AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Shannon was smiling in this picture, too. She was standing with a man and a woman I didn’t recognize, her brown hair lifted by a breeze. Despite the smile, her eyes were shadowed and unhappy. But that wasn’t what mattered.
In the background of the photo was a familiar house, one that Eddie and I had visited a few days ago.
“Hey,” Beatrice said as she recognized it. “That’s Hunter Beach.”
Eddie’s expression went carefully blank as he recognized the cabin on Hunter Beach, the one the backpackers had been using since the seventies and were still using today. His mother was standing in front of it, posing with her friends.
She had been there in 1976, right in the spot we’d stood to talk to the kids around the fire.
I saw his face change when he saw it. Behind Shannon and her friends, a backpack was lying in the sand. A pair of sandals was tucked beneath it, a sweatshirt folded on top of it. Lying on top of the sweatshirt was a letter jacket from Midland High.
The photo had been taken after Shannon left home to find herself. She would have been carrying the camera, with the film in it, when she died.
“Her father had this photo in his house?” Beatrice asked, breathless. “Her father?”
“Oh my God,” Gracie said. “She’s the Lost Girl. The Lost Girl really is real.”
“Her father had her camera,” I said. “He was there when she died.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Detective Quentin leaned back in his chair. “That was impressive, Mr.and Mrs.Carter. You’ve spun quite a tale.”
It was the next morning, and we were back at the Coldlake Falls PD, sitting in an interview room. Quentin was talking to us alone; Beam was nowhere to be seen. Quentin was wearing black dress pants and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. When we’d called the police station to request a meeting with Quentin—we would talk to no one else—we weren’t even sure he would get the message, and if he did whether he would come. Maybe he was done with us. But within forty-five minutes, we got a call back at Rose’s to say we should come to the station because Quentin was on his way.
Eddie and I had decided to tell him everything—about Shannon Haller, about seeing the Lost Girl, about breaking into John Haller’s house and finding the roll of film with the photograph on it. We’d told him about ghosts and Eddie’s adoption and the strange way we’d ended up here without really remembering it. It didn’t matter that we sounded delusional and possibly unhinged. Eddie and I were done carrying the mysteries of Atticus Line around, letting them weigh us down.
We had only left out one part of the story—the attack on me. Whoever Trish was, wherever she was, she didn’t deserve questioning by police and possible attempted murder charges. Quentin might not believe us, but if he could find Trish, he would sit her down in this very room and try to figure out the truth. I didn’t want her to go through that. She’d been through enough.
Quentin crossed his arms, looking at us with his uncanny blue eyes. He had listened to us in silence. As usual, he had taken no notes, as if every word we said was immediately locked into his brain. On the table between us was our only piece of evidence—the photos we’d taken from John Haller, including the one shot on Hunter Beach.
“Mr.Carter,” the detective said crisply, as if he was told ghost stories all the time. “You’re saying that this woman”—he gestured to Shannon in the photographs—“is your birth mother.”
“Yes,” Eddie said. As strange as this interview was, he looked more relaxed than he had when we started, as if he was unburdened.
“You also claim that this woman’s father possessed a camera with this photograph on the film, which means the camera was obtained after she left home. This, to you, proves that the father saw the daughter at least once after she left, contrary to his missing person’s report. And from this, you conjecture that he must have killed his daughter on Atticus Line. In effect, your grandfather murdered your mother. Am I following this?”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
“Mrs.Carter,” Quentin continued, turning to me. “You have stated that your husband broke into the house of a man named John Haller in Midland, and that you followed him. Both of you illegally entered the man’s house through a window while he wasn’t home. In searching John Haller’s home, you found the camera with the alleged film inside, after which you produced these photographs.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“And by the two of you committing this crime, you both claim to have solved one of my oldest open murder cases, a case that—please excuse my word usage—haunts my career even now, nineteen years later, as a blight on my record, even though it happened before my time.”
I looked into his chilly blue eyes as I answered him. “Yes.”
Quentin leaned forward across the table. “I can make one phone call. One. I can call the Midland PD and ask if a man named John Haller has reported a break-in at his home, and the answer will be yes or no. If it’s yes, I will tell the Midland PD that I have two suspects here who are confessing. If it’s no, your entire story disappears. Neither of those options is very good from your point of view. So please explain, Mrs.Carter, why did you tell me any of this in the first place?”
He was hard to read, but I read enough. It was in the undercurrent of anger in his voice at the idea that we were wasting his precious time. “You don’t believe us,” I said.
“Believe you?” He tapped the photograph. “This photo could be of anyone. It could have been taken at any time, and it could have come from anywhere. You could have brought it with you from Ann Arbor, for all I know. It isn’t evidence. To solve a murder case, I require evidence. You’ve given me nothing.”
Eddie shifted in his seat beside me, because he didn’t like the way Quentin was speaking to me. But I held still and kept my gaze on the detective’s. “You don’t scare me,” I told him, my voice almost as icy as his. “Make your phone call. Do it.”
“I am not susceptible to women like you,” Quentin said as Eddie shifted in his seat again, getting angry at the phrase women like you. “Maybe everyone else you meet is, including your husband. They react to your blond hair, your looks, your smile. Pretty, but not too pretty, correct? The way you dress manages to show off your legs without being too showy. You don’t talk too much or too little. You don’t push. You pretend to be agreeable and obedient, and then you do whatever you want. Women like you can keep secrets for years—decades. Until death, if they have to. They never get drunk and slip up or get stupid over a man and tell him too much. And woe to anyone who crosses you. You think I don’t see it? Because I saw it from the very first second I walked into the room the night that Rhonda Jean Breckwith died in your back seat.”
His words fell hard, and I kept my face from flinching. I’d thought I’d been so careful. I should have known.
