Chapter Twenty-Three

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Beatrice had her own car, a shiny blue four-door that gleamed so hard in the summer sun it made me squint. When she opened the driver’s door, I could see the interior was immaculate. New-car smell wafted out and hit my nose.

“Want to get in?” she asked us.

“We’ll take our own car, thanks,” Eddie said.

The girl shifted her weight, thinking. She pulled the pair of silver-rimmed mirror sunglasses from the top of her head and put them on. “That’s probably smart,” she said as I stared at my own reflection in the glasses. “But park down the street from my house so no one sees you, okay? Follow me.”

We got into the Pontiac, parked a few feet away. When Beatrice started her car, “You Oughta Know” blared from the sound system at top volume. She reversed from her spot with a squeal of tires and drove off.

“What are we doing?” Eddie asked as he pulled out and followed her. “She’s a child.”

“I feel old,” I agreed. “But she can’t hurt us, right?”

Eddie thought it over as we crossed through town. “Either she knows something or she doesn’t. Maybe she’s just a lonely girl looking for some attention. We’ll find out pretty soon either way.”

Beatrice led us out of downtown as the sound of Alanis wafted back at us from her open windows. In a few minutes we were on a suburban street, immaculate and sleepy in the midday heat. Except for a few lazy sprinklers, the drops of water gleaming like diamonds, nothing moved.

She parked in the driveway of a house with white siding and blue shutters. It was less than ten years old, the home of an up-and-coming family. The lawn was perfect green, the garden lining the front of the house bright with pink geraniums. A pot with more pink flowers in it was artfully placed on the porch, a bumblebee hovering over it. Beatrice’s brand-new car started to make more sense.

As instructed, Eddie and I drove past her driveway and parked farther down the street. Beatrice had gone into the house, and as we approached, she opened a side door and waved at us. The secrecy was a little excessive, but we rounded the side of the house and went inside, avoiding the front.

“Where are your parents?” Eddie asked.

“At work,” Beatrice replied as the door banged shut behind us.

The blast of air-conditioning hit me as we walked in. I exhaled a breath, feeling goose bumps rise on my skin. I was so used to the low-grade air-conditioning at Rose’s, and at most of the places we’d been in town, that it felt freezing.

Beatrice didn’t seem to notice. “My stuff is all in my bedroom where my parents can’t see it,” she said, taking off her sunglasses, “but it’s, like, weird if we go there, right? Sit down in the kitchen and I’ll go get it. Help yourself to a drink from the fridge.” She thudded up the carpeted stairs. Eddie and I walked down the cool-tiled hall to the kitchen, where there was a country-style wooden table and chairs and an antique clock hanging on the wallpapered wall. I took a seat on a chair that had a seat cushion tied to the rungs of the back, and Eddie sat opposite me.

The window looked to the backyard, as green and perfect as the front yard was. A chaise longue was placed in the middle of the grass, and another teenage girl lay on it, a towel over her face as she suntanned.

“Who’s that?” I asked Eddie.

“She mentioned a sister,” he said. “Maybe that’s her.”

Beatrice came back downstairs with a small stack of file folders, their edges bent with frequent use. She also had a spiral notebook and a pen that was larger in diameter than a thumb. I wondered how she wrote with that thing.

“Okay, I’ll start,” she said, pulling up a chair as if we were all about to work on a school project. She took out one of the files and opened it. “These are all of the cases I could find of hitchhikers who died on Atticus Line. There are six.”

I stared at her in shock. “Six?”

“It’s a lot, right?” Beatrice said. “The first one was in 1976.”

“The Lost Girl,” Eddie said. I felt a chill on the back of my neck, and it wasn’t just the air-conditioning.

Beatrice looked from Eddie to me, missing nothing. “You know about her?”

“We heard the legend. What is this?” I deflected by reaching to her stack of papers and pulling off the top one. It was a photocopy of a story from a newspaper—a few paragraphs in a single column with no photo, a piece that had been buried on an interior page. The headline read: no leads on unidentified remains found.

“That’s the Lost Girl,” Beatrice said. “That’s what they wrote about her in the papers.”

“They didn’t write much.” I scanned the short paragraph. It only said that the remains of a woman, between twenty and thirty years of age, had been found on the side of Atticus Line. The coroner’s examination concluded that she had suffered several blows to the head, and that she had been there at least a month. The girl had no identification on her, and no one had come forward to identify her. Anyone with information was asked to call police. The article was dated April 30, 1976.

