Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  “We have to find my file. The real one,” I said.

  “Claire, I’m not even sure—”

  “I have to look,” I said, more forcefully this time. “Please. I need to know everything.”

  Grant hooked his hand into mine. “Come on, I’ve got the keys to the file cabinets. Let’s see if your old file is still in there.” And without another word, he led me down the hallway and into a small alcove outfitted with three steel cabinets and a shoddy-looking desk. I winced when I saw the nameplate: Mike Graham.

  He shoved a key into the center cabinet, the tallest one, and pulled the top drawer free.

  I held my breath as his fingers darted over the files, one after another, until he reached the end of the row. “Weird,” he said finally.

  “What is it?”

  “Your file’s not in here, either.” He glanced up at me. “Look. Even though some of these files are empty now,

  at least the names are still on the labels. But there’s nothing at all in here with Graham on it.”

  That settled over my brain like a layer of dust. “But why wouldn’t it be there, with all the other old files?”

  Grant just shook his head, and reached down to pull open another drawer, even though it was labeled “LAST NAMES H-M.”

  I poked around the makeshift office, but all I found was a stack of blank manila folders and a string of empty coffee mugs in desperate need of a wash.

  Finally, I came to Seth’s office door. I twisted the knob, but the lock clicked in place.

  I chewed my lip, thinking. There was no logical reason why my file would in Seth’s office.

  Was there?

  His bulging eyes and puffy belly popped into my mind. You look just like your father when he’s trying to lie. All twitchy.

  Seth’s reaction to my presence at the station had seemed extreme, especially since Dad didn’t pose much of a threat to his position as chief anymore. Was it possible he’d been reading my file, too?

  “I think we should check in here.” I tapped a knuckle against the door.

  Grant’s face clouded over. “I don’t think it’d be in there. What would Seth need with your old paperwork?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s the only place we haven’t looked.” I glanced back at him. He was fiddling with his keys, running his finger over the teeth of a particularly thick one. I moved toward him and wrapped my hand around his wrist. “Don’t worry. I’ll be in and out. There can’t be that many places to look, right?”

  Grant nodded slowly. “Okay, but you have to move quick. I don’t know when Seth’s coming in today.” He slipped the key into the lock and pulled open the door.

  The chief’s office was even smaller than the alcove and the database room in back. My stomach hitched when I saw a dusty gray square staining the wall next to the desk. I traced my finger along the perimeter. Which picture had been in this frame again? I think it was one of me and Ella at the Christmas concert, Ella still decked in her outrageous angel wings. I pulled my hand away.

  There was only one beat-up file cabinet in the corner, and it wasn’t even locked. I pulled the first drawer open and pawed through the folders: procedural manuals, payroll, and a bunch of other yellowing documents that didn’t look important.

  Nothing with my name.

  I opened the second drawer. This one was mostly empty, except for an old radio with a hole in the speaker and two hanging files. I looked at the first one.

  Bingo.

  Graham, Claire.

  I opened it.

  The first few pages were official reports on the incident, how they found me at the scene rocking and unresponsive to questioning, how Mom turned in the paring knife for DNA testing. These must have been the same reports Grant had read.

  I flipped the page and a name I didn’t recognize stared up at me.

  Fourteen-year-old Patrick Gillet made the 911 call when he discovered the victim and suspect in the cornfield at 8:56 a.m.

  Patrick Gillet.

  His name bumped against something in my brain, forcing me to remember. I did remember; I knew he went to school me. He must have been in a grade between me and Ella.

  A pair of eyes the color of a cloudy morning popped into my mind.

  I gasped. Patrick Gillet was the same boy Ella wrote about in her diary, the same boy who’d found us in the cornfield.

  My mind raced. Patrick had been at the scene that morning too—he’d seen the gory aftermath of Ella’s attack. The last page in Ella’s diary flickered in my head.

  He’s going to kill me.

  “Claire, hurry,” Grant called from the other side of the door. “You’ve been in there forever.”

  I blinked until the words melted away and I suddenly felt sick. I flipped through the rest of the pages, searching for anything else I could find about Patrick. But there was nothing.

  I was about to close the file and tell Grant to lock up the office when the edge of a crisp, stationery-thick sheet of paper caught my eye. It was the last page in my file. I slipped it free and stared at a seal of some sort, an image of a twisted oak tree with budding leaves.

  Havenwood Mental Institution: Private Records

  I stared at the paper in my hands, unable to comprehend. What was this doing in my file? I scanned the page, and when I saw my name, my fingers started to tingle and the breath clotted in my throat and everything got very, very stuffy.

  Fifteen-year-old Claire E. Graham has been referred for an evaluation for residence in our inpatient treatment facility. Diagnostic tests reveal that there are no physical ailments contributing to mental health; however, there is a family history of psychosis. Because Ms. Graham is currently a minor, and, subsequently, her legal case has been temporarily cleared, our team, including Ms. Graham’s parents, has decided a weekly outpatient treatment program with our satellite psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel M. Barges, in Manhattan is the best course of treatment at this time. It is recommended that the patient be treated for mental illness instead of facing prosecution.

