had been saved and put onto the disc.

  At the same time, the trip down memory lane was painful. There were at least fifty photos of the homecoming dance, couples locked in each other’s arms and dancing, oblivious to the photographer. He and Lizzy were in over a dozen of them. How young they looked. How innocent. Considering how close to the surface his memory of this night was, it could have been yesterday, not almost eleven years. And why it even bothered him, he didn’t know. A lot of water had passed under that bridge, and he hadn’t given his high school days a second thought in a very long time. At least not until he’d kissed Lizzy up near Marston’s Tunnel.

  He shouldn’t do this. He closed his eyes for a long moment and took a long, deep breath.

  He concentrated on the case. He opened his eyes and forced himself to study everyone else—everything else.

  Two hours later, he rubbed his eyes and leaned back in the chair. Then he retrieved his own a flash drive from his pocket and copied every file so he could study each again at his leisure. After all, right then as he waited for his leg to heal, it was one thing he had—time. As for the case so far, he had zilch. At least he knew everyone who was at the dance. So many people he’d forgotten were brought back to him via those still shots—John Hillsworth and Mary Gowen, not together at the dance but now married, Susan Rugdy had been killed in a car accident the year after graduation, and Tim Tennies married Sylvia Dittleman and now had five kids.

  It amazed him how all these memories touched him, all things told to him via his brother or his dad or his mom or via social media or the town newspaper which he could read online. So many details about his hometown and its inhabitants swirled through his brain with his photo study; it was almost like he’d never left. It was certainly like he hadn’t been gone for the last decade.

  And while he’d learned it wasn’t exactly easy going back down this road into the past, to see himself with Lizzy, to see all the friends he’d left behind, he at least discovered her brother, Antonio, had been at the dance. He was in one photo.

  Talking to Kelly Mattis and holding her hand.

  ****

  No matter how much Mac wanted to ignore it, or how much he wished it wasn’t so, Antonio Signorino remained his only suspect, his only lead. It wasn’t much. Hell, it was damn near anorexic. He appeared to be the only guy remotely near Kelly at the dance. Mac wasn’t stupid, he knew it didn’t come close to being evidence. It wasn’t even really a lead. Neither was the idea that Tony attended the University of Missouri at Columbia for a year while there was a murder there.

  It was a place to start. Maybe he should simply give him a call, invite him out for a beer to pick his brain, see what he thought about Kelly, and what he had to say about his year at Columbia.

  Hell, he wished for another direction to take. Not only did this feel wrong, it felt like a waste of time. What would Tony’s motive be? In the photo, he appeared nothing but friendly toward Kelly. There was nothing out of the ordinary with the way he held her hand. If anything, Kelly looked bored or impatient with him. Maybe that was the problem. Perhaps he wanted to dance with her, wanted to be with her, and she brushed him off. It wasn’t much of a motive or reason to cut through someone with a knife, but in his career, he’d seen people kill for less reason. He planned to spend the rest of the day following Tony. What could it hurt since he didn’t know what else to do? He also didn’t have anything else to do.

  Following him in the afternoon wasn’t hard. He stayed in the bakery.

  From his truck parked across the street, the rich aromas of pastries and coffee made Mac’s mouth water. When he saw Lizzy through the window smile at a man he recognized as Mr. Jenkins from the hardware store, Mac licked his lips. She’d told him to stay out of her bakery.

  He considered going in and getting a coffee, just to show her he could. />
  The long-gone, rebel teenage boy who would blatantly ignore her instructions to stay out of her bakery was gone. He was over her. But damn it all to hell, the man of now wanted her.

  He had to keep reminding himself he was here to watch Tony.

  That didn’t make it any easier.

  At four o’clock, Tony flipped the sign that hung in the door to read Closed. A short time later, he exited the front door. Lizzy gave him a quick hug before she locked it behind him.

  Tony took off on foot heading south down the main drag.

  Mac spent the next twenty minutes maneuvering the streets he knew like the back of his hand, following, catching up, watching, losing, and then finding Tony again after he had to sidetrack around a street that was closed due to a broken water main. When Tony hiked up the walk of a restored two-story house across town from the bakery, Mac parked at the curb and killed the engine.

