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true, but as a member of yesterday’s gathering he was smack-dab in the middle of it.
    He turned to me. “Are we done?”
    “In a minute.” Now that we didn’t need to skirt around his relationship to Marty, I wanted to revisit Cameron’s account of yesterday’s dinner party. “When you said that you ate the same food as Marty, what exactly did you eat last night?”
    Cameron angled a glare at me. “You want to know every single thing I ate?”
    “Yep.”
    “Chips, dip, a bunch of jalapeno pepper things wrapped in bacon, some sort of enchilada casserole, taco salad, sour cream, more chips. I guess that’s pretty much it. Oh, and a beer.”
    He had packed away that much food, and he was this skinny? Man, I’d love to trade metabolisms with this guy.
    I compared the list to everything Victoria had told me that Marty had eaten and spotted one glaring omission. “Did you have any of the hot sauce?”
    He shook his head. “I thought about it when Marty dared me to try it, but when Victoria pointed out the flames on the label I decided not to tempt fate.”
    “Fate?”
    “Hot and spicy food can give me some pretty bad heartburn. In fact, that’s what I thought was happening with Marty at first.”
    “When he started getting sick?”
    “Right. He grabbed his water glass like his throat was on fire. After he finished his water he drank Victoria’s.”
    It seemed odd to me that she hadn’t mentioned this.
    “Then he started to sweat,” Cameron said.
    She hadn’t mentioned that either.
    He wrinkled his nose. “A few minutes later I could hear him throwing up in the bathroom.”
    “Cameron, did you or anyone else suggest calling nine-one-one?”
    He stared down at his scuffed sneakers. “Sure, but Marty kept saying that he’d be okay—to give him a few minutes.” Cameron shook his head. “I think waiting all that time was a big mistake.”
    Based on everything I’d heard, I couldn’t have agreed with him more.
     
    ∗ ∗ ∗
     
    Back in the sixth grade Heather Beckett called me a psycho-bitch-freak in front of the entire class. Okay, I freely admit that my competitive nature had gotten the best of me during a game of Truth or Dare , and I shouldn’t have outed Heather as a liar at her own slumber party. It never occurred to eleven-year-old me that there would be retribution, that my classmates would tell their parents about what had happened, and I would never again be invited inside their homes.
    Being the bastard of a B-list actress infamous for her nude photo spread in a men’s magazine had branded me as something of a local curiosity. But once the psycho-bitch-freak label was added it were as if Heather had doused me with kerosene and struck a match. The next morning, did I rise from the ashes a new creation? Not by choice, but I had a metamorphosis just the same. Suddenly, it seemed that I was no longer just my mother’s bastard.
    I had become one scary bastard.
    And I knew I was scaring the crap out of Phyllis Bozeman, who was squirming in the seat that Cameron had vacated five minutes earlier.
    At least she had stopped crying, which was a good news/bad news thing since she was sitting wide-eyed, staring at me like I was some sort of voodoo princess capable of bending her to my will.
    I wished. It would certainly make my job easier, especially today.
    “How’s Aubrey doing?” I asked, painting an easy smile on my face.
    Aubrey Bozeman had been tight with Heather’s cheerleader crowd and had treated me like a social pariah all through high school. I had no interest in the latest Aubrey news, but if some polite chitchat helped her mother breathe a little easier, I could fake it.
    Unblinking, Phyllis swallowed. “Fine.”
    “Good to hear.” Relax. Blink! “I heard she had another baby. Boy or girl?”
    “Another boy,” she said after several seconds of hesitation, as if too much information about her grandchildren might put them in danger.
    “Good for her.” I leaned a little closer.