She gave a reluctant shrug. “I didn’t feel good.”
Clara reached to put her hand on Elizabeth’s forehead, but Elizabeth ducked away.
“I’m fine. I just want to lie down.”
She rushed upstairs. A few seconds later, her bedroom door slammed shut. Marshall started to go after her, but Clara reached for his elbow. “I’ll go.”
He looked worried, but she waved him back into the living room to keep Eli company.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
* * *
Clara tapped lightly on the bedroom door, then let herself in without waiting for a response. Elizabeth was in bed, curled under a blanket. She flinched when Clara sat next to her and reached to rub her shoulder.
“I’m fine.” She curled herself tighter, drawing her knees to her chest, as small as she could possibly make herself.
“What happened, sweetheart? Did you and June get in a fight?”
“No. I told you. I don’t feel good.”
The walls in Elizabeth’s bedroom were painted bubblegum pink, a color that three-year-old Elizabeth had chosen. Most of that pink was now covered in posters of girl bands like Madonna, Heart, and The Go-Gos alongside pictures of Elizabeth and June at various ages. At soccer camp, at the beach, dressed up for Halloween. Soccer trophies and ribbons were proudly displayed on the top of her dresser and desk. Stuffed animals lay scattered around a purple bean bag on the floor. Clara picked up a tattered bear with one eye missing. She held it in her lap, smoothing down the rough fur, tugging on the ears to make them stand straight again.
“You don’t feel good, how? Is it cramps?” she asked. “Because that’s an easy fix. I can get the heating pad.”
Elizabeth groaned.
“There’s no reason to be embarrassed. Every woman goes through this, Bits. Think of it as a rite of passage.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“What? Bits? Why not?” They’d been calling her Bits from the very beginning when they brought her home from the hospital, and Clara’s mother had cooed, Isn’t she a bitsy little thing?
“It’s a stupid baby name,” Elizabeth said.
“Okay then, Elizabeth.” Clara stretched out each syllable. “If it’s not your period bothering you, why don’t you tell me what is wrong so I can help you fix it?”
She groaned again, louder and burrowed deeper under the blanket. “Please, Mom, I’m fine. I just want to be alone, okay?”
Clara returned the stuffed bear to the floor, propping it against the bean bag. She paused in the doorway. “You can talk to me about anything. Whatever it is, I won’t be upset.”
She waited another minute, hoping, but Elizabeth’s only response was silence.
Clara retreated downstairs in time to see the Seahawks score another three points against the Packers, the game nearly over now. She sank onto the couch beside Marshall. He gave her a questioning look, and she patted his knee, saying, “She’s just tired. She’ll be all right.”
The words soured on her tongue, and she tasted them for the lies they were. Her daughter, who used to tell her everything, was pushing her away a little more every day. Eli was interested in a woman who would never be good enough for him, whose return to Crestwood could only mean trouble. And a man was dead. She could say the words a million times, but there was no way any of them would be all right now.
Chapter 6
Brett wasn’t on duty Sunday, but that didn’t stop her from walking the three-mile stretch of beach between Amma’s house and Deadman’s Point. A patrol officer had found Nathan’s car the night before, seemingly abandoned, parked near the bathrooms. There were a dozen empty beer cans in the passenger seat, and the door was hanging open. It looked as though Nathan might have been drinking at Deadman’s Point, then stumbled out to take a piss, lost his footing in the dark, and fell into the ocean. It was a likely-enough scenario. Brett walked the length of the beach anyway, but the waves revealed nothing interesting.
After dinner, she called her friend Jimmy Eagan, a reporter with the Oregonian and the only person she missed from her old life. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Don’t tell me you’re lonely already?” Pans clattered in the background. His words rumbled soothing and familiar, growing distant before coming close again. “You’ve been there, what? Three? Four months? I thought you would have made a few friends by now, no?” He chuckled warmly. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to try a little harder, Bretty.”
He was the only one who could call her that without getting smacked upside the head.
“What am I always telling you? You’ve got to be nicer to people. Sugar and spice and sweet as apple pie.” In the background, a dog barked. “I hear you, Trixie. Hold on, here you go. Good girl.” To Brett, he said, “Sorry, you caught us at dinnertime. You know, if you can’t make friends, you could always get a dog. That’s what I did, and it’s working out fine so far, I think.”
“Hello to Trixie,” Brett said.
“Hello to Trixie,” Jimmy repeated with the phone pulled away from his mouth. Then he was talking to Brett again, “She would say hello back, but her mouth is full of kibble.”
She laughed and relaxed against her grandfather’s leather chair, which smelled faintly of her grandfather’s favorite pipe tobacco. There were two phones in the house. One in the kitchen and one in her grandfather’s study, which was located at the top of the turret, facing the ocean. The office phone was the one Brett used when she wanted privacy. She left the door open a crack so she could hear if Amma needed her, but kept the lights off to gaze out the large picture window at the moon reflecting off dark water.
“How’s the writing going?” She tucked her feet up, curling her body against the armrest.
Jimmy groaned. “It’s shit. Thanks for reminding me.”