  Mac watched as Tony was greeted just inside the door by a woman Mac remembered from high school. Tiffany Harper greeted Tony with a warm smile and chummy rub down his arm.

  Is this where she lived? Then Mac remembered reading in the weekly online issue of the Mossy Point Tribune that Tiffany had married Dane Kizer about two or three years ago. Mac also remembered seeing Tiffany and Dane dancing together in the Homecoming dance photos earlier. He had never been friends with Dane, but they’d been cordial. Dane played baseball whereas Mac participated in football and basketball. Mac knew he and Tiffany had dated all through the senior year.

  If Antonio was visiting Tiff in the afternoon, maybe things weren’t working out for her and Dane after all.

  Mac knew he was again jumping to conclusions. Tony worked IT when he wasn’t helping out in the bakery. He could very well be fixing the Kizers’ home computer, putting in a new router for Wi-Fi—or loading on a new game for Dane to play. Mac remembered Dane was really into the virtual games.

  Did all women greet the local computer geek with a smile like that and a welcoming rub down his arm?

  Maybe.

  Maybe he should give up this crazy idea, enjoy some time with his parents, go have supper with his brother who lived a half hour away, and just share a few beers with some former classmates before he tucked his tail between his legs and headed back to Quantico, let his leg heal somewhere else. He didn’t owe Kelly Mattis a thing.

  He sucked in a breath and jumped, startled, when a knock on the passenger window returned him to the present in a snap.

  He was taken aback even more to see Tony standing there. Hell, he must be losing his touch. It seemed he allowed himself to be too comfortable back in his hometown. He hadn’t even noticed Tony had come back outside. Maybe he should give up trying to find out who killed Kelly Mattis. He wouldn’t be the first to leave the case unsolved.

  Before he could touch the button on the armrest to open the window on the passenger door, Tony opened the door and climbed into the truck to sit with him, slamming the door behind him. There was a long moment of silence as the two of them seemed to measure one another up. Mac slid his hand back and forth along the steering wheel, doing his best not to feel like the cat caught with his paw in the canary cage.

  “We didn’t get much time to talk last night,” Tony said.

  “No.”

  “How long are you in town? Is it really just for the reunion and picnic this weekend, like you said yesterday when you moseyed into the bakery?”

  “Yeah. Maybe longer. I don’t know.”

  Tony seemed to absorb his reply. “Right.” His hard gaze at Mac never wavered. “Would you care to tell me, then, why you’re spending the little time you’ve got following me around town when you could be catching up with relatives and friends? Because if you wanted to catch up with me, you should have stopped me two blocks back.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Oh, come on, Mac. Don’t bullshit me. Any idiot could have seen you. A few probably did. Is this about Lizzy?”

  “No.” Another one-word reply. He was getting damned good at them.

  “Then what?”

  Again, they were quiet for a moment. Somewhere outside a dog barked, muffled through the closed truck window next to Tony. It was a nice fall day. Mac’s window was the only one open a few inches.

  Then Tony let out an exasperated, “Oh, fuck. You’re digging into Kelly Mattis’s murder, aren’t you? Seeing if you can find anything new. Don’t try and deny it. I’m one of the few people you stayed in contact with, remember? I knew you took the FBI test. Then you kind of fell off the grid. After that, whenever I hear from you, it’s just vague shit—everything’s fine and you’re between jobs, blah, blah, blah. We were friends. I hope we still are, but don’t treat me like I’m stupid.”

  “I’m not.” Finally more than one word. Was it progress?

  “So, what? I’m a suspect?”

  How to reply? This was not how this was supposed to work. Mac was supposed to follow Tony, who would lead him to something incriminating. But damn, Mac felt like the criminal.

  “Yes.” It was another one-word answer but was more direct.

  It didn’t appear to surprise Tony. “Care to tell me why or how, what the hell puts me on your radar?”

  Mac didn’t beat around the bush. There was no reason to even try. “You took metals class and made jewelry. Then, when you were at the University of Missouri, there was another murder, similar to Kelly’s. And you were with her at the homecoming dance.”

