CHAPTER ONE
Memory is a monster. But we’re doing our best to use mine for good. Muriel, Hana, and I are having our weekly meeting when the new neighbor arrives. We have a month and a half before we walk the trails with the cadaver dogs and I am determined to have a list of possible burial sites by then. Any new thirst traps entering the neighborhood are just going to have to wait.
“Oh, he’s cute,” calls out Hana from the front window. She’s an Asian American postgrad student with perfect bangs and a pastel aesthetic. “Come and see!”
“What does he look like?” Muriel has white skin, short grey hair, and is a retired librarian. She is amazing.
“Tall with tattoos, dark hair, and a vague air of brooding.”
“How can you tell about the brooding?” I ask.
“Oh, that’s easy,” says Hana. “It’s all in the set of the chin.”
We work out of the study at the back of my house. Hana calls it the war room. A large map of the local area including nearby national parks is on one wall, and newspaper clippings about missing women are on another. Then there are the photos I took the year I dated my ex. Happy snaps of him smiling at various lookouts. Selfies of the two of us posing beside streams. Ryan loved hiking and getting back to nature. Guess it’s why he buried the bodies of his victims out in the wild.
“I don’t mind some brooding now and then. How old do you think he is?” asks Muriel.
“I don’t know,” says Hana. “Thirty or so? Not forty. Somewhere in between.”
“They still need too much training at that age,” comments Muriel. “Too young for me.”
“I actually think he’d be perfect for Sidney.”
Muriel snorts. Which is a valid reaction to the idea of me hooking up with anyone.
I raise my head. “Wait a minute. Weren’t you just telling me how much dating sucks?”
“That’s completely beside the point,” says Hana.
Hana and Muriel befriended me nine years ago before the trial. I had already started to keep most people at a safe distance. Cyber sleuths, digital detectives, and armchair investigators have a habit of making my life hell. They either message me demanding information or accuse me of being an accessory and/or psycho killer. But these two women met in an online true crime forum and offered to help me remember all the places my ex had taken me. And they kept offering until I accepted. Because we know Ryan revisited sites where he buried victims’ bodies. He once took me for a romantic picnic where the remains of Briana Petersen were later found.
Six women were reported missing during the year he attended a local college. One was later accounted for—she’d been escaping a domestic violence situation. But only one body has been located out of the suspected five. Finding those four missing women and returning them to their families is our goal. Along with proving my ex was guilty of far more than just one case of manslaughter. And I need to do it before he serves out the rest of his fifteen-year sentence. I will not allow him to hurt someone else. No fucking way.
Most of the local police seem to think he’s just a boy from a good family who snapped for unknowable reasons and made a single horrific mistake. And most of the general public seem happy to go along with this point of view. But it’s bullshit. There is a small online true crime group researching my ex and the missing women. I am not going to sit around and wait for someone to clean up a mess I helped make, however.
“Sidney, come and see,” repeats Hana.
I smile and shake my head. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve taken an interest in anyone of any sex. The first time I fell in love was such a disaster I can’t be trusted to date. Though I guess just watching wouldn’t get me into trouble.
“Why don’t you go and take a look?” asks Muriel, who is a secret romantic at heart. But she buries it well. “You never know…he might be the one.”
“I’m not sure I believe in the one. Plus I have a lot going on right now. I don’t want to get distracted.”
Muriel is not convinced. “You’ve been using that excuse since I met you. It’s time you got a life.”
“Why don’t you go look?” I toss back.
“Because I’m old enough to know better. Now go and ogle the man and make your friend happy.”
And I know when I am outnumbered. I join Hana in the living room at the front of the house. “What’s going on?”
“He took something inside. At least we’re not the only ones spying.” Hana points across the street. “The old couple have been in their garden for ages. And the students in the share house next to them are hanging out on their patio.”
Mrs. Lawson, one of my neighbors, is also out walking her dog. The frown on her face when she sees me standing there is mighty. I behave like a grown-ass adult, however, and resist the temptation to hide behind the curtain. It’s not easy being the neighborhood pariah.
“What’s her problem?” asks Hana.
“She thinks me living here brings down the property values or something.”
