Chasing Ashes by Joanne McLaughlin

Author:Joanne McLaughlin [McLaughlin, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Detective, Crime
Published: 2023-11-01T06:00:00+00:00

My laptop cast its pale light on the yearbook photo. The Informed Student staffers mostly smiled in the glow. A plastic cup appeared next to my right hand. I smelled bourbon, already a little diluted as the ice cubes stacked to the cup’s rim had begun to melt.

“Except for Kate, you know what became of every person in that picture. You’ve worked with them, or exchanged Christmas cards with them, or gone to their weddings and their kids’ christenings for the last twenty-four years.” Nick sipped from an identical cup, standard U.S. motor-lodge issue. Alcohol mellowed his voice to warm, and he spoke much too close to my right ear.

I hoped the liquor would silence the voice in my head. “Why did Justin ask about Kate?”

“He didn’t, he asked about the girl who was on the phone. Who was she talking to anyway?”

I dipped my nose into the cup, breathed in some of the bourbon’s fire. “She was looking at an F, hoping for an incomplete, in a computer programming class and was running out of time to make up the work. Negotiations with the teacher were not going well.”

“She didn’t do the assignments?”

“Too much was going on, and that class was just one more thing. Jason Goldstein was dead; the threatening letters kept coming; Jim Poole committed suicide and she was trying to keep Barry from falling apart. I don’t know how she managed to get him into the newspaper office that day, let alone into that picture.”

Nick’s breath brushed my neck as he leaned closer to the photo. “Twirl too many plates for too long and a few are bound to fall. Sometimes, you just can’t will things to work out,” he said, then straightened.

So true, as we both were aware.

“What time are we leaving tomorrow? How late can we push it?”

Nick put his empty cup next to mine, put his hands on my shoulders and massaged them. “Gotta be on the road early you said, so you can get ready for some book signing.”

Crap, he was right, but I needed to do this more. “I have to see Christine Anderson. But I won’t be able to get into the hospital before eight probably.”

Thumbs dug into me. “You want to tell me why you want to see Miss Chris?”

“I want to show her this picture and see how she reacts, if she reacts. Maybe she was at the university when I was. Maybe she met Aidan Anderson there and Justin was conceived there.”

Nick applied several knuckles’ worth of pressure to the knot at the top of my left shoulder blade, hard meeting hard. Pain made the room spin. I closed my eyes and saw Christine in her chair, one-syllable riddles buzzing from her computer.

“University registration records for 1988 to 1992 showed no Christine Lawrence and no Aidan Anderson,” he said. “Zilch.”

I leaned into his hands. “Maybe they weren’t fulltime students. Maybe they were working to scrape up enough tuition money. Does it matter? They met, and Christine got pregnant and Aidan was killed on some road.

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