Several blows to the head.The girl we’d seen in that horrible visitation—had it only been last night?—had had bruises, a trickle of blood coming from her ear. She’d still been bleeding, her hair and neck wet with it. Help me, she’d screamed.

I felt hopelessness threaten my mood. What did we think we were doing? The Lost Girl could be anyone, from anywhere. We were never going to find her. The police hadn’t been able to do it in nineteen years. Why did we think we could do this with so little information?

There was the sound of a sliding screen door, and then another girl appeared in the doorway from the next room. She was taller than Beatrice, slender, with a pleasantly long face and straight, dark hair streaming past her shoulders. She was wearing an oversize tee over a bathing suit, the hem of the shirt falling to mid-thigh. She was the girl we’d seen on the chaise longue, which was now empty.

“What are you doing, loser?” she said to Beatrice, who was obviously her sister. “Who are these people?”

“This is Gracie,” Beatrice said to us. She turned to the girl. “This is April and Eddie. They’re the couple who picked up Rhonda Jean Breckwith the night she was killed.”

The disdainful expression left Gracie’s face and her eyes went wide. “For real?”

“For real.”

“You should have told me, dork. I want to hear everything.” Gracie strode into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “So you know about the murders?” she asked us as she pulled out a jug of iced tea.

“We just got here,” I said.

“I’m telling them,” Beatrice said. “They’re from out of town.”

“It’s a cover-up.” Gracie banged her empty glass on the counter a little too loud. “People get killed on Atticus Line, and the police don’t want to do anything. It doesn’t get written about in the papers. I called up three different people who write for the Free Press. None of them wanted to talk to me or write a story. Why do you think that is?” She looked around at us for dramatic effect. “It’s because all of the murders were done by one serial killer, and the cops know exactly who it is.”

“You don’t think Rhonda Jean was killed by Max Shandler?” I asked.

Gracie turned to me. “You think Max Shandler, who has lived here all his life, just woke up one day and decided to kill a hitchhiker? I don’t buy it. He hasn’t confessed, right? Who says he really did it? What’s the evidence? Whatever blood evidence they have, it’s too soon for results. DNA takes months, unless you’re O. J.”

I glanced at Eddie and read his expression. May as well tell her something, it said. I turned back to Gracie. “Rhonda Jean was found wearing Max Shandler’s coat. When we found her on the side of the road, after she’d been stabbed—that’s what she was wearing.”

I hadn’t read the newspaper article Beatrice had shown us in the diner, but my guess was that the coat wasn’t public knowledge. My guess was right. Gracie stared at me, and Beatrice squeaked in excitement in her chair.

I didn’t know if I’d just broken a rule, telling the Snell girls that. But I needed information from them, and I had to give them something.

“What if it was Max Shandler!” Beatrice said. “So much for your serial killer cover-up, Gracie! He’s too young to have done all of them.”

But Gracie already had a comeback. “It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. Max could be a patsy. A setup. Steal his jacket and he looks guilty. It’s pretty simple. I mean, Lee Harvey Oswald, right?” She looked around at us again.

“Hold on.” Eddie raised a hand, palm out. He’d barely spoken during this whole exchange, and with those two words, the Snell sisters shut up instantly. “Before you bring the CIA and Oliver Stone into this, let’s back up. April and I came here for information about the murders.” He held up the photocopy of the Lost Girl article. “Is this all you have? Newspaper articles? Because we can find these ourselves.”

It was the Snell sisters’ turn to exchange a look of silent conversation. “We have more than newspaper articles,” Beatrice said. She pulled out another set of photocopies. “We have these.”

Eddie slid the papers over and looked at the top one. “Is this what I think it is?” He lifted the page, scanning another, and another, handing them off to me. “This is a police file.”

His voice was just stern enough that Beatrice trained her gaze out the window and Gracie studied the fridge door. “We’re resourceful,” Beatrice said, her tone defensive.

I looked at the pages. Sure enough, they were photocopies of a police report—or what I assumed was a real police report, since I’d never seen one. It was old, too, with a lot of the information typewritten or handwritten in a squared, masculine hand. The date in the top right of the first page read April 30, 1976.

Eddie was a few pages further than me, deep in reading, his brow furrowed. “This is a description of the body,” he said. He broke his gaze away and rubbed his forehead. I wondered if he was picturing the girl we’d seen, furious and desperate. It was her body he was reading about. He made himself glance down at the page and say, “Advanced decomposition.”

“She’d been there at least a month.” Beatrice’s tone, normally so brassy, was much quieter as she spoke the words. “They couldn’t determine if she was, um, raped. But the body had all its clothes on.”

