Hush

by Nancy Bush

  “The campout was separate from what was going on at the beach house with Annette and Faith and everyone else.”

  “Yep. It was just supposed to be some of the girls from my class. When the guys showed up, it was Wynona’s turn and they wouldn’t let up on her.”

  “Her turn?” Danner questioned.

  Coby caught herself up short. She’d never revealed the nature of the secrets they’d shared. None of them had, as far as she knew. “She was telling a private secret and they overheard. They teased her about it until she was in tears.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was crappy high school stuff, but some of the secrets were intense.”

  “Can you tell me Wynona’s secret?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with Lucas’s death. Certainly nothing to do with Annette’s.”

  “Okay.”

  Now he was looking at her and she turned away from his scrutiny. It was all so far away it felt . . . almost silly . . . embarrassing, really. But were those secrets hers to share now?

  “Look, I don’t want to rat out my friends. The others who were there. But I’ll say this, we were playing Pass the Candle, where we tell our innermost, deepest, darkest secret when the candle gets passed to us. The guys overheard Wynona’s secret and teased her mercilessly, and I heard from Annette that Wynona has attempted suicide, twice, and it could be related to her secret and it getting out that night.”

  “Annette told you that? When?”

  “At the party.”

  “But she didn’t go to the original campout. She was at the beach house. So who told her about Wynona?”

  “Yvette, I guess,” Coby said slowly. “But Wynona’s story was kind of the one that wasn’t a secret any longer, since the boys knew. Although they overheard some other ones, too.”

  “What was yours? Can you tell me?”

  “Um . . . mine was a lie.” She related what she’d said about her dad. “I couldn’t come up with anything and the other girls were baring their souls. It was Genevieve’s idea and we all joined in. And then, at the end of school, we all got these notes shoved in our lockers that made it clear someone had overheard all our secrets. Genevieve was pissed. We all were.”

  “You got a note, too?”

  “Yep.”

  “All of you got them?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess so. I didn’t take a poll at the time, but it seemed like it. Juliet thought she saw Vic Franzen putting one in Yvette’s locker, but he’s always denied he was the culprit.”

  “Did any of you compare your notes?”

  “We told each other what they said, if that’s what you mean. They had to do with the secrets we revealed that night.”

  Danner asked, “Did you see the notes themselves?”

  “I saw mine . . . and Dana’s, I think. I just wanted them to go away. I got rid of mine as soon as possible. Burned it, actually. It felt creepy to have it around.”

  “So, it’s possible that not everybody got one.”

  Coby took a sip of wine, thought about that. “Ellen wasn’t at school. She’d moved. So she didn’t get one. Why?”

  “Maybe one of the other girls was the perpetrator.”

  Coby shook her head. “No way. I’m inclined to think it was one of the guys. Maybe it was Vic Franzen. He was always trying to work his way further up the hierarchy of the guy’s group. Looking for ways to be cooler.”

  “Shoving notes in a locker just doesn’t sound like a guy thing to do,” Danner pointed out. “It’s kind of girly.”

  Coby hadn’t thought of it in those terms. “Possibly,” she conceded. “What does this have to do with Annette?”

  “Nothing, maybe. You said she was adamant about bringing secrets out into the open. Sounds like a lot of secrets started that night.”

  Coby had an instant mental memory of the campfire, recalling her own anxiety. “We were never the best of friends,” she admitted. “The dads were friends. They’re the ones who kept the group going, and we were just putting in our time. When Genevieve suggested Pass the Candle, we all went with it, not because we wanted to, or at least I didn’t. We just were stuck together and kind of wasting time. And then the guys came and things changed.”

  “Who were the guys?”

  “Jarrod, as you know. Kirk Grassi, Vic, Theo Rivers, Paul Lessington.” She thought a moment. “Oh, and Galen Torres, and Lucas.”

  “Lucas was dating Rhiannon at the time,” Danner said. “And she died a few years later.”

  He sounded like he was trying to remember, so Coby said, “She fell from a hiking trail.”