“And what am I always telling you, Jimmy?”
“You can’t edit a blank page,” he replied in a mocking tone, then changed the subject. “How’s Amma?”
Besides Henry, Jimmy was the only person who knew that one of the reasons Brett had moved to Crestwood was to take care of her grandmother. During their weekly phone calls, she filled him in on her latest antics and complained about their frequent arguments. Everything with Amma these days ended in a battle.
“She left the car in the church parking lot this morning,” Brett said. “Walked all the way home, and when I asked her what she was thinking, she told me she couldn’t drive without her sunglasses. But the sunglasses were right there on her face the whole time. When I pointed that out to her, she stormed off to her room, and I haven’t seen her since.”
“What did the doctor say?”
After several weeks of pleading, bribing, and arguing, Brett had finally convinced Amma to make an appointment. The doctor performed a general physical, then asked Amma a series of questions to test her memory. She got several of the questions wrong, including a question about who was the current president of the United States. Nixon, she’d said with startling confidence.
“I thought for sure he would recommend further tests or an appointment with a neurologist,” Brett told Jimmy. “But he said he wasn’t concerned. People start forgetting things as they age. That’s what he said. And then he sent her away with a recommendation to take more walks and add a daily vitamin to her morning routine.”
“Jesus.”
She knew Jimmy well enough to know he was rolling his eyes over this.
“Of course, Amma felt completely vindicated,” Brett continued. “The entire car ride home, she kept saying, ‘I told you so. I told you this would be a waste of time. I’m absolutely fine.’ She doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal for her to forget little things from time to time. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not just little things. The other day she came downstairs dressed in a blazer and slacks, holding a briefcase. I don’t know where she found that old thing. When I asked her, she said she was going to
work.”
Amma used to keep the books for Pop’s fish packing plant, which had shut down shortly after Pop’s death five years ago. Except for an empty warehouse at the end of a decrepit pier they were thinking about selling, there was nowhere for her to go even if she had work to do.
“And it’s not from time to time, either,” Brett said. “It’s every damn day.”
“So, what are you going to do? Take her to a different doctor? Get a second opinion?”
“That would be ideal, but the more I push her, the more upset she gets. I guess, for now, I’ll just do my best to keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t get into too much trouble. Maybe the doctor’s right? Maybe it’s just old age, and this won’t get any worse.”
“It’s something to hope for,” Jimmy said.
“I’ve got a whole other issue I’m dealing with right now anyway.” Brett shifted in her chair. Her right foot was falling asleep. “Do you remember Archer French’s cousin?”
“Sure. Nathan Andress.”
“Right,” she said. “Well. He turned up dead yesterday morning.”
Jimmy made a choking sound. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Not kidding. His body washed up on our beach. Amma found him.” The moon’s reflection rippled as, somewhere in the dark, a boat passed. “We don’t know very much yet about what happened to him. The autopsy is tomorrow. So maybe it was just an accident. That’s what the lead detective is thinking right now. Except what’s bothering me about that theory is that I was supposed to meet up with Nathan on Friday night at a local diner. He said he had information about Margot. He never showed.”
Silence again, but this time it was heavy and tangled with unspoken words.
“Jimmy? You still there?”
“I’m processing.” There was a muffled sound in the background, a door closing, and his tone shifted to his reporter’s voice. “Let me get a pen.”
“You don’t need to write it down.”
“I write everything down.”
She heard a pen scratching over paper, then Jimmy said, “What do you mean he had information about Margot?”
“I don’t know. He left a message, said he wanted to talk to me, but that was it. He didn’t give any details.”
Brett thought about how Nathan’s voice sounded in his message—hurried and out of breath as though he’d been running.
“What are you thinking?” Jimmy asked.
“You know what I’m thinking.”
“Probably, but I want to hear it from you anyway.”
“When you were here interviewing him and Mary, he said he didn’t know anything about what happened to Margot, right? That summer he was what? Twelve or something? Spent all his time in a peewee football league?”
“He was doing his best to stay out of his cousin’s way,” Jimmy confirmed.
“Cut to last week, and he suddenly remembers something about that summer? A few years? That’s all it took to jog his memory?”
“You think he found out something new between then and now?”
“If only he’d shown up on Friday night, then maybe I’d know the answer to that.” She tugged on the phone cord, wrapping it around her index finger, then letting it unwind again. “I talked to his mother, to Mary Andress, a couple of months ago. Right after I got here.”
“Brett, you didn’t.” Whenever Jimmy used her real name, it always made her feel like a kid in trouble.
“I know, I shouldn’t have, but Jimmy—”
“But nothing,” he interrupted her. “Your sister’s case is technically still open.”
“Yeah, and no one’s working it.”
“Because they all know, we all know, who killed her. There may not have been enough evidence to bring it to trial, but we still know.”
“I don’t know. Not for sure.”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Brett. You were the one who first connected the dots between Margot’s death and Archer’s other victims.”
“I noticed the similarities between how she was posed, not how she was killed,” she argued.
