I winced. “Yeah, I’ve thought about the Ridge.” Hadn’t been back there since that day. Of course wildflowers would be there, the one place I didn’t want to look. But it turned out, I might not have had the choice. “Thanks. I’ll hike up there tomorrow and see it.”
“Great, and lemme know how it goes?”
“Sure thing. You’re a lifesaver.”
“Shucks!”
I grabbed one of the mints from the bowl and began to head up the stairs when my name caught my ears—a bare whisper, but there. From the living room. The women in the book club were talking about me now, and if who they had been in high school was any indication, it wasn’t anything good. My shoulders tensed.
Dana mouthed that I didn’t have to go, but I did. I’d spent ten years running from these assholes, and I was sick and damn tired of it.
Ben warned as I passed, “Don’t pick a fight.”
Oh, I wasn’t.
Heather quickly righted herself in the chair with an air of innocence. She’d been bent in toward some of the other women, whispering over their bookmarked novels. I wondered if they’d even read it, or if buying romance novels to never read and gossip over them was the newest trend. Heather looked like I remembered her, pretty brown hair and pretty brown eyes and a pretty smile over soft pink lips. She wore a sleek black skirt and a paisley-printed blouse. I remembered Dad once telling me that Karen had hired her as a clerk at her legal firm in town.
She smiled with strikingly white teeth. “Would you care to join us? We’re big fans of Ann Nichols.”
I bet she was.
I swallowed the rebuke bubbling up in my throat and sat down on the fainting couch beside her. “I love Midnight Matinee.”
“Nichols hasn’t written a bad book yet,” said one of the other book club attendees happily. “I devour all of them the second they come out.”
“I hear there’s a new one this fall,” said another woman. She was older, with curly gray hair and in a leopard-print sweater. “Haven’t heard anything about it yet, though.”
I could feel Ben staring at the back of my head at that comment.
Heather asked me with a fixed smile, “What was that one book you wrote, Florence? We’d love to read it for our book club next month.”
I returned the smile, and it was a real one. “Seaburn said you already read it when it came out.”
“Oh? Must’ve forgotten . . .”
I was sure she hadn’t. I took a deep breath. Wrestled my emotions under control. I was an adult, and I wasn’t running anymore. “I know you don’t like me, Heather, and I know it was you who spread those rumors about me in high school—that I was crazy or a devil worshipper or whatever.”
She went rigid and darted her gaze around the rest of the book club. A few of them went to high school with us. They knew. The others had a passing, vague recollection of what happened. It was a small town, after all. “It was hardly just me. It was Bradley and TJ and—”
“I forgive you.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“And I forgive me, too,” I went on. “I was so wrapped up in what everyone else thought of me I didn’t recognize that I actually did something good.”
“You found a body, Florence,” she said dismissively, rolling her eyes. “It wasn’t like you solved the case of what’s his name—”
“Harry. His name was Harry O’Neal.” My mouth flattened into a thin line. “He was in our grade. He sat right behind you in math.”
She narrowed her eyes. Did she remember? Probably not. She probably hadn’t thought about the boy murdered on the Ridge in fifteen years.