Blair felt positively relieved when she drove out of the woods and rolled to a stop at the corner of Fulling Mill Road. The houses along this road used to be few and set apart from one another by forest, as far as the eye could see. Now much of the forest was gone, and handsome new homes were built far back from the road. In many cases, tall trees had given way to perfect lawns. Blair knew that to get to Molly’s house you had to turn left. She made the turn and drove slowly down the winding road. She could see house lights far back from the road, some through a cluster of tree branches, warmly beckoning. But which house was it? She peered at the mailboxes in her headlights until one, which said Sinclair, caught her eye. Got it, Blair thought. She knew it was not far. She turned into the driveway and slowly rolled up to the house at the end of the drive.
The Sinclair’s house was built in the style of a log cabin. It had a porch which ran the length of the simple structure and the lamp beside the front door was lit. Its glow illuminated the wide planks and railing of the porch. Blair parked her car and got out. It was still peaceful here, as it had seemed to her when she was a girl. In those days, she loved to come over to Molly’s house. It had seemed rustic and enchanted, tucked into a clearing surrounded by woods. It was the kind of place which inspired a child’s imagination, until murder brought an abrupt end to her innocence.
Blair looked back at the road. It wasn’t far from here to the turnoff which led into the woods. But why would Molly have taken a ride home, and then deliberately gone back there in the rain? Blair shivered. After so many years, how could you ever know? Or find out?
Blair walked up on the porch and knocked. Robbie Sinclair was silhouetted at the window looking out, as if he had gotten up when he heard a car in the drive. He opened the door right away. He frowned at Blair for a moment and then his face broke into an expression of happy surprise.
‘Blair. How nice to see you!’
‘Hi, Mr Sinclair.’
‘Robbie,’ he said firmly.
‘Robbie,’ Blair repeated, though it was difficult for her to address Molly’s Dad as an equal. He had always been a grown-up to her.
‘Come on in.’
‘Thanks.’ As Blair entered the house, she saw Janet coming in from the direction of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She, too, smiled when she recognized their visitor.
Wordlessly she opened her arms, and Blair awkwardly, gratefully, embraced her.
‘Hi Janet,’ she said.
‘I’m so glad you came over,’ said Janet, taking off her apron and laying it over one of the dining chairs by their long table. She led Blair to an old leather armchair by the stone hearth. A Hudson Bay blanket had been thrown over the back of the chair to disguise some wear or tear in the leather. Blair sat down and both Janet and Robbie sat down on the sofa at the other side of the low coffee table. A small but lively fire burned in the fireplace. A big golden retriever, now turning gray, was snoozing on a plaid dog bed at the edge of a hooked rug. He barely lifted an eyebrow when Blair settled herself in the chair.
‘Is that … Molly’s pup?’ Blair asked.
Robbie reached down and scratched the dog behind her ears. ‘Yup. Pippa. She’s a pretty old girl now.’
‘God, how I envied her that dog. I wasn’t allowed to have a pet.’ Blair sighed and looked around the cozy living room. ‘I always loved coming over here when I was a kid. Your cabin in the woods. It always seemed magical to me.’
‘Can I get you anything?’ said Janet. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘Thanks, but I did have something,’ said Blair. ‘Everyone kindly brought us casseroles. Uncle Ellis may never cook again, which would be a mercy.’
‘How’s your uncle doing? He seemed very upset at the funeral.’
Blair thought about it. ‘I guess he was. Hard to tell with him.’
‘Well, you and Celeste were like his children,’ said Janet.
‘Before the funeral, I hadn’t seen him for years,’ said Robbie. ‘Is he still … the same?’
Blair knew what Robbie was referring to. ‘Still a nut job? Yup. Though he might be mellowing. He actually took the confederate flag down!’
‘Thank God,’ Janet exclaimed.
