by Kara Thomas
“I guess.” Nick rubs his eyes. “I mean, they asked what she usually had on her, and when I described her phone and bracelet, they said they didn’t find any of that stuff.”
I glance over at Callie. She’s looking at me, lips drawn.
“The Monster robbed the other girls too,” I say.
Nick’s gaze snaps to me. “Who the hell is the Monster?”
“Wyatt Stokes, the serial killer,” I say. “Murdered four women around Fayette ten years ago. How do you not know about him?”
“I only moved here four years ago,” Nick says. “What does that have to do with Ari?”
Callie looks at me, her face clearly saying that she’s thinking what I’m thinking: if Nick is lying, he deserves an Oscar for his performance.
“Ari’s murder is similar,” Callie says carefully.
“So why are they up my ass?” Nick demands. “If it’s a serial killer, shouldn’t they be out looking for him?”
Callie and I are quiet. She’s the one who finally speaks. “You’re hiding,” she says. “After the stuff with your computer, it doesn’t look good for you.”
“You gotta believe that it wasn’t me,” Nicks says. “Besides, if I did it, why would I leave her off I-95 where someone would see her? My house is on four acres of land. I could have buried her under the barn.”
I’m starting to see why the cops have zeroed in on Nick. “Maybe don’t say that to the police,” I offer.
Callie glances at her phone. “We’ve got to get back.” She hands Nick the eighty dollars. “Don’t go anywhere or talk to anyone until Tessa and I figure some stuff out. You owe me.”
“I owe you my life,” Nick says, walking us to the door.
Callie’s face is somber under the orange glow from the streetlamps outside. “Let’s hope not.”
•••
As soon as we leave the motel, I think of a million questions I didn’t get to ask Nick. If Ariel told him about her clients, maybe she mentioned one in particular who creeped her out. Maybe she said something that morning about the man she was meeting with the night she was killed, a clue to who he is.
Callie’s eyelids begin to droop ten minutes into the half hour drive. I nudge her arm.
“I found something in an old Gazette issue,” I say. “An article after Lori died….It said she was buried in her name necklace.”
“Well, yeah.” Callie turns on the windshield wipers. “She was always wearing it.”
“Did she take it off before bed?” I ask.
Callie thinks for a moment. “No. She never took it off, because she was too afraid she’d lose it.”
“So she would have been wearing it when she was killed.”
“Yeah. I mean, it would have been weird if she wasn’t.”
“He didn’t take her necklace,” I say. “He took a trophy from all the other girls, a piece of jewelry, but he left Lori with a necklace that had her name on it.”
The rain beats against the windshield in a steady rhythm now.
“How—” Callie stops, her mouth hanging open. “How did the cops miss something that huge?”
“They didn’t,” I say quietly.
Callie listens, silent, as I tell her about Rae Felice’s mother coming out years later and saying Rae’s locket was missing. When I’m finished, there’s bewilderment etched across her face.
“Holy shit.” She ups the speed on the windshield wipers and stares ahead, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “Holy shit.”
“I mean, it never made sense that Stokes would choose Lori,” I say. “Whoever killed her…it was personal.”
“But why?” Callie whispers. “Who could have hated her that much?”
Stay the hell away from me.
One detail can change an entire story. A necklace. A phone call. The smallest things could mean the difference between a man’s life and death.
It’s not for me to decide which details matter. I understand that now.
“Joslin.” I force her name out. “She and Lori were on the phone that night. They were arguing, I don’t know about what. I overheard when I went to pee. Lori kept saying ‘stay the hell away from me,’ and when she hung up, I redialed, and I got the answering machine at my house.”
Callie is silent. In front of us, a car stops short. Callie hits the brakes. We jerk forward; when my skull slams back against the headrest, I think, She’s going to tell Maggie, and it’s going to be over.
“The police interviewed Jos,” I say. “She didn’t tell them about the phone call, and I thought if I ratted her out, she’d go to jail for lying to the police. The older I got, the less things about that night made sense….She could have lied because she did it. She could have killed Lori.”
