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Eddie unfolded the paper inside the envelope and read it over. He didn’t say a word. Then he handed the paper to me.
“What is it?” Rose asked, impatient.
I scanned the page, which was a photocopy. “It’s a missing person’s report,” I said. It had been filed by a man named John Haller, stating that his daughter, Shannon Haller, had not been seen or heard from since March of 1976. Shannon was aged twenty-six at the time. The report was filed in December of 1977.
Shannon Haller’s father had filed a missing person’s report.
“I don’t get it,” I said, handing the page to Rose to read. “When we were at the Snells’, the police file said that they checked with Midland and they had no record of a woman missing.”
“Look at the dates,” Eddie said, his voice calm. “The Lost Girl’s body was found in April of 1976. The missing person’s report was filed in December of 1977. There wasn’t a report filed when the police file was written. Not until over eighteen months later.”
“You think this is the girl whose body they found?” Rose asked, her eyes reading the page from behind her large glasses. She read the description that John Haller had filed in the report. “ ‘Brown hair, past shoulder length. Five-five, slender build. Brown eyes.’ ”
Eddie and I exchanged a glance, both of us remembering the Lost Girl’s face. “We can’t assume it’s her,” I reminded him. “There are millions of girls with brown hair.”
“How many of them are from Midland, and how many of them died in 1976, aged between twenty and thirty?” he asked.
I shook my head. “How did the Snell sisters get this?”
“I have no idea.” Eddie picked up the magazine and leafed through it. “There’s more.”
Rose and I moved closer and read over his shoulder. In the margin around an article about the five best eye shadows to buy this season was handwriting scrawled in ballpoint pen. An address in Midland.
At the bottom of the page was written: You’re welcome, punctuated with a heart.
It must be John Haller’s address. Shannon’s father still lived in Midland. I was exhausted, so bone-deep tired, yet my pulse started to pound in my throat. We had to go talk to Shannon Haller’s father. We had to do it right now.
The ghost on Atticus Line had tried to kill me. I had to know who she was, once and for all. I had to know if she was Shannon.
I grabbed a pen from the phone nook. I flipped the pages of the magazine to an ad for Calvin Klein perfume and wrote along the edge, since this was the Snell sisters’ preferred form of communication. Trish, I wrote. Age around 40, Asian, drives a dark green Toyota. Married, has at least one child that is old enough not to need a car seat anymore. Possibly a dentist or works at a dental office. If you can locate her, please check on her and make sure she’s okay. Then I ripped out the page with the Midland address on it. I put it with the photocopy of the missing person’s report. I walked to the front door, opened it, and put the Seventeen magazine back in the mailbox.
I walked back into the kitchen. Rose was frowning. Eddie’s gaze met mine, and his expression was stark and determined.
“Let’s get dressed,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
We took Robbie’s car, because the metallic smell in Eddie’s Pontiac was so bad we couldn’t bear it. I took the first hour driving while Eddie slept in the passenger seat. Then we switched. When I woke up, we were more than halfway to Midland. Eddie was silent in the driver’s seat, his jaw set.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
He tapped one finger to the rearview mirror. “See for yourself.”
I leaned to look in my side mirror. Driving behind us, not bothering to hide, was a police cruiser. There was a single driver inside, a cop in uniform. Officer Kal Syed.
“Are you kidding me?” I said.
“I spotted him right after you fell asleep. He must have been farther back before, but he’s been following us all the way from Coldlake Falls.”
“Does he have nothing better to do?” I rolled down my window, letting the summer wind blow into the car, and adjusted my mirror. Kal didn’t move, but he would clearly be able to see my hand. I gave him the finger.
Beside me, Eddie cracked a reluctant smile, the first one I’d seen in a long time.
I let my rude gesture linger for a moment, just so that Kal would get the message. Then I brought my hand back into the car and rolled my window up. “Do we just let him follow us?”
“I don’t see why not. We’re not doing anything wrong. If he wants to waste his time, we may as well let him.”
“What is he thinking?” I looked in the rearview mirror again. “Maybe he thinks we’ll kill a hitchhiker right here on this road while he watches. Shouldn’t he be questioning Max Shandler about Rhonda Jean? Looking for evidence? Arresting drunk kids? Doing some kind of police work?”