‘Actually, I think it just finally disintegrated,’ said Blair. She could feel herself settling in for a long conversation with these people and she knew that she couldn’t allow it to go any farther without being truthful with them. But how to begin? Her smile faded and she sighed again.
Robbie frowned at her. ‘You ok?’
‘Well, I can’t be in this house without thinking about … Molly.’ To her own surprise, Blair choked up, and tears came to her eyes. She could see the pain in their faces, but also their gratitude. Obviously it was comforting to them that the thought of their daughter could still bring tears to the eyes of someone beside themselves. Janet reached over and squeezed Blair’s hand.
‘Look, I haven’t been up front with you. I’m here because there’s something I have to tell you both.’
‘What about?’ Robbie asked warily.
‘I’m afraid it’s going to come as a terrible shock,’ said Blair.
The Sinclairs looked at one another and then back at Blair.
‘After all these years,’ said Janet, ‘What could you have to tell us now?’
Blair cleared her throat. ‘Well, just before Celeste died, she said that she had something she wanted to tell me. A confession, if you will.’
The room was utterly silent. The Sinclairs stared at Blair, but did not speak.
‘Obviously, we all know that Adrian Jones, well, Yusef Muhammed now, was convicted of Molly’s murder.’ Blair hesitated. ‘But according to Celeste, Muhammed was not the one who … killed Molly.’
‘How would Celeste know that?’ Robbie protested angrily.
‘It seems that … on the day that Molly was … killed, Celeste was in that car with Muhammed. Celeste was with him when he picked up Molly. She said they stopped to pick her up because it was raining. They drove her home.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Robbie coldly.
‘I’m afraid it is,’ said Blair.
‘But, your sister swore she was not with him,’ Janet cried. ‘He tried to use her as an alibi, but she swore she was never in his car. Why would she lie?’
Blair kneaded her hands together and nodded. ‘I asked her the same question. She said she was terrified that Uncle Ellis would throw her, and me, out on the street for good if she admitted she was with a black guy. So she lied.’
Janet shook her head. ‘No.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Blair. ‘I know this is the last thing you want. To have the past dredged up like this. I’ve been dreading coming to tell you this. But I promised Celeste that I would try to help Muhammed. It seems as if he has spent many years in prison for something … well, that he didn’t do.’
‘He did it,’ Janet cried. ‘They said so. The police. The jury …’
‘I know how difficult this must be …’ said Blair.
Robbie’s eyes were wide, and horrified.
‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You have absolutely no idea … What you’re saying … Why should we take your word for this?’
Blair opened her hands. ‘Why would I lie about it?’
Janet began to weep.
‘That’s not a reason,’ Robbie insisted.
‘My sister was dying,’ said Blair. ‘It was on her conscience. She wanted to tell the truth before she died.’
Robbie stood up. ‘I want you to leave,’ he said.
Blair was shocked by his abrupt command. ‘I was hoping that we could …’
‘Now,’ Robbie cried. ‘Get out of our house.’
Blair had expected them to be shocked, and upset. But not this. It was as if they blamed her. She reminded herself that she could not really imagine how they felt. She nodded and stood up. ‘I’m so sorry about this. I’m so sorry that my sister lied about it.’
‘Just go,’ said Robbie, through
gritted teeth.
Blair started toward the front door. Then she turned back. Robbie had his arm around his weeping wife, trying to console her.
‘I’m going to have to see this through,’ said Blair. ‘I’m going to the police. It’s only fair.’
The two of them ignored her. They were huddled together as if against a marauder’s onslaught. Blair took a last regretful look at them and then slipped quietly out, pulling the door shut behind her.
EIGHT
Blair drove home, barely aware of being behind the wheel. She realized that she had never expected the Sinclairs, no matter how shocked they were, to be angry with her. They had always been kind to her and, when she and Molly became friends, Blair had often thought that they saw her as almost a second daughter. She sometimes fantasized that one day they might ask her uncle if she could come and live with them.