  He nodded. “I remember thinking it was a hell of a coincidence that they died the same way.”

  “Yeah . . .” Coby was pensive.

  He gave her a look. “What?”

  “I was just thinking . . . the night Lucas died. The night of the campout . . .” She exhaled. “We all kind of had a crush on him. I kissed him,” she admitted sheepishly. “And I saw him with Genevieve, too. Lucas was . . . not committed to any relationship and we all knew it. All of us except Rhiannon, maybe. Or maybe she did know, but she always insisted she was his girlfriend. But the next day, when Lucas was dead, Yvette announced that she and Lucas were secret boyfriend and girlfriend. She got into it with Rhiannon, who was a wreck. We all were. Yvette was convincing, though, and we all knew Lucas played around, so I think everyone assumed Lucas was Benedict’s father. I know I did. But Yvette told me straight out at Annette’s birthday party that he wasn’t.”

  “You asked her?”

  “More like she attacked me with the facts.”

  He absorbed that a moment, then said, “It all keeps circling back to Yvette.”

  “Yes,” Coby said, nodding. “It does.”

  “Two accidental deaths. Lucas and Rhiannon. And then a murder. Annette Rendell. Lucas was Yvette’s secret boyfriend, and therefore the other woman in the Lucas/ Rhiannon/Yvette triangle, and Annette was Yvette’s sister, with a big secret she was about to reveal.”

  “Maybe Annette learned that Lucas is Benedict’s father,” Coby suggested.

  “Worth committing homicide of your own sister over?”

  “No,” Coby admitted. “But Yvette and Annette didn’t get along. None of the Ette sisters seem to get along with Yvette, from what I can tell.”

  Danner checked his watch, then reluctantly sat up. “I’ll go see Yvette later this week. I’m involved with another homicide at work, a home invasion, that’s my real job.”

  “The one that’s been on the news? Where the wife and daughter were killed and the husband/father was shot?”

  “That’s the one. Do you know what day Annette’s memorial service is?”

  “Wednesday or Thursday. I haven’t heard for sure.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you then.” Her surprise must have showed on her face because he leaned toward her and kissed her once, hard. “I’m going to give you time to think this over.”

  “This?”

  “This,” he agreed, getting to his feet.

  “Oh. All right.”

  He smiled at her disappointment as he collected his now nearly dry jacket from the closet door peg. “There’s somebody out there with something to hide. Something they may have killed for. Be careful.”

  “I will be.”

  “See you at the memorial service.”

  He left and Coby gazed after him longingly. He was right, of course. Rushing into things never worked. She just hoped this delay wasn’t a method to keep her at arm’s length. Sure, he seemed to be all about starting again. Sure, it had been terrific playing around with each other. But she’d opened her heart too fast, too big to him once before and she couldn’t afford to do it again.

  Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

  “I hate that saying,” she said aloud.

  The squad room was just short of a madhouse when Danner stopped in around 10 P.M. Thanksgiving was still a couple of weeks away, but a pre-Thanksgiv
ing party had turned into a brawl, apparently, and a number of drunken partygoers had resisted attempts by the police to slow down the raucous partying, which ended with beer bottles and the like being thrown at the officers; never a good idea.

  Danner ducked around a handcuffed woman swaying on her feet at a nearby desk and headed to his own. He fervently wished Elaine were back, and was both annoyed and resigned to see that Joshua Celek was still around, his freckled cherubic face pulled into a frown of consternation.

  “Curtis was here,” he said to Danner. “He wanted to talk to you.”

  Detective Trey Curtis was a homicide detective who’d been pulled onto gang detail for the last few months, and it looked like it might become a full-time position. Danner wondered what the hell he could possibly want with him.

  “Where’s he now?” Danner asked Celek.

  “Around. What are you doing here? Thought you were in Tillamook.”

  He said it with a kind of sniff, like he thought Danner was trying to escape working on the Lloyd home invasion. “I’m waiting for a file from the TCSD.”

  “Ah . . .”

