by Piper Dow
Wayne still looked uncomfortable but nodded. They put their heads together over Kelly’s phone as she pulled up the pictures. She skipped to the photos of Jill’s room first. She paused at the pictures of the closet, struck anew by the enormity of what they had discovered. She swiped the screen to reveal a photo of the room that included the bed. There was a stack of books on the floor near the bed. Kelly zoomed in, and they were able to see that two looked like textbooks, but Kelly’s hand must have been shaking when she took the photo, because the titles of the books were impossible to read, even blown up on the screen.
“Well. We can see if the library has the textbooks where we can see them - we know we’re looking for one with a part blue, part orange spine, with either white or tan letters. The other one is either White or yellow with green letters, and a blue stripe at the bottom,” Kelly said. She swiped the screen again to see if another, clearer picture might have the books, too. The next photo was of the contents of the drawer of the bedside table. “Wait - I took that!” she yelped, putting her phone on the table and reaching into her bag. She pulled out Jill’s notebook.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Putting the notebook on the table, she opened the cover. She had been right, Jill had used the notebook as a journal. It didn’t look like she had a regular habit of writing things down, but had used the notebook sporadically. The first few pages were from the beginning of the year. She had still been dating the boy that Kelly’s family had all met - Roger. Apparently, Roger was thinking of going to California to law school at the end of the school year, which devastated Jill. Kelly skimmed the pages quickly, gasping when she reached a date in March. Sam had guessed correctly - Jill had been pregnant. The next few pages were full of smudged entries where tears had hit the paper. Roger had given Jill money and taken her to a clinic but hadn’t gone inside with her. Kelly felt the licks of white-hot anger in her stomach as she turned the page.
The next entry was dated a few weeks later. There were no more tear stains on the page, but the words felt wooden and stark to Kelly. There were a few entries over the course of a month, each only a couple of sentences long.
Wayne was gazing into the woods as Kelly read. She skimmed the next couple of pages and then came to the first mention of Mark.
“Listen,” Kelly read the entry out loud to Wayne. “Met a guy today. Said he’s been watching me, and can see the life draining out of my soul. The way he talked was so compassionate. He didn’t ask why I am sad or try to get me to laugh. He said he would like me to give him a chance. I asked a chance for what, and he touched my hand, so soft and carefully, and said a chance to help me live. Agreed to go to dinner.”
Wayne made a gagging sound in the back of his throat. “Seriously, who would fall for that? Smarmy!”
Kelly looked at him thoughtfully. “Think about it,” she said quietly. “She aborted her baby. She was sinking deeper and deeper into depression with every day that went by. She didn’t feel comfortable talking to anyone about it, or else Sam would have known. She must have felt alone, like she was drowning, and someone she doesn’t even know tells her he can see her.” She looked back at the entry. “I do agree, definitely smarmy, but I can understand why she felt drawn to the hope he offered.”
She skimmed another few pages. There were several more entries about Mark, and alarms in Kelly’s mind were ringing more insistently with each entry. With the comments Jill included that Mark had said, it seemed to Kelly that he had been stalking Jill. Jill appeared to find it romantic. An entry after dinner at a pub one night included news that Mark had started an argument with another man at the bar for bumping into Jill. Jill saw it as protective. Kelly snorted - possessiveness was easy enough to see when it was laid out on the page like this.
“Hey! This one is from the week I visited Sam,” Kelly said, outraged at the entry. “She wasn’t as nice as she seemed to be! She says here that she is getting tired of Sam’s talk about church and Sam’s family’s talk about church - we didn’t even talk to her about church! What a mealworm!”
Kelly continued to skim the entries, noting a subtle change over the next few pages. Mark gave Jill a pill when she said she had a headache, admitting it wasn’t aspirin but telling her it would help. Jill described a warm and protective shell surrounding her, keeping pain and badness away. She started having headaches a couple of times a week, or at least, according to her entries, she started telling Mark she had them a couple of times a week. Midway through the notebook, Kelly could see that Jill was using on a regular basis. She never named the actual drug, and Kelly wasn’t sure she actually knew what she was taking. She described little pink pills, and a couple of times noted that the pills were blue or green.
