As I sat that day listening to my doctor describe the journey that lay before me and the decisions I would have to make, I wanted nothing more than to backtrack to the happy, simple days I’d left behind. But that, unfortunately, wasn’t one of my choices. Neither was stopping in my tracks and doing nothing at all. There was only one option: choose a path, keep forging ahead, and do my best to never, ever second-guess the road not taken.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog, Pink Stinks

Chapter 15

Landry was planning to serve lunch—tea sandwiches and fruit salad—in the air-conditioned dining room. Behind locked doors.

The others overruled her, though. They’d prefer to be outside—in the “fresh air,” as Kay calls it, apparently having missed the memo that no such thing exists at high noon on a Deep South summer’s day. Not even here on the porch, where the ceiling fan does its best to diffuse the afternoon heat that swaddles like a wet towel, allowing not even a breath of breeze off the water to stir the live oak boughs that shade the yard.

Torpor has fallen over the world beyond the porch railing. In the rose garden, fat bumblebees barely seem capable of moving from blossom to blossom. Out on the water, a mere smattering of this morning’s fishing boats remain and there isn’t a kayaker in sight. It’s too hot for paddling. Or pedaling, though occasionally a pair of flushed-looking tourists will pass on bicycles that seem to move more languidly, even, than the bumblebees.

Sweat rolls down the back of Landry’s neck as she fills tall green glasses of sweet tea and decorates each with a sprig of fresh green mint. She sets the coordinating green pitcher down beside the vase of pale pink roses she carried out on a tray from the kitchen with a stack of china plates, linen place mats, and napkins.

“You don’t have to go to all this fuss,” Elena protested as Landry set the outside table as nicely as she’d have set the one in the dining room.

“I want to. Y’all are my guests.”

The well-bred belle in her won’t forget that, even now.

But that’s fine. All she has to do is get through one moment at a time. Not so difficult, really, now that she knows her kids will be safely out of the house—and harm’s way—for the remainder of the weekend.

That was her first instinct all along. She should have gone with it, instead of having to put a contingency plan into place when she found out that Jenna Coeur might be on her way here.

Her first phone call—after Bruce—was to Everly. She knew her friend would take both kids overnight, no questions asked.

But Everly didn’t pick up at home, and when she answered her cell sounding too groggy for eleven o’clock even on a Saturday morning, Landry belatedly remembered her friend had gone away for Father’s Day weekend, visiting her widowed dad who retired to Hawaii years ago.

“Is everything all right?” she asked Landry, reading the tension in her voice.

“Everything’s fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I just needed a quick favor, but it’s not a problem, I can ask someone else.”

Her mother, or Barbie June. Neither fell into the no-questions-asked category, though.

She had lunch with her mother two days ago, feeling as though she’d been neglecting her, and was grateful when Mom mentioned her busy weekend ahead, taking a senior bus trip to Mobile to see the Saturday matinee of a touring musical, with dinner afterward.

Ardelle Quackenbush is the kind of woman who would drop everything in a heartbeat to be there for her family; Landry knows she’d insist on missing the show just to be on standby for teenagers with weekend plans of their own. Nor does she want to inflict upon the kids her mother’s early bedtime and house cluttered with fragile antiques that must not be touched.

She correctly guessed that her cousin—also a well-bred belle—would graciously accept overnight guests in a heartbeat despite feeling neglected lately, as long as Landry framed the favor properly: “Sweetie, how would you like to put those two beautiful guest rooms of yours to good use tonight? We have company this weekend and the kids have to give up their beds, and of course they’d much rather sleep at Aunt Barbie June’s than share the pullout here at home.”

Next she texted the kids at work and told them both to call her during their breaks. Neither was thrilled to be shuttled off to Aunt Barbie June’s for the night but they grudgingly agreed.

Now only she is here to face whatever is going to happen next.

Hopefully nothing at all. Bruce is at the airport, waiting for the next flight from Atlanta. Waiting for Jenna Coeur.

If she’s on it.

Landry passes the platter of sandwiches, the bowl of fruit salad, and keeps the conversation going. She asks Elena about the last few days of school. Wants to—but doesn’t—ask Kay again about the woman she saw in the airport.

Wants to tell her to try calling Detective Burns yet again, even though she’s overheard Elena encouraging Kay to do that as well—twice—since they got back from the airport. The first time, as they headed upstairs to settle into their rooms, Kay replied that she’d wait another half hour before calling again; the second time, as they took their places at the lunch table, Kay told Elena she’d just left another message.

If she hadn’t spoken to Bruce already, Landry thought, she’d probably be leaving messages of her own for Detective Burns.

“Look, it’s not as urgent as you think,” he told her when she brought it up in a whispered phone call from the laundry room before lunch. “There’s not much she can do with the information except follow up on it the way she would any other potential Jenna Coeur sighting. She needs to know, but I can pretty much guarantee you that she’s not going to jump on the next flight to Alabama—especially since you said your friend isn’t even positive it was her.”

He’s right. They’re all preoccupied and jumpy.

“Hang in there. I’m at the airport and I’m not budging until that flight arrives from Atlanta. She won’t get past me. You can all relax.”

“I haven’t told them about you yet.”

“You might want to.”

“I will,” she promised, but has yet to do it. Maybe because a part of her still clings to a shred of suspicion about the others.

She forces herself to nibble a cucumber sandwich and tries to focus on what Elena is saying.

“ . . . and I don’t know, all I could think was, thank God he isn’t here. I’ll never have to see him again. Maybe it makes me an evil person, but . . .” She shrugs, stabs a grape with her fork, and pops it into her mouth.

Tony Kerwin, Landry realizes. That’s what she’s talking about: her relief that she didn’t have to face him at school this week.

It doesn’t make her an evil person.

But then a terrible thought occurs to Landry, and the tiny bite of sandwich lodges in her throat.

What if it hadn’t been a heart attack, after all?

What if Tony Kerwin had been murdered?

Thoughts racing, she excuses herself to go inside and get dessert ready. The others offer to help, but she waves them away. “I’ve got it. Just relax. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She hurries up the stairs, past the closed bedroom doors. She put Elena in Tucker’s room and Kay in Addison’s.

“I thought your kids were going to be home tonight,” Elena protested when she showed them upstairs.

“Change of plans.”

“That’s too bad. I was hoping to meet them.”

What if Elena—and not Jaycee, or Jenna Coeur—is the person she should have been worried about all along?

In the master bedroom, she closes and then—after a moment’s hesitation—locks the door. She grabs her laptop from the desk and sits on the edge of the bed, opening a Google search.

Déjà vu.

She did this when Meredith died, trying to figure out what had happened to her— though not as frantically.