Page 1 of The Engagement Party

Chapter One

Book Notes: Lost and Found

Emily Hunt disappeared on the Saturday of graduation weekend. No one noticed until Sunday afternoon.

A blonde with big brown eyes and a deep, soulful laugh that lit up her face wasn’t the type to blend in. The recent college grad dreamed of becoming an investigative reporter, of breaking big stories, getting awards, and doing splashy interviews. Even ignoring her questionable talent, she lacked the patience and drive it would take to survive years of mind-numbing, day-to-day plodding, stockpiles of phone calls and messages, and notoriously unreliable pay. Now, none of that mattered.

Local police and college officials rushed to grab microphones at the press conference and blame alcohol for Emily’s disappearance. Men decked out in business suits and uniforms shook their heads as they lectured the public about the dangerous mix of binge drinking and too much partying on college campuses.

In the span of a few hours, Emily morphed froma young woman with promiseto a cautionary tale. The quick pivot to “this is why we don’t allow fraternities and sororities on campus” by the college’s president ignored the fact neither institution played a role in her being missing.

By not showing up at her parents’ planned celebration lunch, Emily had forfeited the presumption of innocence in her own disappearance.Did you see her dress the other night? She seemed out of control at the party.I tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen.The whispers carried more than a hint of reprimand. But a simple continuum between a fixed point where Emily made smart choices and one in which she invited tragedy didn’t exist no matter how determined people were to bend and twist her story to make it fit.

The rumored explanations for her failure to sleep in her own bed that weekend overlooked the obvious details. Her car hadn’t moved from the school parking lot. Her upended purse sat at the bottom of the steps of the campus’s Museum of Art. Her abandoned cell phone with the newly cracked screen rested a few feet away.

As the hours rolled on, pontificating gave way to panic. Before sunset on Monday night, they formed a search party. The “they” included the official cadre who’d engaged in enraged finger-wagging about Emily’s partying and the supposed “friends” who barely knew her yet spilled half-truths disguised as secrets in exchange for less than five minutes of fame and attention. Within hours, a couple in their sixties who happened to be boating in the area found Emily’s body. There she was, four miles from campus, partially clothed and tangled in weeds in the New Meadows River.

She’d been twenty-two for nineteen days and a college graduate for one afternoon.

The water cleansed her crisis-manufactured guilt. Her role shifted again, this time fromthe cause of her own demiseto beloved victim, forever enshrined as young and beautiful. Her personality locked in place, waiting for the passage of time to polish and mute every flaw into oblivion.

Her death turned out to be a horrible beginning to a winding and tragic tale rather than an ending. Not an accident. Not a result of alcohol. A murder.

The saddest part? None of this would have happened if she’d gotten into Amherst as she’d dreamed.

Chapter Two

Sierra

Sierra Prescott groaned when she stepped in her office and saw the unshuffled stacks of bids, bills, and invoices swamping her desk. If she squinted she could almost make out the glass that held down the important scraps of paper, like her computer password.

Screw privacy issues.Her business partner, Mitch Andersen, insisted on swapping out intricate strings of numbers, letters, random capitals, and nonsense symbols every month. He was a safety guy. Thirty-five going onliving in a bunker. He worried about everything. He could find a tiny hint of potential trouble in every bit of fantastic news. Then again, with his background being skeptical wasn’t a surprise. It was a survival mechanism.

She’d been out in the field, on a landscaping job for the new boutique hotel in Rockport, for nine days. It would take another five for the ache in her knees to subside. So, she switched to desk work. Clearly not a great decision.

“Mitch?” She shouted his name into the empty office suite.

Because it was Sunday, rational people remained at home, playing with their kids and puppies, and enjoying this thing called a weekend. Not that she or Mitch had any needy creaturesin their care. Both were single. Both lived alone. Both worked too much. Neither of them bothered to file a piece of paper until the threat of being buried alive in a pile of overdue bills overcame them.

“Hey.” Mitch appeared in the doorway. As usual, he wrapped up his entire greeting with that one word.

He wore jeans and a zip-up sweater to fight the cooling September winds. His brown hair had that ruffled, don’t-own-a-mirror look. He was a handsome-without-trying type. A mix ofboy next doorandhot single dad on the playground. His lazy smile kicked up on one side without any emotion or lightness behind it. Not that he was a psychopath, but he’d been raised by one and had learned early how to navigate a series of emotional land mines.

Sierra picked up the crumpled postcard by her foot and held it in the air. “Is this garbage or part of some basketball game you were playing, using the trash can?”

“Garbage.”

His tone actually saidproblem. Intrigued, she unrolled the paper to find an invitation addressed to Mitchell Andersen with a handwritten note on the side.

We expect you to be here. —W

She didn’t have to ask who W was. Though she’d only talked to him on the phone, she knew all about Will Mayer. Mitch’s college friend, or one of them. Part of a supposedly unbreakable group of friends that shattered one spring, twelve years ago. A topic Mitch rarely discussed.

“Will’s getting married,” she said, as if Mitch hadn’t read the card before junking it. “To someone named Ruthie Simmons.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wonder if her parents actually named her Ruthie or Ruth.” Mitch didn’t say a word, so Sierra kept talking. “Weirdly, it’s a printed invite to an informal get-together happening in three weeks. A call would have made more sense, but the event is clearly low-key.” She pointed at the card. “Says so right here.”

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