“I don’t get it,” Kelly said, after nearly 10 minutes of reading in silence. “Mark was supplying her with drugs - she doesn’t say what kind, but it looks like there were three or four kinds of pills she was taking. But then he would make her get cleaned up and go to class. She said it was important to him to have people think she was good. At one point it seems like she must have asked him about something harder, but he must have said no, because she seems mad at him and about him needing people to see her as good. She talks about some of his friends but says he won’t bring her out much and when she runs into any of his friends without him around, they all act like they don’t know her, like she’s invisible. Which, apparently, she is supposed to do, too. It all seems very bizarre to me, to be honest, Wayne.”
Kelly looked up at Wayne. He had turned to sit with his back to her and was tossing twigs at a little pine needle tepee he had set up at the end of the table. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Waiting for you to finish so we can get out of here,” he said, calmly. “Remember you said we need to catch the 5:45 bus to get home? It’s already almost one.”
Kelly jumped. She glanced at her watch and grabbed the notebook and her phone, stuffing them back into the messenger bag. Some folded pages had slipped out of the notebook and fallen onto the table - she shoved those in with the book. She realized that she had eaten the sandwich and finished the apple while reading the journal entries. “You’re right - let’s go,” she said.
Wayne paused as they grabbed the bikes. “Do you know how to get to the school from here, or do we have to go back past Sam’s apartment?”
Kelly shook her head.
“No, but at least we can put the name of the school into the GPS,” Kelly said. “Better use yours, though - my battery is already half gone.”
Wayne nodded, pulled out his phone and tapped in the name of the school. Hitting a couple of tabs, he noted that it would take them almost half an hour to get to the school on bike. Kelly threw her leg over the seat and pushed off, following Wayne out of the parking lot. She was thankful that they turned left out of the park and not right - she really had no desire to go back past Sam’s apartment and chance another encounter with the man they had run from. Thinking of that, she hollered ahead to Wayne.
“Hey, that guy at the apartment! I don’t think that was Mark,” she said when he had slowed enough for her to ride up alongside him. “Mark had to have been slick, right? To draw Jill into his web, and from what I remember he was not bad looking.” She tried to remember what he had looked like from the few minutes she had seen him when he was picking Jill up for the party. “The guy at the apartment was kind of scruffy, wasn’t he?”
Wayne nodded. The voice on his phone called out directions to take a left in 1000 feet. Kelly couldn’t even see a left to take until they rounded a corner.
“Crap!” Wayne’s tense whisper came at the same time Kelly saw the car at the intersection. It took a right onto their road and drove past them. The driver was fiddling with the radio. He glanced at them as they rode toward the intersection, then back at the dashboard. Kelly forced herself to keep pedaling and face forward, though her breath caught in her chest. It was the guy from the apartment. Next to her, Wayne had turned to look at the car in the pretense of che
cking the road behind them in order to take the left turn.
“Oh, man, Kelly, that was way too close!” he whispered as they took the turn and drove on. “I don’t know that this is a very good idea.”
Kelly secretly wondered about the plan, too. However, remembering Sam’s white face on the pillow at the hospital steeled her nerve.
“Wayne - we know that there is a whole crapload of stuff going on. We are the only ones looking for anything more than Sam getting mugged at a bus stop after using drugs. We have to do this! Who else is going to help her?” she said.
“Hey, I want to help Sam, too, but who’s going to help us if we end up like she did?” Wayne uttered tersely. They kept pedaling, with increased energy sparked by their fear.
“We’re going to be in public once we get to the school,” Kelly said. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to soothe Wayne’s fears or her own, but it helped her feel a little more controlled. “And he didn’t see us or know us if he did see us. The car kept going, right? Nobody knows we are here, Wayne. Nobody is going to be looking to hurt us.”
