Page 44 of So Dark

He headed out, leaving Faith to wonder if she’d just witnessed the end of their friendship. And how long before herrelationship with David ended too? If only she could go back to when things made sense.

But that wasn’t how life worked. Once you made a mistake, you suffered the consequences of that mistake. Even if you lost everything.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Michael returned fifteen minutes later with some TV dinners and a couple of apples. "Here you go," he said, tossing Faith one of the apples. "Keep the doctor away."

“Thanks. Um, Michael. Forget what I said earlier. I was—”

“I won’t forget it,” he said. “I also won’t talk about it right now. And neither will you. We have a case to solve. We’ll deal with the rest later.”

She lowered her eyes. She hated leaving the air unclear between them, but he was right. They needed to focus on the case. Personal issues had to wait.If only it wasn’t so much easier said than done.“Right. Sorry.”

He sighed. “It’s okay. Just… stop bringing it up, all right?”

She looked away, then, so she didn’t look too obviously upset, she bit into her apple. Michael started one of the TV dinners and said, "I'm going to reach out to Kelly's neighbor again. Graham Nash's personal life is a black hole, but hers isn't. I'm going to talk to the neighbor and see if I can figure out where she might be. Why don't you call Jake back and get his impression of Graham Nash? I'm sick of sitting around, so if we can find anything that gives us an excuse to get out of this hotel, I'm all for it."

She nodded. “Yeah. That sounds good.”

“Good.”

She dialed Jake’s number, and when he answered, she said, “I realize I forgot to talk to you about Graham Nash.”

"Graham? Was he one of the victims, too?"

“No. But the killer is targeting members of Nature’s Guardians, so Graham is either a target himself, or he’s… well, he could be the killer.”

“Huh. You know, that wouldn’t surprise me.”

Faith’s eyes widened. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. He was an asshole.”

“Really? How so?”

“He was… I guess asshole isn’t the right word. He was just a big shit-talker. You know, he always had to act like he was better than everyone else. And he was good, don’t get me wrong. It’s just tiring to hear someone talk about themselves all the time.”

She frowned. “Interesting. We heard from Lisa that he mostly kept to himself.”

“Really? That’s surprising. He couldn’t shut up. He talked almost as much as Lisa.”

Faith leaned back in her chair. “Why would Lisa lie to us about that?”

“I don’t know. She liked him. Not the way I liked Kelly, but she admired him. She bought into his bullshit, I guess. He acted like he was the greatest survivalist the world had ever seen, and she believed him. The rest of us all thought he was full of hot air. It got to the point where we couldn’t take it anymore. We voted to kick him out of the group.”

Faith’s frown deepened. “Lisa told us he left of his own accord.”

“I mean… you could say that. We had a meeting, and we all told Lisa our thoughts. He told us we could… Well, he made a very rude comment. When we all said that either he left or we did, he repeated his sentiment and stormed off. Lisa chewed us all out, called us names and didn’t speak to us again for days. We had the camping trip the following week, and she was cheery and polite again, but the tension was there. I left after the camping trip, like I already told you, so I don’t know how much Graham’s departure influenced the end of the group, but I do know that he was Lisa’s favorite, and she was very upset when he left.”

Faith tried to wrap her head around this new information. “He almost never texted any of you, though. Not even Lisa.”

“How do you know that? Were you spying on our cell phones?”

“We pulled your phone records for this investigation, yes.”

“You don’t need a warrant for that?”

“We got one. I’ll send you a copy.”

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