Thicker Than Water. Maggie Shayne

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      “Mom, you can’t!”

      She paused in dialing, the phone in her hand. “Dawnie, how am I going to feel if I go in to work tomorrow and someone hands me some copy about a carload of Fayetteville-Manlius students who crashed on their way home from a party? You said yourself they brought beer. Did they have a designated driver?”

      Dawn swallowed the lie that leaped to her throat, lowered her head, shook it slowly. “No. They were all drinking.”

      “Then may be a patrol car will get there before they leave, and maybe they’ll get home alive tonight.” She finished dialing.

      Dawn sighed hard enough to make her mother fully aware of her feelings about this, then stalked through to the stairs and up them.

      “We’re not finished here, Dawn. You’re grounded. Two weeks. No arguments.”

      “Whatever,” Dawn muttered. God, everyone was going to know who had ratted them out. She and Kayla were the only two who’d left the party early. She closed her bedroom door with a bang and flopped facefirst onto her bed. She would be the most hated junior in Cazenovia High School tomorrow.

      It wasn’t fair. Her mom was keeping secrets, too. Big ones. But it was okay for her to sneak around and hide things. Just not for Dawn. It was such a double standard.

      She punched her pillow, buried her face in it and wished for a solution.

      A pebble hit her window. Then another. She scrambled off the bed, yanked the curtains wide and stared through the open window. Kayla stood on the back lawn, in the spill of light from her bedroom. “I thought you went home.”

      Kayla rubbed her arms, glanced behind her. “Something creeped me out. You get in trouble?”

      “Yeah, some.”

      “Grounded?”

      “Two weeks.”

      “Bummer.”

      The bushes that formed the boundary between the neat back lawn and the untamed field that sloped downhill to the lake shore moved, as if something were creeping through them. Dawn frowned, and Kayla turned her head quickly. There was nothing there. Just the wind, Dawn thought. “My mom’s on the phone, narc-ing out the party.”

      Kayla shivered. “I should go back down to the landing and tell everyone before I head home.”

      “I wouldn’t. She might just call your mom next. I didn’t say your name, but she’s not stupid.”

      Again the bushes moved. This time Dawn swore she saw a shape, a dark shadow, moving with them. Someone was out there, watching.

      “Jesus, Kayla, get in here!”

      Kayla moved a few steps closer to the house. “I gotta get home. My parents will kill me if they go to check my room and find me gone.”

      The shadow moved again, looking so much like a dark, menacing human shape this time that Dawn opened her mouth to scream.

      But before the sound escaped, there was a sudden, brighter pool of light flooding the back lawn, and the shadow vanished in its glow. A second later, Dawn realized the light was coming from her own house’s open back door when she heard her mother say, “You might as well come on in, Kayla.”

      Kayla grimaced but hurried inside, seeming almost as relieved as she was upset at being caught. Dawn went downstairs to do damage control, telling herself all the way that she probably hadn’t seen a damn thing, other than maybe a stray deer or a nightbird. Her mother’s paranoid tendencies were finally starting to rub off on her.

      

      Every person in the newsroom looked up when Julie burst in the next morning, ten minutes late.

      Bryan, her assistant, who’d been on her heels from the front entrance all the way to the newsroom, talking all the way, finally managed to thrust the cup of coffee he was carrying into her hands.

      “Rough night?” the news director, Allan Westcott asked.

      “No sleep. Did you get my fax?”

      “Yeah. It came in at 5:00 a.m.” Westcott shuffled the pages in front of him. “Your report says the body was discovered around midnight?”

      She nodded.

      “So why the delay?”

      She had to say something, and admitting that she’d been out rifling through the dead man’s apartment in the wee hours was out of the question, nor were Dawn’s antics any of the man’s business. By the time she’d phoned the police about the party, called Kayla’s parents, lectured the girls while awaiting Mr. and Mrs. Matthewses’ arrival, seen Kayla safely off, double-checked the locks and gotten Dawn back into bed, it had been four-thirty. She’d barely had time to type up the details, reread them to be sure she hadn’t included anything she wasn’t supposed to know and fax the report to the station.

      There’d been no point in trying to sleep by then.

      “Julie?”

      She blinked and sipped her coffee. Perfect, just enough cream and sugar. Bryan was learning fast. “Yes,” she finally answered. “Rough night. Long, rough, sleepless night. Have the police released the identity of the victim yet?” She took another sip, trying to hide her nerves as she hoped the cops hadn’t mentioned her missing car keys or her behavior at the crime scene to her boss.

      “No. We’ve been checking every half hour. I, uh, I understand Sean MacKenzie was on the scene with you last night.”

      Julie felt her eyes widen but hid her surprise behind a bright smile. “Which makes it even more vital that we stay on this. I couldn’t bear to have that snake in the grass scoop me.”

      Westcott cleared his throat and glanced at the producer, who was chewing her lower lip. Other glances were being exchanged around the table.

      “What?” Julie asked, looking from one face to the next. “What’s going on?”

      No one looked her in the eye, until Allan shrugged and cleared his throat. “Sit down, Julie. Drink your coffee.”

      Frowning, suddenly very worried, she sat. There was a folder in front of her customary chair. She pretended to look through it, while knowing, deep in her gut, that she was about to be fired. They knew about her walking into that crime scene last night. The cops had told—or more likely that rat bastard Sean MacKenzie…

      …whose face was smiling up at her from an eight-by-ten glossy. It sat inside the folder, opposite his professional bio.

      Lifting her head slowly, she speared Allan Westcott with a look that should have set his hair on fire. “You didn’t—you wouldn’t…”

      The door opened, and a man walked in. She felt him before she even turned to look at him, standing there, looking fresh and handsome and smug. “Hope I’m not so late I get fired on my first day,” he said. Then he met her eyes. “Morning, partner.”

      She СКАЧАТЬ