Callie’s expression is drawn. She looks like she’s lost somewhere. Finally, she says, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She was my sister, Callie. If you said anything to anyone…I didn’t know what would happen to her. I know I screwed up, and if I’d told the truth, they would have looked at people other than Stokes. If Jos killed Lori, it’s my fault that she got away with it.”
“Tessa.” Callie’s voice is forceful. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Something within me releases. I didn’t know how much I needed to hear Callie say that until she said it.
“But if Jos killed her—” I say.
Callie holds up a hand. “You’re not hearing me. There’s no way that happened.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The guest room window,” Callie says. “Stokes—I mean, whoever took Lori—they cut the screen to get inside.”
I rack my brain for this piece of information; the window wasn’t in any of the trial transcripts that were made public. I read them all. “Are you positive?”
“Yeah, we had to get it replaced before we sold the house,” Callie says. “Think about it. Joslin wouldn’t have cut Lori’s window to get into her room.”
“Because she knew where you guys kept the spare key,” I say.
The Greenwoods hadn’t gotten around to making Lori her own house key, but she came and went as she pleased, using the key hidden under a rock that Callie had painted. How many times had the four of us walked back from the pool together for lunch, Callie, Jos, and me cocooned in our towels as Lori stopped to get the key and let us inside when Maggie wasn’t home?
“Jos could have just waltzed through the front door if she wanted to get into my house,” Callie says. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
It’s true; a slashed window screen does make it seem like a stranger got inside Lori’s bedroom.
“Why didn’t Lori close the window?” I ask Callie. “She knew we’d seen someone outside….Why wouldn’t she have locked the window if she was sleeping on the first floor?”
“We didn’t have AC in the spare bedroom.” Callie curls the end of a strand of hair around her fingertip. “It would have been too hot to sleep. Maybe she just didn’t believe there was someone outside.”
A thought occurs to me. “Or maybe she was expecting someone.”
“Like a guy?” Callie frowns. “Lori had a boyfriend back at college.”
I tilt back against the headrest and close my eyes. “Maybe it wasn’t like that. She could have gotten mixed up with bad people while she was here.”
Callie snorts. “Like, drugs people? Lori wasn’t like that.”
There’s a silent but at the end of her sentence. But your sister was.
I don’t know if Joslin did drugs. It would definitely explain her behavior in the months before she left town—she was moody, thinner, and coming home at all hours. But she was grieving over Lori. Jos was hiding something about the night Lori died. I never considered that something else was eating away at her too.
“Danny could’ve been a dealer,” I wonder aloud. “My mom and Jos fought about her dating him, since he was a dropout and everything.”
Callie’s quiet as she considers this. Then: “If Lori foun
d out Danny was a dealer, she would have freaked.”
And he may have killed her to keep her quiet.
“Jos was supposed to be with Danny that night,” I say. “Maybe he threatened Jos to make her stay quiet about what she knew about the murder. She could have left Fayette to get away from him.”
Callie’s quiet again.
“What?” I say. “You don’t buy it?”
“It’s not that I don’t buy it,” she says. “That would explain a lot of things, if they were involved somehow. But if it’s true, and we find Danny…him not wanting to talk to us will be the least of our problems, you know?”
I do. But it doesn’t mean I’m going to back off. If Danny is the person my sister has been running from all these years—if he killed Lori and I can prove it, somehow—she won’t have to hide anymore.
My sister didn’t kill Lori. I try the idea out. I want it to be true more than I’ve ever wanted anything else before.
My sister didn’t kill Lori.
If I find out who did, maybe she’ll finally come home to me.
We arrive back at the house undetected. Not long after I fall asleep, I wake up with a fierce pounding in my bladder. The cuckoo clock says it’s ten after four. Across the hall, I hear the shower. Rick, getting ready for work. I wait for the sound of the bathroom door opening and Rick padding back into his bedroom, but it doesn’t come.
