Page 23 of The Engagement Party

No, no, no.Nothing else. No more. Not one more horror.The words rose above the shock and slammed into Sierra.

She wanted to close her eyes and disappear. A scream begged to get out, but she swallowed it. Falling apart would put them in more danger. Then she looked at Mitch and saw the way his knees kept buckling as gulping breaths shook through him.

“This doesn’t make sense. I can’t...” He inhaled a few times before standing up.

Sierra brushed a soothing hand over his back. She wanted to tell him everything was going to be okay, but she couldn’t form the lie.

“Emily.” Mitch turned the paper over, studied it, then looked around the room. “They’re all photos of Emily.”

Another dead person from his past. More trauma he hadn’t processed. A new unwanted nightmare for her to share.

“Why would they be here? How are Emily and Tyler even connected?” Sierra had so many questions but those rose to the top.

“Me.” Mitch exhaled. “The only connection is me.”

Chapter Seventeen

Book Notes: Who Killed Emily?

When a woman goes missing suspicion first falls on those closest to the victim. Family. A boyfriend or former boyfriend, a teacher, or a neighbor. Someone from her inner circle. That boy she turned down for a date who might have been unstable and furious and wanted revenge.

Emily, a college student full of energy and life, didn’t have any obvious enemies. That meant everyone, from known predators in the area to loved ones, fell under suspicion. Everyone who knew her and many who didn’t demanded answers. They craved a simple, easily packaged explanation that provided quick closure. One that confirmed this murder was about Emilyonlyand they were safe in their homes and on their streets. A solution that allowed them to treat the violence as an aberration and sink back into their lives after shedding a few tears for the loss of a young life.

A group of uncomfortable bedfellows, consisting of law enforcement, concerned citizens, and online true crime warriors, dissected the lives of every man who had known or come in contact with Emily. Her father, Phillip, didn’t escape scrutiny.Each hour away from the family home, including those unaccounted for during graduation weekend, came under suspicion. His usual schedule consisted of day trips to New York City and longer trips to other cities “for work.”

Clocking all those business hours backfired on him. Phillip’s much-touted work ethic boomeranged into a haunting misdirection ofDid her dad kill her?andWhat happened behind those closed doors?until a zealous podcaster overstepped and physically followed Phillip. This podcaster found Phillip’s mistress and their secret two-year-old daughter in the Upper West Side brownstone he owned in the city. The second family and additional property Emily’s mother never knew about.

Phillip’s reputation disintegrated into a sinkhole of name-calling after that. Online sleuths launched wild accusations and shifted his life to center stage on every gossip site. His marriage imploded into a fiery wreck of a divorce that raged on for years after Emily’s death.

Emily never knew about her father’s fall from grace but every mention of her parents both in the news and in whispers around town to this day start with a reference to the couple’s murdered daughter.

While that fiasco raged, the police quickly ruled out Emily’s younger brothers, who were out of school and seen all over the hotel and town of Brunswick with their mother during the weekend Emily vanished. Law enforcement then turned to interrogating friends and former boyfriends. Not a quick undertaking because Emily’s friend circle turned out to be wide. It included people who thought they were friends andactualfriends. High school friends, many of whom she abandoned for college friends, as well as obligatory through-other-old-money-families friends.

Emily dated but not with an intensity that ever suggested she’d foundthe oneor even fell in love. Her taste in young men others might find odd intrigued law enforcement. Television analysts obsessed with archaic diligence about what they viewed as Emily’s overactive sex life. How she dated but never found arealboyfriend or potential husband, as if that were the only reason a woman would go to college.

The pundits and self-proclaimed experts debated for hours about how, without her, some of her partners might be considered incels—part of an online subculture of misogynists who are unable find a romantic partner or are “involuntarily celibate” and sometimes violent.

These talking heads all ignored the reality that the young men she dated, even after the inevitable breakups, didn’t hate her. They stumbled over themselves to go into graphic detail about the sex and how much she loved to “do it” in public places, mere feet away from anyone who might notice. Shemadethempopular just by being seen with them.

One guy stuck out. A loner with a tragic past reminiscent of great literature. Once the police learned about him they dug in.

Chapter Eighteen

Ruthie

Ruthie jammed her finger against the number keypad of her cell, trying to make something happen. When that didn’t work, she scanned her apps. “There has to be a way to get a signal out.”

Kitchen cabinet doors banged around her as Will rummaged through the shelves in his usual half-assed fashion when doing a task he didn’t want to do. He’d barely looked around inside, thenthud. “We find the jammer then we can make the calls.”

She heard his voice. Normal. Watching him now, she saw the engineer at work. Methodical. Logical. No panic.

Depleted and terrified, sure someone with a knife or some other equally lethal weapon spied on them as they moved around the main floor, Ruthie didn’t understand his sense of calm. She balanced her hip against the counter. “You’re not shaken or confused.”

He switched to staring at the lower cabinets. “I’m trying to find this—”

“There’s a dead man in a car fifty feet away from us.” Screw thejammer and his friends and her ridiculous plan of coming to an isolated island for this weekend.

Will crouched down and balanced on the balls of his feet as he opened another set of cabinet doors and performed a cursory inspection. “It’s farther than that.”

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