I scanned the pages as Eddie handed them to me. There weren’t very many; there wasn’t much to say about unidentified bones and scraps of flesh ravaged by animals. No fingerprints, no wallet or ID. No belongings found with her at all besides her clothes. No confirmed cause of death, though there were blows to her head that had cracked the skull. They’d taken X-rays of her teeth, in case they could match them with someone reported missing. The investigation had gone cold from there.

How did two teenage girls have a copy of an unreleased police file?

Gracie’s voice came from behind the kitchen counter, where she was still standing. She recognized each page even from that distance; she must have known them by heart. “Go to the next section,” she told Eddie. “The one dated in June.”

Eddie turned the page, then frowned down at what he was reading. “They found a jacket?”

“Six weeks later,” Beatrice supplied. “It was shoved into some underbrush. A hundred feet away.”

Eddie scanned a page, then picked up a photo—or, more precisely, a photocopy of a photo. He held it up for me to look at.

“It’s a letterman jacket,” I said, looking closely at the fuzzy photocopy. The jacket had dark blotches of what was most likely dirt on it. It was hard to tell without color.

“A high school letterman jacket,” Beatrice supplied. “From Midland High School in Midland.”

Midland was farther south, almost at the Indiana border. “The Lost Girl was in her twenties, not a high schooler,” Eddie said.

“They don’t even know if the jacket was hers,” Gracie said. “It could have been there randomly. It could have been the killer’s. Or she could have owned it a long time. They couldn’t find any evidence connecting it to the Lost Girl. No hairs or blood or anything. It had been there too long.”

“The file says that Midland PD was contacted, and they didn’t have any reports of missing women,” Beatrice added. “And that was it. A dead end.”

Eddie lifted the next set of papers. “Another police file,” he said. “Katharine O’Connor’s.” He looked up, his eyes narrowed. “Tell me how you got your hands on all of this. Now.”

The girls were silent, but I knew Eddie would get it out of them. I pulled the Lost Girl file toward me and flipped through it, reading for myself.

There was a standoff between Eddie and the two weirdest teenagers I’d ever met, but finally, Gracie caved. She rounded the counter and sat in a chair at the table, flipping her long hair behind her shoulders in a move I had done many times myself when my hair was long enough. I kept it cut just above my shoulders now, so hair tossing was much less dramatic. “Okay, so I got into some car trouble,” Gracie said.

“You were totally speeding,” Beatrice interrupted.

“Fine, okay. I was speeding.”

“Like, six times.” Beatrice looked at us. “They were going to impound her car.”

“Shut up,” Gracie snapped at her little sister. “Anyway, Dad knows a lot of people, and he arranged that I could volunteer at the police station to pay off the tickets. Like community service. Everyone thought it was this huge punishment, like I’d be bored. It’s the best.” She smiled. “Coldlake Falls isn’t the most exciting town, but I get to see everything. I fetch coffee and order supplies, but what they really needed was help in the file room. It was a complete mess, stuff piled everywhere, nothing alphabetized or labeled the right way. Enter me.” She grinned again. “I spent six weeks in there, and by the time my punishment was up, it was so perfect that they asked me to stay. Oh, and the photocopier is in the room next door.”

“Oops,” Beatrice said, her grin mirroring her sister’s.

“Jesus.” Eddie’s tone was halfway between admiring and creeped out. “You two are a little scary.”

“Just resourceful,” Beatrice said. “If we don’t do it, who will?”

Gracie’s smug smile faded. “Some of those kids were my age. They got killed and dumped a few miles from my house. Over and over. Like garbage. Someone did that, and the police and the newspapers think that I don’t have a right to know about it.” She pointed to the file I was reading. “They didn’t put anything about the letterman jacket in the papers. They didn’t want it public because it was something only the killer would know. But they could write about it now. They could put out a story twenty years later: Hey, do you remember a girl who went missing in 1976? A girl with this jacket? Do you know? I bet someone knows, someone remembers her, but they won’t do it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because we need tourists,” Beatrice replied. “If there are stories about a serial killer in Coldlake Falls, the tourists go away. Which is why the cops could have planted evidence on Max Shandler, just like they did on O. J. Make it look like one guy went nuts and killed a girl, and they caught him the next day. Everyone’s safe. No reason to cancel your vacation.”

“They didn’t plant evidence on O. J.,” Gracie said.

“Yes, they did,” Beatrice shot back.

Gracie shook her head, her tone imperious. “O. J. did it. Everything else, I question.”