I can’t hold it anymore. I have to use the toilet downstairs.
There’s a light on in the kitchen. When I finish up in the bathroom, I see Maggie sitting at the table, her head in her hands. She looks up at me and blinks. I smell muffins. The timer on the stove ticks.
“Are you baking?” I ask her. At four in the morning?
Maggie rubs her eyes. The skin around them is pink and raw. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d get something ready to drop off at the Kouchinskys’.”
I sit in the seat next to her. She covers my hand with hers, clutches me like we’re teetering at the top of a roller coaster. “This brings back awful memories.”
I remember Maggie shouting at Rick when they got home that night, after he knocked on Lori’s bedroom door and didn’t get an answer. What do you mean Lori’s gone? I remember Maggie and Rick frantically putting together a MISSING flyer with Lori’s picture on it. They hadn’t even gotten the chance to print it out before the police found her body.
“Do you remember her at all?” Maggie whispers. I know she means Lori, not Ariel. I nod.
“She loved the mornings.” Maggie smiles. “Couldn’t sleep past six. It was inhuman.”
A flicker of a memory in my head: Lori in her shiny black leggings and lime-green gym shirt. Bangs pulled off her face with a white headband. She ran every morning, even in the rain. Maggie hated that she insisted on going alone. Lori would brag about how she went jogging in Philadelphia all the time, and Philly was much more dangerous than Fayette.
And maybe that was why he chose Lori, if it really was the Monster and not someone she knew. Maybe that was why he chose all of them, and left their bodies in plain sight, to show that he’d taught them a lesson. You think you’re safe, but you’re not.
Maggie takes her hand back from me. She leans forward on the table and rests her chin on the heel of her hand. “My sister had a difficult time after her husband’s death. That’s why Lori started spending her summers here. The drinking…Our father had a problem.”
She catches herself. Closes her mouth. I can tell this is the closest Maggie will get to acknowledging the incident with the vodka bottle under Callie’s bed. The numbers displayed on the oven timer count down from one minute.
“I worry about Callie,” Maggie says. “I know it must seem to you like she’s had an easy life, but she doesn’t deal with disappointment well. She cried for days when you left.”
I imagined hearing something like this from Maggie some day, and I always expected it to make me feel better about Callie abandoning me. Instead, I feel an inexplicable tug of longing for my own mother. She worried about Joslin and me so much that as the years went by, it seemed like her worry whittled away at her body, taking away her curves and the soft parts where I used to lay my head when I was a toddler.
I wonder if Annette worries about me still, wherever she is now, and if when I find her, there will be anything left of my mother.
•••
I climb back into bed after my conversation with Maggie but never fall asleep. When it’s a godlier hour, I head downstairs, noticing that Callie’s door is open and her room is empty.
She’s not in the kitchen either, where Maggie is arranging the now-cooled muffins on a plate.
“Morning, sweets.”
“Hi,” I say around a yawn. “Where’s Callie?”
“On Tuesdays she works at the studio,” Maggie says. “A pre-K twirling camp. She’ll be home by noon.”
I don’t want to wait for Callie to get home before I stop by Joe Faber’s ex-wife’s house. I was hoping to catch the woman on her way to work—if the former Mrs. Faber works. If I miss her, I’ll have to wait for her to get home.
Maggie drains what’s left in her coffee mug and sets it down. “Once I shower, I’m going to bring these over to the Kouchinskys, if you want to tag along.”
Something locks up in me. I think of the way I couldn’t even go up to Ariel’s family after the funeral, and I feel a flush of shame.
I stumble over my words. “I—I was going to call Gram back….”
It’s not a lie, sort of. She’s left two voice mails since yesterday morning.
“Oh, good,” Maggie says. “I was wondering when you’d talk to her. I’m sure she’s worried about you.”
I smile and head upstairs, trying not to be unnerved by the fact that Maggie noticed I haven’t spoken with Gram all week. I don’t want to think about what else she’s noticed.
