“Not a single day has gone by when I haven’t thought about her. I’ve read everything I could about the murders. I lurk on all the true crime message boards. I watched that terrible TV movie, back in the day...”
“But you never contacted the police,” Summer said.
Pollard shook his head.
“You never said a word about her to anyone—not even your wife.”
“No.”
“You kept her secret.” Quentin said it without anger, without judgment. Though the “why” was implicit. “You let her live.”
Pollard gave Quentin a slight, sad smile. “Our whole lives, we tell ourselves stories, don’t we? I was a kid, and I was in love, and so I told myself the most powerful story I could about her. In order for the story to work, though, she had to be innocent.”
Quentin said, “Why would a killer return to the scene of her ugliest murders, less than a week after they took place?”
Pollard’s face relaxed. “Exactly,” he said. “A guilty person would never do something like that, would they? They would want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the crime scene. Everybody knows that.”
Pollard stood up. Quentin took the cue. He picked up his phone. Summer did the same, and they both thanked him for his time, shook his hand.
“I almost forgot.” George Pollard removed a sealed, legal-size envelope from his pocket and handed it to Summer. “This is my stub from the movie we saw at the revival house,” he said. “I kept it all these years. But I’m thinking you guys might want it.”
When they were alone in the elevator, Quentin spoke for the first time since he and Summer had left the office. “What I said about a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. I hadn’t meant it as a rhetorical question.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Do you think it’s true, Summer? I mean... I’ve been on the same message boards and websites as him. Every one of them treats it as a definitive fact that Cooper and LeRoy both died in that fire.”
She shrugged. “Nothing is a definitive fact that happened in 1976. There was no DNA testing back then.” She opened the envelope Pollard had given them, slipped the ticket stub out.
“I know that. But.” Quentin took a breath. “I mean... Look. Maybe George Pollard hooked up with some crazy girl forty years ago, and she told him she was April Cooper. I believe that. But do we really want to fly to New York and freak out this poor woman and her entire family, just because Pollard says her voice sounds familiar?”
“Quentin.”
“And anyway. I want to tell the story of the survivors of a forty-year-old killing spree. I don’t want to go allCSI Inland Empirewith this.”
Summer said, “We might not have any choice.”
“What do you mean?”
She handed him the movie ticket stub, soft as silk from so muchholding over so many years. The revival house’s name was printed at the top along with the date: June 24, 1976. The exact same day that first responders in Death Valley found the charred remains of April Cooper, Gabriel LeRoy, and what looked to be the entire Gideon family. At the center of the ticket stub was that day’s feature—the movie George and April had watched from beginning to end three times in a row, falling deeper and deeper in love with each viewing. The letters were faded and so ghostly thin, Quentin had to remove his glasses and squint in order to read them:Easter Parade. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Way to bury the lede.”
“RENEE LOOKS LIKEsomeone famous,” said Dean, who was watching over Quentin’s shoulder as he viewed the Daily Culture video clip for the umpteenth time. They were in bed, and it was close to midnight, Quentin having spent most of the evening chatting up the amateur sleuths on an Inland Empire Killers message board, asking for any possible clues—however shaky, however thin—that April Cooper might have survived the Gideon fire.
TBH, one of the sleuths had written,I think there’s more of a chance that Amelia Earhart survived that plane crash, flew back to the States, and joined the Rockettes.
The Gideons were all men and boys, another had explained.Mom died in childbirth six years earlier. The remains were of a girl April’s age, height, and build. And her body was right next to the one identified as LeRoy’s via dental records.
Quentin had known all this, of course. It was information found in nearly everything that had been written about the Inland Empire murders, Wikipedia entry included. And it had made for some impressive pyrotechnics in the 1986 TV movie. But hearing it again, from people more genuinely obsessed with the case than even he was, force-bloomed the doubts that had seeded themselves in hismind the moment he dropped Summer off at her apartment. All they had to go on was one ticket stub and the off-the-record musings of a middle-aged man who’d been taken in for a few free meals by some vagrant girl forty-three years ago. That wasn’t a podcast. Hell, it wasn’t even a decent story to tell at a cocktail party.
“I don’t think she looks like anyone,” Quentin said, pointedly.
“Come on, honey,” Dean said. “Who knows what a fifteen-year-old would look like at fifty-eight?”
“You believe George Pollard. You think I should believe him too.”
“I believe,” Dean said, “that anything is possible.”
On-screen, Renee was waxing on, yet again, aboutEaster Parade. “I know it’s not a mother/daughter movie per se,” she was protesting over Robin’s gentle teasing. “But it’s a movie I love to watch with my daughter.”
