Blur (Blur Trilogy)

by Steven James

  Daniel reasoned that if he had noticed these papers on the table when his dad was reading them, he could theoretically have known about Trevor, even before the funeral.

  Okay, but then why didn’t that register before?

  Maybe it was one of those things you didn’t consciously notice at first, but somehow remembered later when something reminded you of it.

  He’d had that sort of thing happen when he smelled chocolate-chip cookies and remembered details about visiting his grandma’s house—the layout of her kitchen, what she had on her countertop, the sound of her old clock ticking in the next room.

  They were all things he hadn’t necessarily noticed back when he was there last month, but when he remembered them happening, it all came back to him in vivid detail.

  Maybe that’s what was going on here—buried memories climbing to the surface, brought to light by the stress of the funeral and the homecoming game.

  Paging through the newspapers kept Daniel busy until Kyle swung by at nine forty-five to take him to school to pick up his car.

  They didn’t talk too much about the game or the concussion or the hospital visit, but Daniel did tell him about meeting up with Stacy last night and how she was going to join him at the lake this morning.

  “She just showed up at your house?”

  “Yeah. She was waiting for me when you dropped me off.”

  “I didn’t see her.”

  “She was standing over by the garage.”

  “Doesn’t that seem a little weird to you? That she just came by your house in the middle of the night and then hid in the shadows waiting for you to get home?”

  “She wasn’t hiding.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “She just wanted to talk with me.”

  “Okay, then how did she even find out where you live?”

  “My last name’s not a state secret, Kyle. There’s something called the Internet.”

  “I hear you. I’m just . . . I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right about it.”

  “Okay, maybe it’s a little unusual, I’ll give you that, but at least she cared enough to stop by.” Daniel hesitated. “Anyway, I’m gonna ask her if she’ll go to the dance with me tonight. You know, when I see her at the lake.”

  “Let me know how that goes,” Kyle said vaguely.

  “You don’t think I should ask her.”

  Kyle turned onto the road leading to the school. “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Kyle took a breath. “Listen, man, I don’t know her, you do. I just think it’s a little strange for her to show up at your house at like eleven o’clock at night to see if you’re alright when she could have just talked with you after the game like Nicole did.”

  “Like Nicole did.”

  “That’s right.” They arrived at Beldon High’s parking lot and Kyle aimed his Mustang toward Daniel’s car. “I saw you two talking.”

  “Ah. Well, you’re right.”

  “About what?”

  “What you just said about Stacy. That you don’t know her.”

  Silence tightened between them.

  Kyle parked. “Okay.” His tone was stiff and distant. “This is your car.”

  “I’ll holler at you.” Daniel swung open his door.

  “Sure.”

  He pulled out his keys and, after Kyle had taken off, he left for Lake Algonquin to meet Stacy.

  He didn’t like that Kyle was uncomfortable about her.

  But he could deal with that later.

  Right now it was time to meet the girl who’d waited for him after school on Thursday, and had come all the way to his house last night to see how he was doing.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  The day was languishing under a somber gray sky. Thick clouds threatened rain, but held back, as if they were waiting for some signal before dumping on the lake and the surrounding forest.

  Although some of the trees were changing color, none were vibrant in the overcast day, and most of those that weren’t pines were just a rubbed-out, lifeless brown, making it look like the area was already tired of autumn and ready to get on with the next season.

  When Daniel parked near the boat landing, there were no other cars in the lot, but as he closed the door behind him he noticed Stacy waiting for him near the shore, wearing a charcoal gray raincoat.

  When she heard the door close, she turned and smiled at him.

  “Parents drop you off?” he asked.

  “I decided to walk. Like I said, it’s not far.”

  A trail encircled the lake, and as they hiked toward the inlet where Emily’s body had been found, every so often they came to abandoned campsites with chunks of charred wood lying in makeshift campfire pits surrounded by hefty rocks from the nearby shoreline.

  On weekends, kids came out here to party, and many of the fire pits were cluttered with glass shards from liquor bottles and scrunched, blackened, half-disintegrated aluminum beer cans that would never completely burn up no matter how hot the campfires might get.

  One of the pits was still smoldering, probably from kids hanging out last night after the football game. The dull, sooty smoke wisped upward, then quickly disappeared, torn apart by the stiff breeze coming in off the water.

  By the time Daniel and Stacy arrived at the inlet, the wind had picked up even more, and ragged waves were surging toward them across the lake.

  They came to a sixty-foot stretch of beach that lay in sharp contrast to the rocky shoreline that surrounded most of the lake.

  This area was well-known to the kids who lived in the area, and in the summertime when the lake warmed they would come here to swim in the afternoons, or at night in the moonlight, or when the northern lights were shimmering and flicking in their anxious, eerie way across the sky.

