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Eddie took a step forward. “We’re not from here,” he said. “We were passing through town. We picked up a girl named Rhonda Jean, who maybe was hitchhiking. She’d been stabbed.”
“Stabbed?” The braid girl’s voice was a high near-shriek, slicing through the empty room. Todd went pale. The long-haired kid looked like he wanted to turn and run.
Eddie nodded. “She died. We feel bad about what happened. We’d like to know more about her. We don’t even know if the police told her family.”
A high-pitched keening came from the girl with the braid, and Kay took her arm. “Gretchen,” she said softly. “Sit down.”
The girls moved to one of the sofas, and the rest of us followed. I took a seat on an old La-Z-Boy, kicking aside an empty chip bag. Gretchen was still making the keening sound, as if she was trying not to cry. Kay patted her back a little awkwardly, as if the two girls didn’t know each other very well. I caught the long-haired kid looking at my legs and gave him a glare that would melt ice. He looked away.
“We didn’t know Rhonda Jean all that well,” Todd said, running a hand through his messy, dark hair. He’d sat on another sofa, with Eddie on the other end. “She was here, what? Two weeks? Maybe three?”
We’d had it wrong. Rhonda Jean wasn’t heading for Hunter Beach when she was killed; she was leaving. “Where did she stay?” Eddie asked.
“She roomed in Gretchen’s tent,” Todd said.
“She didn’t have a tent.” Gretchen wiped her face with her palms. “She said she came from Baltimore. Her dad was a big businessman or something. But he hit her, and he hit her mother, and Rhonda Jean couldn’t stay anymore. She wanted out.”
The back of my neck went cold. It shouldn’t have; these were old scars, healed over.
“She was backpacking around the country,” Gretchen went on. “Looking for work for cash under the table. She’d heard it was free here, so she came. The bus only stops in Coldlake Falls. If you want to get to Hunter Beach from there, you have to walk or hitch.”
I didn’t ask about taxis, and neither did Eddie. We knew better. A taxi from Coldlake Falls to Hunter Beach might be twenty dollars or more. Twenty dollars was food for three days, longer if you stretched it. There was no one here who would pay that kind of money when walking and hitching were free.
I’d lived that life, and I was still living it now. Eddie and I had enough to get by, and that was all. I didn’t think I’d ever taken a taxi in my life, and if I asked Eddie, he’d probably say the same.
“I let her sleep in my tent,” Gretchen was saying. “She was quiet, friendly, got along with people. She put money into the communal grocery tin. She had a couple of old paperback books she liked to read on the beach. I think she just wanted to be left alone.”
“What was her last name?” Eddie asked softly.
“Breckwith.” Gretchen seemed to be the only one in the group who had known Rhonda Jean. If she’d stayed here for three weeks, then she’d definitely kept to herself. I looked at the two men, trying to read their expressions. Could one of them have done this?
“Did she tell anyone she was leaving?” I asked.
Gretchen shook her head. “She packed her things last night and she was just gone.” She started to keen again.
“She left at night?” Eddie asked. “That seems strange, doesn’t it? Why would she go to the Coldlake bus station at night? Buses don’t leave then.”
Gretchen was crying too hard to answer, so Kay said sullenly, “Who knows? She probably thought she’d walk to the bus station, then sleep there until the first bus left. They start at six.”
Maybe, but it didn’t sit right. Walking hours to a bus station at night wasn’t something I would have done—not unless I had a very pressing reason to leave. Sleeping alone on a bus station bench, waiting for the first bus to leave, wasn’t the action of a girl who was having a good time at Hunter Beach.
“No one saw her leave?” I asked.
“We let people come and go here,” Todd said. “You’re not answerable to anyone. That’s why people come.” His words had an edge to them, and I realized that to him, I represented some kind of establishment type. It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. I was probably the same age as him, and I’d lived exactly the same kind of wandering life. It was weird, how being married made you seem like a grown-up. Until I landed in Ann Arbor, I hadn’t been a middle-class girl looking for adventure and a place with no rules. Like some of these kids, I’d been traveling to survive.
I glanced up at Kurt Cobain on the wall. The sadness in his eyes had always unsettled me. I was pretty sure he’d despise the fact that his face was up on the wall. As for his music, I was a Guns N’ Roses girl. I’d begged Eddie to let me play “Paradise City” while we walked down the aisle, but he’d had to say no because it would upset his parents.
Two days ago. We were married two days ago. I’d worn a pearl-colored satin sheath I bought at a thrift store for seven dollars, and Eddie had borrowed his father’s suit. We’d stood in front of a justice of the peace while his mother sobbed and his father held back manly tears. My secondhand heels had pinched my feet, and I’d done my own hair and makeup. I’d felt like I was finally starting a life.
“Rhonda Jean probably walked,” the long-haired kid was saying. “Cars don’t come this way very often. If you want to get to the bus station, you walk and hope that one of the locals drives by.”
“There are locals around here?”
“Sure,” Todd said. “Up the beach a ways. There are a few houses. They’re set back from the road, so you can’t see them if you took the main road in. Sometimes you’ll have luck hitching at the Dollar Mart parking lot, which is half a mile that way.” He pointed past the kitchen.
Eddie nodded, like he’d been interrogating people all his life. “Who owns the van parked at the entrance to the beach?”
“I do,” Todd said. “We use it for grocery and supply runs.”
