River Road(71)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

Lucy sat quietly for a time. She was overlooking something important. She was sure of it.

She gave up, hoisted the tote and walked back to the inn. She went upstairs to her room and took a few minutes to refresh herself in the bathroom. When she looked at her image in the mirror she thought about the night of the party. It had been thirteen years, but doing the Brinker tree had brought back memories.

Maybe she had been asking the wrong questions. She and Teresa had been looking at those who had been in Brinker’s inner circle. Maybe she should be looking at the wannabes.

She was not the only outsider who had been at the ranch on the night of Brinker’s last party. There had been a lot of other kids hanging around the fringes, moths drawn to the flame.

Mason said it sometimes helped to revisit the scene of the crime.

She grabbed her tote and went back downstairs. Outside, in the parking lot, she got into her car and drove the short distance to Harper Ranch Park.

As usual, there were a number of people walking dogs, jogging and sunbathing in the main section of the park. She found a parking place close to the secluded area near the river where Brinker had staged his parties. She took the charts out of her tote and studied them, one by one, trying to remember who had been where the night of the party.

Teresa’s words came back to her. “. . . Kelly wasn’t much good at chemistry.”

The name in one of the boxes that was very distant from Brinker’s box suddenly stood out as if it had been written in neon. She put the paper down on a nearby picnic table and circled the name twice.

It was you, she thought. You were there all the time.

She hurried back to the parking lot, used her key fob to unlock her car and slipped into the front seat. She left the car door ajar to allow in the slight breeze while she took out her phone. She found Mason’s name on her contacts list.

The passenger-side door opened abruptly. Beth Crosby slid into the seat. She had a gun in her hand.

“Give me the phone,” Beth said.

Lucy handed her the phone. Beth tossed it out the window.

“Now we’re going to take a scenic drive along River Road,” Beth said. “Close the door.”

Lucy realized she was still holding the sheet of paper that contained the Brinker cult family tree. When she turned to pull the car door closed she let the paper slip from her hand. It landed on the ground and fluttered a little. It would no doubt blow away, she thought. But at that moment she could not think of anything else to do.

“Drive,” Beth ordered.

46

You figured it out, didn’t you?” Beth said.

“That you were the one who brewed up the hallucinogens for Brinker all those years ago?” Lucy asked. “Yes. You’re the one person on the Brinker family tree who had the skill. You were a star in science class back in high school. That year you were studying for your degree in wine-making at the local community college. Probably taking a lot of chemistry classes.”

“I was the science geek back in high school. I loved chemistry. Started playing around with hallucinogens in my senior year.” Beth frowned. “What did you mean by a Brinker family tree? Brinker didn’t have any family except his father.”

“I did a chart showing the names of all of the people who hung around Brinker thirteen years ago. It came out looking a lot like a family tree.”

“So that was what you were doing with Teresa this afternoon. It made me nervous watching you two together. But when Teresa went back to her shop a few minutes ago, she saw me on the street and said hi as if nothing was wrong, so I thought maybe everything was okay. When I saw you come out of the inn, get into your car and drive toward this section of the park, though, I got a bad feeling.”

“I didn’t put it together until I came here and started asking the right questions. Tell me, how in the world did you end up as Brinker’s drug supplier? You didn’t move in his circles.”

“Nolan Kelly was the one who approached me,” Beth said. “We went to school together. He knew I could make some very special stuff, and he wanted to impress Brinker.”

“How much did Brinker pay you?”

“Nothing.”

“You just gave him the drugs? Why would you do that? Wait, don’t tell me. You thought you were in love with him, didn’t you? You wanted to make Brinker pay attention to you.”

“Shut up,” Beth hissed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Brinker needed me. It was my drugs that made him a rock star here in Summer River that year. And it was my drugs that made it possible for him to make those videos of those whores.”

“Please don’t tell me that you were the one who filmed the rapes. That would be just too awful.”

“They deserved it, all of them,” Beth said. “They were the kind of A-list girls who made fun of girls like me.”

“You were sure Brinker would fall in love with you once he understood how much he needed you.”

“He would have realized he loved me if your aunt hadn’t murdered him,” Beth said, very fierce now. “I knew when he disappeared that something terrible had happened. He came to see me after that last party, you know.”

“What did he want?”

“Drugs. But he said he wanted me to make something extra-special. He wanted something stronger, something that would be lethal. He went on and on about how he was going to kill everyone connected to Mason Fletcher. I got scared.”

“Because you knew that if a number of people in a small town like Summer River started to die from an overdose of illicit drugs, there would be an investigation and sooner or later the trail would lead straight back to you.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” Beth said. Her tone slipped from fierce to anxious in the blink of an eye as if she was reliving the emotions she had experienced at the time. “I was afraid that if I didn’t give him the drugs he wouldn’t want me anymore.”

“He never did want you. He just used you.”

“Stop saying that. You don’t know how it was between us.”

“Yeah, right. So what did you tell him the last time you saw him?”

“I told him it would take me a while to come up with the kind of heavy drug that he wanted. The truth is, I thought that once he calmed down he would realize that killing off everyone around Mason was maybe not the smartest move in the playbook.”

“Did he calm down?”

“No,” Beth admitted. “He just got angrier. Called me all sorts of names and . . . and he hit me. He said he couldn’t be bothered to screw an ugly bitch like me, and then he left. I never saw him again. The next day it was all over town that he had left Summer River. Three days later, the rumors that he had been killed in a drug deal gone bad started to circulate.”