Chapter Forty

CHAPTER FORTY

Twenty minutes later, Beatrice drove her car into an empty parking lot outside a closed Kmart. She pulled the prints from under her shirt, where she had hastily stuffed them as we made our escape from Coldlake Falls High School.

“So? Are we going to talk about that?” she asked, turning in her seat to look at the rest of us.

She had regained some of her composure, but she was still shaken. In the passenger seat, Gracie was pale and silent.

Oddly, I felt calmer than I had since I watched Eddie climb through John Haller’s window. The pulse in my throat had slowed, the sweat drying against my shirt. “I told you what happened,” I said. “You said you believed me.”

“Are you kidding me?” Beatrice’s voice was high-pitched with leftover adrenaline. “We did, but that was before—oh my God.”

“I think I might throw up,” Gracie said.

“I want to look at the photographs.” Eddie’s voice was calm. “We need to do that before we talk about anything else. Turn on the light.”

Dusk had fallen, and it was shadowy inside the car. Beatrice reached up and turned on the interior light, throwing us all into a glare.

There were four photos, so she passed them around, one to each of us. We all looked at our photographs, the ones that Eddie and I had broken the law for, the ones that we’d risked everything for.

“Mine’s unreadable,” Gracie said. She flipped her photo so we could see that it was a blur. “She must have moved when she pressed the shutter.”

“Mine’s Shannon with a girl I don’t recognize.” Beatrice flipped her photo, too. In it, Shannon Haller had her arm around another girl’s shoulders, big smiles on both of their faces. It was a lot like the photo I’d seen at her father’s house, though the woman was different. An everyday photo of a young woman hanging out with a girlfriend, taking a picture because they were having a good time.

I looked at my own photo, my hands cold. I couldn’t speak.

Eddie was silent, too, staring at the print in his hands.

“Well?” Beatrice’s voice was sharp with excitement. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

I was frozen, but Eddie slowly turned his photo around. It was of Shannon, by herself, standing on a set of concrete steps. She looked serious, solemn, her slim body held tensely. She was wearing jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, a backpack on her back.

“That’s my mother,” Eddie said, his voice low and raw. “I remember her face. That’s her.”

“Eddie,” I said softly, and he looked at me.

Had he always known? Had I? Shannon was a little too thin in the photo, her cheeks hollow, her eyes too large. But I saw the shape of Eddie’s nose, the angle of his eyebrows in that picture. I saw the tentative expression on her face, the quiet way she held herself. In death, Shannon was terrifying. But in life, she resembled her son. She was a woman who’d had hard luck and struggles, one who had made decisions both good and bad and paid for them. A young woman who just wanted a better life and wasn’t sure of how to get there. Lost, just like the rest of us.

“She brought you here,” I said to Eddie. “That’s why we can’t remember exiting the interstate.”

His voice was close to a whisper. “I’m so sorry, April.”

“She was looking at you,” I went on. “That first time, when she was in the back of the truck. And outside Max Shandler’s barn. I thought she was staring at us, but she wasn’t. She was staring at you. Only you.”

“What are you talking about?” Beatrice nearly shrieked.

“Bea, be quiet,” her sister said.

“She grabbed you from the car,” I said. It was falling into place now. “She reached across me and grabbed you, because it was you she wanted. It was so weird that no one had ever seen her like that, remember? The storm, and the light, and the way she banged on the car. It seemed so strange that no one else had ever seen that, but now we know why. Because she wanted you. When I was alone, she tried to kill me—but not when I was with you. She never wanted to kill you.”

“I’m so sorry,” Eddie said again. “You didn’t ask for this, but you got dragged in anyway. It’s my fault.”

I took the photo from my back pocket and handed it to him—the picture of Shannon and the little boy who was Eddie. He took it and looked at it for a long moment.

“I always thought I didn’t remember her,” he said, the words coming slowly. “I thought I didn’t know her face. But now I think it was because I was trying not to remember. I was trying not to recall her face—I’ve been doing it for years. I remember staying with neighbors, wondering when she would come home. Wondering if she would ever come home.” He put a hand to his forehead and rubbed slowly, closing his eyes. “There’s so much I don’t remember. The day they took me away—I don’t remember that. I worried about her so much, wondered if she was all right. I wondered if she had been hurt or was in the hospital. If she would ever come back for me. Then she didn’t, and I think I tried to forget everything.”

“I think she would have come back for you,” I said. “If she had lived. She wasn’t perfect, but she was trying. Carla said she was sober before she disappeared. She just didn’t get the chance.”

We were all quiet for a moment. Beatrice seemed to have calmed down, and she was biting her lip, her expression solemn. She and Gracie may not know all the details of Eddie’s story, but they could guess enough.

“She’s really pretty,” Gracie said.

Eddie looked at the photo of his mother holding him as a boy again, and then he raised his gaze to me. “April? Your photo.”

The picture in my hand felt like ice. I had the urge to tear it up, throw it out the window, as if that could keep everything the way it was in just this moment.

But we’d come all this way—so, so far from the road we’d thought we’d travel—and there was no other way to go but forward.

“There’s more,” I said.

Eddie nodded, as if he expected it.

“Take another look at that photo.” I pointed to the picture of Shannon standing on the steps. “She’s wearing a backpack.” I held up my photo. “And then there’s this.”

Shannon was smiling in this picture, too. She was standing with a man and a woman I didn’t recognize, her brown hair lifted by a breeze. Despite the smile, her eyes were shadowed and unhappy. But that wasn’t what mattered.

In the background of the photo was a familiar house, one that Eddie and I had visited a few days ago.

“Hey,” Beatrice said as she recognized it. “That’s Hunter Beach.”

Eddie’s expression went carefully blank as he recognized the cabin on Hunter Beach, the one the backpackers had been using since the seventies and were still using today. His mother was standing in front of it, posing with her friends.

She had been there in 1976, right in the spot we’d stood to talk to the kids around the fire.

I saw his face change when he saw it. Behind Shannon and her friends, a backpack was lying in the sand. A pair of sandals was tucked beneath it, a sweatshirt folded on top of it. Lying on top of the sweatshirt was a letter jacket from Midland High.

The photo had been taken after Shannon left home to find herself. She would have been carrying the camera, with the film in it, when she died.

“Her father had this photo in his house?” Beatrice asked, breathless. “Her father?”

“Oh my God,” Gracie said. “She’s the Lost Girl. The Lost Girl really is real.”

“Her father had her camera,” I said. “He was there when she died.”