AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I stared blindly at the printout of account activity. A week ago, there had been seven thousand dollars in the account. Then, a withdrawal of all of it. And now there was nothing.
My heart raced and I felt my pulse in my neck. The money was gone. My secret money. The money I had been relying on to keep me afloat, just in case.
“Did you not do this withdrawal?” the teller asked, mildly curious at my obvious panic.
I shook my head. My voice was a croak. “No.”
“Oh. Well. It says here it’s a joint account, so maybe it was—”
“I know who it was.” I shoved the paper back at her. “It’s fine. I’ll do a withdrawal from a different account.” I’d have to use the account my paycheck went into after all.
“You’ll need to do a new slip.”
Twenty minutes later I exited the bank and stood on the street, my mind racing. Think, April, think. You’ve dealt with surprises before. For a moment the old panic rushed over me, mixed with hurt and a searing, cleansing blast of anger. That money had been promised to me. It was supposed to be mine. Mine.
I gathered myself and walked slowly toward the library. I waited out front for a while, sitting on the stoop next to the garden. From here I could see the front door of the Midland police station, a squat concrete building with glass doors. Nothing was happening there; it was quieter than the library was. Maybe I should try the police station alone. Some men responded positively to requests from women who looked like me, especially if I could convince him I was helpless.
I was about to try it when the library doors opened and Eddie came out. He had a piece of paper in his hands. When he saw me, he grinned, raising the paper so it could flap in the breeze.
“I told you,” he said. “Librarians know everything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
What he’d found was a classified ad in the back of the local Midland newspaper in November 1977. SHANNON HALLER, PLEASE COME HOME, it read. I last saw her in Midland in March 1976. Twenty-six years old, long brown hair. If you are Shannon, please call, I am worried. If you know Shannon please call Carla. Then a phone number.
I stared at the photocopy Eddie had taken. “How did you find this so fast?” I asked. I pictured him wading through a pile of old newspapers.
“Luck,” Eddie replied. “I took a shot that someone might have looked for her. Also, the Midland paper was only published once per week back then. And the classified section was less than a page long.”
Maybe this wasn’t the Lost Girl. Maybe this was a completely different girl who had disappeared from Midland in 1976, a month before the Lost Girl’s body was found. Maybe Shannon Haller had simply left town, gotten married, and started a new life without telling her friend Carla. But it was something.
We walked to the phone booth on the corner, and Eddie dialed the number from the classified ad. “It’s ringing,” he whispered to me, the phone to his ear. “We’re lucky today.”
“Grow a mustache and you could be Magnum, P.I.,” I said.
He waggled his eyebrows at me, then schooled his features as someone on the other end picked up the phone.
The woman who answered wasn’t Carla, but her daughter. The phone number was still Carla’s—Midland was that kind of town—but Carla wasn’t home. She was at her job as hostess at the Wharf, a seafood restaurant. The daughter was very helpful and had no problem giving her mother’s information to the polite man who had called out of the blue. Carla’s last name was Moyer, she had three teenagers, and she had worked at the Wharf for nearly ten years. Lunch hour was usually pretty busy, but since it was a weekday, it would be quieter and we might luck out if we wanted to talk to her.
“Did you get some money?” Eddie asked after he hung up.
My throat tried to close again, thinking of what had happened at the bank. “Yes,” I said.
Eddie smiled at me. He was in his element, I realized. He was having fun.
“Let’s go have lunch,” he said. “I’m in the mood for seafood.”
—
Shannon is dead,” the woman across the table from us said. “She’s been dead since 1976. I didn’t let myself believe it at first, but now I do. In the back of my mind, I think I’ve always known she was dead.”
The Wharf had high ceilings, dim lighting, and deep booths. Fishing nets and paintings of boats decorated the walls, but to see them you had to squint. Weekday lunch hour meant there were a few tables of retirees spaced through the large dining room. It was a relatively new restaurant, built just outside the orbit of the mall.
Carla Moyer was somewhere in her forties. Her dark hair was cut to her shoulders and worked over with a curling iron, her bangs carefully pieced out and sprayed. She wore black dress pants and a black satin blouse with shoulder pads. Rimless glasses were tucked in the breast pocket of her blouse. When we told her we had found her ad from 1977 and wanted to talk about Shannon, she had immediately taken a break and joined us in a booth as we ordered lunch.
“Why do you think she’s dead?” I asked her.
Carla looked past us into the distance, recalling. “We met in rehab. Actually, it was called a ‘dry-out camp,’ if you can believe that. You signed up and went to summer camp for a week, cabins and all. No booze and no drugs. You went cold turkey while you played Frisbee and took canoe rides with your fellow campers. And when you got home, you were supposed to be cured. That was the kind of rehab you could get in Michigan in the early seventies.”