Wayne’s GPS chirped out directions to take the next right, then find the school on the next street on the right. They had made better time than the half-hour initially forecast - probably because of trying to put as much distance between them and the car as they could.
“Hey, we aren’t going to have a long time to stay at the school, either,” Wayne commented. “Remember we have to get the bikes back to the shop before they close - that’s at 5. Otherwise, you won’t get the deposit back. Just keep it in mind that we need to leave enough time to ride back to get there before they close.”
Kelly nodded. Wayne had a thing for time, some inner clockwork he ran by, making sure he wasn’t late. She was used to him keeping her on track.
They turned in at the first entrance for the school. There was a cut out with a map of the campus, which they used to locate the library on. Pulling back into the main drive, Wayne’s front tire hit the grate on a drain cover and twisted, sending him sprawling on the ground. He jumped up quickly, grabbing the bike handles and pulling the bike toward him, but the tire had popped. Grimacing, he pulled the bike to the side of the road. He rubbed his hands on his jeans, leaving a line of blood behind on one leg.
“Jeez, Wayne, are you okay?” Kelly straddled her bike and pulled his hands out to look at them. The asphalt had ripped the palms a little, but she doubted they hurt more than his pride.
“I’m fine,” he said, pulling his hands away from her. “Just sting a little. What are we going to do about the tire?”
Kelly looked around. At each building entrance, there were bike racks, most of which had at least a few bikes chained to them. “We can check the bookstore - with this many bikes on campus, they might stock bike supplies,” she said.
Wayne nodded, breathing out in disgust. “I’ll go there and see, and meet you at the library. If they don’t have tubes, you won’t have much time to check anything.”
Wayne checked the campus map quickly before heading off toward the store, wheeling the bike beside him. Kelly glanced at the map again to refresh her memory and headed to the library, carefully maneuvering around the drainage grate.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Opening the large wooden doors, Kelly took a deep breath. She loved the smell of libraries, the pages and glue used to bind the books, and the quiet scratching of pens on paper and tapping of fingers on keyboards. She quickly located the reference desk and headed over to it, phone in hand. She had decided on a cover story in case she was asked, but there was no one standing at the desk just now. She pulled up the photo of the textbooks to remember what was on the spines and started looking at the books on the shelf behind the desk. She saw one spine with blue and orange, but it was a French text. A white spine with blue lettering looked promising, but it had no blue stripe at the bottom. She kept looking.
“May I help you?” The voice came from behind her left elbow.
Kelly jumped, sliding her phone toward her chest to hide the screen. She turned to see a grey-haired man limping toward her. He wore a sweater with patches on the elbows over a brown plaid flannel shirt that made Kelly wonder how he wasn’t melting in a puddle of sweat.
“I’m looking for a textbook,” she said. “I can’t remember the name of it. It’s blue and orange on the spine.”
The man pulled glasses from his pocket and put them on his nose as he went around the desk. He pulled a list from beneath the counter. “What class is it for?” he asked, prepared to scan the list.
“I’m not sure,” Kelly said. “My sister asked me to see if you have a copy because hers is missing a few pages - I think she bought it used. I can’t remember the name or the class, just that it was blue and orange.”
The man looked at her over the top of his glasses as he slid the list back under the counter.
“Well, these are the textbooks we have. We don’t allow them to leave the library, though,” he said. He waved his hand at the shelf behind him. “If we allowed these books to leave, they wouldn’t be here for others to borrow.”
“No, I know that,” Kelly assured him. “My sister knows she’ll have to come here to read the pages if you have the book, she just asked me to look since I was going to be here anyway.”
The man nodded. He turned to look at the shelf, scanning the spines. Kelly had already ruled out the books on the bottom shelf and was working her way up the wall. She snuck a look at the photo on her phone again. She needed to find a book with either white or tan letters, with a blue and orange spine. The old man pulled out a couple of textbooks with blue or orange on their spines, but neither was the right one. Kelly kept scanning. On the third shelf up, her heart leaped. There was a book with the right colors on the spine, though it had yellow letters in the title. She pointed to the book and asked him to bring it to her to look at.
