Page 46 of The Engagement Party

Cassie dove in. “How much do you really know about Ruthie?”

“We’re going to be married.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “That’s not really an answer.”

“You can’t believe she’s running around killing people.” Willdidn’t pretend to be confused as he sometimes did. He liked to hide behind the practical and one-track-thinking engineer stereotype. Not this time. He jumped right to the defensive.

“Her story doesn’t make much sense.” A huge understatement but Alex didn’t want to get bogged down, walking through each instance where her story had failed. The rest of them could come downstairs at any minute.

Cassie flipped back to in-control attorney mode. “How much have you told her about what happened at Bowdoin?”

Will shook his head. “I would never tell her or anyone.”

“It might slip out.” Secrets did that. Holding them chipped away at your decency, at your strength, and worse, at your memory. The lies expanded. New lies got piled on top of old ones until the line between fiction and fact blurred and the secrets found room to weasel out. Alex knew because he lived it.

“Never.” Will’s voice remained firm. “We made a promise.”

Alex wasn’t convinced. “And now one of us is dead.”

Revenge was a nasty bitch.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Ruthie

And now one of us is dead.

Ruthie hesitated at the top of the steps when she heard the words. She debated storming into the room and confronting them about their covert conversation and dire words. But what did the sentence really tell her? They had secrets. Hell, so did she.

Theirs were about murder. She’d bet everything on that.

She thumped a little louder on the stairs, warning them of her impending arrival. “You fixed the power.”

Will shook his head. “No. I thought you did.”

She almost tripped and fell down the last few steps. “How? I’ve been upstairs, helping with Sierra and taking a quick shower to wash away the . . . you know.”

Cassie took over the topic. “We’re going to act like the electricity went off due to the storm and is now back on because the wind died down.”

That amounted to a lot of denial. Cassie wallowed in it. Ruthie tucked that information away for later.

Will had other ideas. “Okay, but the shed always—”

“How’s Sierra?” Cassie practically shouted the question over Will’s voice.

Ruthie didn’t want to think about an attacker wandering around outside or near the electricity panel. She didn’t want to think at all, so she focused on the discarded towel on the floor. That looked like Will’s handiwork. He lived in a perpetual state of emotional stagnation. A poster child for arrested development.

He was a grown man and could pick up his own wet towel. Being his fiancée was enough of a sacrifice. She refused to be his babysitter or his mother.

Since everyone in the room was staring at her, she flipped back to Cassie’s question. “Not great. Sierra slipped and landed in a puddle of blood out there and then fell apart. I don’t blame her. It was a miracle she stayed as calm as she did for as long as she did.”

“Wait a second.” Alex’s voice grew stronger. “How was there a puddle when it was raining outside? Shouldn’t the blood have washed away?”

Will shrugged. “It depends on where and when Jake was killed.”

Ruthie refused to dissect the questions and comment. Their recluse friend Jake being massacred only a few feet away while they’d said hello and drunk wine was bad enough.

“We’re done with that topic for now,” Cassie said.

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