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“What?” Nowak asked, bringing Cade back to the present.
“Nothing.” A lie. But Nowak didn’t call him out.
This wasn’t good.
Dredging up the horror of the past would only cause more trouble.
And Rachel would be devastated. She already had anxiety issues and, well, maybe even more than that. Fuck, he thought. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! The byline indicated that Mercedes Pope, one of Rachel’s former classmates, had written the article. In it both Nathan Moretti and Lila Ryder had been quoted, two more “friends.” Nathan had been Luke’s friend and fellow athlete while Lila, well, she had dated Luke, ended up having his kid. She’d also gone to the Sea View cannery with Rachel that night. Now, of course, in a bizarre twist of fate, Lila was his damned stepmother.
This town was just too damned small.
“Somethin’ wrong?” Mendoza asked, looking up from the baseball scores, but Cade didn’t bother answering, just strode out of the lunchroom and headed back to his desk. He hadn’t noted the significance of the date this morning, but he was sure as hell that Rachel had.
He wondered if she had known about the article.
Maybe.
But probably not.
And she wasn’t quoted in the piece.
Mercedes Pope had been at the cannery that night as well. Now she owned part of the newspaper her grandfather had founded some fifty years earlier. And, it seemed, had decided to dredge up the ice-cold case now.
“Great,” Cade said aloud. “Just . . . great.”
Rachel had never gotten over the trauma of Luke’s death. “Damn it all to hell.”
His phone buzzed as he made his way back to his desk. He glanced at the screen.
Kayleigh’s number came into view.
Shit, no.
His jaw tightened and he clicked the message off before reading it.
Not now.
The day had already started off on the wrong foot.
But the good news?
It wasn’t yet eight in the morning.
There was a damne
d good chance things would only get worse.
* * *
Rachel kicked off her shoes on the back porch, then stepped inside the kitchen and dropped the bakery sack on the counter. A fresh pot of coffee was already brewing, thanks to autoperk. She tapped on each kid’s door, calling through the panels, “Time to get up. C’mon, ‘rise and shine,’” using the same time-worn phrase her mother had a quarter of a century earlier to motivate Rachel and Luke from their beds. It worked about as well today as it had then. “Move it! We don’t want to be late.”
A groan from Harper’s room.
Nothing emanating from Dylan’s.
No surprise there.
Upstairs, she showered and changed, pushed her hair into a high ponytail and dabbed on lipstick and mascara before hesitating at the bathroom mirror and eyeing her reflection. She should bring up the missing drugs with the kids. Actually she had to, she thought, and opened the cabinet to retrieve the bottle before slipping it into her pocket. Then she trundled down to the first floor, where she discovered Harper, eyes at half-mast, standing at the kitchen counter.