Looking down at the title, The Sociology of Organizations, Kelly felt a flutter of excitement. She must be on the right track! She had been afraid that it might be a math book or one from some other basic core course that she couldn’t be positive about, but Jill was a sociology major. “Um, I think this is the one, but can you tell me which professors are using this textbook?” She asked the librarian.
He pulled his list out from under the counter again. “That’s Professor Harlin’s text, his class is the only one using it.”
Thanking the man for his help, Kelly walked away to a table and sat down. She pulled out the notebook she and Wayne had been making the lists in and wrote down the name of the book and the class. Somehow, she had to figure out how to find some of the other students from the course.
“Hey, aren’t you Sam’s sister?”
Kelly lifted her head as the voice drifted to her across the table.
A couple of the girls Sam worked with at the mall bookstore had been walking past. Kelly recognized one of them as Marie, though she couldn’t remember the other one’s name.
“Hi!” she said.
The girls came closer. “How is Sam doing?” Marie asked quietly.
Kelly frowned, cocking her head a little. “What do you mean? When was the last time you saw her?”
Marie looked like she may have opened a door she hadn’t wanted to. “Oh, um, well - Sam hasn’t been to work for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure what happened,” she said. She started to back away from the table. “Just tell her I said hey, okay?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Kelly was torn - she didn’t want to drag more people into her sister’s life, but she needed to know what was going on. She jumped up from the table. “Wait!” she whispered, reaching out one hand and grabbing Marie’s sleeve. Marie looked back at her, fear flashing across her face. Kelly let go of her arm. “I’m sorry, please, wait,” she said. “Something is going on, and I’m trying to figure out what. Sam was attacked this weekend - she’s in the hospital.”
Marie’s hand flew to cover her mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
Her friend grabbed her other sleeve and gave a little tug. “Not here!” she breathed. Her eyes darted around the library.
Marie glanced at her friend, then back at Kelly. “Meet us in the back study cubbies in 15 minutes,” she said so softly that Kelly almost missed it.
Nodding, Kelly sat back down. She returned her attention to her notebook as the girls continued their stroll toward the bathroom. What was that about? She racked her brain, trying to remember the other girl’s name. Donna? Delia? Something that started with a D. Kelly had met Maria a couple of times over the past two years that Sam had worked at the store. It was a popular place for students to work part-time since there were so many students with such varying hours available to work. Marie had always seemed like a nice person. She was an English major, Kelly thought, remembering her focus on British authors the last time she had seen her at the store.
Kelly knew that Sam had not mentioned losing her job. That was what it sounded like Marie was saying - she said she wasn’t sure what happened. Kelly snuck a glance at her phone to check the time. She still had eight minutes. She knew the study cubbies Marie was talking about - they had outlets to plug laptops into and cups of coffee were allowed. Standing up, Kelly strolled over to the new admission table and picked up a book. She turned it over to stare at the back, appearing to read the summary while she surreptitiously glanced around the room. Why had the other girl been so nervous to talk in the main lobby? There were a couple of students gathered at one table in the corner, pointing to diagrams of the circulatory system and muttering comments to each other. A young man sat on one of the couches with one ankle crossed on his knee, eyes closed and hands laced behind his head, listening to something through a set of headphones. A few more clusters of couples studying on stools at high top tables in front of the windows failed to raise her suspicions. She put the book down and picked up another. Turning her body a little, she noticed a man at the coffee vending machine with his back to her. He wore jeans and ratty sneakers, and a faded blue hoodie sweatshirt, unzipped. His brown hair was just curling up a little at the collar. Catching a glimpse of the side of his face as he bent to pick up his coffee, Kelly felt her chest constrict. She quickly turned her back to him and carried the book she held with her as she crossed the room to head into the stacks. She couldn’t be 100 percent sure, but she was almost certain the man was the same man from the hospital the day before.