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Beatrice looked from Eddie to me, missing nothing. “You know about her?”
“We heard the legend. What is this?” I deflected by reaching to her stack of papers and pulling off the top one. It was a photocopy of a story from a newspaper—a few paragraphs in a single column with no photo, a piece that had been buried on an interior page. The headline read: no leads on unidentified remains found.
“That’s the Lost Girl,” Beatrice said. “That’s what they wrote about her in the papers.”
“They didn’t write much.” I scanned the short paragraph. It only said that the remains of a woman, between twenty and thirty years of age, had been found on the side of Atticus Line. The coroner’s examination concluded that she had suffered several blows to the head, and that she had been there at least a month. The girl had no identification on her, and no one had come forward to identify her. Anyone with information was asked to call police. The article was dated April 30, 1976.
Several blows to the head. The girl we’d seen in that horrible visitation—had it only been last night?—had had bruises, a trickle of blood coming from her ear. She’d still been bleeding, her hair and neck wet with it. Help me, she’d screamed.
I felt hopelessness threaten my mood. What did we think we were doing? The Lost Girl could be anyone, from anywhere. We were never going to find her. The police hadn’t been able to do it in nineteen years. Why did we think we could do this with so little information?
There was the sound of a sliding screen door, and then another girl appeared in the doorway from the next room. She was taller than Beatrice, slender, with a pleasantly long face and straight, dark hair streaming past her shoulders. She was wearing an oversize tee over a bathing suit, the hem of the shirt falling to mid-thigh. She was the girl we’d seen on the chaise longue, which was now empty.
“What are you doing, loser?” she said to Beatrice, who was obviously her sister. “Who are these people?”
“This is Gracie,” Beatrice said to us. She turned to the girl. “This is April and Eddie. They’re the couple who picked up Rhonda Jean Breckwith the night she was killed.”
The disdainful expression left Gracie’s face and her eyes went wide. “For real?”
“For real.”
“You should have told me, dork. I want to hear everything.” Gracie strode into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “So you know about the murders?” she asked us as she pulled out a jug of iced tea.
“We just got here,” I said.
“I’m telling them,” Beatrice said. “They’re from out of town.”
“It’s a cover-up.” Gracie banged her empty glass on the counter a little too loud. “People get killed on Atticus Line, and the police don’t want to do anything. It doesn’t get written about in the papers. I called up three different people who write for the Free Press. None of them wanted to talk to me or write a story. Why do you think that is?” She looked around at us for dramatic effect. “It’s because all of the murders were done by one serial killer, and the cops know exactly who it is.”
“You don’t think Rhonda Jean was killed by Max Shandler?” I asked.
Gracie turned to me. “You think Max Shandler, who has lived here all his life, just woke up one day and decided to kill a hitchhiker? I don’t buy it. He hasn’t confessed, right? Who says he really did it? What’s the evidence? Whatever blood evidence they have, it’s too soon for results. DNA takes months, unless you’re O. J.”
I glanced at Eddie and read his expression. May as well tell her something, it said. I turned back to Gracie. “Rhonda Jean was found wearing Max Shandler’s coat. When we found her on the side of the road, after she’d been stabbed—that’s what she was wearing.”
I hadn’t read the newspaper article Beatrice had shown us in the diner, but my guess was that the coat wasn’t public knowledge. My guess was right. Gracie stared at me, and Beatrice squeaked in excitement in her chair.
I didn’t know if I’d just broken a rule, telling the Snell girls that. But I needed information from them, and I had to give them something.
“What if it was Max Shandler!” Beatrice said. “So much for your serial killer cover-up, Gracie! He’s too young to have done all of them.”
But Gracie already had a comeback. “It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. Max could be a patsy. A setup. Steal his jacket and he looks guilty. It’s pretty simple. I mean, Lee Harvey Oswald, right?” She looked around at us again.
“Hold on.” Eddie raised a hand, palm out. He’d barely spoken during this whole exchange, and with those two words, the Snell sisters shut up instantly. “Before you bring the CIA and Oliver Stone into this, let’s back up. April and I came here for information about the murders.” He held up the photocopy of the Lost Girl article. “Is this all you have? Newspaper articles? Because we can find these ourselves.”
It was the Snell sisters’ turn to exchange a look of silent conversation. “We have more than newspaper articles,” Beatrice said. She pulled out another set of photocopies. “We have these.”
Eddie slid the papers over and looked at the top one. “Is this what I think it is?” He lifted the page, scanning another, and another, handing them off to me. “This is a police file.”
His voice was just stern enough that Beatrice trained her gaze out the window and Gracie studied the fridge door. “We’re resourceful,” Beatrice said, her tone defensive.
I looked at the pages. Sure enough, they were photocopies of a police report—or what I assumed was a real police report, since I’d never seen one. It was old, too, with a lot of the information typewritten or handwritten in a squared, masculine hand. The date in the top right of the first page read April 30, 1976.
Eddie was a few pages further than me, deep in reading, his brow furrowed. “This is a description of the body,” he said. He broke his gaze away and rubbed his forehead. I wondered if he was picturing the girl we’d seen, furious and desperate. It was her body he was reading about. He made himself glance down at the page and say, “Advanced decomposition.”
“She’d been there at least a month.” Beatrice’s tone, normally so brassy, was much quieter as she spoke the words. “They couldn’t determine if she was, um, raped. But the body had all its clothes on.”
I scanned the pages as Eddie handed them to me. There weren’t very many; there wasn’t much to say about unidentified bones and scraps of flesh ravaged by animals. No fingerprints, no wallet or ID. No belongings found with her at all besides her clothes. No confirmed cause of death, though there were blows to her head that had cracked the skull. They’d taken X-rays of her teeth, in case they could match them with someone reported missing. The investigation had gone cold from there.
