Page 25 of Paranoid

By Mercedes Pope

“What?” Rachel’s heart nearly stopped; she set the cup down with trembling hands and coffee sloshed onto the mail scattered over the tabletop. She didn’t care, barely noticed. She focused on the two photographs accompanying the text. The head shot was one of Luke’s senior pictures, many of which still graced her mother’s mantel. The second was a damning image snapped by a photographer that night that showed Ned helping Rachel into the back of a cruiser. Her face was turned, in profile, horror evident on her features, while her father was solemn beside her, holding the door open, both of them oddly illuminated by the lights from the police vehicles.

“Oh, God. No.” She shook her head as she scanned the article and her thoughts raced. Why would Mercedes do this? Why hadn’t she called, given Rachel a heads-up?

But she did call. And text. Remember? You assumed it was about the reunion and elected not to reply.

Her stomach did a nosedive. She read the story three times even though she knew all the salient facts; she’d lived them: Stupid kids playing a dangerous game at the old warehouse. Someone noticing and calling the police to report trespassers. The cops arriving and finding one of the boys near death, struck by the bullet of a real gun supposedly fired by his half sister. That girl being arrested. That girl being her.

Rachel couldn’t stop tears from filling her eyes, couldn’t stop the guilt that burrowed deep in her heart. Nor could she tamp down the anger that she felt creeping in, a dark fury that someone she’d thought of as a friend would do this. To her. To her parents. To her children. But then Mercedes, who’d gone by Mercy then, had never been one to pull punches, had she? And she’d never liked Luke. She’d been one of the few of Rachel’s friends who had seen through Luke’s smile and bravado.

She looked away and cleared her throat.

Even if Mercedes had called to warn her, the article felt like a betrayal. For God’s sake, Mercedes had been at the cannery that night, a willing participant, like so many classmates and recent graduates.

Twenty years had passed and it seemed like yesterday.

She clicked off the newspaper app. Told herself she just had to get through the rest of the day and the damned meeting tonight, and things could go back to normal. Or as normal as they had been.

Wait a second.

She clicked onto the article again and noticed a note at the bottom.

Part 1 of a 4-part series.

“What? No. No . . . no.” Then, as if her friend were in the room with her, she whispered, “God, Mercedes, why?”

Because she’s not your friend. Face it, Rachel, she never has been.

Mercy had to have known how dredging up Luke’s death would impact Rachel and her family. How everything had changed that night. Everything. Rachel’s fractured family had completely shattered, and her friends, the kids she’d hung out with at school, had all avoided her during the last few weeks before graduation. And who could blame them? She’d been shell-shocked, convinced she’d murdered her brother. Charged with the crime.

; She wondered how her mother was dealing with this article, and her dad, what did he think? Neither had been quoted in the paper. Only Nate Moretti and Lila Ryder. Nate had said, “It’s still hard, you know. Luke was my best friend, and yeah, I was there but I don’t know how it happened.” Lila’s quote was a little more dramatic: “I miss him every day. Luke’s the father of my son, Lucas, who is Luke’s namesake, but it’s been hard on me, and hard on my boy, of course, never knowing his real dad.”

Tears burned the back of Rachel’s eyes but she fought them back. What was it her mother had always said? “No use crying over spilled milk.” But in this case buckets of tears had been spilled. In the days after Luke’s death, they’d all cried.

Mom.

Had she read this? Oh. God.

It will never be over, she thought as she slid her phone from her pocket and poked her mother’s number from her list of favorites.

Melinda picked up on the second ring. “Hi,” she said, obviously knowing Rachel was calling. But her voice had no life.

Damn it.

“Hey, Mom.”

“I saw it. That’s what you’re calling about. Right? The article in the paper or the fact that it’s the . . .” She let her voice fade, but they both knew she was mentioning the date.

“Yeah. I wanted to know that you’re okay.”

A beat. Then, “Well . . .”

What to say? “It’s tough.”

“Yes. That it is. That it is . . . for all of us. For you, too,” she said. “And, I suppose, your father.”