Darkest Dawn (9 page)

I shook my head.

“Do you still have the room key?”

I nodded. Words flitted through my head but I couldn’t reach out and grab any of them through the fog. I imagined the police banging on the door any minute and dragging me out of there.

“Is the room booked in your name?” Tucker asked.

“No,” I choked on the syllable. “I said my name was Jennifer. Since I paid cash the front desk guy didn’t need an ID from me.”

“Maybe it was a suicide. They wouldn’t need to question anyone if that was the case.” Bri got up from the couch and Tucker’s eyes burned the back of her head. He didn’t get up. Bri left the room.

The sound of water running and the clanging of dishes broke the awkward silence.

Tucker slid down on the couch like a snake in grass. “Bri is too nice to ask. But I’m not. Do you swear you know nothing about what happened?”

I didn’t hesitate. “I swear.” I grabbed the note from my pocket and handed it to him. I waited about a minute until he finished. “I only came here about my mom.”

His eyes narrowed briefly before his expression softened. “All right then. What’s next on your plan?”

The anxiety from this morning flooded me. I wrung my hands in my lap. I didn’t have a lot of time. I pushed the body out of my mind and focused on what I’d need to do next. “The motel was the only place other than the school mentioned in the note. Since he or she didn’t meet me there, maybe they would leave something at the motel?”

Tucker lowered his chin, looking down at me. “The motel that the police are investigating?”

I shrugged. “Do you have a better idea?”

“It’s Kael.” Bri’s pale lips turned downward in a grimace.

“What?” Tucker sat up straighter.

Bri sat between us, holding her phone in her hands. “I thought the pictures were too blurry—”

Her phone screen showed the guy sneaking around the back of the motel. From that distance, he could have been anyone. “Who’s Kael?”

“Some guy,” she said.

Tucker let out a snort. “A creepy guy.”

Bri dropped her phone into her lap. “He’s not creepy.”

I held my hands up. “Regardless! How do you know it’s him?”

She moved her fingers around the screen, zooming in on the corner of the motel. A motorcycle leaned against the brick building. “That’s his bike.”

Tucker’s mouth opened and closed with no words escaping.

Bri swiped a stray chunk of hair from her cheek. “Why was he there?”

A niggling sensation tugged at the back of my mind. The leather jacket the guy wore reminded me of the guy I’d met in the hallway at the school. “Do you have a picture of him?”

Bri’s nose wrinkled before she looked back at her phone. She opened up a browser and typed the name Kael Theron. She clicked on the images tab and a grainy newspaper article from a couple of years ago came up.

I took the phone from her to properly identify the person. Even though the picture was a few years old, it was definitely that guy.

“Umm, care to explain?” Tucker interjected.

I recounted my introduction to Kael earlier that day. “I don’t know what he planned to do if he caught me.”

Bri took her phone back. Her eyebrows furrowed. “If I didn’t know about you, how would he?”

I chewed on my lip. Everyone else I’d met had mistaken me for Bri. How did Kael know what no one else did? “He knew I wasn’t you.”

Tucker clicked his tongue. “You know I’ve always said that guy was bad news.”

“How so?” I asked.

Bri rolled her eyes. “Don’t get him started.”

Tucker scoffed. “I know not all the rumors are true. But do you know where he went all those years ago?”

Bri rose from the couch and headed toward the kitchen. “It’s none of my business. Or yours for that matter.”

Tucker turned to me when Bri left the room. “Kael’s dad used to be mayor of Willows Lake, for like ten years. There was a scandal with him and some woman, then his wife took Kael away. After that he holed himself away for years.” Tucker pointed at the kitchen. “They live right on Willows Lake less than a mile from here.”

The thought that Kael was so close to where I was elicited a violent shiver down my spine. “So the dad sounds like a creep, but what’s wrong with Kael?”

“His mom died shortly after she and Kael left. Then he went to live with his uncle in some backwoods down in the South.”

“Why didn’t he come back here to live with his dad?”

“Mr. Theron lost it after his wife left. He would wander through town drunk until he finally holed himself up in the mansion for good. Kael came back here a few years ago and became as elusive as his dad. I heard he beat some guy half to death in a bar. And his daddy’s money got all the charges dropped. I bet his punishment was to come home and work off his debt.”

