Page 84 of Tell Me (Savannah 3)

“That was a long time ago. I don’t think it was just one boy, and I didn’t pay much attention anyway, y’know. Oh, but there was something. The one of them that had been with her in high school? That would be Flint Beauregard.”

“Beauregard. Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. The boys were all goin’ on about it. And then he ends up bein’ the detective on the case.”

A cold feeling stole through Nikki. “Anyone else besides Beauregard?”

“Well, they were all braggin’ about her. That’s the way they were. Flint, though . . . they all knew about him.”

“Do you have their numbers? Your brothers?”

“Oh, no. The boys are gone now. Passed on a few years back, within six months of each other. Frank had a heart attack while he was workin’, and cancer got Jeb.”

“I’m sorry,” Nikki said.

“That’s just the way of it sometimes.”

A few minutes later, Nikki had hung up, lost in thought. She felt hollow inside. It couldn’t be, could it? That Flint Beauregard had fathered Amity O’Henry? Had he known? Why, then, would he pursue Blondell so vigorously, and why hadn’t Blondell cried foul, whatever the case?

No, she was missing something. An important piece. She thought of the girl she’d befriended. Amity had taken after her mother in so many ways, physically as well as in her attitude toward men. But Flint Beauregard? Maybe . . .

Amity, the girl everyone knew of, but no one really knew. “What happened to you?” Nikki wondered aloud.

“Tell me more about the lake,” Amity had pleaded once when they’d been hanging out that summer, just listening to CDs in Nikki’s room on one of the rare times Amity had come over. “Do you swim in it?” She was sitting on the bench at the vanity Nikki’s mother had insisted she needed, while Nikki was stretched out on her bed. The sun had been streaming through the windows, some Michael Jackson song playing, Amity picking up bottles of nail polish and reading the labels as they talked.

“We used to go there a lot when I was a kid, and yeah, I swam in it,” Nikki had admitted.

“It must’ve been fun.” She’d seemed sad for a second, as if reflecting on her own home life and making comparisons. For the first time, Nikki had actually been embarrassed about her bedroom, with its designer quilt and coordinating curtains.

“It was.”

“With your cousins. Hollis and Elton?”

“Sometimes. Mom and Hollis’s mom don’t really get along.”

“Why not?”

Nikki had shrugged. “They just don’t like each other. Hollis seems to think it has to do with some big secret, but then Hollis is always thinking there’s a major scandal somewhere.”

“Is there?” Amity had asked quietly, as she stared into the mirror, her gaze finding Nikki’s in its reflection. “A scandal.”

“I don’t know, but Hollis sure thinks so. She thinks her mother is a big fake or something.”

“Maybe she is.”

“I guess.” Hollis had always been making up stories, creating drama, believing the worst about anyone, including Amity, though Nikki hadn’t mentioned that. Instead, she’d picked up her old stuffed elephant, which at the time had been fifteen years old and missing an eye.

“Can we go there sometime?” Amity had asked, her eyes shining with anticipation. “To the cabin?”

Nikki had shrugged. “It’s pretty rustic. I never really liked it, and most of the time we went, my sister and brothers and me, it was with Hollis and Elton and their parents. But that was a long time ago. No one goes up there much anymore.”

“We should go!” Amity had said. She pulled her hair away from her face in both hands and turned her head, looking this way and that, eyeing her reflection in the mirrors. “I mean it. Let’s go there.”

“Sure, I guess.”

Letting her hair down, Amity had twisted on the bench. “It could be fun,” she said, never mentioning the two bottles of nail polish she’d hidden in her hand and, when she’d thought Nikki wouldn’t notice, had tucked into the pocket of her jeans, folding her T-shirt over the bulge.

Nikki had never mentioned the theft to anyone.

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