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“Why did Marnie have photos of this barn, then?”
It didn’t feel right. My stomach was turning, my head pounding. “Maybe Viv stole the car,” I said. “Maybe she stole it and stashed it.”
“Maybe whoever killed her stashed it,” he countered.
“We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.” I sighed. “This is a crazy dead end. We’ve done all this work, and we aren’t any further along than we were. It’s a red herring, Nick.”
“What’s that smell?” he asked.
There was definitely a smell. Sour and rotten, but old. “Garbage?”
“Worse than garbage.” He straightened and stepped back, leaving the front passenger door open. He opened the back passenger door and peered in. “Nothing back here. But the smell is worse.” He straightened again, leaving that door open, too.
We walked to the back of the car. The trunk had a keyhole in it, the way all old cars did. We’d seen no sign of a key.
“How do we get that open?” I asked as Nick bent his knees, lowering himself to a crouch.
“We don’t open it,” he answered me. “We call the cops.” He pointed to the floor beneath the trunk. “Either that’s oil or it’s very old blood.”
I crouched and followed where he was pointing. There was a large pool of something black beneath the trunk. It was dry and very, very old.
The blood rushed from my head, and for a second I thought I would faint. The pool was definitely too big to be oil. I gripped my knees and tears came to my eyes, too swift and hard for me to stop them. “Viv,” I said. I started shaking. My aunt was in the trunk, her body a foot from me, behind metal and cloth. She was dead in this car. She had been here for thirty-five years, her blood pooling, then drying and darkening on the floor. So lonely and silent. I inhaled a breath and a sob came out. “He killed her,” I said, my voice choked. “He did it. He killed those others. He killed Viv.”
I felt a hand on the back of my neck—large, warm, and strong. “You’ve got this, Carly,” he said gently. “You’ve got it.”
I inhaled again, because I couldn’t breathe. Another sob escaped my throat. My cheeks were soaked with tears now, my lashes wet, getting water on my glasses. “I’m sorry,” I managed as I cried. “I didn’t—I didn’t expect—”
“I know,” he said.
I’d been so in control. I’d been able to handle everything—ghosts, mysteries, this strange and crazy place. It wasn’t a game, exactly, but it was a project. A quest for justice. A thing I had to do in order to get on with my life. And if I did it, I would be fine again. I would know.
I hadn’t expected that being at Vivian’s grave would break my heart. I hadn’t expected the grief. It was for Viv, and it was for my mother, who had lived the last thirty-five years of her life not knowing this car was here, that her sister’s body was alone and silent in the trunk. My mother had lived three and a half decades with grief so deep and so painful she had never spoken about it. She’d died with that grief, and now she would never feel any better.
I sobbed into my dirty hands, crouched on the floor of the barn. I cried for Viv, who had been so beautiful and alive. I cried for the others—Betty, Cathy, Victoria. It was over for them, too. I cried for my mother and for me.
Nick moved closer, put his arm around my shoulders. He knew exactly how I felt—of course he did. He knew how this kind of thing rips you in pieces from the inside out, changes the makeup of who you are. He was the only person who could be here and actually understand. He held his arm around my shoulders and let me weep. He didn’t speak.
After a minute I heard Heather’s voice from the other end of the barn. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a car,” Nick called to her, his voice calm. “There’s old blood pooled under it. We think there’s a body in the trunk. Can you call the cops?”
Heather didn’t say anything, and I assumed she’d stepped back out to pull her phone out of her pocket. I wiped my eyes and mopped the snot on my face, attempting to get a grip.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“We should go,” Nick said quietly. “This is a crime scene.”
He was right. Thirty-five years old or not, this was the site of my aunt’s dumped body. We needed to get our footprints and our fingers and our hair fibers out of here. Even the rankest amateur knew that, let alone a true-crime hobbyist like me.
I straightened, Nick keeping his hand on my elbow to help me keep balance. He’d know all about crime scenes, since his childhood house had been one. Nick had real-life experience of crime instead of just in books and on the Internet. Well, now I had experience, too.
Vivian was dead. But Simon Hess had been at the Sun Down. He’d seen Viv. And he’d disappeared at the same time. I knew now what had happened to Vivian, and I knew who had done it. My next job was to track down Simon Hess, wherever he was, and make him pay.
* * *
• • •
It was past noon when a cop came out of the barn and down the drive to where I was standing. The gates to the rusty fence were thrown open now and the dead foliage had been crushed with tire tracks. A single uniformed officer had been sent out first, and then a short stream of vans and unmarked cars had arrived. We had been shooed off the property from the first, and we hadn’t been able to see anything that was going on. We’d been questioned, together and separately, over and over. It was freezing and damp. When the cops finished with us, Nick had driven Heather home because she was nearly shaking with cold and shock. I hadn’t been able to leave. Not until someone told me something—anything.
In my pocket was a photo. One of the pictures from Marnie’s stack, showing Simon Hess’s car parked at the Sun Down. It was exactly the same make and model as the car we’d seen in the barn. The size and shape were burned into my mind, and I knew, in my heart, that we’d found Simon Hess’s car.
Nick came back in his truck, bringing me hot coffee and something to eat. I’d sipped the coffee and forgotten the food. My phone was long dead. I stood on the dirt road, as close to the gates as the cops would allow, simply waiting. I was going to wait for as long as it took.
The police knew my situation, that I was looking for my aunt who had vanished in 1982. After a while someone inside the barn must have taken pity on me, because a man came down the dirt drive to the gate. He was about fifty, a black man with close-cropped graying hair. He was wearing jeans and a thick black bomber jacket, which meant he wasn’t a uniformed officer. I had no idea who he was. His face was stern, but when he looked at me I knew he had seen people like me before, desperate family members waiting for any word at all.
