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“Sixteen.”
“These hitchhiker cases on Atticus Line,” Eddie said, his voice gentle. “You know about them?”
“I know everything.” Beatrice pulled the newspaper toward her. “I collect all the information I can find. My sister does, too. You could say it’s a hobby, except it’s about dead people so we’re not allowed to talk about it. I know it’s weird, but I don’t care. I want to know the truth. I want to know everything about these murders. I want them solved. And now another one has happened, and you two practically witnessed it.” She looked back and forth between Eddie and me, her look assessing in a way that was cold for a girl of only sixteen. “Either that, or you did it yourselves. But of course you didn’t. Max did. Right?”
I tried to read her. Was she telling the truth? What did she actually believe?
“What do you want from us?” I asked her.
“I want to know what you know, and you want to know what I know,” Beatrice said. “Why don’t you come to my house and we’ll talk?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Beatrice had her own car, a shiny blue four-door that gleamed so hard in the summer sun it made me squint. When she opened the driver’s door, I could see the interior was immaculate. New-car smell wafted out and hit my nose.
“Want to get in?” she asked us.
“We’ll take our own car, thanks,” Eddie said.
The girl shifted her weight, thinking. She pulled the pair of silver-rimmed mirror sunglasses from the top of her head and put them on. “That’s probably smart,” she said as I stared at my own reflection in the glasses. “But park down the street from my house so no one sees you, okay? Follow me.”
We got into the Pontiac, parked a few feet away. When Beatrice started her car, “You Oughta Know” blared from the sound system at top volume. She reversed from her spot with a squeal of tires and drove off.
“What are we doing?” Eddie asked as he pulled out and followed her. “She’s a child.”
“I feel old,” I agreed. “But she can’t hurt us, right?”
Eddie thought it over as we crossed through town. “Either she knows something or she doesn’t. Maybe she’s just a lonely girl looking for some attention. We’ll find out pretty soon either way.”
Beatrice led us out of downtown as the sound of Alanis wafted back at us from her open windows. In a few minutes we were on a suburban street, immaculate and sleepy in the midday heat. Except for a few lazy sprinklers, the drops of water gleaming like diamonds, nothing moved.
She parked in the driveway of a house with white siding and blue shutters. It was less than ten years old, the home of an up-and-coming family. The lawn was perfect green, the garden lining the front of the house bright with pink geraniums. A pot with more pink flowers in it was artfully placed on the porch, a bumblebee hovering over it. Beatrice’s brand-new car started to make more sense.
As instructed, Eddie and I drove past her driveway and parked farther down the street. Beatrice had gone into the house, and as we approached, she opened a side door and waved at us. The secrecy was a little excessive, but we rounded the side of the house and went inside, avoiding the front.
“Where are your parents?” Eddie asked.
“At work,” Beatrice replied as the door banged shut behind us.
The blast of air-conditioning hit me as we walked in. I exhaled a breath, feeling goose bumps rise on my skin. I was so used to the low-grade air-conditioning at Rose’s, and at most of the places we’d been in town, that it felt freezing.
Beatrice didn’t seem to notice. “My stuff is all in my bedroom where my parents can’t see it,” she said, taking off her sunglasses, “but it’s, like, weird if we go there, right? Sit down in the kitchen and I’ll go get it. Help yourself to a drink from the fridge.” She thudded up the carpeted stairs. Eddie and I walked down the cool-tiled hall to the kitchen, where there was a country-style wooden table and chairs and an antique clock hanging on the wallpapered wall. I took a seat on a chair that had a seat cushion tied to the rungs of the back, and Eddie sat opposite me.
The window looked to the backyard, as green and perfect as the front yard was. A chaise longue was placed in the middle of the grass, and another teenage girl lay on it, a towel over her face as she suntanned.
“Who’s that?” I asked Eddie.
“She mentioned a sister,” he said. “Maybe that’s her.”
Beatrice came back downstairs with a small stack of file folders, their edges bent with frequent use. She also had a spiral notebook and a pen that was larger in diameter than a thumb. I wondered how she wrote with that thing.
“Okay, I’ll start,” she said, pulling up a chair as if we were all about to work on a school project. She took out one of the files and opened it. “These are all of the cases I could find of hitchhikers who died on Atticus Line. There are six.”
I stared at her in shock. “Six?”
“It’s a lot, right?” Beatrice said. “The first one was in 1976.”
“The Lost Girl,” Eddie said. I felt a chill on the back of my neck, and it wasn’t just the air-conditioning.
