The Darkest Corners

by Kara Thomas

  A murky image starts to come into focus in my memory: Lori, surfacing from the deep end after diving in, reaching for her throat to make sure her name necklace was still there. She rarely talked about her dead father, but she never took that necklace off.

  If Lori was buried with her necklace, the killer didn’t steal it from her.

  Shit.

  I roll up the newspaper and stick it up my pant leg so no one will see me take it.

  •••

  This is really bad.

  The stolen jewelry was never a part of the trial. For one, the police never recovered from Wyatt Stokes’s trailer anything belonging to the victims. The fact that the Monster took jewelry from the victims was a detail that emerged years later, something used to embellish the documentaries and true crime books for people with boners for serial killer stories.

  People who knew Marisa Perez and Kristal Davis said that the girls were missing jewelry when their bodies were recovered. But Kristal had been known to pawn her stuff for drug money; no one could prove that she’d had anything for the Monster to steal from her in the first place.

  The missing jewelry detail didn’t become public until a few years after Stokes was sentenced, when Rae Felice’s mother said her daughter had been missing a gold locket that had belonged to her great-grandmother. Rae’s mother had gone through a box of stuff from Rae’s apartment and hadn’t found the locket. But by then it didn’t matter.

  It’s just a throwaway line in a Podunk local paper— She was laid to rest in her necklace. Shana Rosenberg definitely did not realize that that one line could indicate that Lori Cawley was killed by someone other than the Ohio River Monster.

  Someone who didn’t take her necklace because they didn’t know they were supposed to in order to make it seem like she’d been one of the Monster’s victims.

  Stokes’s defense team has to know about this. They would have torn apart every aspect of the case, looking for something to cast doubt on the prosecution’s version of the murders.

  The possibility that Lori Cawley wasn’t even killed by the Ohio River Monster would turn the entire case upside down. If two murderers were active at the time, how could anyone be sure Wyatt Stokes was even one of them?

  Is the necklace the new evidence they found? Or do they have an even bigger bombshell that could prove Stokes didn’t kill Lori Cawley—bigger than the DNA?

  A bead of sweat slips down my back.

  Two killers. And if Stokes really is innocent, both of them are still out there.

  Instead of leaving the library, I return to the computer I was using before. Log in again.

  I open up my email and start composing a message to the Fayette County Penitentiary.

  I get back to the house in time for dinner, which pleases Maggie infinitely. She pushes a plate of roast chicken at me. No one comments on my appearance, but I catch Callie wrinkle her nose as she sits in the chair next to mine.

  “Where have you been jetting off to?” Maggie asks, passing a bowl of peas to me. “I hope you’re staying hydrated.”

  Callie eyes me over the rim of her water glass, like she’s waiting to see how I’ll answer the first query.

  I shrug. “Forgot how much I missed riding. Too humid to do it in Florida.”

  “Well, it’s pretty awful here right now,” Maggie says, turning to Rick. “You should really put that window unit in the guest room so Tessa can have some AC.”

  Rick mutters something unintelligible as Callie knocks her knee into mine under the table.

  My room, she mouths. After dinner.

  I’m sweating, and not from the bike ride. I don’t know how much longer I can keep everything to myself. Callie can be relentless. As kids, she was always getting me to admit to things—like when we were eight, and she had her first crush on a boy, Evan Merrill. She was convinced I liked someone in our class too, so she badgered me until I blurted a random name.

  If Callie senses I know something I’m not telling her, she’ll shake me until the truth falls out.

  Somewhere between the air conditioner debate and Maggie saying she ran into Emily Raymes, who was behind the counter at the grocery store, I decide I have to tell Callie everything tonight. And I mean everything: the phone call, the necklace, and the nagging fear that we’re not looking for just one killer but two.

  Callie asks to be excused when we’re finished. I’m too antsy to feel guilty about not helping clean up, and follow Callie out of the kitchen and up the stairs into her room.

  “You have to see what Ryan showed me,” she says in a single breath as soon as the door’s closed behind us. She gestures for me to follow her to her desk.