Blair knew that her own terrible grief at Molly’s death was a solace to the Sinclairs, and no matter how often Blair apologized for letting Molly leave the house alone on that fateful night, they had never blamed her. They urged her not to blame herself. There was only one person to blame, they often said, and that was the man who had taken Molly to the woods, who had killed her.
So it unsettled her deeply to see that anger in their eyes. Even after all these years, their opinion mattered. And now, just because she was trying to do the right thing, she was banished. Banished and blamed. The unfairness of it made her indignant, but most of all, it was just painful. Blair barely spoke to her uncle when she returned to the house. She went directly to her old bedroom and closed the door. She checked her phone for messages and saw that there were a few work-related texts, but she did not have the strength to answer them. She just wanted to close her eyes and blot out the world. Blair got into the narrow bed, still in her clothes, and pulled up the covers. Before she knew it, she was asleep.
Several hours later she sat up in the bed, her heart hammering, jolted awake by a nightmare she could not remember. She was filled with a disturbing sense that she had forgotten something important. The house was dark and silent and Blair was aware that everyone had long since gone to bed. Whatever she had been dreaming about eluded her, it had been replaced by the realization that she had failed to ask the Sinclairs the names of the detectives who had investigated Molly’s murder. Well, she certainly couldn’t ask them now. They had made it clear that they didn’t want to hear from her again.
Blair turned on the lamp on the bedside table and picked up her phone. She googled Molly’s name and any number of combinations of words pertaining to the murder, but the references she found were only a few lines and there was no in-depth information about the police investigation. The archives of the county paper online only went back ten years. There was one article from five years ago about Yusef Muhammed, when he received his college degree and began his law studies. In it, he complained about the injustice of his incarceration and never even mentioned Molly.
She wondered if perhaps her uncle had kept any clippings about the crime, but she immediately dismissed that idea. The only reason he took the paper was for the hunting and fishing report. But she wanted to go to the police tomorrow armed with all the relevant information. I can stop at the newspaper office tomorrow, she thought, on my way to the police station. The office was where it had always been, right off of Main Street. Surely they would have every issue accounted for in their own archives. It was an outdated way to get information, but it might still be possible to find what she wanted. Somehow it seemed appropriate for this out of the way hamlet in the mountains and she found the thought strangely calming. She switched off the light and lay back down. As she began to drift off to sleep, she suddenly remembered. She was supposed to buy milk for Malcolm. She would run and get it in the morning, before Uncle Ellis had a chance to complain.
The offices of the Yorkville County Clarion were not exactly bustling. Even so, Blair had to wait for several minutes at the front desk to attract the attention of the pudgy, bespectacled, sweatshirt-clad girl who was intently staring at her computer screen.
‘Yeah, can I help you?’ she asked at last, when it became clear that Blair was not going away.
‘I’m trying to find information about a crime that was committed in Yorkville fifteen years ago. I was wondering if you had archives I can search. I looked online and you’ve only got articles going back ten years.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ the girl insisted defensively. ‘If they want it done, they need to hire somebody to put it online. I can barely keep up with my own work. They’d have me delivering the damn paper if they could. My Dad told me this was a dying business and I should get into some other line of work, but I had all these ideals about the free press. I mean, come on—’
‘Archives?’ Blair interrupted her.
‘Oh. Right. Well, they’re not very organized.’ She pointed to a doorway at the back of the office. ‘Go through there. You’re looking for something from fifteen years ago?’
‘About that,’ said Blair.
‘Well, call me if you need a hand,’ said the girl, but Blair did not think this was a sincere offer.
She walked down to the back door, turned the knob and went inside. The room seemed to be a general storage area filled with boxes of Styrofoam cups, a crate containing sports equipment and a line of old jackets and hats hung along the wall. There were also piles of newspapers everywhere, some labeled as to the year and others just piled haphazardly, with no apparent rhyme or reason. She waded into the towers of newspapers and began to search.
