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Games We Play (Thistle Cove 2)

Page 14

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I’m about to get out of bed when I hear a second buzz vibrate from the drawer of my nightstand. I open the drawer and pull out Rose’s old iPod. I’d kept it, along with the SugarBabies app and profile I created. I knew there was more to Rose’s disappearance and presumed death than what people were saying, and I felt certain this dating app for sugar daddies was part of it.

I’d told the police about it, but once Rose’s death was ruled a suicide, they seemed happy to close her case for good. I was just too scared to look further into the relationships Rose had developed on SugarBabies, particularly the one with a man named BD. But besides that, I consider guiltily, I’d been busy with my own life—a post-Rose life, that surprisingly, opened a lot of previously closed doors for me. I stare down at the iPod, feeling not just the weight of the device, but the shame for ignoring finding out the truth about Rose and seeking my own happiness instead.

I’d barely touched the iPod in the last two weeks, too busy, too distracted, too willfully avoidant of the long stream of waiting notifications for Eden Dollanganger, the name I’d used, a play on the title of a book Rose and I loved when we were younger.

A twist of nerves flutter in my stomach, knowing this is a tricky rabbit hole. Rose and I had a lo

t of things in common before she ditched me, and there’s a small part of me, the one that can’t let this go, that is scared I’d start down this path and never turn back. But that same connection makes me want to know the truth. Did a sugar daddy have something to do with what happened to Rose? Shouldn’t I find out more?

I stare down at the phone. Twenty-five notifications. Twenty-five old guys wanting to, potentially, make an arrangement with a young woman exchanging support, in the form of housing, allowance, support, in return for companionship, loyalty, and sex.

One of these guys could know something about Rose.

None of these guys can bring her back.

I place the phone back in the drawer and shut it, shut out the need to dig around in something so recently settled. Rose is gone, and whatever trouble she was in has nothing to do with my life going forward.

That’s what I tell myself, but even as I walk away down to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, I don’t fully understand that secrets don’t like to stay buried in Thistle Cove.

I push myself through the next two chapters of Moby Dick, jotting down notes for the summary I have to turn in on Monday. It’s only when I’m done that I pull out the envelope of photographs Shannon gave me at the game.

I start sorting through the thick stack of black and white photos, most candids from around campus or at school events. The pictures are weird because I recognize almost everything in them: the windows on the back hall by the Home Ec room, the school crest on the gym wall; the painted Viking by the main entrance, the bonfire, floats, homecoming dance. The only difference is that I don’t recognize the faces. Well, that’s not entirely true. On a few, I catch a glimpse of someone I think I know. If I had to guess, it’s a parent or someone I know from around town.

“Holy cow,” I mutter to myself, when I do recognize one of Mrs. Gimple, twenty years younger, obviously right out of college. Her hair is flipped back in Farrah Fawcett wings. I flip the photo over, and it has her name and the date, 1991.

There’s one other that catches my eye. A photo of a group of football players, dressed in game day jerseys, sitting out on the picnic tables in front of the school. It’s a group of six, and I only recognize three of them: Brice Waller, Ezra Baxter, a dead ringer for his son, and Jason Chandler. I flip the picture over and see their names, along with Richard Remmington, Miles Keller, and Joel Ashby, 1991. The year they won the state championship.

The same year Jaqueline Cates went missing and was found dead on the water's edge, strangled.

My mind spins, and I pick up my phone.

“Hey,” I say, “want to go to breakfast?”

“It’s after noon,” Ozzy says, and from the groggy sound of his voice, he just woke up anyway. “Isn’t it a little late for breakfast?”

“Do you want to go or not?”

He laughs, and I imagine his smile. “Yeah, pick me up in fifteen?”

It takes me twenty, but the good thing about a late breakfast is that you miss the Saturday rush at the Thistle Cove café, the town’s best place for bacon and pancakes.

Once we’re seated and have steaming cups of coffee in front of us, I say, “I’ve been doing a little investigating into the class of 1991.”

Ozzy pours sugar in his coffee. “You do know we work on the yearbook, not the newspaper, right?”

I kick him gently on the shin under the table. “I can’t help it if my yearbook duties have led me to other, more interesting details about the alumni of Thistle Cove.”

“Okay,” he says, “tell me what you know.”

Our waitress comes over and brings us stacks of buttery pancakes and a plate of bacon for us to share.

“Well, I don’t know much,” I say, taking the syrup from him and pouring it over my pancakes. When they’re good and soaked, I reach in my bag and pull out the photo of the football players. “Don’t you think that it’s really weird that three people we know were at the high school the year that Jacqueline died.”

He studies the photo. “Thistle Cove is a small town. A lot of people grew up here and still live in town. Half our classmates had parents that went to the school.”

“But how many are still friends, and thirty years later one of their daughters goes missing?”

“Still not that crazy for this place.”



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