Like Margot, French’s victims had been found posed after death, arranged like woodland goddesses with flowers in their hair, their arms crossed over their chests. Each one had her tongue cut from her mouth. But where Margot had died from blunt force trauma, French’s victims, the eleven women he admitted to killing anyway, had been strangled. They had also been found completely naked, and there was evidence of sexual violence and semen left behind by the killer. Margot had been spared that horror at least.
“Archer says he didn’t kill her,” Brett argued.
“Since when did you start believing psychopaths?”
“Jimmy, she wasn’t with the others.”
When Archer French was finally arrested, they found rows of canning jars in one of the bedrooms. Eleven jars, eleven tongues, and none of them belonged to Margot. This was the reason Margot’s case was technically still open. There’d been no tongue and no confession and no other real physical evidence linking Archer to Margot. The bodies had been posed the same, and that was it; the connection was there, but it was too weak, too circumstantial to build a case, let alone gain a conviction.
Jimmy was quiet a moment, then said, “There could be a million reasons for that. He might have kept it somewhere else, or lost it. Or I don’t know. Archer was in Crestwood that summer. He had opportunity. She was posed exactly like his other victims. A dozen different detectives say he did it. I’m saying he did it, and you know this case has been my life for nearly as long as I’ve been a reporter.”
“Yeah, well, I’m saying he didn’t do it,” Brett cut him off.
This wasn’t the first time she and Jimmy had argued about whether or not Archer French killed Margot.
Even before the police acknowledged there was a serial murderer killing women in the Pacific Northwest, Jimmy Eagan was writing their stories. He tracked missing persons’ cases and Jane Does from the beginning, looking for connections. He wrote articles that got pushed to the back of the paper and almost no one read. He kept searching for answers long after the local cops had stopped, and he didn’t give up until he found enough evidence to convince them to open a proper investigation.
Even after the special unit was formed and detectives took over, Jimmy stuck around to help. The entire time the police hunted French, Jimmy was there. He knew French better than anyone except perhaps Archer French himself. He knew Margot’s case, too. Because of Brett, because after they’d gotten to know each other better—after she realized what he knew and what he had access to—she had asked for his help.
Jimmy was the one who had obtained Margot’s file and let Brett read it. After agreeing there were disturbing similarities, he had returned to Crestwood to interview people who might remember. He was the one who came up with a name: Archer French. Mary Andress’ nephew, a creepy young man, who clung to shadows and stole fish heads and hooks from the boat he worked on the summer Margot was killed. It was Jimmy who tracked down French. Jimmy who almost got himself killed in the process. He was writing a book about the entire ordeal, for Christ’s sake. If anyone knew exactly what Archer French was capable of, if anyone knew how the cases were connected, it was Jimmy. So if Jimmy said French killed Margot, Brett should believe him.
Except Archer French swore up and down that he had nothing to do with Margot’s death. He’d been denying it since his arrest. The detective who interviewed French asked about each of the eleven women he’d killed. With each name, French smiled and said, “Yes, she was mine. Yes, I took good care of her.” But when the officer asked about Margot Buchanan, he turned serious and shook his head. “Not that one. Not her. I didn’t hurt her.” A smirk crept onto his face, and he winked at the camera filming the entire interview. “I would have, though, if someone hadn’t gotten to her before me.”
It shouldn’t have mattered whether French admitted to killing Margot or not. He admitted to
being in Crestwood that summer and talking with Margot once outside the movie theater. He even admitted to following her a few times. Plus, his signature was all over the crime scene—the flowers and crossed arms, the missing tongue, and carefully arranged hair. Everyone who worked on the French case said, yes, he killed Margot. Of course, he did. Most likely, she was his first, whether he confessed or not. He had been convicted for the deaths of eleven other women and was now sitting on death row. He could deny his involvement all the way to the electric chair, but Margot would still get justice, they said.
But to Brett, without a confession, without hearing the whole story, it was a hollow justice that left her feeling unsettled. Because why would French admit to killing eleven women, but not Margot? What was one more confession? One more life sentence?
“Mary didn’t have anything new to tell me anyway,” Brett said, remembering how Nathan’s mother had been surprised to hear from her but willing to talk. “She said she told you and the detectives everything she remembered, and even if there was something new, it happened so long ago, she wouldn’t trust her memory of it.”
“And then you tracked down Nathan?”
“No,” she said. “Yes. Well, sort of. Mary told me that she hadn’t spoken to Archer in a long time, but that since he’d been in prison, Nathan had started writing him letters, and so maybe Nathan would know something.”
There had been kindness in the older woman’s eyes and pity, too. As she was leaving, Mary had said, “I know it does you no good now to hear it, but I’m sorry. If I’d had any idea the kind of things he was capable of…” She shook her head. “He’s my sister’s boy. I never thought. Well. I’m sorry, anyway. I truly am.”
“I met Nathan at a bar sometime last month,” Brett told Jimmy. “We didn’t really talk much about Margot or Archer. I tried bringing it up, but he kept changing the subject. I thought it was a dead-end too, but I gave him my business card anyway. Just in case. And then, Friday morning, I get a message from him.”
“And then, Saturday morning, he turns up dead,” Jimmy finished.
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