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“What do you mean?”
He spoke slowly, as if working the words out. “We assume she was a hitchhiker, headed either to or from Hunter Beach. But we don’t know that. Not without knowing who she was. The police file doesn’t have any mention of the police going to Hunter Beach at the time to interview the kids there. It looks like they didn’t even check whether any of them knew about a missing girl. So how do we know that’s what she was doing?”
I put my own spoon down, following his train of thought. “She’s the only victim that wasn’t identified.”
“Right. And that was deliberate. Someone made it impossible to identify her on purpose.”
“The tag torn from her T-shirt,” I said.
Eddie nodded. “Whoever killed her ripped the tag out of her shirt because it could identify her somehow. The jacket they found might have been hers, or it might have been misdirection. What if the Lost Girl wasn’t a hitchhiker at all? What if she was local?”
“There would be a missing person’s report,” I said. “Kal must have checked. Someone must have in all this time. The first thing to do would be to look at missing person’s reports from the time of the murder.”
“What if there wasn’t a report?” Eddie asked. “She was in her twenties. Maybe she told her family she was leaving home. Maybe she’d done it before. Maybe someone in her family killed her, then told everyone she’d left town.” His gaze focused on the distance, the banana split forgotten. “She was the first murder. She meant something to him. He didn’t want anyone to know who she was, and he took steps to cover it up. I think it’s because she knew her killer.”
A trickle of worry started deep in my stomach. Not because Eddie was right, or because we might be looking for a killer here in town. I worried because this was the deep thinking mechanism I’d seen so many times by now: Eddie vanished inside his own head.
I didn’t like it when he went so deep. When he went too deep, I couldn’t follow.
And if I couldn’t follow, who knew where he would go?
“Eddie,” I said softly.
His gaze focused a little at the sound of my voice, but he didn’t look at me. “She’s still on that road, April,” he said. “Just her. Not the others. She’s been there since 1976, all alone. She’s still on that road.”
I reached across the table, put my hand on his. “I know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Eddie was still in Iraq when he started seeing things that weren’t there. Someone standing just outside the shower door. A figure in the sunbaked distance, waving at him. One night he woke up with the cold metal of a gun pressed to his temple, the safety being clicked off. But there was no one there.
He talked to an army doctor about it. I didn’t know anything about the inner machinations of the military, but somehow Eddie was discharged with a vague medical condition on his record and a prescription that eventually ran out. He didn’t have enough money for expensive psychiatrists or treatments, and he was too ashamed to ask for more help from the army, so he went home to live with his parents and got a job fixing cars. He was physically fine, so the army was done with him. Case closed.
He didn’t feel the gun pressed to his head anymore, but he heard dogs barking where there were none, and he had dreams in which he woke up to find his limbs gone. The shame of feeling like he was crazy stopped him from talking to any more doctors, because it was supposed to be over.
He told me about his “head problem,” as he called it, early on. It wasn’t something that happened all the time—just now and then. “I’m fine until I’m not,” was how he explained it. “And then I’m fine again.”
“Why do you think it happens?” I asked him.
“According to the army doctor, my brain thinks someone is trying to kill me,” Eddie replied. “Because for a long time, someone was trying to kill me.”
I didn’t know what it was like to be in the army, to be deployed. I didn’t know anything about what happened in Iraq aside from what Eddie told me. I didn’t know what it was like to wake up with the feel of a phantom gun pressed to my head.
But I did know what it was like to have someone try to kill you. My father had done it plenty of times.
So I told Eddie the things I’d never told anyone else. I told him about my father knocking my mother’s teeth loose, about him pulling his belt from its loops and hitting her with it as she crouched in the corner. I told him about how if I made a sound—or even if I didn’t—my father would come for me when he was finished with my mother.
I told him about the night we’d left, about my mother pulling me from bed and putting me in the car, about how we drove and drove through the smoky night and I begged her to go faster. I knew, just as she did, that we had exactly one chance to get out of there. That our lives depended on how fast she could drive.
I told him about how we changed our names, our identities, so that we couldn’t be found. How we had gotten by for a while, just the two of us. Then my mother was gone, and there was just me.
Eddie had listened, and then he had said, “So your name isn’t really April Delray?”
“It is,” I told him. “But that wasn’t the name I was born with. That girl is dead.”
Eddie hadn’t questioned that, and when he spoke, his voice was flat. “I understand.”
He knew what it felt like to leave your past self dead and buried, to leave the body of the person you had once been by the side of the road and drive away.
