Murder Road (15 page)

“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.”

After the night with the spaghetti and meatballs, Eddie and I weren’t exactly dating. It was something simpler and yet more complicated than that. I had roomed with plenty of people who had been in half-assed relationships, who agonized over unreturned phone calls, confusing gifts of concert tickets (What does it
mean
if he invites me to see the Smashing Pumpkins with him?), and who made a mixtape for who. I’d seen a dozen dramatic breakups and a few engagements, which were also destined for eventual dramatic breakups. None of that described Eddie and me.

We spent a lot of time together. He helped me get my car fixed. I went with him to run his errands, because even his errands were interesting to me. We watched TV and he rubbed my feet—he was insanely good at it—and we talked about everything and nothing. I never, even once, wondered why he didn’t call me back.

Was that dating? It didn’t seem like it to me. Instead, under the
quiet exterior of our time together, it felt like I was being pulled open, the threads of me unraveling as every part of my life came apart at the seams. I didn’t recognize this life. I had run for so long since California, been so many women. I had never let a man help me fix my car or rub my feet. These things were momentous to me.

They were momentous to Eddie, too. At times I’d catch him looking at me as if he was happy to see me but wasn’t quite sure how I’d come to be there. He was closed off and inside himself like I was, though his reasons and methods were different from mine, and he was equally baffled as to how all of this was happening. I didn’t think he’d call what we were doing
dating
, either.

He didn’t even try to sleep with me, not at first. Even though my skin hummed every time he touched me, even though we sat so close at the movies that our knees touched. Even though we were often alone in his bachelor apartment or in my shared living room, my legs curled underneath me as we watched TV.

We had dinner with his parents. His mother was polite and pleasant, though I could tell she wanted to open the top of my skull and dig around inside with a microscope, analyzing this girlfriend that Eddie had brought home. His father took refuge in hearty jokes and comments about politics that were targeted so widely, he obviously hoped to draw me in.
Taxes going up! You hear about that Russian space station? What’s next?
Maybe he wanted me to reply with a joke about Bill Clinton playing the saxophone, but I didn’t. I rarely watched the news—the roommates in my shared house changed the channel when the news came on, and no one subscribed to a newspaper.

After that dinner with his parents, Eddie said he was going to the bathroom. I followed him down the hall past the kitchen,
where he passed the bathroom door and walked out the back door of the house.

“What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise when I joined him on the back patio, damp with melting March snow, the air frigid.

I didn’t answer, and for a long moment I listened to him take deep breaths, one after the other. I had known that he wasn’t going to the bathroom; I had known that he was going to escape for a few minutes to breathe. I had known it, and his parents hadn’t. Eddie was lonely, even here, with these good people who loved him. His experience overseas, where he’d changed from a sweet young man into something else, was locked inside him; he couldn’t let it out, and he couldn’t get rid of it. No one in his life understood him anymore.

After a few minutes, I brushed my fingertips against his wrist. “Ready to go back?”

He was staring into the darkness, oblivious to the damp cold that must be seeping through his zip-up sweatshirt. “April, this is how it’s going to be,” he said.

“I know.”

“It doesn’t change; it doesn’t get fixed. It just is. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“If you want out, you have to say so.”

I sighed. “Nothing about this scares me. It probably should. But it doesn’t.”

He nodded and we went back inside.

I watched him now as we sat at a picnic table outside a
restaurant called the Ice Cream Queen. The handful of tables around us, unsteady on the uneven grass, were filled with families and kids. A hot breeze blew pine scent mixed with sugar and lifted the damp hair from my neck. Wasps buzzed over the garbage can. My head was spinning.

Eddie had ordered a banana split. This was his way of treating me, telling me that we were supposed to be on our honeymoon and I should eat something other than nonfat Yoplait, my usual staple. He picked up the long spoon and dug in.

“That was the weirdest afternoon I’ve ever spent,” he said.

I picked up my own spoon. “I agree.”

“Did you see that house? It was like something out of a magazine. Their parents have no idea.” Eddie took a bite of syrup-covered vanilla ice cream and shook his head. “They could be in trouble over those photocopies. Those were confidential files.”

“The idea didn’t seem to bother them,” I said. “Anything for the pursuit of justice, I suppose.”

