Next Girl to Die

by Dea Poirier

  On my way to the mayor’s, I make a quick pit stop at the coffee shop. It’s a tiny place, a storefront sandwiched between a cleaners and a small butcher shop. The brick facade and simple café sign make it look like it’s old world. In reality, it opened while I was in high school. Before that, it was a bakery. I can picture myself here fifteen years ago with Rachel at my side. Dad would bring us for cupcakes. The memory makes my heart ache, and I fall back on my training to distance myself from it. Compartmentalization is the most useful skill I’ve ever learned.

  I glance up and notice a security camera pointing down Main Street. That’ll give me a hint of what was happening downtown around the time of Madeline’s death. I need to get a copy of that video. A bell, as delicate as one on a cat collar, jingles as I walk through the door.

  Large glass windows, partly frosted over, partly fogged with cold, line the front of the café. The interior looks exactly the same, save for a new paint color, which is a much better choice. Tables are packed tight in the front of the café, like they anticipated everyone in the island hanging out here at once. Right now, though, it’s empty. I can’t imagine Vinalhaven ever being the kind of place where people pack into the café to use Wi-Fi.

  Behind the counter, a woman with large gauges in her ears and purple eyeliner smiles at me. She’s got dark hair pulled up, revealing star tattoos trailing to the collar of her shirt. When I look closer, I realize there’s turquoise strewn throughout her bun. She looks out of place here. I wouldn’t bat an eye if I saw her on the streets of Detroit, but I can’t help but wonder what my mother thinks of this woman.

  “Claire?” she calls a little too loudly.

  “Hi,” I say as I approach the counter and search her face. If she knows my name, I must have known her.

  “Morgan,” she says when it’s clear I don’t recognize her.

  The name strikes a chord, but it doesn’t match my memory. Morgan was a small girl, a band geek. She didn’t do a single thing to stand out.

  “How are you?” I ask, trying my best to sound like I remember her or like I’ve even considered her existence at some point since I left. The truth is once I left the island, the only time I thought about anyone here was when my mother brought them up.

  “I’d be a lot better if it weren’t for, you know.” She motions in the general direction of the park. It hasn’t even been three hours since the CSI team got here. I shouldn’t be surprised, but Jesus. “She was such a sweet girl. Had a voice like an angel and always sang solos in the choir at church,” she says, shaking her head. Before I can agree, she follows it up with, “What can I get you?”

  “Double cap with extra foam and a copy of your surveillance video from last night,” I say without skipping a beat. “Did you see her much outside of church?” I jot down a few notes as she heads toward the espresso machine.

  “I’ve gotta call my boss to get the video for you. That’ll take a bit. But about Madeline, she worked at Haven, that restaurant, on weekends, and I know she volunteered at the hospital in Rockport. I think she wanted to be a doctor or something. She got into some college already. That happened a few weeks ago—the mayor wouldn’t shut up about it,” she says and hands me my coffee. “Anything else?”

  “Nope. How much do I owe you?” I reach for my wallet.

  “On the house. Just find the bastard that did this. Come back in a couple hours, and I’ll have the security footage for you.”

  Her eyes are focused over my shoulder instead of on me. I look back, trying to see what she’s looking at. Noah strolls past the café, a laptop bag hanging from his shoulder. There’s a look of recognition on her face that makes me ask, “How long has he been in town?”

  She watches him for a moment before looking back at me. “He was here a few weeks ago and left. But he came back two days ago.”

  I nod my thanks and tuck away my notepad. I don’t trust the journalist yet, and my instincts tell me to keep an eye on him. As I walk out of the café, I glance down Main Street and watch Noah slip into the hotel and disappear.

  Compared to yesterday, Mayor Clark looks worn down when he answers the door, like the weight of Madeline’s death is on his shoulders. Red rings his eyes, and his lips are chapped and flaky.

  He offers me a pained smile and waves me into the house. “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” he says. There’s no mess. We pass through the foyer, a pair of high-top sneakers lying near the coat closet, where they were kicked off.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asks as he shows me toward a flowered couch in the middle of a very formal living room. Though the outside of the house is run down, everything inside is pressed, pristine, like it should be behind a velvet rope.

  “No, thank you. I know it’s very soon, so if you’d like me to come back another time, I understand. The reality is, though, the faster I jump on this, the more likely it is we’ll be able to find the person who did this.”

  The balancing act here is difficult. Technically speaking, Mayor Clark should be considered a suspect. All parents are when a child is killed. But toeing that line is never easy.

  He sneers like I said something offensive. “Person? No. It’s not a person that did this; it’s an animal,” he growls. He wrings his hands and sits on the very edge of his seat, like he’s ready to jump up at any moment. He rests his hands on his knees, digging yellowed nails into his pants. “I’ll help however I can. You have to find who did this. I have another daughter, Allie. I can’t bear the thought of losing her too.” The last word gets caught in his throat and comes out strangled.

  “We’re going to do everything we can.” I pull out my notebook.

  “Is this related to Emma? It has to be.”

  Though it looks like the deaths are likely related, I can’t give him that information, especially not yet. “We’re still investigating. It’s too early to say.”

