Chapter Twenty-Six

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

IT'S EARLY SATURDAY evening and Brenda is sitting with the detectives again in her living room. They tell her Cameron has retained an attorney. She finds that disturbing. It makes her feel nauseated, that she let that boy into her house. That she allowed him to take her daughter out in his truck all over the countryside at night when she was away in another town at work.

Detective Stone asks now, ‘Did Diana ever talk to you about her gym teacher?'

Brenda furrows her brow in confusion. ‘Her running coach? Mr Turner?' Stone nods. ‘No, not really.'

‘Apparently Diana complained to the principal about him.'

This takes her completely by surprise. ‘About what?'

‘Inappropriate behaviour.'

She's astonished. Diana had never said anything to her. It troubles her that her daughter never mentioned this. Why didn't she? Why did her daughter tell her so little? She'd always thought they were close, but now she's not sure. It adds another layer to her grief – that her daughter didn't confide in her, and now it's too late.

‘She never told me about that.' She asks, ‘Do you think he might have done this?'

‘We don't know. We interviewed him. It seems unlikely, but we're keeping an open mind.' He adds, ‘They've finished with the body, so you can start making funeral arrangements.' After a pause he says, ‘Cause of death was strangulation, with some kind of ligature. There was no obvious sign that she was sexually assaulted. They weren't able to recover any evidence from her body for DNA analysis, and as you know, her clothes are missing. And we haven't recovered any evidence from the field where the body was found, or from the house. We will continue to search for her missing clothes, and her cell phone.'

Brenda finds herself staring at the door to the living room. Her daughter's jump rope usually hangs from that doorknob, and it's not there. That's what's different, she realizes now. She says, ‘Diana's jump rope – she always leaves it hanging on the back of that doorknob,' she points, ‘and it's not there. She used it to skip in front of the TV.'

‘When was the last time you remember seeing it?' Stone asks.

She tries to think. ‘I don't know for sure. But it's always there. And now it isn't.' The realization of what it means dawns on her, sickening her. She watches the two detectives share a glance.

When Roy sees the white cross on the edge of his field that evening, in the failing light, the flowers laid beneath it, he stops the tractor and sits in silence. He doesn't know who's put it there, but he thinks it's a nice gesture. It reminds him of those crosses you see at the side of the highway sometimes, where people have been killed in accidents, with flowers or teddy bears scattered beneath them. All of a sudden, his heart wells up with a heavy sense of life's misery. How tragic and unfair that this young girl died, and that she died so horribly, so senselessly. He finds it hard to shrug off, perhaps because it feels so strange for this to happen in their small rural town, or perhaps because she was left in his field. He can't get the image of her dead body and the scavenging birds out of his mind. He wonders if he will ever be able to work this field, or even drive by it, without thinking of it. Tomorrow he will buy some flowers.

As he sits on his tractor, looking at the cross and the flowers, silently paying his respects, he feels a lingering sense of unease, that something else is wrong in his world. He's not sure what it is, but it has to do with his daughter. Maybe everyone around here is worried about their daughters right now, he thinks, after what happened to the Brewer girl. There could be a killer here somewhere, and nobody knows who it is.

But it's more than that. Ellen has seemed quiet and strained the last couple of days, and she's admitted to him that she's worried about her fiancé. He knows they haven't seen each other yet this weekend. Roy hopes he isn't getting cold feet. The wedding is only weeks away.

Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022, 9:45 p.m.

Riley and I went back over to Mrs Brewer's tonight after supper to tell her about the cross we put up. We showed her pictures of it on our phones. She seemed very moved by it and thanked us. I walked Riley home again because she's not allowed out alone after dark these days.

Mrs Brewer told us something she probably shouldn't have – that the detectives have learned that Diana complained to Principal Kelly about Mr Turner, the gym teacher, for ‘inappropriate behaviour' and that they'd interviewed him, but they don't think he killed her. I have to admit I was shocked. Diana never said a word to me or Riley about it. I could tell Riley was shocked too. Apparently Diana hadn't told her mother either, and I could sense that Mrs Brewer was hurt by that. I guess Diana was more secretive than we realized. It makes me wonder what else Diana didn't share with us, or at least with Riley. I was also surprised because Turner always seemed like an okay guy to me.

And now they think they know what the murder weapon was. Mrs Brewer told us that Diana's jump rope is missing from the living room. I can't stop thinking about it, how it might have happened. If she was strangled with her own jump rope, wouldn't it mean Diana was probably murdered in the house, and then taken to the field after? That seems to be what they're thinking, according to Mrs Brewer, but they're not releasing much information to the public.

It would have been risky to carry her to a vehicle in front of her house to get rid of her body. But her street ends in a dead end, and there's an empty field next to her house. There's an abandoned road on the other side of that field. You can't see it from the street – no one uses it. I'm wondering now if the killer could have carried her from the back of the house through the field in the dark to a truck on that road. I wonder if the police have thought of that.

Cameron and I used to ride our bikes on that road when we were kids. But anyone could have known about it, even Joe Prior, if he was watching her, if he was planning it.

I feel a dull stirring of something, cutting through all this numbing grief. If it wasn't so upsetting, I could almost imagine myself writing about it some other way. Not as a diary, but as a novel maybe. It would be a way to honour Diana. But I'd give anything just to have her back.

Life is so strange, so unpredictable – I always thought I'd write about all of us one day, Diana included. But not like this.

Paula Acosta watches the late-night news, sitting up in bed with her husband. There is no new information about Diana's murder. They show the same old footage of the tent in the field, the crime-scene figures moving about. There are no new leads, not that they're divulging, anyway. There is nothing about Brad Turner. She wonders if Kelly spoke to the police at all.

She frets about the people who were closest to Diana. Her mother. Her boyfriend, Cameron; her friends Riley and Evan; the girls on the track team. Her heart breaks for all of them. It's so dreadful that murder has come to their small town. She'd thought they were safe here.

Brenda lies in bed, late at night, all alone in the draughty house. She waits for it to come over her, the feeling she had the night before, that her daughter was close by. She yearns for her. She whispers tentatively, ‘Diana, are you there?'

But there's nothing. When she finally falls asleep, she dreams of the jump rope, tight around her daughter's neck.