Page 10 of They Say a Girl Died Here

“Johnny?” Grandma frowned, looking at him. She was still confused, Anna could see.

“That’s right.” He smiled. “It’s me, Evelyn. Just a heck of a lot older than when you last saw me. You had a fainting fit. But you’re okay now.”

Anna stepped back, not knowing how to comfort Grandma herself anyway—there was too much bitterness between them, too much silent blame—and turned away, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in her small purse.

“I’m going to have a smoke, that okay?” The bench faced in the other direction, away from the parking lot and the flower beds beside it, and the doctor only half turned when she spoke, focused as he was on Grandma. “Leave you two to get reacquainted?”

“That’s fine. Evelyn’s safe with me. She’s always been safe with me.”

Anna said nothing to that but simply walked away, because since when was a woman always safe with a man? Only a man would have the arrogance to say that. For a woman it was often so hard to know if men were wanting to protect you or hurt you, or when one could tip into the other.

She’d just leaned against the wall in a patch of shade and lit her cigarette, smoking hard despite her sleep-dry mouth, when she heard a roll of tape ripping. She peered around the corner to see a skinny man, about her age, clothes hanging off him, taping a poster to the wall. He froze, a trembling rabbit in the headlights, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

“So it’s you putting them up.” Anna looked once again at the smiling faces of Lila and Bonnie and the ominous question at the bottom. Who will be next? “Sheriff Adams was pissed. Says the case is closed. Cigarette?” She held out the pack and after a tiny hesitation he grabbed one with shaking fingers and let her light it. He’ll be dead soon. The thought had come out of nowhere the moment she’d seen him, but close up the whites of his brown eyes were yellowed and his pale skin—so pale he could have been dead already—was scabby with blemishes and sores. The inside of his arms were track-marked and scabbed from shooting up. He probably would be dead soon.

“Thanks.” His body twitched nervously, every sinew and bone dancing. “Got to be clean. Think straight for this. Still struggling. There’ll be another one. I know it.”

Despite the doctor only being a shout away, Anna took a step back as she exhaled a long stream of smoke. This guy was too close. A man was a man, however weak he looked. She didn’t want to be within easy reach.

“How come you think the killer’s still out there?” she asked.

He sucked so hard half the cigarette nearly burned down in the one inhale. “Because he did this to me. After Lila. When they knew it wasn’t me. The summer workers were gone then.”

“Who did what to you?” He might have been making sense to himself, but Anna was struggling to understand.

“You have to be careful.” He kept the cigarette in his mouth as he put the Scotch tape in a small backpack and slung it over his shoulder before pulling an electric scooter away from where it rested against the wall. “If it could happen to Lila, could happen to anyone. He’ll be looking for the next one now. It’s nearly time. Promise you’ll be careful.”

“I will,” she muttered. She didn’t need a man telling her to be careful. She’d learned the hard way. A cloud drifted across the sun, and she stepped closer, still needing an answer to her question. “But who did what to you?”

“The clown.” He looked back at her sorrowfully as he stood on the scooter deck and then kicked off from the pavement. “The clown did it.”

Watching him disappear down the quiet Sunday street, Anna took another glance at the dead girls before the last of the cigarette smoke burned her throat. The clown did it. So the poster guy was crazy. A paranoid junkie obsessing over dead girls. She smoked to the edge of the filter, then ground it out against the bricks and tossed it close to the wall. There was a collection of similar butts already there, an almost neat pile of twenty or so. Maybe Pastor Keene was a secret American Spirit smoker too.

13

“How come you know my grandma?” Caroline asked.

Dr. Burdett had turned up around six with a large Crock-Pot full of homemade chili and cornbread, and now they sat around the table eating as if they were a normal family who did this all the time. At least the food was good, and having a guest meant there were no awkward silences or snipes.

“Johnny and I met when we were about your age,” Grandma answered for him. “Back before cell phones and the internet. We met at a church dance and became friends.”

“We became more than friends, Evelyn. Don’t start changing the past to be all respectable. By the time we were sixteen we were pretty sweet on each other, as they called it back then. True love.” He winked at Caroline. “We were going to get married. But then your grandfather came to town and stole my Evelyn away.”

“I’m not sure it was quite like that,” Grandma said. “Was it?” She frowned, not trusting her memory.

Grandpa George had died long before Anna was born, when Mom was still a kid herself. A quick, polite heart attack during a board meeting. From what she’d been told, he was kind but God-fearing like Grandma, a serious man from a wealthy family. He’d come out here for a summer after college, on his father’s instructions, to learn how a hard day’s manual work really felt before joining the family’s finance business, and went back to Boston in the fall with Grandma in tow. Twelve years later he was dead. The money Grandma had inherited she’d looked after wisely, and after Anna’s dad disappeared in the night with no chance of alimony, Grandma might have made Mom suffer for it, but she also made sure that there was food on the table and the bills were paid. The last of the money went on this return to Harper’s Creek and the big old ramshackle house they were all now trapped in.

Mom hadn’t wanted to move, but they couldn’t afford the city anymore, and she could get a nursing job out here that paid as much with far fewer expenses; that’s what she’d said. And living with Grandma would be rent-free. They could build some savings. Anna felt the weight of guilt with that. Mom hadn’t worked for six months in the aftermath of the thing and had been losing at playing catch-up ever since.

“But we sure had some fun back then when we were young, didn’t we, Evelyn?”

“Not too much fun, Johnny Burdett. I was always a good girl and you know it.”

A good girl. Of course Grandma had been. Wouldn’t bring trouble on herself like Anna had. What would Grandma think about Lila and Bonnie? Had they brought trouble on themselves? She was definitely a well, what did she think was going to happen, dressed like that? kind of woman.

“You never married, Johnny?” Mom added more chili to her plate. “Or wanted to go to the city yourself?”

“Never met the right girl at the right time.” His eyes twinkled as he leaned on the table and sipped his beer. “And I couldn’t leave Harper’s Creek. It’s funny how your roots settle into a place. Mine go down too deep here to ever pull up. Always have. I love the wide-open spaces of nature, the sound of the corn rustling in the wind in the good years, seeing the tired joy on farmers’ faces after a hard day’s work doing something that matters. Hearing the livestock. Being able to nod hello to at least five or six folks whenever I go down Main Street. The way people help each other out in the lean years. Like now. I didn’t come from a farming family, my father was a foreman at the old meat-processing plant out on Schweitzer—”