  There’s a website open on her laptop—Connect. Simple black letters. Discreet.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “It’s a creepy site people use to find hookups in their area,” Callie says. “Some of the listings are totally disgusting.”

  I glance over some of the links on the home page, resisting the urge to look away. Adventurous couple looking for a third. (Philly-metro area.)

  Callie selects Casual encounters from a drop-down menu and adjusts the search settings. Maximum age: 19. Area: Fayette and Somerset Counties. A halfhearted message encouraging us to report potential exploitation of minors pops up before the results load.

  Callie scrolls down purposefully, like she’s been on this page before. She clicks on Nice girl wants a man who’s not afraid to get a little naughty—PICS.

  “ ‘Nineteen-year-old brunette available for a mature guy seeking companionship,’ ” Callie reads. “ ‘Let’s work something out. Serious inquiries only.’ ”

  The girl in the photo is wearing a black dress that’s so tight, it may as well be painted on her body. She’s standing in front of a mirror, angled so her ass is on display, and her face is cropped out of the photo. Dark brown hair falls all the way to her bony elbows.

  Callie points to the girl’s hand, the one that’s not planted on her hip. She’s holding a digital camera up to the mirror. In the area between her thumb and forefinger, there’s a patch of lightened skin. The one we used to say looked like it was in the shape of Alaska.

  “Ariel,” I breathe.

  Callie clicks out of the page before I can read the rest.

  “Ryan says it’s total escort language,” she says quietly. “ ‘Let’s work something out.’ It’s how they communicate that they’re selling. I just don’t get why.”

  “Obviously so she wouldn’t get busted for prostitution,” I say.

  “No, I mean why would she do this?” Callie demands. “Okay, your life sucks and you want to get out, but having sex with random creeps for money?”

  Her face is splotchy and red. She pushes herself away from the desk, and before she turns away, I see that there are tears in her eyes.

  Finally, Callie clears her throat. “I called her a whore.”

  Her voice is as small as she looks, sitting on the bed with her back pressed to her headboard and her knees to her chest. “I called Ari a whore because she hooked up with this guy I liked. I got pissed, and I said it to her face. It was two years ago. That’s why we stopped talking.”

  I don’t say anything. Mostly because I get the sense that Callie doesn’t want me to.

  “I had no idea,” she says. “I never, ever should have said it….I just had no clue.”

  For the first time since I got here, I can understand Callie. I know how she feels right now—almost as if learning the truth about Ari’s other life had blown apart bits of the world Callie had thought she lived in.

  It’s possible to know—like, really know—another human being. But I’m starting to think that most of us never even want to try to know another person until it’s too late to save them.

  Callie wipes her eyes with a tissue from the box on her nightstand. I feel like crying too; I decide now that I won’t tell Callie about Jos tonight.

  I figure there’s only so much we can beat ourselves up abou
t, things we wish we’d done differently, before we’re broken beyond repair.

  •••

  Without Ari’s computer, Callie and I don’t have a way to figure out who she was meeting up with through Connect. So we decide to run with my plan to track down the people who were in Jos and Lori’s circle that summer, to see if there’s anyone the police may have missed talking to.

  There was Danny, Jos’s boyfriend. Jos was only as tall as his chest. He was as thin as a yardstick, his jeans always sagging to his hip bones. His teeth were stained with nicotine, and he said a total of five words to me in all the time I knew him. Hands off the ride, kiddo.

  Danny could still be in Fayette. He certainly didn’t have the brains or motivation to get out—at least he didn’t back when he was dating my sister. Even if he doesn’t know where Jos is now, he may know why she and Lori were fighting that night.

  Every moment Jos wasn’t with Lori, she was with Danny. You’re spending too much time with that boy, my mother would scold her, even though Danny was a man. He was nineteen, two years older than Jos.

  I’m leaving at the end of the summer. You can see him all year, I heard Lori tell Jos when Jos went to Danny’s house one morning instead of to the pool with us.