  The lake bottom dropped off quickly after about twenty-five feet, and there were stories of people showing off by jumping off Windy Point there, where it was supposedly deep enough to survive a fall like that, but Daniel had never met anyone who’d actually done it. When he’d asked his dad about it, neither had he.

  Daniel stood beside Stacy, and as they looked across the lake, he felt the brisk wind brushing against his face like tiny invisible claws.

  A shiver slid through him. He suspected it wasn’t just from the wind and the weather, but also from being here near the place where a girl had actually died.

  “It was right over there.” Stacy pointed toward a stretch of shallow water off to their right. “That’s where they found her. I read about it. They had a photograph in the paper—I mean, not of her, but of the lake, the place where the fishermen were when . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  He remembered seeing the article. “Right.”

  It began to sprinkle—sharp pinpricks of rain falling with unusual energy in the wind that had now started kicking up whitecaps on the lake.

  Daniel gazed at the sand around him, the cattails that grew near the wind-bent grass that fringed the woods. A dead fire pit lay on the edge of the forest.

  “What now?” Stacy asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  They both took a little time to stare quietly at the water and the untamed wilderness surrounding it. The silence that passed between them seemed appropriate to Daniel, almost like a small way of honoring Emily’s memory.

  Eventually, as the rain picked up, Stacy flipped her hood up over her head and Daniel turned up his jacket’s collar.

  “Maybe we should go,” she suggested.

  Stay on this. Seek the truth. Learn what happened.

  “Let me look around first.” He indicated for her to wait beneath one of the looming pines that lined the shore, then he paced across the beach.

  He suspected that the footprints already in the s
and were from people who’d been out here when they were recovering Emily’s body, or maybe kids coming out to the fire pit. Other than that, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  For a few minutes he scrutinized the area, looking for anything that might help him make sense of the events of the last few days, of the ghostly apparitions he’d seen, but all he saw were the rough waves of the lake, the distant shore, the empty swath of dark, rain-splattered sand.

  No ghosts.

  No dead bodies rising from the water or approaching him or speaking to him or grabbing him or pulling necklaces through their necks or beckoning for him to join them in the lake.

  No apparitions at all.

  Thankfully.

  Go back home. There’s nothing out here.

  He walked to the shoreline one last time and noted a few sticks that had washed onto the sand, as well as some clumps of leaves and soggy tangles of weeds from the lake’s bottom. From the line of debris it was clear that the waves hadn’t reached farther up the beach in a long time.

  Finally, when Daniel found nothing, he decided Stacy had been right. It was time to leave.

  He’d taken two steps toward her when he noticed the pair of glasses in the sand near the woods.

  Even though they were half-buried, he recognized them immediately—they were the ones Emily Jackson had been wearing in the photos at the front of the church during the funeral.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Heart slamming hard against the inside of his chest, Daniel approached the glasses.

  Emily told you to find these. When she sat up in that casket she told you to find her glasses!

  Rivulets of rain trickled down the sloping beach and emptied into the lake. One of them passed beneath the glasses and had washed some of the sand away in a narrow trench, making them more visible.

  He picked them up.

  One of the earpieces was twisted sideways and the left lens was missing, but they were definitely the same style as the ones Emily had on in the photos, the same ones he’d seen her wearing at school before her disappearance.

  “Stacy, over here.”

  A moment later she was beside him. “What is it?”

  Daniel held them up. “They’re Emily’s.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. I mean, I can’t be positive, but they’re the same kind she wore.”

  “They’re broken,” Stacy pointed out, with a trace of uneasiness.

  “Maybe someone stepped on them.” But that wasn’t exactly what he was thinking.

  “Maybe.” Stacy didn’t sound convinced either.

  “Well, we haven’t had enough rain to raise the water level this high, so they didn’t wash up onshore. And the location isn’t right, I mean the distance from Windy Point—unless someone with a better arm than I have threw them off.”

  He suspected that the cops would have looked around here, but the glasses were near the highest point on the beach and had been half buried, so it was possible that even if his father and his deputies had investigated the area, they might have missed them.

  Stacy said, “She might have taken them off and left them here if she went swimming.”

  As if on cue, a gust of wind slapped cold rain against them. “It’s way too cold to swim,” he replied. “It was even colder last week. Besides, she never would have worn her jeans and shoes if she jumped in the water on her own, would she?”

  “I don’t know.” And then: “What do you mean, ‘on her own’?”

  “I mean she wouldn’t have decided to go in the water dressed like that.”

  “On her own.”

  “Yes, on her own.” He just went ahead and said it: “Unless someone pushed her in.”

  “Or held her under.”

  That was almost the same way Ronnie had put it the other day when he was talking about his suspicions concerning his sister’s death.