  Ignoring him, Danner signed onto his computer terminal and checked his e-mail. The scanned file was there and he quickly sent it to the printer. He didn’t want to spend any more time at the station tonight than necessary, and he left the squad room at a fast walk down the hall to the copy center. The printer was spitting out pages at a quick clip and he checked to see they were the report from the Tillamook County Medical Examiner. Dr. Jeffrey Gilmore’s name was attached to the file, so Danner waited until all the pages were out and then gathered them and stuck them under the stapler. He was just smacking the top of the stapler with his fist when Curtis stuck his head inside.

  “Got a minute?” the dark-haired detective asked. He was lean and gruff and had a reputation for getting the job done.

  “Sure.”

  Danner followed Curtis down another hall to an open room, away from the action in the squad room. It was an interrogation room not in current use. Curtis flipped on the lights.

  “Got some questions for me?” Danner asked, half-amused, half-curious.

  “Just wanted to get away from the squirrels,” he said, referring to the drunken brawlers being charged in the squad room. “You’re working on the Lloyd case, and I know Drano gave you the okay for that Deception Bay homicide, too. I wanted to know if I could take Celek off your hands for a while.”

  “Not a problem,” Danner assured him.

  “We’ve got some burglaries that I think he’d be better suited for,” Curtis explained. “The clubs are trying to blame the gangs, which only pisses them off. But the jobs are small time, amateurish. Mostly equipment theft. Not really in my gangs’ scope, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not drugs and prostitution?”

  “You got it,” Curtis said.

  “What kind of clubs are getting hit?”

  “Nightclubs with local bands, mostly, around Portland, Beaverton, Laurelton, Gresham.”

  Local bands . . . Danner couldn’t help but think of his brother, but he kept that thought to himself. Instead, he said magnanimously, “As far as I’m concerned, you can have Celek as long as you want.”

  Curtis tipped his dark head and grinned slyly. “Like that, is it?”

  “He does the job just fine,” Danner said diplomatically.

  “Just not like Metzger would. I hear you. When is she coming back?”

  “End of next week.”

  Curtis nodded. “If you need help on the Lloyd investigation, tell Drano I’m available.”

  “It’ll never happen. You’re too good at what you do.”

  “Yeah. Shit. You’re right.” He tapped the jamb of the door as a good-bye and left.

  Danner took his scanned file back toward his desk, the noise level increasing with every footfall that drew him closer to the squad room. As he entered, he determined this was not the place to get anything done tonight, so he went down to the parking lot, jumped into his Wrangler, and tried to stay within the speed limit on his drive toward his apartment in Laurelton, the westernmost community outside Portland on Highway 26.

  His apartment was a renovated bungalow, taken over by developers at the height of the real estate boom in 2005 and turned into condos that sold like hotcakes at first, then went into short sales and foreclosure, and now were rented out by disheartened owners. Danner had moved from an apartment about ten blocks away whose walls were tissue-paper thin, but it had been all he felt he could afford at the time. He’d socked his money away and when the opportunity arose to sign a two-year-lease at the bungalow, he took it. Now he pulled into the central carport and walked down a narrow concrete sidewalk to the door of his unit. He stepped inside, flipped on the light, wished he had a dog, like always, and tossed the file on the peninsula of solid granite that jutted on an angle from the cabinets, separating the kitchen from the living room.

  He had two bar stools, fake black leather with arms, and he sank into one now like it was a Barcalounger. Flipping open the file, he had to blink several times because Coby Rendell’s face seemed to be superimposed on everything he was looking at. Recognizing his own idiocy, he allowed himself a few moments to review the evening they’d spent together and then, with a smile on his lips, he dragged his attention to the file’s contents.

  Twenty minutes later he felt that awareness that always grabbed him like a cold hand on the back of the neck.

  Among the pages was a small, typewritten observation at the bottom of a page that listed the condition of the body.

  Stubs of hair at victim’s crown. Section missing.

  He heard his own voice: “You looked in the envelope?”

  And Coby: “It was a lock of blond hair. Blondish, I guess, with some light brown in it.”