  I sank onto the wobbly desk chair and tried to breathe, breathe, breathe.

  My parents hadn’t shipped me off to New York because I was scared, because I was in so much pain from watching Ella suffer. They sent me away because they had to.

  It was either that or send me directly to Havenwood, which was the kind of place they sent deranged women who murdered their babies for spilling grape juice on the carpet.

  It wasn’t the lack of evidence, or Ella’s inability to remember, that got me off without any charges. It was because they thought I was legitimately crazy. Certifiable, even.

  Had Grant seen this letter?

  I pressed my palms to my face and tried to snuff out the images, the thoughts, flashing behind my eyelids.

  “Claire!” Grant barked, and I jumped. “Seth’s car just pulled up—you’re got to get out of there now.” He poked his head into the doorway, his face polluted with panic. He glanced at me and then the file. “Hurry, hurry, hurry. Put it back and get out. Let’s go!”

  Something in me snapped back to life and I spun around to cram my file back into the hanging folder. I started to shut the door when I noticed two hasty letters, scribbled in pencil, on the second file tab.

  M.G.

  “Let’s go, he’s walking toward the door!” Grant yelled behind me.

  I bit my lip. There was a chance this was nothing, that this file didn’t have anything to do with Dad. But there was an even bigger chance that it did.

  Quickly, I grabbed it out of the hanging folder and shoved it under my jacket. Then I slammed the cabinet shut and raced out the door.

  Grant’s fingers shook as he tried to jam the key into the lock. Just behind him, the knob to the front door began to rattle. I wrapped my hand around Grant’s and squeezed until it stopped shaking. The key slid into the
lock with a click.

  I didn’t let go of his hand as we ran down the hallway, our footsteps muffled by the faded carpet. I heard the hinges of the front door yawn open just as I pulled the back door shut behind us.

  twenty-six

  When we pulled into my driveway, I breathed a sigh of relief. The Explorer was gone, and the house sat dark and empty. No parents to face. At least for now.

  “Stay,” I breathed, pulling the file from my under my coat. “I want you to look at this with me.”

  I thought Grant’s eyes were going to pop out of his head when he saw the manila file in my hands. “Did you—did you take that from Seth’s office?”

  I chewed on the corner of my lip. The last thing I wanted was to get Grant in trouble—or worse, fired—but I had to know the truth. I nodded and tipped the file into a patch of sunlight so he could see the initials. “I think Seth’s keeping a secret file on my dad, and I want to know why.”

  Grant blinked at the file and then looked back up at me. The way the sunlight hit his face made his lashes look like tiny matchsticks. He squeezed my hand. “Well then, open it.”

  I took a deep breath and turned to the first page inside.

  It was a picture. Not of my dad, but of a cornfield. I recognized it from the newspaper articles I’d seen. It was the makeshift backyard behind Sarah Dunnard’s house, part of the clearing near Lark Lake. This was where the police had reported finding the pinpricks of her blood, staining the base of the cornstalks.

  It wasn’t news. I flipped to the next page.

  Another picture, and for a second I thought it was a duplicate. But then I saw the blood.

  A cluster of stalks just beyond the back porch, splattered in angry slashes of blood. It pooled into the snow like a liquid halo.

  Grant saw it too; he reached over me to turn back to the first picture, and then laid them side-by-side. In the newspaper picture, the blood-stained stalks were gone, and so was the clump of snow in front of them. It was almost like they’d never existed.

  “But how—” I started, wrinkling my eyebrows.

  “There’s only one explanation,” Grant said slowly. “Someone must have tampered with the evidence before the reporters came.”

  So the rumors were true—someone had tampered with the evidence in the Dunnard case. “But why?” I asked. “And why would Seth think it was my dad that did it?”

  Grant shook his head. “The only thing I can guess is that because your dad was the first on the scene, Seth thought it was most likely him.”

  I flipped over the pictures and kept going. There were three more images: one of a mutilated print in the snow, something oval-shaped with blurry edges, and another of a small depression in a snowdrift.

  I squinted at the photo of the print. “Animal?”

  “Maybe,” Grant said, taking the picture from me. “It does kind of have that triangle shape to it, like a paw print. But it’s too messed up to tell for sure.”

  “What’s this one?” I asked, holding up the second photo. There was definitely some kind of shape in the snow, like something had been nestled in it, but I had no idea what. It almost looked like two shapes: a perfectly round depression, and a larger, lumpier one beneath it.

  “No clue,” Grant said. “But Seth must have thought it was important.”

  I moved on to the third photo: another depression, but this one long and thin and stained with blood at the very tip. My heart stopped and suddenly the air in the truck’s cab became very, very still. Grant swallowed and cleared his throat. He didn’t have to say anything; I knew what he was thinking.

  “A knife,” I said slowly. “This looked like it was made by a knife. And it’s the same shape and size of my dad’s hunting knife.” Never mind the blood in the snow where the tip must have fallen.

  Grant breathed. “So that’s why Seth’s hellbent on proving your dad did this.”

