All Night Long

darkness. Whoever was at the wheel was driving toward the main road without lights.
    “Damn.” He got to his feet and grabbed his jeans off the back of the chair. “There she goes again.”
    He yanked on the denims, ripped a dark shirt off a hanger, shoved his feet into his running shoes an eft the bedroom at a run.
    Jason raised his head when he went past the couch.
    “Where are you going at this time of night?” he mumbled sleepily.
    “Out.”

    “Right.” Jason dropped back down onto the pillow. “Knew when I saw the corn bread that you were a goner.”

Thirteen
    She hated the thought of going back into the house, especially at this hour. Irene stopped in the pool of darkness that drowned the steps outside the utility room and took the key out of the pocket of her trench coat. She had a flashlight with her, but she didn’t dare switch it on until she was inside. She had also taken the precaution of leaving her car parked out of sight down the road.
    Tonight she did not want to risk being seen anywhere near the Webbs’ summer place. What she was about to do probably came under the heading of illegal entry she thought. Sam McPherson was already unhappy with her. She did not want to give him a reason to try to run her out of town.
    A ghostly breeze slithered through the trees. The interior of the house was drenched in night and shadow. Unlike last night, no light burned in the front room.
    She unlocked the door, dropped the key into her pocket and held her breath as she moved into the deep darkness of the utility room. Closing the door very quickly she removed the small, pencil-slim flashlight and switched it on.
    As soon as the narrow beam sliced through the shadows she was able to breathe again.
    She moved cautiously into the hall and went toward the staircase that connected the living and dinin rea to the upper floor. The darkness downstairs seemed especially dense. It took her a moment t ealize that someone had drawn the curtains across the floor-to-ceiling widows after Pamela’s body had been removed. Sam, probably, she thought. His goal had no doubt been to deter morbid curiosity seekers, but the result was that she did not have to worry about a passerby noticing the thin beam of her flashlight.
    It gave her an eerie jolt to realize that everything looked so [_House & Garden _] normal tonight. Surely there should have been some sense that a person had died here recently. But Pamela’s death had not involved overt violence or blood, she reminded herself just booze and pills.

    Booze and pills. One of the classic suicide strategies. What if she was wrong and everyone else wa ight? What if Pamela really had OD’d, accidentally or otherwise?
    Okay, so call me a conspiracy theorist.
    She did not linger downstairs. If Pamela had hidden any secrets before she died, they would be in her bedroom.
    Over the course of the summer that she and Pamela had been close, she had come to know her friend’s bedroom almost as well as her own. She had spent hours upstairs in this house, listening to the latest music, talking about boys and reading an endless array of fashion and celebrity gossip magazines.
    She climbed the stairs to the second floor and turned toward the bedroom that Pamela had used whe he was a teen. The door was ajar.
    That would not have been the case seventeen years ago. Pamela always kept the door closed in those days and with good reason. She’d had a lot of things she wanted to hide from her father and the housekeeper, including birth control pills, condoms and mysterious packets of what she claimed were designer drugs that she had purchased from dealers who hung out around her fancy boarding school.
    Pamela had been very proud of the hiding place she had crafted to conceal her treasures—so proud, in fact, that after swearing Irene to eternal secrecy, she had shown it to her.
    A trickle of anticipation fluttered through Irene as she moved into the room. It was the memory of Pamela’s secret place that had lured her back here tonight. The odds of finding anything in it that might offer an explanation or an insight were slim to vanishing, but it was a place to start.
    The curtains and shades had been pulled shut in this room, too. Relieved that she did not have to be overly cautious with the flashlight, she splashed the beam quickly around the space.
    Shock drove out the sense of anticipation she had been feeling. A dark, edgy chill of deja vu roiled her nerves.
    Nothing had been