  He stared unseeingly across the bar and into his own kitchen.

  The question was: when had that lock of Lucas’s hair been taken? Postmortem? Or had someone snipped it off as a souvenir?

  Rituals. Rites. I will see all the bitches soon, those that remain.

  Once upon a time they were the royalty of the school.

  I’m always with them, though they don’t know it. Annette would have betrayed me, and when the opportunity arose, I had to kill her. Her gurgling death was necessary.

  I always do what is necessary.

  I saved Lucas from a life not worth living. He was staring at the sky, broken. His beauty fading. If he had lived, he would have not been the same. I turned him over and pressed his face into the cold salt water.

  And I took care of that other bitch, that outsider, with her big lips and thrusting thighs who dared to poach from me, taking what wasn’t hers. I found the means to crush her throat.

  But when I see the realm from Rutherford High, I will decide who dies first.

  Coby, I whisper to myself. Soon. . . .

  Chapter 15

  The memorial service for Annette took place on Wednesday on a dry, windswept November afternoon with leaves being whirled around in small eddies in the parking lot and mud puddles slowly drying in the respite of two full days without rain.

  Coby held the collar of her coat close as she skirted the remaining puddles and headed to the door of Cramer House, a hall in Northwest Portland that had once been an Elks Lodge but had been taken over, renovated, and was now an event destination. She’d worn a black skirt, a pale blue sweater, and a black raincoat that hid everything and offered another layer of warmth.

  Jean-Claude, Suzette, Juliet and Nicholette, and Nicholette’s daughter, Paige, were standing just inside the double doors, greeting people as they entered an anteroom that led into a larger room with a stage on one end. Dave was a few steps farther inside, and after murmuring condolences to the Deneuves, Coby slipped into her dad’s arms as he gave her a heartfelt hug.

  Yvette and Benedict were nowhere to be seen.

  Faith appeared a few moments later and also hugged their father, then Coby and Faith found a couple of
chairs toward the rear of the room where they had a bit of privacy.

  “Do you know I had to talk Mom out of coming,” Faith said.

  Coby shook her head in disbelief. “She didn’t like Annette. At all.”

  “What the hell is going on with them?” Faith muttered, glancing back to Dave.

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know,” Coby murmured.

  McKenna and Big Bob Forrester came in together and squeezed in a few rows ahead of Faith and Coby, McKenna giving Coby a quick smile of acknowledgment. And behind them, something of a surprise: Donald Greer with Wynona. Wynona wore a long brown wool coat, her face as cold and rigid as a gravestone. If she saw Coby she gave no sign of it.

  Annette’s voice suddenly clamored inside Coby’s head as if she were speaking to her again: Wynona made two suicide attempts, one with pills, one by slitting her wrists. Neither effective. I don’t want to sound like a complete bitch, but they were cries for help, not a serious attempt to kill herself, and she got a lot of attention. Then she decided to dedicate her life to social work, helping others, but she’s not very good at it.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Faith whispered to Coby.

  “Nothing.”

  Just before the Deneuves took their seats Yvette blew in, Benedict in tow. Yvette wore a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black boots; Benedict was in a navy sports jacket over blue jeans. He wore a red tie and yanked at his collar with two fingers, looking about as uncomfortable as any eleven-year-old could.

  Surreptitiously, Coby glanced around for Danner. She’d seen Jarrod and Genevieve arrive, but if Danner was on the premises, he was keeping a low profile. Settling in, she drew a breath and waited for the service to begin.

  Danner drove with controlled urgency toward Cramer House, aware that he would likely miss the opening remarks and/or prayer. He’d planned on calling Coby and seeing if she needed a ride, but things had started running at work almost from the moment Danner, and then Lieutenant Drano, had okayed Celek to move to burglary and leave Danner on the Lloyd home invasion/homicide case on his own. Things were coming together fast now, a snowball rolling down a hill with increasing speed. He was counting the hours until Elaine Metzger returned, but in the meantime those hours were flying by, leaving him no time for the Deneuve homicide or much of anything else.