  Daniel looked at Stacy oddly, unsure why she would have phrased it like that. “Yes. Exactly.”

  She peered at the nearby bluff towering from the water. “Remember, they were saying she might have fallen off there? The current could have carried her here into the inlet.”

  “But then why would her glasses be all the way up the beach, if the water hasn’t risen that high?”

  “But if she didn’t take them off, or if they didn’t get washed up onshore after she drowned . . .”

  Daniel had the sense that Stacy was thinking the same thing he was. “They might have gotten broken if she was fighting with someone.”

  “And she might not have drowned accidentally.”

  “No. She might not have.”

  For a long time neither Daniel nor Stacy spoke. At last she said, “We should tell your dad.”

  “Let’s have one more look around first.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I guess the other lens, or maybe anything else that might show us there was a struggle.” He slipped the glasses carefully into his pocket. “Or whatever looks like it doesn’t belong out here.”

  Then a thought.

  “Look for a necklace,” he said.

  “A necklace?”

  “Yes. It has a silver chain and a locket.”

  She gazed at him curiously. “That’s pretty specific.”

  “Just a hunch.” He avoided eye contact. “I mean, Emily was wearing one in the pictures they had at the funeral. I’m just wondering if it might have washed up onshore.”

  “Don’t you think maybe we should wait for your dad or the cops or whatever to get here?”

  “Well . . .” He pointed to the water running off the beach and into the lake. “If the rain keeps up, it might wash stuff away before they could arrive.”

  “You don’t just mean stuff. You mean evidence.”

  “Yes.” It was a little unnerving to say it. “Evidence.”

  They spent the next fifteen minutes crisscrossing the beach and the nearby rocky shore, then examining the fire pit and the grassy areas nearby, and even the cattails, but found nothing unusual. The other lens remained missing. Nothing else indicated that there might have been a fight there on the beach.

  “Okay,” Daniel said. “Let’s head back. I’ll take these glasses to my dad, see what he thinks. Maybe he’ll be able to find out if anyone else has handled them. Fingerprints, that sort of thing.”

  He was well aware that, though cops on television almost always tested for DNA, that didn’t happen so much in real life—at least not out in a rural county like this.

  Not that there were many violent crimes in the area anyway, but it was just too costly, and besides, Daniel’s dad had mentioned to him one time that there was a huge backlog of DNA tests at the state level that had been requested by lawyers trying to get cases retried for people who’d already been convicted of crimes.

  But maybe this time, if there was enough suspicion that someone actually had killed Emily, they might take it seriously enough to do the tests.

  As he and Stacy neared the parking lot, she shook her head. “It’s really creepy, you know, to even think that someone might have killed her. It’s crazy enough that she drowned, but . . . who would do that?”

  Once again he remembered what Ronnie had said about his suspicions that his sister had been murdered. “I have no idea.”

  “Just thinking about it weirds me out.”

  “My dad will get to the bottom of it. For now, let’s not tell anyone about the glasses. If it’s even possible that she was killed instead of dying accidentally we need to let his department take care of it. Talking about it to anyone might not be such a good idea.”

  “Okay.”

  When he mentioned bringing up the glasses to anyone, he couldn’t help but think about where everyone was going to be tonight—the dance—and how easy it would be
to let something slip, especially about news this big.

  And when the dance came to mind, he remembered telling Kyle earlier that he was going to ask Stacy to go with him.

  But for some reason, it didn’t seem like this was the best time to do that, not after finding the glasses and wondering about the possibility that Emily had actually been murdered instead of just drowning accidentally.

  Another opportunity would come to ask Stacy.

  When? The dance is tonight.

  They made their way past the final abandoned campfire pit and back to the parking lot where they’d first met up. There was an additional car and a maroon SUV parked there now near the boat landing. Probably fishermen. No one was in sight.

  As they were about to say good-bye to each other, their eyes met for a moment too long. Just that fraction of a second when you know you should look away, that if you don’t, you’re communicating something more than just passing interest.

  He bit his lip and gazed past her at the water.

  After the moment had lengthened into something that spoke volumes, he glanced back at her. She peered at him expectantly from beneath her hood.

  He felt the urge to brush away a wet strand of hair that had curled down and lay against her cheek.

  Go ahead. Ask her. It’s not that big of a deal.

  He was about to clear his throat and go for it, but before he could, she spoke first: “Well, let me know what your dad says about the glasses.”

  “I will.”

  “Thanks for letting me tag along out here.”

  “It doesn’t feel so much like closure, does it?”

  “Not quite.” They stood looking at each other in the rain that wasn’t showing any sign of letting up. “Okay.” She hesitated. “I’ll see you later, then.”

  “How about I give you a ride home?”

  “It’s okay. I’m already drenched.”

  “Seriously, I don’t want you to have to walk through this rain.”