AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I felt something loosen in my chest. It hadn’t taken long for the Snell sisters to find Trish, who was a dentist with a nice husband and a nine-year-old daughter. The sisters had taken turns watching her house for a while, noting as she left for work and came home again, seemingly innocent and unbothered by almost killing me. Either she was a psychopath who remembered that night and felt no guilt, or she had no memory of it at all.
None of us had ever given her name to the police, so Trish Cho could go back to her life, never the wiser.
“Okay, good,” I said. “What else?”
The sisters looked at each other. “Um, John Haller,” Gracie said. She glanced at Eddie. “Your grandfather.”
“It’s okay.” Eddie flexed the wrist of his bad arm. “Go ahead.”
“Did you find the adoption records?” Beatrice asked.
“It’s a long process,” Eddie replied. “I’ve talked to my parents—my adoptive parents—and they’ve put in a request to unseal the records. It has to go through a bunch of approvals, and even then, it might not happen.”
“So you might not get to know,” Beatrice said.
“I know,” Eddie answered her. “Shannon was my mother. Records or no records, I know.”
Beatrice nodded. “Okay, well. Gracie figured out how he found you guys that day, if it matters.”
“I overheard a conversation at the police station,” Gracie said. “I still volunteer there, even though I’m not in trouble with the tickets anymore. Anyway, I heard one of the officers saying that Kyle Petersen took a phone call that day from a man wanting information about the car parked in front of his house. Officer Syed had come to the guy’s door, and this other car had been with him, parked behind the cruiser, so he thought the car was from Coldlake. He gave the license plate and Kyle looked it up.”
“Our car,” Eddie said. “We took Robbie’s car that day.”
“Right,” Gracie said. “So Kyle told Haller the car was registered to Rose’s address and gave it to him—just handed out the information, no questions asked. Haller said thanks and hung up. I think Kyle got in trouble for the whole thing, because he left the PD. There’s a rumor he went to Indiana.”
That filled in one of the blanks in the story. We hadn’t known how John Haller had found Rose’s address, and no one on the Coldlake Falls PD was willing to tell us. Now we knew why.
We were walking past the center of the cemetery. There were half a dozen people here, visiting their loved ones’ graves on a sunny autumn Saturday. Beatrice and Gracie seemed to be walking with a destination in mind. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Max Shandler,” Gracie said, ignoring me. She flipped her hair off her shoulders. “It was super hard to get information, even though we both worked on it.”
“I had to volunteer as a candy striper so I could try and access hospital records,” Beatrice complained. “It sucked.”
“No one wants to give out information,” Gracie agreed. “His file wasn’t kept in the records room like the others. I can’t even get hold of a Post-it Note with Rhonda Jean’s name on it. It’s like the entire case has been locked in a vault.”
“Still, we got a few things,” Beatrice said. “One of the nurses at the hospital told me that Max Shandler had brain cancer.”
I felt a chill at the back of my neck. “Like John Haller,” I said.
“Exactly,” Beatrice agreed. “Weird, right? Not diagnosed or anything, like he had no idea. But our hospital here is small, and we don’t have a cancer center, so Max got sent to Grand Rapids. I think he’s really sick.”
“Officer Syed told me that he tried to visit Max Shandler and got turned away,” Gracie said.
“Kal tried to visit?” I asked.
Gracie nodded. A flush stained her cheeks, and I realized it was at the mention of Kal. I couldn’t blame her for having a crush, even though Kal was married. “He talks to me sometimes,” Gracie said. “He’s pretty cool. I think he has some idea that there’s weird stuff happening in this town. Anyway, he had some questions for Max, so he drove to Grand Rapids one day. Max is under security because he’s charged with murder, even though he’s too sick to go to prison. But Officer Syed assumed he’d be let in, since he’s police. He wasn’t. He was turned away.”
“He isn’t in a normal hospital,” Beatrice added. “He’s in some kind of exclusive, private clinic, under lockdown. Which is weird, because I don’t think the government is paying for that, and I didn’t think the Shandlers had that kind of money.”
“Maybe they came up with it short term,” Gracie said. “Max might not last to the end of the year.”
“Maybe,” Beatrice said. The word hung in the air, unanswerable. None of it made any sense. Why was a man charged with murder being kept in a private hospital instead of in prison, no matter how sick he was? Who was paying the bill?
Detective Quentin would know the answers. Though I was sure if I waited a thousand years, he’d never tell.
“We’re here,” Beatrice said, and suddenly I knew where they had taken us.
We stood in front of a headstone, newly placed. shannon haller, it said, along with her date of birth and her approximate date of death—March 1976.