The guilt follows me as I sneak out into the garage to get Callie’s bike once Maggie gets into the shower. Guilt, guilt, guilt. I feel guilty for lying to Maggie on top of everything I’ve been keeping from her. I’m guilty for avoiding my Gram.
Sometimes I think guilt is the only thing I’m capable of feeling.
•••
I see the church first. It’s a sad-looking old thing, its windows busted and burned at the edges. Takes a certain person to live across the street from that for fifteen years and never complain about the place not being knocked down.
Across the street from the church, there’s a house with a chain-link fence that extends to the edge of the property; if you want to park in the driveway, you have to get out of the car and open the gate. There’s a pickup truck with New Jersey plates parked half on the lawn, half on the gravel.
I glance inside the mailbox; on the top of the stack is a Buy ’N Bulk flyer addressed to Melissa Lawrence.
Barking. A screen door slamming. A woman screams at me from the porch. “I told you to leave the paper at the gate and be done with it.”
Two very large dogs gallop toward me, their jaws flapping, drool flying everywhere. They stop short of the gate. Off to the side, there are three empty steel bowls. Two dogs. Three bowls.
I freeze, but not because of the dogs, who are throwing themselves up against the chain link. The woman is coming down the driveway, gravel crunching beneath her hunting boots.
Melissa Lawrence is, if you’re polite, what you’d call “a woman who can handle herself.” I’m not polite, so I’m thinking that Melissa Lawrence is the type of woman who will break your nose for looking at her the wrong way.
“Are you deaf?” she snarls at me, her dogs circling her feet. One stands on his hind legs, puts his paws on Melissa’s chest. She doesn’t even flinch under his weight—just pushes him down and picks up a gnarled rawhide the size of my head and chucks it across the yard. The dogs bolt after it, body slamming each other to get ahead.
Melissa looks me up and down. Doesn’t see me holding pamphlets or a clipboard. Puts her hands on her hips.
�
��I don’t know you,” she says.
“I’m looking for Joe Faber,” I say.
Melissa glares at me with freaky, bulging eyes. “Someone’s seen him around?”
“No. I was hoping you had.”
Melissa lets out a hollow, phlegmy laugh. “Joey knows not to come within ten miles of me. What’s this about?”
“A guy—man—named Danny,” I say. “He worked for Joe’s landscaping company.”
“Yeah, I knew Danny. Friends with Joe’s boys.” Melissa’s voice has hardened. It makes me nervous, but still, there’s a flicker of hope in me at having a link to Danny.
“Do you know his last name?” I ask.
“Never had reason to ask. They’d bring their girls around and head off to the barn.”
“Was one of them this girl?” I unfold the picture of Lori that I clipped from the Gazette article. Melissa looks down at it. Her face darkens.
“You think I don’t know who that is?” She gives a body-shaking cough, spits the refuse on the ground. “Yeah, I seen her before.”
“Here?” I ask. “Lori was here?”
Melissa nods. “Once or twice, with that scrawny piece of jailbait Danny was messin’ around with. They were partying in the barn one night, and the blonde got upset and left. Never saw her again after that.”
“The other one”—I can’t bring myself to say my sister’s name—“she didn’t go with her?”
“She tried to get her to stay, but the blonde was all shook up,” Melissa says. “Probably Tommy or Mike made a pass at her. Knowing them.”
“Where are they now?” I ask. “Joe’s sons?”
The look on Melissa’s face says that I’ve worn out my welcome. “Joe moved ’em out of state. That’s what I told the police, and that’s all I know.”
The police. They questioned the Fabers after Lori’s death? As far as I knew, Wyatt Stokes was the only person of interest they ever focused on. Melissa starts to head back up her driveway.
“Please,” I call out. “I’m looking for my sister. Danny’s girlfriend.”
I’m sure she’ll keep walking and ignore me, but Melissa stops. What comes out of her mouth is even more surprising.