Chapter Twenty-Two

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Rose had a part-time job at a grocery store as a checkout clerk. Eddie and I followed her to work the next morning. We filled a cart full of groceries: frozen hamburgers, tuna, canned peaches. SnackWell’s cookies and SlimFast bars for Rose and me. Hot dogs and soft white buns. Cans of Diet Pepsi. Bologna, bags of frozen peas and corn, Raisin Bran, Frosted Flakes, ice cream bars, packets of Kool-Aid, bricks of bacon. Rose checked us out, using her employee discount. Her glasses reflected in the fluorescent light, and the green apron made her skin look yellow.

“This is nice of you, I guess,” she said, the words coming out reluctantly.

“It’s the least we can do.” I gave her one of my big smiles. “I think we’ll be staying for a few days. We may as well finish our honeymoon.”

Rose gave me a narrow-eyed look. We hadn’t told her why we’d come back last night, or why we’d decided to stay in Coldlake Falls instead of going home. We weren’t sure ourselves why we were here. Eddie and I needed to regroup.

We drove the groceries back to Rose’s and put them away. Then, unable to look at her knickknacks or Princess Diana any longer, we drove to downtown Coldlake Falls, in search of somewhere to eat. Eddie didn’t talk much, but I was used to that. Still, I knew he was tense, and both of us were tired after a restless sleep.

Now that I wasn’t in the back of a police car, I took a better look at the town. Coldlake Falls was busy on a weekday in July, the pharmacies and grocery stores bustling, sweaty parents and sunburned kids roaming the sidewalks. It was a town big enough for exactly one Blockbuster—the parking lot full—and a movie theater with Apollo 13 and First Knight on the marquee. It was the place you went to stock up on cold beer or buy sunscreen before you moved on to your campsite or motel. The people here were just passing through. There were a couple of teenagers with backpacks at the bus station, waiting for a bus, but we didn’t recognize them. They were likely coming from Hunter Beach.

We found a diner and slid into a booth, the skin on the backs of my thighs sticking to the vinyl seat. It was a small place, packed with people coming and going, smelling of coffee and french fries. A TV on the wall above the front cash register was showing a news story about Tonya Harding. I ordered a Coke and a salad. Eddie ordered a turkey sandwich and made no comment when I stole fries from his plate.

“So,” he said after a minute. “We’re going to find her, right?”

I paused with a fry halfway to my mouth. Eddie’s face had its usual serious expression, but something in the way he looked at me was careful, as if he wasn’t sure I’d agree.

“I suppose we are,” I replied, keeping my voice light and neutral. Like it didn’t matter to me.

I was trying to relax him, but instead he got even more serious. “April, do you want to go home?”

I raised my gaze to his. Though most people couldn’t read Eddie’s stoic expressions, I could. I’d studied him in depth; he was my favorite topic. So I knew that right now, Eddie didn’t want to go back to our apartment in Ann Arbor. But if I asked him to, he would do it.

There was something deeper in his expression, something troubled. Something that hadn’t been there before last night. But I couldn’t worry about that right now.

“I don’t want to go home,” I said. There was nothing for me at home. My job was pointless and our apartment was the cheapest one we could afford. I only wanted to be where Eddie was. “I want to find her.”

His brow smoothed a little, but he shook his head. “So do I, but I’m not sure why.”

“Because it would be meaningful,” I said. “We’d be doing something that matters, at least a little. More meaningful than our jobs. More meaningful than playing Yahtzee and taking naps.”

“It’s a terrible idea.”

“We’ve had terrible ideas before. At least, I have.”

“Like marrying me?”

The question was a surprise. I’d never given him an inkling that I didn’t want to marry him. Had he wondered about this without telling me? “No,” I said. “Like the time I drank vodka before going to the fall fair and eating a funnel cake. I’ll never eat a funnel cake again.”

His shoulders relaxed. This was how it worked: I eased him down, and in return I got to watch some of the pain leave his body and his face. He’d never met a girl who was willing to put the work in. Well, he’d met her now.

“I guess we need a plan,” he said, his voice easier now.

“A ghost plan,” I said.

“I don’t know how to make one of those.”

“It will be hauntingly difficult.”

Eddie paused with the ketchup bottle in his hand and smiled a little.

“One would even say vanishingly hard,” I tried again.

“April, your puns are terrible.” He paused. “It will be fine as long as we don’t get spooked.”