For a brief moment I felt bad for the guy. I’d been the focus of gossip in every school I’d been to. The “new girl” status never went away, and when the number of schools stacked up behind me, kids assumed I had been kicked out for drug-related offenses. I’d only tried to rebuff the rumors once or twice before I’d embraced the persona. It made leaving that much easier.

Bri came into the room. “These dishes aren’t going to clean themselves.” She gave Tucker a pointed glance. I wondered how much she’d heard him saying. And I wondered why she chose to defend this mysterious guy. Since I had no other options, he moved to the top of my list of suspects for who had brought me to town.

***

Bri put away the last of the dishes, closing the dishwasher with her foot. “What do you do for fun?”

The question caught me off guard. “For fun?” I crossed my arms and leaned against the counter. “I like to read. And movies.” Two things I could always count on since we moved so much.

Tucker sat on the counter, trolling through the cabinets for snacks. “What do you read?”

“Non-fiction, fiction. Pretty much anything I can get my hands on. True crime especially.”

Tucker stopped munching on the cookies he found. Bri turned to me.

“What?”

She opened her mouth and quickly closed it.

Tucker indicated in Bri’s direction. “She’s obsessed with crime shows.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really?” I usually undersold how interested I was in true crime books. Most people already thought it was weird that I moved around a lot. Whenever I told them I liked reading about murders and missing people they tended to shut me out right then and there.

Bri looked at her hands. “I’m not obsessed.”

Tucker rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay. Are you sure you’re not twins?”

Bri gave him a look. “Not twins.”

I glanced at Bri. “Different birthdays, remember?”

He blew a raspberry. “Have you ever seen your birth certificates?”

Bri paused at his remark and flicked a glance at me.

Tucker looked between us. “I was joking.”

“Did you grow up in Willows Lake?”

Bri nodded. “Yeah, why?”

Tucker’s question piqued my interest to find out more. And to make sure—one hundred percent—we weren’t twins. “And you never knew your father?”

Bri’s nostrils flared. “No.”

Tucker cleared his throat.

I pressed on before losing my nerve. “And she never told you who he was?”

She licked her lips. “No and I don’t care to know who he is. He left my mom
pregnant
—” she accentuated the word “—and alone months before I was born. So if you’re suggesting that my mom—or yours for that matter—had twin girls and separated them, I think you’d be reaching to make that theory plausible.” Her hands were in fists at her sides.

I glanced at Tucker and he didn’t meet my gaze. Guilt flooded through me. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” I searched through the photos on my phone, bringing up one of my mom. I knew I was playing a dangerous game by showing her the photo. The prospect of sleeping outside even crossed my mind. If it were me, I would want to know the truth. I held it between us.

Tucker slid off the counter and peered over Bri’s shoulder.

“That’s my mom.” I’d looked at the picture thousands of times since she died. I’d even had an anxiety attack when I thought I’d lost my phone one night. The photo had been one that my now deceased grandmother let me take a picture of after the funeral. Only a few years later her house burned to the ground with her inside.

Even though the phone faced away from me I could see her face, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. Her two-toned eyes were brilliant against the lakeside background. She could have been my older sister by how similar we looked.

Bri took a shuddering breath and walked away from the phone.

Tucker took it from my hands and pulled it close to his face. “Holy cow.”

Bri lifted her own phone to her ear, her back to us. After a few seconds she spoke. “Mom, please call me back when you get this. It’s important.”

Tucker handed my phone back. “Now what do we do?”

Bri rested her chin against her shoulder, still not meeting my eyes. “Now we wait.”

***

I flew swiftly through my dreams. At one point I ended up in a mirrored room. Instead of just Bri and me, there were hundreds of us all around. A dark figure appeared. I tried to warn the others yet no sound came out of my mouth. I bounced to the next dream as the dark figure sliced through the room, taking all of them down. The dark figure’s face was revealed as I fell from the dream and it was none other than Kael’s, with an angry glower.

A presence hovering over me rocketed me from my dreams. Instinctively, I reached up and connected with something smooth and hard.

“Whoa!” Tucker stumbled away from the couch.

