Page 32 of They Say a Girl Died Here

For once she was up first, not much after six, and she’d hoped that Lucas had left already, but as she got her backpack on in the hallway, Jamie’s posters and tape inside, she could see his van was still outside. She shoved her feet into her sneakers as voices and footsteps came down the stairs. Shit.

“So dinner Monday night, then?” Mom said, girlishly eager. “I’m going to make my famous carbonara. You won’t want to miss it.”

“Sure.” Lucas didn’t sound convincing. Almost too upbeat. “I’ll have to see how the plumbing job I’ve got goes, though. Could take hours. Won’t know till I get there.”

Anna quickly unlocked the door. There was no way she wanted to face him after last night. She never wanted to see him again and definitely not in their house.

“Of course. But we won’t eat till after seven. I’m on an afternoon shift. Short one. Two till six.”

“Great. I’ll let you know.”

“Hey, An—”

Anna fled into the daylight and closed the door behind her as if she hadn’t heard her mother, running down the porch steps and kicking off on the scooter before anyone could call her back, her heart in her mouth. At least he hadn’t told Mom about her threats, she thought as she raced toward town, enjoying the breeze that came with the scooter picking up speed. There would be no dinner. By Monday, he’d have broken up with her. He was a creep and a coward and he would not be in their house.

She thought about Lucas a lot while she taped and tacked Jamie’s posters around town, replacing the others that the sheriff must have taken down, feeling the need to do something meaningful for him. Something that would matter and keep the pressure on if the killer was in town. If a poster scared one girl into staying home or walking with a friend instead of alone, then it was worth it. That’s what he’d wanted. The streets and sidewalks away from the diner and gas station were still empty before eight and she was sure no one saw her. She put one outside the grocery store and the small library. One outside the church where she’d first seen Jamie. Her headache had gone, thankfully, and she paused for a smoke there. The cigarette butts had been cleaned up too, but as a small act of rebellion against everything and nothing, instead of taking hers to put in a trash can, she left it where the pile had been, before moving on and putting a poster either side of the drugstore’s automatic doors. The words under the girls’ smiling faces were imprinted in her mind. Who will be next?

Had the police spoken to Lucas after either of the girls’ murders? They’d suspected Jamie, but who else? Had they looked into anything special about the dates they were killed? Was there anything significant about their deaths coming three years apart? Had they looked for other similar deaths anywhere else in the state—or out of state? What about where the girls were killed?

They say a girl died here.

She knew those creepy words were just Grandma’s Alzheimer’s talking, but even a stopped clock was right twice a day, and all the kids had hung out in Beech House. If it was the murder site, then what did that mean for Anna if the killer was still at large? Would it make her a more likely choice as a next victim?

There was only one course of action. She was on long shifts this weekend, but first thing Monday morning, she’d go to the sheriff’s office and ask some questions. There was trauma in this town and it wasn’t healed, just like she had trauma she couldn’t heal. Only the truth could do that, and it seemed to her that there was a cloud of doubt over Michael Cairns’s guilt.

38

“That’s a beautiful blouse,” Anna said as a heavyset woman hurried back from the restroom to her seat at the front desk. She flushed happily at the compliment, beaming a warm, friendly smile that almost made Anna mean what she’d said about the garishly colored polyester shirt.

“Why, thank you. The sheriff says he needs to wear sunglasses indoors around me, but I ignore him. The world needs more color in it. Color makes me smile. Sorry I wasn’t here.” She leaned forward. “UTI. Can’t shake it. I’m Roz. How can I help you?”

“Oh, I hate those. I get them a lot too.” Anna had never had a UTI in her life, but she loved that Roz had shared so quickly. Behind the desk, through a wall with a clear upper half, Anna could see a couple of locked rooms with key-code punch pads, no doubt the armory and records rooms, and she could hear some laughter from down the corridor to the right. It sounded like Sheriff Adams. “I’m Anna Maybourne.”

Roz’s face furrowed into care and concern. “Oh, you’re the poor girl who found Jamie Carlson? His poor mother is devastated.” She leaned forward. “Although they could have cared more when he was alive, if you ask me, because that boy deserved better.”

“I agree.” She hadn’t known Jamie for more than a couple of conversations, but she felt a lingering closeness to him after her dream, and after finding his body, it was like they were bound together now. She was sure the last message he had typed out was for her, and that carried a weight of responsibility she couldn’t—and didn’t want to—shake off. “Do you think I could talk to the sheriff? If he’s not too busy?”

“Sure. Let me check.” She stayed in her chair, used the intercom, and within a moment she was nodding Anna down the corridor.

“Sheriff’s office at the end. There’s only four rooms down there, so you can’t miss it. Nice to meet you, Anna.”

“You too, Roz.”

The corridor was short, and as she passed the deputies’ office she saw Todd and the other deputy, Pete, in his thirties with a smugly satisfied belly that was starting to hang over his belt, both at their computers. Todd looked up to see Anna going by, his expression suddenly curious, and half lifted a hand to wave, but she ignored him, focusing ahead to where Sheriff Adams was in the doorway to his office, waiting for her.

“Come on in, Anna.”

She stepped inside, surprised at how neat the room was; for some reason she saw him as an organized-chaos type. She stopped him as he went to close the door. “Can you leave it open, please?”

He paused, thoughtful. “Sure.” He waved her to a seat and took his own behind the desk. “So what can I do for you?”

“I was thinking about Jamie and what he said to me. He was so adamant that if anything happened to him, then I’d know the killer was still in Harper’s Creek. What if he was right? I mean, something has happened to him. It made me wonder. What if Michael Cairns wasn’t the right guy, just the easiest?”

Sheriff Adams stared at her for a long time before he spoke, his voice calm and even. “After Lila was murdered, you think we sat back doing nothing? Men were turning up for DNA tests voluntarily even though there was no DNA found to match it against. Her clothes were never recovered. We didn’t even know why she was out of her house. She’d been watching movies with Jamie, he walked her home, and then she must have snuck back out of her window for some reason. She’d left her phone in her bedroom, and there were no clues on that. As you know, this is neither a big town nor a rich one, and generally speaking we don’t get a lot of crime, so most folks don’t even have a Ring doorbell, let alone security cameras, and the only place with CCTV is The Shamrock, and that just covers their parking lot. Lila’s mom said she’d heard her and Jamie arguing that night, so yes, of course he was our prime suspect. It’s nearly always the boyfriend or husband.”

“But it wasn’t him, was it?” she countered. “Surely you found that out fast.”

“He didn’t tell you, did he?” Sheriff Adams laced his fingers. “How he fled town scared for two days after her body was found? Hid out in an empty barn five miles away. So the first forty-eight hours—the crucial time—was spent looking for him. Even his folks didn’t know where he was. Eventually he came back, told us about his shoulder; we checked it over and he was ruled out. But time was lost. And did we question other people? Hell yes. Of course we did. But when Jamie came with tall tales of clowns shooting him up with heroin, did we also take that with a grain of salt? Again, hell yes.”