I shook my head. “I can’t believe I married you. How did I ever find you?”

Eddie squished his sandwich flat, making the lettuce crunch. He was smiling now. “You came out of your room with no shirt on, as I remember.”

“And it was a done deal.”

He shrugged, his eyes on his sandwich, but his cheeks went just a little bit red.

“I wish I’d known how to find the right man earlier,” I teased him. “I wouldn’t have worn a shirt for all of 1994.”

“Too bad,” he said decisively. “I found you first.”

It was my turn to feel warm. Would this feeling wear off, I wondered? In twenty years, would I be sitting across from Eddie, thinking he was nothing but a nuisance and a pain in the ass? Maybe, but right now it was hard to picture it. I wondered if he knew that his compliments made me go gooey inside. I didn’t think he did.

“It can’t have just been the bra,” I said, sipping my Coke. “I mean, you’d seen a topless woman before.”

“We’re not talking about that,” he said, his voice firm, his previous tension gone now. Aside from the fact that he’d had a couple of girlfriends, Eddie never gave salacious details. I didn’t marry them, was his explanation. I married you.

“So it was the bra,” I said.

Eddie paused, as if he wanted to say something else, and then he said, “It was blue. I’d never seen a blue one before. You know what? You’ve never told me why you said yes to me that day, considering I was basically a Peeping Tom and I had my shirt on.”

Why had I said yes to him? I hadn’t been on the hunt for a boyfriend, or even a date. I had never let anyone get close to me. I’d just been on my way to get laundry. I should have forgotten about Eddie Carter in minutes, the way I forgot about most of the boys I met. But I hadn’t.

“It’s because I’m not stupid,” I said, spearing a forkful of salad. “Any woman who turns you down is stupid. But it’s too bad for the rest of them, because I found you first.”

“And here we are,” he said. I knew in that moment that he found it as unlikely as I did, that we were married. That we’d been married for nearly five days.

“Here we are,” I replied. “And I guess we just agreed to try and find the Lost Girl.”

Eddie sighed. “What do we know?”

“Not a lot. Gretchen said she was murdered in the seventies and her body was left by the side of the road. They never solved it or found out who she was.”

We were quiet for a moment. It really wasn’t much to go on, and neither of us was an investigator. We didn’t know where to start.

“We know what she looked like,” Eddie said, his voice soft. “No one else knows that.”

I closed my eyes. I could picture the girl we’d seen, with long hair parted in the middle. I could picture the clothes she was wearing. But her face—would I recognize her face if I saw it in a picture?

“We could look at newspapers,” I suggested. “This is a small town. A murdered girl would be in the papers, especially if they didn’t know who she was.”

“We’d have to read a whole decade’s worth if we don’t know the year,” Eddie said. “Do you think Officer Syed would help us?”

I nodded. “The police will have a file, right? He probably won’t let us read it, but he can give us something to go on so we don’t have to spend a week in the library.”

“Someone missed her,” Eddie said. “Someone knew she was gone, wondered where she went, maybe filed a report. But she could be from anywhere.” His gaze flicked past my shoulder to something, and he frowned before looking back to me.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“That girl in the next booth is looking at us.”

“A lot of people are looking at us in here.” It was true. Some of the people coming in and out of the diner paid us no mind, but others gave us intent stares, as if they didn’t care if we noticed. I knew right away what the difference was between a local and a tourist. The locals had heard that a girl was murdered; the tourists hadn’t.

“I know, but that girl is really staring,” Eddie said. “She barely looks old enough to drive. Why is she staring at us?”

I craned my neck and twisted around. Sure enough, in the booth behind us was a teenage girl, sitting alone. Her brown permed hair was tied in a ponytail, and she had sunglasses perched on the top of her head, like me. She had a glass of Coke in front of her and was wearing an oversize tee. She caught me looking, and I narrowed my eyes, giving her a warning signal. She blinked back at me slowly and sipped Coke through her straw.

I turned back to Eddie, affronted. “What is her problem?”

“Ignore her,” he said. “She’s just some local kid. Do you think we should go back to Hunter Beach?”

“We can try, but I doubt they’ll talk to us. We need to start with Kal. He won’t talk to us if we walk into the Coldlake Falls police station, and I never want to go back there anyway. We need to meet him in private. I bet Rose knows how to get a message to him.”