Eddie poked at a piece of banana. “I’m not sure we learned much.”

I wasn’t, either. We’d read Gracie’s illegally photocopied files, one for each of the six Atticus Line murders. It hadn’t been a huge undertaking, because the files were slim, filled with a bare minimum of information. We knew more now than we had when we met Beatrice, but not a lot more.

Six murders over nineteen years, all of them on Atticus Line. Not on a regular timeline, not at a regular time of year, not in a specific place along the road. None of the victims knew one another or anyone local that police could find. None had apparently been
sexually violated, and all of them were found with clothes on. Some of them were missing their belongings and some weren’t.

None of the cases were solved, and there weren’t even any good suspects. None of the victims had been in the middle of a lovers’ quarrel or other fight. None of them dealt drugs, owed money, or had anything to do with organized crime. None of them had told anyone they were being followed or stalked. Each one—except the Lost Girl, who wasn’t identified—had been coming or going from their everyday life, taking a break from the world to hitchhike to Hunter Beach and pretend that nothing mattered for a little while. None of them carried enough cash worth robbing them for.

It was a lot of information, but there was no pattern. If it weren’t for the fact that all of the murders were on one road, they would seem completely random.

But six people were dead, and there were no good answers to the puzzle. It was impossible to tell whether there was one killer, or two, or three, or six—could there really be six killers in one relatively small town? Or six murderers who happened to drive down one road, looking to kill?

“Hunter Beach is the one connection,” I said, trying the theory by saying it aloud. “The victims were all coming or going from there. Is it worth going back?”

Eddie shook his head. “The police have probably been there by now. Everyone we talked to is most likely gone. Besides, no one stays there for long, especially for nineteen years.”

He was right. The backpackers on the beach might not be breaking the law, but they would rather roll up their sleeping bags and leave than get into any trouble. It’s what I would do if I were
in their shoes. “Maybe we should track down the owner of the property,” I said. “Kal said he lets the kids stay on the beach, even though the town doesn’t approve.”

Eddie thought it over. “It’s an idea. Property records are easy enough to look up. If the property has had the same owner all this time, it could be the connection.” He put his spoon down. “But I keep coming back to the Lost Girl.”

“What do you mean?”

He spoke slowly, as if working the words out. “We assume she was a hitchhiker, headed either to or from Hunter Beach. But we don’t know that. Not without knowing who she was. The police file doesn’t have any mention of the police going to Hunter Beach at the time to interview the kids there. It looks like they didn’t even check whether any of them knew about a missing girl. So how do we know that’s what she was doing?”

I put my own spoon down, following his train of thought. “She’s the only victim that wasn’t identified.”

“Right. And that was deliberate. Someone made it impossible to identify her on purpose.”

“The tag torn from her T-shirt,” I said.

Eddie nodded. “Whoever killed her ripped the tag out of her shirt because it could identify her somehow. The jacket they found might have been hers, or it might have been misdirection. What if the Lost Girl wasn’t a hitchhiker at all? What if she was local?”

“There would be a missing person’s report,” I said. “Kal must have checked.
Someone
must have in all this time. The first thing to do would be to look at missing person’s reports from the time of the murder.”

“What if there wasn’t a report?” Eddie asked. “She was in her
twenties. Maybe she told her family she was leaving home. Maybe she’d done it before. Maybe someone in her family killed her, then told everyone she’d left town.” His gaze focused on the distance, the banana split forgotten. “She was the first murder. She meant something to him. He didn’t
want
anyone to know who she was, and he took steps to cover it up. I think it’s because she knew her killer.”

A trickle of worry started deep in my stomach. Not because Eddie was right, or because we might be looking for a killer here in town. I worried because this was the deep thinking mechanism I’d seen so many times by now: Eddie vanished inside his own head.

I didn’t like it when he went so deep. When he went too deep, I couldn’t follow.

And if I couldn’t follow, who knew where he would go?

“Eddie,” I said softly.

His gaze focused a little at the sound of my voice, but he didn’t look at me. “She’s still on that road, April,” he said. “Just her. Not the others. She’s been there since 1976, all alone. She’s still on that road.”

I reached across the table, put my hand on his. “I know.”