  I grab my phone and pull up the picture of the necklace I found at the park. “Is this Madeline’s?”

  He nods. “Yes, her mom gave it to her, back before she took off a few years ago.”

  The necklace was found at the edge of the woods near the park. The only thing beyond those trees is the bay. This fact adds to my speculation that she was brought from the water.

  “Where was she supposed to be last night?” I ask.

  “Upstairs,” he says as he shakes his head.

  “Do you have reason to believe she left the house of her own free will? Or do you think it’s possible she was taken from the house?” I’ll need to check the house for signs of forced entry, though I didn’t notice anything on my way in.

  “We have an alarm, and it was on when I went to bed. She must have turned it off.” He rubs his lips as he looks out the window behind me.

  She snuck out, but he doesn’t want to say that’s what she did. And if she was shutting off the alarm, it wasn’t the first time she’d done it. In these old houses, all the bedrooms are upstairs. Most alarms aren’t connected to second story windows. But I’ll need to see if she was sneaking out from the upstairs or shutting the alarm off to leave through the front door. If she was shutting it off, that would at least give me an idea of how often she was doing this.

  “Did she ever get in trouble for sneaking out in the past?” If she was anything like my sister, she likely got caught at least once.

  “Just once after her mom left. She hasn’t done it since.”

  So he never caught her again, then.

  “What about a boyfriend? Does Madeline have one?” I ask, forcing myself to use present tense.

  He shakes his head. “No. She didn’t show any interest in having one either.”

  The similarities make me think of Rachel. Did Madeline have a boyfriend her dad didn’t know about? Or was she really not interested in dating? At least in all the interviews I’ve seen from Emma’s friends, there was no indication she was dating.

  “How about close friends I could talk to?”

  He gives me the names of several girls.
I’ll have to interview them all this week.

  “I heard that Madeline volunteers at a hospital across the bay. Is it possible that someone there might have gotten into a fight with her?” I ask while I’m still scribbling down names.

  He shakes his head. “Everyone loves Madeline. If she wasn’t home or volunteering, she was at the church with her choir group. She’s such a good girl. She didn’t deserve this.”

  My mom has said the same thing about Rachel a thousand times. Rachel didn’t deserve it. But Rachel was anything but a good girl. She lived a secret life beneath my parents’ noses. I knew they wouldn’t have believed me if I’d breathed a word of it. Guilt smothers me as I think of it. Would she still be alive if I had tried to stop her from sneaking around? If I had intervened?

  No parent really knows their teenager. It’s not just police work that’s taught me this. Whatever parents think is a well-constructed farce created by their child. They underestimate them at every turn and live in a world of their child’s creation. Or maybe they just don’t want to see the truth.

  “What else can you tell me about Madeline?” I ask, and I try to keep my tone even, firm.

  He scratches his chin and stares at the floor. He’s not all here—I know that, but I need him to give me something. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he says after a long silence.

  “I’m just trying to understand who Madeline is, what she does, what her personality is like.”

  “I’m not sure why any of that matters.”

  “Everything matters right now, because even the smallest detail could help me find who did this.” Sometimes it’s the little things that end up being the most useful. What did she do on Tuesdays? Who was her best friend? These things could help me figure out what was different about the day she died.

  There’s a spark in his eyes as he looks up at me, like it finally clicks for him. It’s as if I can see the fog lifting around him.

  “Madeline has always been a happy child. No matter what, she finds the bright side of something. She doesn’t seek happiness; I swear she made it. But something was different lately. She was pretending to be happy. I just don’t know why.”

  “Was she having problems at school or with her friends? Did anyone show unusual interest in her? Notice anyone hanging around?”

  “No, not that I know of,” he says as he wrings his hands. “I should have pressed her more to find out what it was. Maybe I could have figured out what was going on if I’d tried harder. I just kept telling myself if it really mattered—she’d tell me. She’d come to me.” His voice cracks, and his eyes flood with fresh tears.

  “It’s not your fault, Mr. Clark,” I say, wishing there were more I could do to ease his pain.

  His eyes sharpen, and for a moment his anguish is consumed by something feral. “Don’t you blame yourself for Rachel?”

  My chest tightens, and a heaviness hangs on my shoulders. The dark cloud that is the memory of my sister shrouds me. “Every single day.” I regret it the second it’s out of my mouth.

  His eyes soften, my words smothering whatever was growing inside him.

  “What was Madeline’s schedule like? What’d she do after school?”

  “She usually went to the church to help out. She used to be involved in volleyball, but she wanted to focus more on school. It was her goal to get into medical school,” he explains.

  “She was accepted on early admission, right? That’s unusual for a sixteen-year-old. Could anyone have been jealous about that?”

  “She took the SAT early and got an almost perfect score. That, combined with the letter she wrote, got her early acceptance. Her admission was contingent on her grades staying up, of course. She was going to start some classes, her general ones, next year.” The tears pool in his eyes again. “Why did they have to take her?” He buries his face in his hands.

  It’s something I hear all the time. It could have been anyone else’s kid, anyone else’s sister—but this time, it wasn’t. It’s not some stranger in the news; it’s a piece of you, a part of your life that’s torn away. I know he’s not wishing anyone else died instead, but I also know the desperation of loss. Bargaining to the point that you’d trade anyone and anything to get them back.

