Though there had been a moment—one moment—when it seemed like His teeth bit down a little harder than necessary. There was a sore spot on the inside of her right thigh that was sure to bruise. But that was just a little rough play, nothing to worry about.
It wasn’t because He was a monster who wanted to hurt her.
He left her very early, by ten a.m., but Miranda had stayed in the cabin for a few more hours. She’d brought a small pack with a lunch and some magazines, and she felt absolutely decadent lying on the blankets naked while she flipped through her Mademoiselle and Cosmopolitan.
Around midafternoon she decided Janice would be drunk enough for her to sneak home. She was better prepared this time to encounter her mother even if Janice wasn’t passed out. There was a brush and hair spray and deodorant in Miranda’s bag, and Janice would never know that she had spent the morning writhing underneath her lover instead of building forts or whatever other kiddie thing Lauren liked to do in the woods.
Jake and Lauren disappeared into the trees, the sound of their murmured voices growing quieter. Miranda was glad they were gone, because she didn’t want to run into them.
I wish I could tell Lauren what happened, though.
Miranda didn’t have to tell her friend who she’d been with all morning. Lauren would just be shocked—and probably furious, too.
But Miranda and Lauren had always shared their secrets and their milestones, and this was something Miranda had always thought she would tell her best friend.
Maybe we’re not best friends anymore. The thought made her feel like there was an empty place inside, a hole where Lauren used to be.
She wanted to run after Lauren then, to grab her hand, to ask her to ditch Jake and go with Miranda to the old ghost tree.
Meet me by the old ghost tree, she thought, wondering if she thought hard enough that Lauren could hear her.
Lauren would never hear one particular thought, because Miranda would barely admit it to herself. It was just a tiny whisper, barely a brush of wind from somewhere in the back of her mind.
I don’t want to be alone. Please don’t leave me alone.
6
Alex found his opportunity to sneak down to the archives late in the afternoon. Hendricks and Pantaleo were out patrolling. Christie was in a meeting with the mayor about the security preparations for the fair. About two hours after lunch Miller fell asleep in his chair, his head lolling forward onto his chest. Miller had his legs up on his desk at the time. Alex wondered if he would stay in that position or if the rolling wheels of Miller’s chair would slowly creep away until his feet crashed to the ground.
Would he wake up if that happened? Possibly not.
Once Alex and Miller had been out on the county road with the speed gun and Miller had conked out in the passenger seat. When an out-of-towner in a yellow Mustang went by doing a cool eighty-five miles per hour Alex had flipped on the lights and sirens and pulled out behind him. Miller slept right through the sirens and the rapid acceleration of their squad car. He snored through Alex getting out to ticket the driver and all the way back to the pullout where they’d started. In fact, Miller didn’t open his eyes until they were parked again and Alex turned the engine off. After this incident Alex found himself worrying that if Miller’s house was on fire he would sleep right through the sound of the smoke alarm.
Alex thought that if Miller rolled right out of the chair and ended up on the floor, it wouldn’t even break the rhythm of his snores.
Though it was tempting to stay and wait for the outcome, Alex thought it better to try to get some time in searching the records before all his time was taken up patrolling the fair.
It doesn’t make sense for us to do it, really. The town should hire private security.
He double-checked to make sure the front door was locked—all the officers had keys. He didn’t want someone to sneak in and slit Miller’s throat.
Such a thought would have been laughable just three days earlier. The most dangerous thing that Alex would have considered was someone coming in and dumping a milkshake on Miller’s head as a prank.
But someone had cut those girls up into little pieces. And someone had killed Joe diMucci and taken his heart out of his chest. And nobody talked about these things. Nobody seemed to even remember that they happened.
Alex started in on the files from 1983, the year prior to Joe diMucci’s death. The 1984 search had yielded nothing until he came across Joe’s file under the November tab. It was the same for 1983—nothing until November.
A seventeen-year-old girl named Jessica Gilbert had gone missing on November 12 of that year. The girl was an honors student, the secretary of the student council, a violin player, and the captain of her volleyball team. She had no boyfriend and only two close friends, the same ones she’d had since grade school. In other words, she was a high achiever who never even broke her parents’ curfew and therefore was unlikely to be a runaway. The girl was last seen wearing a red plaid flannel nightgown climbing the stairs to her own bedroom after kissing her parents good night.
The next morning her mother was surprised Jessica wasn’t out of bed and downstairs eating breakfast early, as it was a school day and Jessica usually had to meet with the student council on Monday morning before classes began.
When Mrs. Gilbert went upstairs to check on her daughter she found the bed unmade and Jessica nowhere to be seen. She went through every room in the house but her daughter was not there. The front door was locked with a deadbolt and a chain latch, and both of those had been secured when her husband went out that morning to get the newspaper—she’d heard him slide the chain latch open as she stood in the kitchen making coffee. The back door had also been locked, although that had a simple knob lock. But Mrs. Gilbert was certain Jessica hadn’t gone out that way because her daughter didn’t have a back door key, only one for the front. And the two keys for that door were on her own and her husband’s key rings.