  I snapped my head up to look at him. “He could have just been carrying the knife that day. It could have fallen out of his pocket. It doesn’t mean anything. And the cornstalks and paw prints—who knows what that was.” I took a breath. “And anyway, if Seth had all this evidence against him, why didn’t he just take it to the crime unit in Toledo and have Dad thrown in jail? Why hide it?”

  Grant didn’t say anything; I could tell he was thinking. Frantic, I flipped through the remaining pages. There had to be something else here, something that screamed “wolf” instead of “murderer.”

  There were only two pages left. The first was a small slip of paper the size of an index card. It read, Abbreviated Medical History of M. Graham across the top.

  This was the kind of card you find stapled to the file in your doctor’s office, the kind they update every year when you go in for a check-up. Seth had been digging deep to find something, anything, to prove Dad’s guilt.

  I scanned over it. It looked pretty standard, from what I could tell. There was a list of recent check-ups and cholesterol tests; one visit listed for a sprained wrist over five years ago. Nothing out of the ordinary. I looked at the bottom of the card, where the word Prescriptions was neatly printed. Under it, there were two words—one I’d heard of and the other I hadn’t.

  The first was Paxil, an anti-anxiety medication. I remembered the tiny pills from when they’d been prescribed to me in the days following Ella’s attack.

  The second was something called Clozapine.

  “Do you know what Clozapine is?” I asked Grant, but he just shook his head. I bit my lip. “Maybe it works with that anxiety medication, like a mood booster or something.” I slipped the card back into the folder and pulled out the last page, an enlarged photo of the house currently looming in front of me.

  But in this photo, the side of the house near Dad’s shed was still charred and hollow, and the angry black words still screamed across the siding. This time, they were blown up enough so I could read one of them.

  Watching.

  I threw the image back into the folder and slammed it shut.

  “What is it?” Grant asked, worry etched in the lines around his eyes.

  I shook my head. How could I explain the way that word curdled in my throat like sour milk; how whenever I read it, I read it in Ella’s hurried print.

  They’re watching you, Claire.

  I looked up at the house, at the off-color patch of paint along the side. A web of snowflakes stretched across the windshield; the snow was coming down faster now, smothering everything in tufts of white.

  “Can you help me with something?” I unbuckled my seat belt. “I need to see what’s on the side of the house. Can you help me do that?” I looked steadily at him. “Can you help me figure out the truth?”

  Grant leaned over then and kissed me, warm and determined, and pulled the key from the ignition. I led him through the snow, even though it soaked our jeans up to the knee. When we reached the back of the house, I grabbed his hand and pressed it to the fresh coat of paint. “Feel that? This is where the new paint starts. I scraped off a little of it the other day.”

  “I remember when this happened,” he said as he ran his fingers along a ridge in the siding. “It was big news for Amble. Practically everyone in town came here as soon as they heard about it, but your dad had already painted over it. He was in the middle of painting when the reporters showed up.” He scratched at the paint. “This should come off pretty easy.

  He didn’t have time to prime it.”

  I touched the edge of the letter left behind, the one that looked like it could have a curve. “What do we need to do?”

  “I have some paint thinner and a wire brush in the back of my truck. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot.” Grant wedged his thumb under a crack in the paint and a chip fluttered to the ground. “Yeah, see? It might work.”

  I laughed, an awkward sound I wasn’t used to. “Who drives around with p
aint thinner and a wire brush in the back of their truck?”

  Grant smirked. “The deputy trainee program has many perks, Claire. Besides my paper-filing and coffee-making duties, I also get to scrub graffiti off of Amble’s important landmarks in the summer. Such as the elementary school. And the dumpster in the back of the diner.”

  Then he kissed my cheek so gently that it felt like the memory of a kiss instead of the real thing. “Be right back,” he said, his lips lingering on my skin. And then he was gone, while I waited with my hand cupping my face, like if I held it there long enough I could keep his kiss forever.

  We started to smooth the paint thinner over the spot with a couple of massive sponges that Grant also apparently needed to complete his deputy duties. It made the layer of paint watery, and soon it began to drip into the snow. I cringed as I watched the flecks of red turn to pools. It almost looked like blood. I hadn’t really thought about what I was going to do after I stripped the house down to its secrets.

  Grant barely needed to use the wire brush; the paint practically melted away, as if it had wanted us to know what was hidden beneath it all along. I wiped off the last of the paint that hid the curved letter. It turned out to be a U. My eyes ran over the rest of the word it belonged to: you. I started to feel sick all over again.

  Grant stepped back from the wall, pulling me with him. He squeezed my hand as he strung the crooked words together.

  We’re watching you, Graham.

  A wave of nausea washed over me. I clenched my stomach as I bent into the snow. I didn’t even feel the cold seeping through my jeans.

  They’re watching you, Claire.

  Another warning. Another threat of something deadly lingering ahead, waiting. Watching. Another set of eyes—human or animal—waiting to hurt us.

  Breathe. Grant’s voice was in my head and suddenly I was out of the snow and in his arms and wrapped in a blanket on the couch.