  I don’t know what Danny will be able to tell me if I find him. I know what I want to hear him say—that the girls had a stupid argument over Jos blowing Lori off for him. Danny heard the whole thing, because Jos was with him just like she said she was. Jos didn’t say anything about the phone call to the police because it hadn’t meant anything. The Monster really did kill Lori, and my sister wasn’t involved.

  I lie in bed, and I let the wanting take over my body like a dull ache. And I fall asleep without my music for the first time since I landed in Pennsylvania.

  •••

  I overslept. I know because the sun is streaming through the split in the guest room curtains. The sun isn’t what woke me up though; my phone is ringing.

  My stomach shoots into my throat when I see the first few digits. They match the number on the prison’s website that I saw yesterday before sending that email.

  As many ideas do, the idea that I should talk to Wyatt Stokes seems terrible now that I’ve slept on it. I stare at my phone like it’s a grenade. I thought it would be a few days before I got this call, if at all.

  I have no idea what to say to him.

  I hit answer as the call is about to go to my voice mail. An automated voice greets me.

  “This is the Fayette County Penitentiary. You have a prepaid call from—”

  There’s a pause. The sound of a mucous-y cough. Then a voice that chills me to my core.

  “Wyatt Stokes.”

  Every single one of my nerve endings dulls. The automated voice is back.

  “Press one to accept.”

  “Hello?” My voice echoes in my head, almost as if I were in a dream.

  “Hello.” His voice is different. It’s less gravelly than I remember. Less frightening. He sounds almost bored, like he’s calling only because he has nothing better to do. Which is probably true, since he’s in prison.

  I take a deep breath in and let out the words: “My name is Tessa Lowell. I don’t know if you remember me.”

  “I remember you.” There’s a muffled sound on Stokes’s end. A sneeze. “You gonna tell me why you requested to be on my approved calls list? I know it’s not faith outreach.”

  I had to check one of the boxes stating my purpose for communicating with an inmate. It worked. I can’t believe it worked. Suddenly, my hand is sweating so badly that my phone nearly slides away. “Because I have some questions for you.”

  “What makes you think I’m gonna answer your questions?” Now he sounds like the man I remember. The one who infuriated the cops who interrogated him; the one the judge and prosecutor looked at with contempt. Trailer trash. Devil worshipper. Freak. Sociopath. Monster.

  There’s a scene in the documentary about the murders where the interviewer asks Stokes why he thinks the police had it out for him. He looks right into the camera and says, as if he had the answer ready, “They want to believe I did it. I don’t think they’re ’fraid of me ’cause I’m different; I think they’re afraid of the Monster turning out to be someone who looks just like one of them.”

  I switch my phone to my other hand and wipe my sweaty palm on the bedspread. Listen for sounds outside my door. It’s silent.

  “I was close with Lori Cawley,” I tell Stokes, my voice wavering just above a whisper. “I want to understand what happened to her.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Stokes says. “The only folks who want to talk to me these days are the ones who think that I didn’t do it. So either admit that we’re having this conversation because you’ve had a change of heart, or I’m hanging up.”

  “I don’t think you killed Lori Cawley,” I say. “I don’t know who killed those other girls, or if you were involved, but I think whoever killed Lori only wanted it to look like the Monster did it.”

  “I didn’t kill those other girls.”

  I grip my phone. “I believe you.”

  And I mean it, because someone strangled Ariel Kouchinsky and left her naked body along the river. There are too many other blanks to fill in—the Monster’s ten-year absence, whether or not Ari was missing jewelry—but for once, I’m searching for answers that are in my reach and not buried in my memory of the night Lori died.

  There’s silence on Stokes’s end.

  “You know this is being recorded,” he finally says.

  “Yes. I know.”

  There’s rustling on his end, like he’s switching the phone to his other ear. “Well, Tessa Lowell. If I didn’t kill your friend, then who did?”

  For a second I think he means Ariel, but he’s talking about Lori.

