The Pact
A mystery for anyone who has ever hated a friend's boyfriend…Rachel Benjamin and her friends aren't looking forward to Emma's wedding. The groom is a rat, and nobody can understand what Emma sees in him. So when he turns up dead on the morning of the ceremony, no one in the wedding party is all that upset. Not even Emma.Rachel, who had the good fortune to find Richard floating facedown in the pool, is feeling as if she's woken up in an Agatha Christie novel. It doesn't help that everyone around her seems to have a motive for murder. So, while the cops detain Emma's family and friends at her isolated Adirondacks compound for the weekend, Rachel, an investment banker by trade, makes like Miss Marple (minus the gray hair and sensible shoes) and does some digging of her own.Her investigation gets especially tricky when Peter Forrest, the too-good-to-be-true best man, turns out to be both her number-one love interest and her number-one suspect. And Rachel can't help remembering the solemn pact she and her friends made back in college — a promise to rescue each other from bad relationships, using any means required. Has someone taken the pact too far?
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would never have been written without Michele Jaffe, who had the great misfortune to read every draft and provided invaluable encouragement and input.
Laura Langlie, my agent, guided me through this process with a sure hand, unflagging confidence and good humor. She even pretended to take my theory of jinxing seriously.
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Farrin Jacobs, Margaret Marbury and the entire team at Red Dress Ink for (however clichéd it may sound) making a dream come true.
My college roommates—Anne Coolidge, Holly Edmonds, Heather Jackson and Gretchen Peters—kindly allowed me to steal bits and pieces of themselves and our past (liberally seasoned with artistic license, of course!). Rulonna Neilson, ad hoc image consultant, shepherded me through the jungle that is Bloomingdale’s cosmetics department and captured the moment for posterity. Meg Cabot offered the wise perspective of an industry veteran and more champagne than was probably good for either of us.
My mother, Judith Sturman, my sister-in-law, Lindsay Jewett Sturman, author Gini Hartzmark and friends Stefanie Reich Offit and Karen Bisgeier Zucker graciously served as early readers, critics and sounding boards. Finally, my father, Joseph Sturman, and my brothers, Ted and Dan Sturman, managed neither to laugh at nor tease me about the excellent use to which I was putting my MBA.
Thank you all.
This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my parents.
PROLOGUE
I met Chris at the beginning of my junior year. He was tall and handsome, with thick dark hair and green eyes fringed with the sort of lashes that only boys seem to get but that girls covet. He sat next to me one September afternoon in Modern Art and Abstraction. I dropped my pen, he picked it up, our eyes met, and I fell head over heels in love with a sociopath.
Of course, it took nearly six months for me to realize that he was, in fact, a sociopath. He was a senior and a bit of a mystery to my circle of friends. He’d transferred to Harvard from a small liberal arts college out west, and he had an air about him that was part Mark Darcy and part James Bond. He swept me off my feet, and I was more than willing to be swept.
The first time I realized something was off was the night he figured out how to call in to my answering machine and play back the messages. I was at the library working on a paper, but he was convinced that I was cheating on him. A few months and a number of similar incidents later, I was out of love and desperate to be rid of him.
He wasn’t easy to break up with, but after several tedious conversations that began with “We’ve got to talk” and ended with him still thinking I was his girlfriend, he finally gave up. Soon I heard that he was dating a sophomore, who no doubt was just as enchanted by his attentions as I’d originally been.
The night my breakup with Chris became official, my four roommates and I rose to the occasion with a Girls’ Night Out, a ritual that we’d perfected since its inception freshman year. We would start with blender drinks in our common room in Lowell House and then embark on a pub crawl in Harvard Square, inevitably ending up at Shay’s, our favorite wine bar on JFK Street.
By the time we arrived at Shay’s that fateful evening it was after midnight. The tables were crowded with a mix of undergrads and some business school students from across the river, easily identifiable by their conservative dress and bottles of imported beer. We found seats on the front terrace and ordered the usual—a bottle of cheap red wine to be shared by everyone except Jane, who ordered a Black and Tan. As we waited for our drinks, I began lamenting my poor judgment for the umpteenth time that evening. “How could I have been so stupid?” I moaned. I was a little worse for wear after five hours of fairly enthusiastic drinking.
Hilary, never one to mince words, had a ready reply. “I don’t know. Was he that great in bed?”
Luisa exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke with impatience. “Have a little sympathy, Hil. Rachel was in love. Her first love. Everyone acts like an idiot the first time.”
Hilary snorted her reply but held her tongue while the waiter unloaded our drinks. Emma looked around the table expectantly. She was wearing a sleeveless Indian print dress and woven leather sandals, her mass of dark blond hair hanging loose down her back.
Jane took a sip of her Black and Tan and gave me a good-natured smile. “We all knew that you would come to your senses sooner or later. It happened to be later than we would have liked, but the important thing is that it happened.”