When Van Christie asked Mrs. Gilbert what she thought had happened to her daughter, she seemed completely at a loss. She didn’t think Jessica would have been able to climb out of her bedroom window—there was no tree limb to grab, or thicket of bushes below to jump into. In fact, there was nothing outside Jessica’s window except smooth yellow siding.
Jessica had gone up to her bedroom the night before, carrying a thick library book under her arm. And sometime between the ten o’clock news and sunrise the next morning the girl had disappeared from her home without a trace. Her shoes weren’t missing, nor her wallet. There was no indication that she’d left the house of her own volition.
There wasn’t any sign of a struggle, either, or a broken window or picked lock. Jessica was simply gone.
Despite the extraordinary circumstances and the fact that Jessica was a minor, Van Christie had not called for a search. In fact, his notes in the file indicated that he thought the girl had run off with someone and would be home soon.
Alex grew angrier and angrier as he read the file. Christie’s behavior had been almost criminally incompetent. He hadn’t undertaken a search. He hadn’t notified the police departments of nearby towns to be on the lookout for the girl. Christie hadn’t done anything, as far as Alex could tell, except go to the Gilberts’ house and take a statement.
He’d just waited until a couple of teenagers looking for a quiet place to grope each other had stumbled upon Jessica Gilbert’s remains out in the woods. Then Christie took the photos, notified the family, and filed everything away.
The entire incident barely caused a ripple in the quiet waters of Smiths Hollow. Alex bet that if he checked the newspaper records of the time he would find no front-page story, either.
Just like now. Two girls were found brutally murdered and as far as Alex could tell most of the townspeople didn’t even know it had happened. Although he didn’t condone sensational journalism, there at least ought to have
been a warning for the sake of public safety. Should parents let their kids go about unsupervised with this kind of killer on the loose?
The crime scene photos were shockingly familiar. The girl had been dismembered and beheaded, and the remains arranged in a strange pattern on the ground. It could have been the same set of photos that Alex had taken a few days earlier.
“When Christie arrived at the crime scene the other day he acted like he’d never seen such a thing before,” Alex murmured.
He looked at the date Jessica Gilbert went missing. November 12, 1983. Something twanged in his memory.
Alex pulled out the file on Joe diMucci. Joe had left his house on November 12, 1984, and his body was found the next morning.
Some kind of anniversary? Alex went back to the cabinets and drew out all the files for November 1982. There were only five of them. Smiths Hollow really didn’t have much crime to speak of.
But the crime that it did have was more horrifying than he’d ever imagined.
The third report in the pile was about a girl named Sarah Villaire. Sixteen years old and—reading between the lines—nothing but trouble. She’d been arrested for shoplifting, vandalism, drunk and disorderly—even soliciting (apparently she’d attempted to trade sexual favors for the purchase of alcohol). She lived with her divorced mother; her father’s legal residence was in Indiana.
The report that Christie took from Sarah’s mother was disturbingly similar to the one about Jessica. The mother—listed as Miss Tanya Mazur—had seen her daughter go to bed on November 12, 1982 around eleven p.m. Miss Mazur stayed up for some time after, watching a film that Sarah wasn’t interested in. The mother and daughter lived in a small, one-level cottage with four rooms and a bathroom.
Miss Mazur was, by her own admission, nervous about the possibility of a break-in since they were two women living on their own. Before she went to bed herself she walked around the house checking the windows and both the front and back doors. Each door had a slide bolt lock as well as a keyhole lock in the knob. All of these were secure.
Sarah had snuck out of the house after dark before, but Miss Mazur had checked her daughter around one a.m. and Sarah was sleeping soundly.
The next morning Sarah’s mother woke around seven a.m. Both the front and back door were still locked and bolted when she got up. She made a habit of checking these because an unbolted door meant Sarah had gone out in the night.
Miss Mazur cooked breakfast and then went to her daughter’s room to wake her. She found the bed empty. Sarah’s bedroom had one window, which was easy to climb through, but it was locked from the inside.
“It was like she just disappeared into thin air,” Miss Mazur was quoted as saying.
Christie had done no follow-up on this case, either. There had been no interviews with her friends or neighbors, no search for a missing minor, no public call for witnesses or assistance. Just the bare facts of the disappearance were taken into the report with the later addition of the discovery of the girl’s remains.
In the woods. In the same place that Jessica Gilbert’s were found a year later, and Joe diMucci’s were found a year after that.
And all three of them had gone missing on the same day.
Alex realized his heart was beating hard in his chest, like he’d been out running laps. Just what had he stumbled onto here, exactly?
It was fairly obvious that there was some kind of cover-up. It was even clearer that the mayor was involved somehow, as Christie seemed to take his marching orders from Touhy’s office. Christie was always the only officer listed on the reports.
Was Touhy a murderer, and Christie was covering for him?
Or were Touhy and Christie hiding the murders for some other reason?
Why, though? Why would anyone keep this from the community? Why would they actively prevent the murderer from being caught?