  I wish I didn’t have an answer to the question. I wish I’d never seen Joslin about to go after our mother with that shard of glass, and I wish I’d never heard the fear in Lori’s voice when she yelled at my sister that night.

  I thought if I stayed in Fayette, I could get enough answers to squash the doubt in my mind—the possibility I’ve carried with me ever since I figured out who Lori was arguing with on the phone that night. I thought I could rearrange the clues and make them fit so I wouldn’t keep arriving at the same conclusion.

  That Joslin doesn’t just know who killed Lori; she put her hands around her friend’s neck and did it herself.

  I pee, wipe the gunk of out my eyes, and shuffle downstairs, where Callie, already dressed, is fixing herself a coffee. She looks up at me, her bottom lip folding under like something is off.

  She heard me on the phone, I think.

  My knees go weak until she says, “You slept late.”

  The stove clock says it’s a couple minutes after nine. Normally, I’m up at seven every day, a pattern I haven’t been able to break for years. At least I was never late for school.

  “Guess I was exhausted.” I slide into a chair at the kitchen table, where Maggie has left a paper plate with two bagels. I can’t bring myself to eat; it was so, so stupid of me to talk to Wyatt Stokes in this house.

  I know Callie wouldn’t understand why I had to talk to him. I know she’s only digging into the past with me out of fear that the police will pin Ari’s murder on Nick, and the real Monster will be free to prey on more girls. She feels guilty for how she treated Ari, scared that it’s our fault she’s dead. All on top of us being exposed as little liars, right before we’re supposed to start our shiny new lives away at college.

  But she doesn’t want Stokes to get out of prison. She thinks he’ll come after us if he’s free, get revenge on us for lying.

  Is that why I felt like I had to talk to him? To convince myself he doesn’t want to hurt us?

  I tear off a piece of bagel. It sticks in my mouth.

  Callie sips her coffee and looks at me. “I thought about what you said last night, about your sister’s boyfriend. He’s probably a good plac
e to start.”

  I nod, swallow away what’s left of the bagel in my mouth. “I don’t know his last name, though.”

  “Maybe an old yearbook?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know where he went to school, but I know it wasn’t in Fayette. And he never graduated.”

  Callie cups her mug with both hands. “I’m out of ideas, then. I haven’t seen him since that summer.”

  “So he could have left town not long after Jos did.” I rack my brain, trying to remember if I saw Danny around in those short months after Jos left and before I went to live with Gram.

  “You think it means something?” Callie looks skeptical.

  “Like, do I think they planned to run off together? I don’t know.” I’d never considered the possibility that simpleminded Danny might have been involved in what happened that night. He’d only ever hang out with Jos alone, maybe to convince himself he wasn’t dating a high school girl. He never interacted with Lori much either, except for a head nod when we all ran into him. I’d hear him and my sister on the porch sometimes, from my spot on the living room couch. Jos would nag Danny for never wanting to hang out with Lori, and he’d mutter that Lori was stuck-up.

  But as far as I knew, Danny didn’t hate Lori. He regarded her in the same way he regarded me, as a minor annoyance standing in his way whenever he wanted Joslin’s attention.

  “Didn’t Jos say she was with Danny the night Lori was murdered?” Callie looks up at me. I can see the wheels in her head turning. I swallow.

  “Yeah. Hey, what if we asked someone at the pool?” I say, redirecting. “Danny worked for the company that cleaned it.”

  My sister was never interested in high school guys, no matter how much my mother tried to beat it into her that older men were trouble. My mother never liked to talk about Jos’s real father, except to say that he was twenty-one when he got Annette pregnant at seventeen, and he promised to take care of her and he didn’t.

  Jos met Danny on Memorial Day weekend, before Lori arrived that summer. I only remember because my mother told us we had to stay home while she was out cleaning houses, but as soon as the door clicked behind her, Jos showed me that she was wearing her bathing suit already. The Greenwoods were camping at Cranberry Run for the weekend, so it was just Jos and me at the pool.