It was possible, maybe, but I had a hard time picturing Kyle Petersen and Chad Chipwell planting DNA evidence as if they were the LAPD. If the LAPD even had planted evidence. I didn’t follow the case closely enough to know. Normally, I paid no attention to murder.

“It isn’t just because of tourists,” Gracie said, returning to the topic at hand. “It’s because the Coldlake Falls PD know who the killer is, and they’re covering for him. Framing Max Shandler is part of that.”

“So who is it?” I asked her.

“If we knew, do you think we’d have all of this?” Beatrice waved to the pages strewn across the table. “We would have done something, told someone before Rhonda Jean got killed. We’d stop being obsessed. We’d go back to being normal.”

There was something in Gracie’s expression that said she had a theory she wasn’t telling us, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. A police cover-up in Coldlake Falls seemed far-fetched to me, the product of a teenager watching too much TV. Detective Quentin was odd and unsettling, but he had shown up in the middle of the night, determined to catch a murderer. He wouldn’t be breathing down our necks so hard if he already knew who it was.

“I’m not sure you’d become normal all that easily, case or no case,” Eddie said.

“I agree,” Gracie said. She smiled. “What’s normal, anyway? You two came into town and picked up a murder victim. Now you’re still here, trying to solve it. I don’t think normal is on your menu.”

Eddie shifted in his seat but said nothing. Even from that small movement, I knew he was amused.

Holding Beatrice’s gaze, I lifted up the page I had been reading. “This says that the Lost Girl was wearing a T-shirt with the tag ripped out,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gracie said. “The tag at the back of her neck.”

“Did any of the others have that?”

She shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

“How far apart were the murders?” Eddie was digging through the pile of files.

“Here.” Beatrice flipped through her spiral notebook, then showed him her handwritten list. “The Lost Girl was 1976, and she was the only unidentified one. Tom Monahan was killed in 1982. Stephanie Wolfe was killed in 1989—she’s the only Black victim. Carter Friesen was killed in 1991, then Katharine O’Connor in 1993, and Rhonda Jean Breckwith two days ago.”

“Nineteen years,” Eddie said.

If Max Shandler was twenty-eight, he would have been nine when the Lost Girl was killed.

Eddie flipped through the notebook, scanning the modes of death. “Beaten with something curved, possibly a tire iron. Stabbed with something resembling an ice pick. Beaten on the back of the head with something large and blunt, possibly a branch or rock.” He flipped the page. “If a man is out hunting, why doesn’t he just bring rope and a gun? And for that matter, a garbage bag?”

We all pondered that. “A gun is loud,” I offered.

Eddie didn’t blink. “So are screams. These methods of death are messy, slow if it isn’t done right. The victim can scream and try to run, maybe get away. The reports don’t say anything about restraint marks, so he didn’t tie them up, which means they could fight him. It could take minutes for the victim to die, even longer. Every minute is a chance he’ll be seen and caught.” He scratched his jaw. “A gun, yeah, it’s loud, but it’s fast. Atticus Line is a remote area. You take one shot, two if you want to be sure, and you drive off. People think someone is hunting or scaring a stray dog off their property. Before anyone can check out the sound, you’re long gone.”

His voice was so flat. This was the Eddie who had been overseas, who wasn’t the same as the man who crooked his knees behind mine in bed every night.

Gracie spoke up. “Maybe he likes it. Making them suffer, making it hard. Maybe that’s part of the fun.”

“He had lots of time,” Eddie said. “He killed them, and no one came. No one even found the bodies for a while. But they all had their clothes on. He could have abducted them, could have done a lot of bad things to them, but he didn’t.” He ran his finger down the writing in the notebook. “The death was the point. Just the death.”

Something was niggling at me, trying to rise to the surface at the back of my brain. I turned to the Snell sisters. “Have you two heard rumors of the Lost Girl haunting Atticus Line?”

Beatrice rolled her eyes. “Everyone has heard those stories. They’re so old.”

“Don’t let her see you, or you’re next!” Gracie’s eyes went wide and she waggled her fingers.

“So you don’t believe it?” I asked.

“In ghosts? Of course not. Those are just legends.”

So they could believe in the LAPD framing O. J., but not in old-fashioned ghosts. “Have either of you ever been out on that road at night?” I asked.

The girls laughed, as if I’d said something funny. “For real?” Beatrice said.

Gracie shook her head. “Of course I’ve never gone out there at night. I’d like to live to see nineteen. Or at least until I’m old enough to get out of here. It isn’t ghosts I’m afraid of, though. Why not just stick a thumb out? What a great way to get murdered.”