  Tony’s dark eyes were endless. “That’s all you’ve got? More than twenty people were in metals class. You were one of them, or have you forgotten? And there were a few hundred students in the freshman class at Mizzou when I was there, three hundred in the Chemistry 101 class alone. I took it with Sara Gibson, the murder victim I think you’re referring to.”

  “I know it’s a long shot.”

  “It’s a real long shot in the wrong damned direction. I didn’t kill either of them. I haven’t killed anyone. And I hate to point it out to you, but you were also at the dance. I’m just wondering, what does metals class have to do with Kelly’s murder?”

  “She was wearing a bracelet when her body was found.”

  “She was allergic.”

  “You knew that?”

  Tony shrugged. “Yes. She told me because I did make a bracelet—more than one as a matter of fact—in metals class and offered to give one to her. She took it and thanked me but told me she could never wear it. She said she’d break out in hives and itch clear into next week if she had it against her skin. Did you know her mom had a special class ring made for her out of porcelain?”

  “No. Sounds like the two of you were friends.” Mac didn’t think Kelly had any true friends.

  “I’m probably the only guy in the entire class who didn’t have sex with her. I’m probably the only guy who just talked to her.” He let out a hard sigh. “I think I’m the only guy she talked to, just talked.”

  “Why do you suppose that was?” Mac had to ask. “I mean, was it because you found her to be a nice person when so many others didn’t?”

  He saw Tony bite his bottom lip as he contemplated an answer. “I wasn’t interested in her. She knew that. So I wasn’t competition or a conquest.”

  Mac watched him from across the seat as a car slowly drove past outside. “Oh? Not interested at all? I didn’t think there was a guy in the entire school who didn’t sniff out Kelly’s handouts.”

  Tony met his gaze evenly. “It seems back then, both Kelly and I were interested in the same guy. You.”

  To say he was shocked would have been the understatement of the year, but Mac managed to keep it tucked inside him with a deep breath and a clench of his jaw.

  “The only difference was,” Tony continued calmly, “she really expected you to ask her to the dance. So when you didn’t and you showed up with my sister, she was…enraged would have been putting it mildly. I watched her at the dance because I was concerned about my sister. I figured Kelly might do something, being the m
alicious bitch everyone knew her to be. Honestly, I was surprised she didn’t toss a drink on Lizzy or try to scratch her eyes out. As for me, I never expected anything at all from you. I knew that being a friend was as close as I was ever going to get. And I accepted that.”

  Mac worked to digest Tony’s bombshell. It wasn’t easy. Trying to stay on topic, he asked, “Who’d she leave with?”

  “I have no idea. One minute she was there with me. And I was trying to convince her to dance with me, trying to take her mind off killing my sister. While I was busy watching you with Lizzy, she left. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask Dane Kizer. I hung with him until I headed home, which was about a quarter of midnight. It wasn’t until after one when my dad and Lizzy got home that I learned Kelly was dead. And if you’re going to ask me if she seemed preoccupied, the answer is yes, she did. She always did. After all, she was always worried there might be a girl who was prettier than she was, and she was just as worried there might be one guy who didn’t notice her.”

  “That’s true,” Mac had to agree. “What else did she talk about?”

  Tony shrugged. “Just stuff. She said she planned to leave town.”

  “Leave town. When? How?”

  “I have no idea. I thought it was just talk, like everyone else’s talk about how we all planned to escape as soon as our tassels were switched to the other side.”

  “And if she did have a plan, how would she pay for that?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Maybe she figured out she could sell it instead of always giving it away. She didn’t tell me.” He paused. “I’m not your killer, but I’d sure like to help you find him or her. I’m tired of that unsolved mystery hanging over this town like a dark cloud.”

  Mac wouldn’t normally believe someone who just said he wasn’t the killer. After all, killers confessed sometimes, but not that easily. And they almost always denied it. However, he believed Tony, especially given the evidence against him wouldn’t hold water. Just to be on the safe side, he did plan to talk to Dane Kizer.

  “Speaking of Dane Kizer, I thought you guys were friends, especially if you hung out after the dance. And now you’re what? Banging his wife in the afternoon?” Mac wasn’t certain why he asked. He just needed to know how things stood before he asked Dane about being with Tony on dance night.