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Thinking back, she clearly remembered the smell of dust from those early days.
She’d been toiling over the files when she’d heard the call come in.
“Sheriff!” the officer at the front desk had called. “You need to go to Chestnut Hill. There’s been a suicide! A seventeen-year-old girl has killed herself!”
Listening to the words, May had felt her heart clench.
At a low point herself, she’d felt so terrible for this young girl, her whole future ahead of her.
She’d stared down at the files, tears prickling her eyes, as she wished, too late, that the girl had shared her predicament and been able to get help.
Vulnerable herself at that time, she felt the case lance into her heart.
And May thought it was for that reason that she deliberately hadn’t looked for any further details or read up on it at all. She’d blocked it out, not wanting to feel that sadness again. Chestnut Hill was in a different local jurisdiction; the Fairshore police hadn’t been involved beyond the sheriff’s callout.
Now, reading on, she learned more about what had played out.
“Penelope Jackson had been a victim of bullying,” May read from the news report, her voice shaking slightly. “She left a suicide note behind in which she said she could no longer stand being harassed by girls in her class.”
“That’s terrible,” Owen said.
“She took the family’s old rowboat to the lake, where she sailed out onto the waters and overdosed on sleeping tablets. By the time she was found, she was already dead. Her family described themselves as ‘heartbroken’ by the terrible incident.”
Owen gasped. “But that’s so similar to what happened at these murder scenes.”
“It is,” May agreed. “Owen, this has to be behind it. It has to. It’s just too similar in too many ways. Someone knew about this incident. Someone had it in mind. I’m convinced of it. And I’m wondering if it could be Penelope’s father.”
She summarized more from the article. “The suicide note stated that Penelope had been mocked because of her family. She’d stepped down as captain of the lacrosse team after other girls had complained, and refused to be on the team.”
“How disgusting of them!” Owen said.
“Bullies can be so cruel,” May agreed. “And what’s also clear is that the school was not doing enough to manage the problem.”
“What else does it say?”
“Her few friends spoke out to say she was threatened and her belongings were thrown around the locker room. The bullies stole her school books and even made up a letter, pretending to be from Penelope herself, saying that she was doing all this to herself because of her ‘weird’ parents.”
“Why were the parents weird?” Owen asked.
“It says here the father was a survivalist who was trying to isolate from society out in the woods. Her parents were divorced, and her mother had remarried to a logger who apparently had a criminal record, but the article is not clear on what it was. But apparently all of that was a reason for terrible bullying at school.”
“Seriously?” Owen said.
“There’s an editor’s note here to say that the mother subsequently left her second husband after Penelope’s suicide. She moved out of state.”
“So that’s a hugely tragic story. But it means there are two suspects who could have done this, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Penelope’s real father and also her stepfather. Both of them would have gone through trauma and both of them would have had the right resources and materials to be able to reconstruct the scene. Because that is what sounds like might have happened.”
“What do we know about them?”
Crowding around the screen again, May looked up both the men.
“Mr. Jackson lives in the woods north of Chestnut Hill. He has a cabin there on the shores of the lake. And the stepfather, Abner Delaforte, lives on a small farm outside of town. I think that area also borders the lake.”
May thought to herself that both of these sounded like isolated spots. If either of the men had taken Chanel South, she could be held here at this moment.
If they were not the right suspects then there would be no harm done in looking. The chances were good that if Jessop really was guilty, he would crack under Kerry’s intense questioning.