  He shakes his head. “You have to find whoever did this. You have to.” His eyes are wide, feral.

  “I will do everything in my power to get justice for your daughter,” I say, the weight of the words striking me immediately. I’m not one to make promises I can’t keep. However, in this case, the reality is pretty clear—if I don’t solve this, I’ll be out of a job. There’s enough pressure during any normal murder case, but with the daughter of the mayor a victim, the pressure is upped tenfold.

  “Is there anything else you think I should know? Anything could help.”

  He laces his fingers together, his forearms resting on his knees. “The Warrens and the Lane family. The Warrens, they’ve got a boy, Ryder, sixteen or seventeen. Do you remember him? He’s a bad seed. They’re all bad seeds in that family, as I’m sure you remember, but he’s the worst. And the Lanes, shut up in that house—they’re up to no good.”

  I do remember Ryder, but he was a toddler the last time I saw him. He’s Allen’s younger brother.

  The bad feeling in my stomach creeps up my throat, and though I try to swallow it, it does me no good. I’ve had plenty of run-ins with the Warrens. I hoped to steer clear of them this visit. Those Warren boys have been blamed for everything on this island for as long as I can remember. If the wind blows the wrong way, if a boat gets back to shore with a shitty haul, hell, if it’s a long winter—somehow it’s all their fault. If we were still in the 1600s, they’d be burned as witches.

  “I’ll look into that,” I say, though there’s nothing of note to look into. I need more to go on to question anyone from either of those families. As it stands, no one has given me any tangible link to the Lanes or Warrens. “There are a few items from Madeline’s room that I need for the investigation. The sooner we get those, the better. But would you rather I grab them now or come back later?” As a rule, during a homicide investigation, we always start with the cell phone and computer. She didn’t have her cell at the scene, so I’m hoping we find it here.

  “What do you need?”

  “Her devices; a journal or diary, if she has one. Did you try to track her phone?”

  “I did. She always takes her phone if she leaves the house. But the app showed me the phone was off, and the last location was here at the house.” He motions toward the upstairs. “She usually keeps it on her nightstand. I didn’t see it this morning—that’s how I knew she was gone.” He looks toward the stairs. His eyes are far off, like he’s waiting for Madeline to walk down.

  If her phone isn’t here and it’s not on the body, it might lead us to the killer—that is, if it gets turned back on.

  “One second, please,” I say as I grab my phone and text Sergeant Michaels. We need to trace Madeline’s phone. I fill him in on the details about the trace her father tried to do, but with the help of the cell phone company, we can get something far more accurate.

  He texts me back almost immediately that he’s putting in the request.

  “I will need your permission to pull Madeline’s phone records and to trace its current location,” I explain to Mayor Clark. Every provider is different: some will take verbal permission, while some will require a form. Either way, I want all my bases covered so I can get it now.

  “Of course, whatever you need.”

  Mayor Clark leads me upstairs. I grab Madeline’s tablet and laptop. It doesn’t take me long to confirm that she didn’t leave her cell behind. I scan the windows and verify they don’t have sensors for the alarm. If she hopped out that window, she could easily climb down the lattice along the side of the porch or down the big tree out front. Though I look for any signs of forced entry up here, there’s nothing. My instincts tell me she snuck out.

  “Does anything seem out of pl
ace to you?” I glance around the room. It looks like it did yesterday, the pile of clothes still on the end of the bed. I make a mental note of that.

  He crosses his arms and shakes his head. “No.”

  “Any idea about the clothes?”

  “She was going through them to get rid of the ones she said didn’t fit right anymore.”

  Behind him in the hall, the tiny girl from the park is peering in the room. Her eyes are still ringed with red. Her long brown hair falls limp around her pale face. The way she looks at me suggests she’s got something to say.

  “I’d like to talk to your daughter for a minute,” I say. It’s not so much a request, but it isn’t an outright demand. I want to be sure Mayor Clark doesn’t see it as optional. It’s a difficult situation, but I remember just how much sisters can know.

  He glances back, seeing her for the first time. “Allie? You want to talk to Allie?”

  I nod. “I do.”

  He heads into the hall and squeezes Allie’s shoulder, and she slips into the room. She hangs back, about fifteen feet from me, close to the wall. Her arms are crossed, her eyes cast down.

  “How are you doing?” I ask Allie as Mayor Clark descends the stairs.

  She offers me a one-shouldered shrug but doesn’t look up at me.

  “I know how tough this is, believe me. There’s nothing that I or anyone can say to make this better. But you will get through this.” It won’t help, but I wish someone had said that to me fifteen years ago. Allie isn’t old enough to have been alive when Rachel died, but I’m sure she’s heard the stories. Whether she’s connected me to those stories isn’t evident on her face.

  She nods and glances at me for just a moment. “Thank you.”

  “Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”

  “Yeah.” Her arms tighten around her torso.

  “Would you feel more comfortable doing this somewhere else?” I’m not sure I’d want to answer questions about Rachel in her room, especially the day I found out she’d died.