It took her a lot less time than she would have thought to find the correct year. The papers were – it turned out – grouped together in order by year, even if they weren’t all labeled. She hunted through them until she found the month and weeks of, and after, the crime. She thought she was only going to look for the name of the detectives who worked on the case, but, in fact, she ended up sitting at a table in the corner, reading all the accounts of what had happened.
There were no gruesome pictures of Molly’s body, but there were pictures of the spot where the body was found. Grim-faced detectives in topcoats conferred in the wooded clearing while uniformed officers searched the area. There was one heartbreaking photo of Molly’s parents being whisked into the police station, Robbie’s face stony and Janet covering her mouth with one hand. Blair and Uncle Ellis were not mentioned. The earliest accounts said that Molly had visited a friend after school and then was walking home when she encountered her killer. The police were talking to an eyewitness who saw Molly getting into a gray sedan. Police were looking for that car and its owner. The body was being examined for signs of sexual assault, but preliminary indications were that Molly Sinclair was not raped.
‘Can I help you?’ a voice asked.
Blair jumped, and looked up. A tall, tired-looking young woman with greasy blond hair and the profile of a beauty queen poked her head into the room. She was wearing jeans, a faded gray T-shirt and a ripped, down vest. Blair peered at her. She looked somehow familiar but Blair couldn’t put a name to the face.
‘Oh, no thanks,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve found what I’m looking for. Although it would be a lot easier if these papers were archived online.’
‘Probably a good idea,’ the woman said.
Blair frowned at her slightly. ‘You look familiar to me,’ she said.
‘I’ve got one of those faces,’ she said dismissively.
‘I thought maybe we went to school together,’ she said. She gazed at the grungy clothes and elegant features. They made a jarring contrast. She wore no makeup and her skin was sallow over her drab clothes. This woman wasn’t fashionably comfortable. She was unkempt.
‘Couldn’t tell you,’ said the woman. ‘Gotta run.’
Blair mentally ran through some of the people she had known in school. And then, suddenly, it clicked, and she saw the woman as she once was.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Blair. ‘Aren’t you Rebecca Moore?’
&nb
sp; The other woman reacted defensively. ‘Should I know you?’
Blair shook her head. ‘No. No. I was sort of … You were a few years ahead of me. You were kind of a legend.’ She could remember her clearly now. She was one of those girls who was always trailed by a gaggle of boys. Her clothes casually preppy. Perfect nails. Perfect hair.
‘Ah yes,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Big fish. Small pond.’
‘After college, didn’t you end up as an anchor on the TV news in some big city?’ she asked.
Rebecca sighed. ‘Yes. L.A.,’ she admitted.
Blair nodded. ‘I remember now. Your success was the talk of the town,’ said Blair. ‘You were like a shooting star around here.’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘It was another life. So, what about you? Never left this place?’ she asked.
Rebecca’s assumption reminded Blair of why she had always wanted to get away from Yorkville. In this town she would always be seen as what she was in high school: an unpopular kid from a family that was down on its luck.
‘As a matter of fact, I live in Philly,’ she said archly. ‘I have my own company there.’
‘Well,’ said Rebecca briskly, ‘good for you.’ She started to walk out of the room.
Blair was irked by the other woman’s dismissive tone. Was it so onerous for her to be remembered for her success?
‘How come you’re back here?’ she asked. She was aware that it sounded as if she were asking Rebecca what became of that big career of hers. The question hung in the air.
‘Shit happens,’ Rebecca said, terminating the conversation.
Never mind, Blair thought. Just another high school hotshot who flamed out before she really made her mark. Blair thanked her stars that she was established elsewhere and would not be staying in this town for long. Then she shrugged, glanced at her watch and went back to her research.
Half an hour later she walked into the Yorkville Police Station and approached the uniformed young man seated at a desk behind a Plexiglass window.
The Girl in the Woods Page 7