We were interrupted when the girl from the next booth approached our table. “Hi,” she said, in a tone that was bold and not shy in the least.

I looked up at her. Now that she was up close, I could see that her T-shirt had Gwen Stefani on it and she was wearing cutoff jean shorts. Black eyeliner lined her eyes, a little smudged, belying the roundness of a face that had only recently emerged from childhood.

“Hi,” I said.

The girl had a newspaper in her hand. She put it on the table between us, slapping it down dramatically. “This is you guys, right?”

It was a local paper, the Coldlake Falls Free Press. The headline on the front page read: arrest in local hitchhiker murder. The photo was of Rhonda Jean. It was a school photo, and Rhonda Jean was giving a shy smile that was a little sad, her freckles sprinkled across her nose.

“What do you mean?” I asked the girl, tearing my gaze from Rhonda Jean’s face.

“Here.” The girl planted her index finger on the article, pointing out a paragraph. Breckwith was apparently discovered injured on the side of Atticus Line by a couple passing through town, who claimed they were on their way to their honeymoon. Coldlake Falls PD will not comment on whether the couple are persons of interest in the investigation.

“No comment,” Eddie said.

I stared at the line, livid. Which jerk on the Coldlake Falls PD had refused to say we weren’t suspects anymore? Quentin? Or Beam?

“It is you,” the girl said. “I saw you at the grocery store with Rose. You’re staying with her, right? Rose doesn’t have any friends, and she never has guests.”

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“I was curious,” the girl said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I figured you might be this couple, so when I saw you get out of your car and come in here, I looked in your car windows. Half the fabric in the back seat is cut out. That means you’re these people.” She tapped the newspaper again. Her nail was smooth and manicured, painted with opalescent polish. “Rhonda Jean Breckwith was in your back seat, right?”

I glared at her. “You’re annoying me.”

“How do you know Rose?” Eddie asked.

“I used to work at the grocery store until I got fired. She hates me, but that’s cool.” The girl looked at me again, unafraid of my murderous expression. “What did Rhonda Jean say to you when you picked her up? Did she say Max Shandler had killed her? I want to know everything.”

For God’s sake. “Why is it any of your business?”

“I live here.” The girl sat in the booth next to Eddie. He slid down politely, because he was a gentleman, and she settled in, leaning forward. “This is my town. I’ve met Max Shandler. If he’s been killing girls like me, I want to know about it.”

She had a point. Eddie and I exchanged a look. He seemed puzzled and almost amused. We should probably get rid of this girl, but Eddie was in no hurry to do it. I let myself think through the angles for a minute. This girl knew Max Shandler. Maybe she could answer some of our questions.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Beatrice Snell. What’s yours?”

“April Carter.” I nodded toward Eddie. “That’s Eddie Carter, my husband.”

“Hi,” Eddie said.

“Hi,” Beatrice said. “Do you think Max Shandler killed Katharine O’Connor, too? What about Carter Friesen?”

The back of my neck tightened, and I saw Eddie straighten a little. “Carter Friesen?” he asked.

“August 27, 1991,” Beatrice said. “Stabbed on Atticus Line after getting picked up hitchhiking. He barely made it from the bus station. He was found on the stretch just past the turnoff to town. He was eighteen.”

There was a second of silence at the table as we stared at her.

“There are more,” Beatrice said. “Rhonda Jean was stabbed, right? So was Carter. But not all of them were. Max couldn’t have killed all of them, but if he did the last three, why do you think he changed his method of killing?”

“Jesus,” I said. “How old are you, fifteen?”

“Sixteen.”

“These hitchhiker cases on Atticus Line,” Eddie said, his voice gentle. “You know about them?”

“I know everything.” Beatrice pulled the newspaper toward her. “I collect all the information I can find. My sister does, too. You could say it’s a hobby, except it’s about dead people so we’re not allowed to talk about it. I know it’s weird, but I don’t care. I want to know the truth. I want to know everything about these murders. I want them solved. And now another one has happened, and you two practically witnessed it.” She looked back and forth between Eddie and me, her look assessing in a way that was cold for a girl of only sixteen. “Either that, or you did it yourselves. But of course you didn’t. Max did. Right?”

I tried to read her. Was she telling the truth? What did she actually believe?

“What do you want from us?” I asked her.

“I want to know what you know, and you want to know what I know,” Beatrice said. “Why don’t you come to my house and we’ll talk?”