Bri appeared in the doorway holding a spatula. “I told you not to wake her.”

I sat up quickly, taking a breath to calm my racing heart. “Waking me up is fine. Hovering over me like a creep is going to get you punched.”

Tucker blew a raspberry. “Sue me for being curious.” He turned to Bri. “She even makes the same sleep faces you do.”

Bri made a face. “I don’t make faces when I sleep.”

I got up from the couch. “Neither do I.”

Tucker rolled his eyes. “Yes you do. You both do.”

“Anyway …” Bri left the room.

We’d gone to bed without hearing from Abbey. I didn’t think I needed to apologize for stating the obvious. Bri wasn’t the same after seeing the picture of my mom.

Tucker and I followed her into the kitchen.

“I hope you like pancakes,” Bri said.

My stomach responded for me with a loud growl. I’d only eaten half my meal last night. “Who doesn’t?”

Bri smiled and pointed the top of the spatula at Tucker.

I glanced his way. He was making a face as if she were cooking up a pan of insects. “Coffee is the only breakfast anyone needs.” He punctuated his point by taking a gulp from his mug. His mouth tightened and his eyes watered.

“I bet that didn’t feel good.” Bri flipped a pancake the size of the pan.

“Did you and Jake talk?” Tucker asked.

My ears perked up and my skin flamed at the mention of his name. I cut into the pancake and pretended to be oblivious.

Bri grinned. “Not officially.” She slid the pancake onto a plate before continuing. “I assume he told you what he wanted to tell me?”

“We don’t gossip like you girls do.” Tucker paused. “Well, not like you and I do. It’s obvious though. Your relationship has been changing for months. And with the dance coming up it seemed the perfect time to step out of the friend zone.”

I had no doubt that Jake intended to kiss Bri the other night. Hearing it was another story, especially now that I knew her. It would break her heart if she found out. Heat flushed my cheeks and I could see Bri’s were rosy too, for a totally different reason.

Bri sat in the chair across from me. “You okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m thinking about what to do next.”

Bri crinkled her nose. “You have no way to contact the person who sent for you?”

I sighed. “If I had that information I would have done it already.” It came out harsher than I intended but I hated wasting more time on this.

“What about talking to the police?” Tucker suggested. “I’m sure they have a file from the accident. Maybe whoever contacted you accessed the file and found out something you might not have known.”

“And how would I get them to talk to me?”

Tucker pursed his lips. “It’s a good thing Brianna here is such a sweet girl around this place.”

Bri preened. “Jake’s sister works at dispatch.”

“What about the dead body at the motel?”

Tucker put his mug down on the counter. “I guarantee the dead guy is the only case they have now. If they thought you were a lead they would have showed up here by now, mistaking you for Bri.”

“We both can’t show up there.” And like hell was I going anywhere else in the godforsaken town on my own.

Bri pointed her fork at the ceiling. “I have an idea. Why don’t you and Tucker go down there and see if you can find anything? I’ll go to the library.”

“The library?” I asked.

“Yes. The school system has access to the state’s newspaper registry. I’m sure I can get information on the accident from those clippings. We can meet back here and see if we can figure out this mystery on our own.”

I spoke slowly, feeling the need to ground myself in her plan. “You want me to go to a police station and pretend to be you?”

Bri shrugged. “Tucker will be with you so he can do most of the talking.”

“What would make them want to help me, or you, out?”

“We can say its research for a school paper,” Tucker suggested.

The thought of letting Bri out of my sight made my stomach twist. She had a point. If I was going to solve this mystery soon, splitting up would get the job done quicker.

Bri grabbed my hand and led me from the room. “Let’s get you into some of my clothes.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bri

Bri’s hands gripped the wheel of Tucker’s truck as she squinted through the pouring rain and high-velocity windshield wipers. She couldn’t remember the last time it had rained so hard in Willows Lake. A sense of foreboding came over her as she made her way down the main road of town toward the school. Tucker and Sloane were going to meet her in a few hours at the condo and hopefully figure this whole thing out. She knew she and Sloane were delaying the inevitable question of why they looked alike. Finding any information about Sloane’s mom, Cara, might bring them to that conclusion while figuring out what really happened to her.