Because that was definitely what happened. Christie didn’t even bother with the pretense of an investigation. A person went missing. They were found dead. The case was filed away and forgotten. Wash, rinse, repeat.
It was easier to search now that he had clearer parameters. Alex pulled out all the November files from the last five years, and every year he found the same thing.
Marilynne Simmons. Went missing November 12, 1981. Found dead November 18.
Veronica Hawthorne. Missing November 12, 1980. Found dead on Thanksgiving day.
Bernice Charpentier. Missing November 12, 1979. Found dead two days later.
Every year a girl went missing on November 12. Every year her body was found in pieces in the exact same place in the woods.
Every year.
Every year and nobody ever spoke of it.
Every year a girl was brutally murdered and Smiths Hollow went about its business as if nothing happened at all.
Except for last year. Last year there hadn’t been a girl. It had been a man—Joe diMucci. But there had still been a dead body.
Was there no outcry because people didn’t know? Or—and this was much, much worse—because they did know but somehow accepted it as a part of life here?
Alex rubbed his eyes. You’re getting tired. The whole town isn’t part of a vast conspiracy to . . .
His thought trailed off. To what? To sacrifice one girl a year? Was the town full of Satanists or something?
“This isn’t some weird horror movie, Alejandro,” he told himself.
But there is something weird going on.
He heard the sound of boots on the floor upstairs—a heavy tread, probably Miller freshly awake from his nap and heading to the bathroom to piss out the giant pop he’d had with lunch.
Alex didn’t want Miller to know what he was doing. Either Miller was as clueless as he seemed (which was very likely—Alex thought it would be hard work to pretend to be that simple) or he was part of Christie’s cover-up. Either way, Alex didn’t want Christie to find out.
He hurriedly put away all the irrelevant files and collected the ones of dead and missing girls that he’d found. Then he dashed up the stairs to the hallway and peeked right. The bathroom door at the far end was closed. He felt absurd sneaking around, like he was a child trying not to get caught by his parents.
Alex moved down the hall toward the main room of the station. He had to pass Christie’s office, but the door was closed and there wasn’t any sound of movement inside.
There was no air conditioning, so the windows in the front room were open—not that it made a bit of difference, really, as the whole station was like a sweltering oven. Alex heard the whoosh of cars passing by outside on the road, and the unmistakable buzz-call of a red-winged blackbird. The air was still and heavy and he was pretty certain there was no one in the building except him and Miller.
He dashed to his desk, stuffed the files in his backpack, put the pack back inside the bottom drawer, and tried to look busy. It wasn’t that difficult, since he needed to organize all the statements from the roadhouse incident into a coherent report—writing reports was not Miller’s strong suit so he generally left that to Alex.
Why is Miller even here? Alex thought, although it didn’t come from a place of malice. He liked Miller fine. He just didn’t seem that interested in being a police officer.
Alex supposed it wasn’t easy finding qualified people in a town this small—it was one of the reasons why Van Christie had been so eager to hire him.
The door to the bathroom banged open. Miller reminded Alex of his kids, the way every door needed to be thrown against the wall with all the force they could muster.
“Where were you?” Miller asked as he settled back into his sleeping position on the other side of the desk.
“Just went out for some air,” Alex lied. “It’s stuffy as hell in here. Are you taking another nap?”
“Fair duty starts tomorrow,” Miller said, closing his eyes again. “
Gotta sleep while I can.”
Alex didn’t mind if Miller took another snooze. It meant he’d leave Alex alone to think. He had a lot to think about.
If all the other deaths had happened on November 12, then why had those two girls been killed this week? Why were the bodies found in a residential yard instead of in the woods? Was there a copycat killer?
That was an even bigger nightmare—the idea that there might be two of these guys running around.
Whether there was one or two killers it was pretty clear that Christie was treating these two murders the same way he’d treated all of them.
He was going to pretend they hadn’t happened, and everyone in Smiths Hollow would continue knowing nothing.
Or pretending nothing happened.
Alex wasn’t a detective. He didn’t have any training. But he was going to expose Touhy and Christie, expose the murders that had been happening under everyone’s nose.
Yeah, you’re going to righteously demand justice, Sheriff Lopez, he thought. But just how are you going to do that?
7
Lauren and Jake emerged from the woods the same way that Lauren had gone in—through the Arakawas’ yard. Mrs. Arakawa’s white Mazda 626 wasn’t in the driveway and Lauren was glad. She didn’t want to answer any questions right now about what they’d found in the woods, or why she’d gone in alone but returned with Jake.
From the Arakawa house there was a fairly commanding view of the cul-de-sac and the houses on the street beyond. Lauren saw Jake’s bright orange Gremlin in his driveway six houses away from the cul-de-sac. A few houses past that was Lauren’s home.
There was a police car parked in front of her house, and she saw her mother standing by the mailbox talking to Officer Hendricks.
Her first thought was Great, I can hand these bags over to him right now.
Her second thought was Then Mom will know what I was doing and she’ll get pissed.
“Listen, can we put these in your car for right now?” Lauren asked. “I know Officer Hendricks is right there, but I don’t want my mom to know what I was doing.”
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