A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) Read Online Free Page A

council’s pictures. As president, his picture was at the top and center of the page. Beth Davis’s picture was in the third row beneath his. Her title was secretary.
    He cleared his throat when he recalled how pretty, with her strawberry blond hair and creamy complexion, the council secretary had been. She was the image of every boy’s wholesome desire.
    Beth had been his girlfriend. They had become engaged the night of the Valentine’s Day formal in their senior year. The night of the prom, they almost eloped. Then they graduated and went out into the real world.
    The newspaper staff was on the next page. Editor Gail Reynolds was front and center of the group photo. With her hair pulled back into a bun, she was dressed in gray slacks and a navy blue silk blouse with a plunging neckline. She looked like the serious news journalist.
    Tucked in one step behind her, assistant editor Jan Martin was almost hidden. She struck an expressionless pose. She thought she looked stupid when she smiled. She had taken off her glasses for the picture. She only recently started wearing contact lenses on some occasions. She wore her straight hair loose. She was dressed in a blousy blue cotton suit with a long jacket. The suit’s shoulder pads and wide skirt looked out of proportion on her small frame.
    Joshua found Tori Brody’s portrait shot several pages back. She had been a sophomore when they were seniors. The photograph displayed above her name bore only a slight resemblance to the lawyer he had met that morning. Even at fifteen, she had oozed sensuality. He sat behind his desk and stared at her picture.
    In the decade following the era of sexual freedom, when it became acceptable for girls to let go of their virginity before marriage, the title of slut and whore was supposed to go the way of chastity belts. Not necessarily for girls like Tori Brody in Small Town, America.
    She was from the wrong side of the tracks. She lived in a mobile home park by the river. Her father took off when she was a baby. Her mother was a barmaid with the reputation of having affairs with married men. Her older sister dropped out of school to get married. Without adult supervision, Tori was exploring sex when Joshua was still working up the nerve to ask girls to dance at the junior high social.
    Tori Brody fell in with the type of people that Joshua and his friends avoided out of self-preservation. They were the first to smoke cigarettes and drink beer. By high school, they dressed in worn blue jeans and leather; rode in hot cars and motorcycles; dealt drugs; and thought nothing of inflicting injury on anyone unfortunate enough to cross their paths.
    With bleached-blonde hair; eyes framed with lush lashes; slender hips; and breasts accentuated in daring styles that pushed the envelope of the school’s dress code, Tori was hard not to notice when she entered Oak Glen High School. Within weeks, envious girls and lust-filled boys labeled her as not being the type of girl Joshua could take home to his grandmother. The most sensuous girl in the school, she was sought and won over by the leader of the school’s roughest gang.
    That was Max Bowman. Everyone knew he carried a switchblade, though few saw it because switchblades were illegal. He cherished his girl like the trophy she was.
    Joshua was indifferent to Tori and her friends. The gap between the two social classes in the world of high school was so wide that he would never even have met her if it weren’t for a photography class that he took in the spring of his senior year.
    As circumstance would have it, she was seated next to him. She managed to smile at him whenever possible. Within a matter of weeks, he laughed at her sexual innuendoes, which she could summon better than Mae West.
    Eventually, his apprehension around the promiscuous girl gave way to a friendship—until one spring afternoon when Joshua stepped out of the boys locker room after softball practice into a mob led by Max Bowman, who