Chapter Thirty-Eight

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

I’m not saying you’re being followed by the police,” Beatrice Snell said. “But then again, I’m also not not saying it.”

“They could have put a tracking device on your car,” Gracie said. “It isn’t that hard to do. It gives off a radio signal. You were smart to come to us.”

We had picked up Gracie at the movie theater as she came out of an afternoon showing of Dolores Claiborne. (“Not bad,” was Gracie’s succinct review.) As we drove, I talked.

I told them everything—about the encounter with Shannon Haller’s ghost on Atticus Line, about going to John Haller’s house, about Kal seeing us there, about breaking in. As I spoke, Eddie stayed silent.

The Snell sisters listened intently to everything I said as Beatrice drove through Coldlake Falls, making random left and right turns. Then we started talking about what to do.

“Okay,” Gracie said. “So you have this roll of film, right?”

I looked at Eddie. He spoke for the first time. “I have it.”

“And we don’t know what’s on it.”

“It could be nothing,” Beatrice said. She had put her sunglasses back on and was frowning as she drove. I hadn’t told them that Eddie believed that Shannon Haller might be in his head, but both sisters had accepted without question that we’d broken the law to steal a roll of film, as if it seemed logical to them. “What would Shannon have left behind on film that we need to see? If she was leaving home, she would have taken everything important with her.”

“Well, we won’t know until we develop it,” Gracie said. “Maybe it’s like the Zapruder film.”

“Where should we get it developed?” Beatrice asked.

“I was looking for a one-hour photo place,” Eddie said.

Gracie clucked her tongue. “The only one I know of is Bickle’s Photo.” She checked her watch, a thin band on her narrow wrist. “It closes in ten minutes.”

“Can we get in after hours?” Beatrice asked. “Who works there?”

“Mark Sankowicz.” Gracie made a face.

“Yuck,” Beatrice said. “I turned him down for homecoming last year. He probably won’t let us in after hours. Besides, I don’t trust him.”

“Me, neither,” Gracie agreed.

I was melted into my seat, oddly relaxed. It felt good to let someone else take over, to stop making decisions for a little while. The Snell girls were only too happy to steer the ship. The tension had left Eddie, too, and while the sisters talked in the front seats, the distance between Eddie and me could be forgotten. We had a task to do, and for better or for worse, we were committed to it now. We would see it through.

“Did you get my magazine?” I asked.

“Got it,” Gracie said. “We’re on it. That’s why you wanted to find this Trish woman? Because she’s the one you met on the road last night.”

“I just want to make sure she’s okay,” I said.

Gracie nodded. “We’ll find her. If she was driving away from the interstate on Atticus Line, she’s probably local, because Atticus Line ends at Hunter Beach and there are no other towns along the way. There are less than a dozen dental offices here. I hope she’s all right.” She shuddered. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have the Lost Girl inside you, making you do things.”

I grasped Eddie’s hand and curled my fingers around it, but he looked away.

Beatrice sat up in the driver’s seat. “I have an idea. We can develop the film ourselves at the high school. There’s a darkroom there for photography class.”

Gracie put a palm on her forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that? It’s perfect.”

“But it’s summer,” I said, “and it’s late. Isn’t the school closed?” I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for any more break-ins.

The sisters exchanged a look. “Okay, I might have an illegal key,” Gracie said. “I may have used the school newspaper’s ditto machine after hours to make an anonymous pamphlet about UFO abduction cover-ups, but it was important. People need to know.”

“We found seventeen people in Coldlake Falls who say they were abducted,” Beatrice added. “Some of them weren’t even high.”

“Do either of you know how to develop film?” I asked.

“I got a B-plus in that class,” Gracie said.

“A-minus,” Beatrice added.

I looked at Eddie. He seemed to pull himself out of his thoughts. Reluctantly, he shrugged.

“It’s as good an idea as any,” he said. “I’m in.”

---

—Coldlake Falls High School was a small, redbrick building, a perfect cube with a square of green lawn in front and a running track behind it. The parking lot was empty, and the building looked abandoned in the lengthening summer sun. Darkness wouldn’t fall for a while yet, but the long shadows made the school look lonely and sad, like every school does in summer.

Gracie had picked up her key at the Snell house while the rest of us waited in the car, parked out of sight. Now she unlocked the school’s side door and it swung open with a soft click. The experience was anticlimactic, to be honest. Still, my stomach turned as Eddie and I took part in our second break-in of the day.

The lights were off in the halls, and the only light was from the lowering sun through the windows. The air-conditioning was off, but the air wasn’t unbearably hot. I looked at the announcement board with curiosity as we walked past it, taking in the old notices of play auditions and student council meetings from last school year. High school had been a very distant experience for me, as if I’d spent time on another planet. Mom and I had moved so much that it had been a struggle to graduate, and I’d never gotten involved in football or yearbooks or math clubs like other students. It went without saying that I had had no friends.

Beatrice led us down one hall, then another. In the dim light and the silence, my exhaustion nearly caught up with me, and I had the urge to lie down and take a nap. High schools in summer, it turned out, were strangely peaceful places.

“In here.” Beatrice whispered, even though there was no one else in the building to hear. Her hand was on the knob of a door labeled photography lab. She turned it experimentally, and it gave. The lab wasn’t locked.

We slipped inside, all of us moving like fugitives. Gracie flicked on the light, showing a classroom with several tables instead of desks, a chalkboard on the front wall. Gracie clicked the door shut behind us.

“Okay,” she said in her normal voice. “The darkroom is over here.”

As the girls opened the door labeled darkroom, I imagined years of students passing through this room, the happy ones and the miserable ones, the smart ones and the stupid ones, with their small rivalries and petty resentments, on their way toward a destiny they couldn’t see. Though we’d never talked about it in depth, I knew exactly what Eddie had been like in high school—big, shy, quiet, overlooked by most of the girls, doing his best to get good grades because he didn’t know any other way to be. I knew Eddie so well that I could see it, see him, his hair overgrown and his shoulders slouched at sixteen.

Our gazes caught, and a flicker of a smile touched his mouth. He guessed what I was thinking. For a second, everything fell away and it was just us—no secrets, lies, worries, or unsolvable problems. Just Eddie and me.

“Come on,” Gracie hissed, and Eddie gestured for me to precede him into the darkroom.

Eddie took the canister of film from his pocket. “Let’s do this fast,” he said.

The girls got to work, preparing the equipment and the chemicals. They whispered directions to each other. Eddie and I waited.

Somewhere outside, I heard the snap of a door closing. We all froze.

I put my hand on the doorknob. There was no mechanism to lock the door from inside—probably a measure to prevent teenagers from locking themselves in to fool around. Anyone could open the door and find us.

The four of us looked at one another. “You heard that, right?” Beatrice asked, her voice a whisper again.

Our faces said that we all had. We waited in silence for the sound to come again.

Ice-cold air crept up the back of my neck, like fingers. Somewhere down the hall was a thump, as if something heavy had been dropped.

“Do it,” I hissed at the girls, my voice coming out harsh. “Do it fast. Right now. Go.”

The girls blinked, and then they nodded. Gracie looked at Eddie, who was standing by the light switch. “We’re ready. You can turn out the light.”

My hand tightened on the doorknob. I didn’t know who—or what—was outside this darkroom, but it wasn’t going to open this door. If the door opened, this would all be for nothing.

What did you take pictures of, Shannon?

I looked at Eddie, nodding to him that I was ready.

Eddie turned off the light.