Chapter 30
I arrived at the Ashfords’ house around noon. The kitchen light was aglow as I pulled into the driveway, and it wasn’t long before Rosemary peeked through the blinds and then met me at the front door.
“Good to see you,” she said. “Come in.”
I stepped inside, and Rosemary led me straight to the kitchen. She offered me a cup of coffee, which I accepted, and I took a seat beside her.
“How’s the case going?” she asked. “Are you getting anywhere?”
“I am, and that’s why I’m here,” I said. “I have a few questions. You grew up around here, right?”
“Dustin and I both did.”
“When I was here the other day, I told you about Anne, the young woman who went missing.”
“I remember. What about her?”
“I think Audrey may have been investigating Anne’s disappearance before she died,” I said. “Anne would have been a little older than you when she went missing.”
“Funny, I don’t remember hearing anything about it.”
“Did she ever ask you anything about your former classmates at school?” I asked.
“Not about my classmates, no. But she did ask me if she could look through our yearbooks.”
“When?”
Rosemary moved a hand to her hip. “Oh, let’s see now, it would have been a couple of weeks before she died, if I remember right.”
“Did she say why she wanted to look at them?”
“She said it was for history class. A final assignment about the school and its students through the years. She wasn’t one to lie, so I didn’t think to question it. Should I have?”
“Hard to say. How many yearbooks did she look at?”
“Seven. Dustin was three years ahead of me in school, so our Freshman and Senior yearbooks are the same.”
“I’d like to see them, if you don’t mind.”
She nodded. “They’re on a shelf in the coat closet. I’ll get them.”
Rosemary walked to the closet and opened it, pulling out a cardboard box.
The lid came off with a faint scrape. Inside sat several yearbooks, their covers worn at the corners.
She carried the box to the kitchen, and we spread the yearbooks across the table.
Rosemary’s name appeared in glitter pen on the inside cover of the first one, surrounded by dozens of faded signatures, some faded, others still holding up to the test of time.
I opened the first yearbook and began flipping through it. Rosemary leaned in beside me, pointing to faces, names, and the occasional scribbled note written in the margins.
“That was my friend Tara,” she said, tapping on one of the photos. “She moved to Paso Robles after we graduated. Always thought we’d keep in touch, but for some reason we didn’t.”
I nodded but said nothing.
I didn’t care about Tara or about strolling down memory lane.
I cared about patterns and clues, anything Audrey might have left behind that might be of use to me.
We worked through Rosemary’s first yearbook and then the second.
Nothing stood out. The third was more of the same.
It was disappointing, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.
Audrey must have asked for the yearbooks for a reason, and I didn’t believe it had anything to do with a school assignment.
Rosemary raised a finger. “Oh, I just thought of something I should have mentioned at the start. Audrey spent the most time going through Dustin’s yearbooks, his senior year in particular.”
The comment gave me hope.
“Which one is it?” I asked.
Rosemary slid one of the books to the side, grabbing the one beneath it and handing it to me. “This is the year we met.”
I opened the book and began turning pages. When I came to the senior portraits, I noticed something strange—a black circle had been drawn around one of the portraits.
Not a neat pen mark.
A hard, deliberate ring drawn in thick marker.
I flipped through a few more pages and found another classmate had been circled.
Then another.
Then another.
I pointed out a few of the classmates that had been circled. “Before I make any assumptions, I just want to be sure you or your husband didn’t draw these circles.”
She leaned closer. “I did not. And as for Dustin, it doesn’t seem like something he would do. It wasn’t done in any of his other yearbooks.”
Turning to the next page, my eyes landed on yet another circled photo, and Rosemary’s hand flew to her mouth.
“That’s … that’s Dustin.” Her eyes darted to me, then back to the book. “Why would Audrey circle his photo?”
I wondered the same thing.
I also wondered if there was a connection, something linking everyone who had been circled.
My attention shifted to the next circled portrait, noting it was Talia’s father, Gabriel Kinkaid. Not too far from it was another circle of Brianne, Gabriel’s wife.
Two pages later, I saw that Vaughn Lambert’s picture had also been circled, along with that of his wife, Tilly.
Logan’s parents.
Then another, Aiden Robinson.
Willow’s father.
It seemed they’d been chosen with purpose.
On the last page of the senior class portraits, two more faces had been circled, Jordan Ward and Wendy Ward. Twins. Their names meant nothing to me, but given they’d been circled, I imagined they soon would.
“I’ve spoken to everyone except the twins since your daughter died,” I said. “What can you tell me about them?”
Rosemary glanced at their photos. “Ah, Wendy. She’s one of my closest friends.”
“She knew Audrey well, then?”
“I should say so. She’s her godmother.”
“And Jordan?”
“Haven’t seen him much over the years. He lives on the other side of the world, in Sydney. Has an Australian wife and a few kids.”
I thumbed through the rest of the book, finding nothing more of note, and then I snapped photos of every classmate Audrey—presumably—had circled.
Closing the book, I looked over at Rosemary. “When do you expect Dustin to be home?”
“He took a job out of town. He won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“The people who are circled, do they mean anything to you?”
“Yes and no.”
“They must have been circled for a reason. What connection did those classmates have to you or your husband?”
“Since they were three years older than I was, we didn’t run in the same circles,” she said.
“Dustin and I met when I was a freshman, but we didn’t start dating until I was a senior.
As to your question about them having a connection, there is one.
There was a time when everyone circled had been good friends.
Dustin told me they used to do everything together. ”
“What changed?”
She leaned against the wall, folding her arms. “It’s just … it was a long time ago, and I don’t want to betray anyone’s trust without talking to Dustin first.”
“If telling me what you know helps me figure out what happened to your daughter, isn’t it something you need to do, whether he would approve or not?”
She gave my comment some thought. “I suppose you’re right. Here’s what I remember. In high school, Vaughn and Tilly were dating, and as you know, they’re now married. What most people don’t know is, in their senior year, Tilly was stepping out on Vaughn with Aiden.”
“Just so I’m clear, they were having sex, right?”
“Right. I knew nothing about it, of course, not until years later when I asked Dustin why the friend group had a falling out.”
“What did he say?”
“He said they were all hanging out together at a bonfire one night. Tilly had too much to drink, and she started crying and just blurted it out, admitting she’d been having an affair.”
“How did that go over?”
“Not well. He said everyone started arguing and picking sides. It got ugly. They may have disagreed on their feelings about the affair, but there was one thing they all agreed on. The secret needed to stay in the group. They made a promise not to speak of it to anyone else, not even their parents. And to my knowledge, they all kept that promise.”
“Except Dustin told you,” I said.
“I’d like to think we tell each other everything. And the secret was safe with me … well, until now.”
Affairs happened all the time, so I found it strange that they had made a pact to keep it between themselves.
“Is there any part of the story that you’re leaving out?” I asked. “I don’t understand why they’d make an actual pact to keep something like that between themselves. I’m even more surprised that it seemed to have worked.”
“I haven’t told you the worst part yet. Tilly didn’t just admit the affair. She admitted she’d gotten pregnant but lost the baby before they could determine whether it was Aiden’s or Vaughn’s.”
Now that was a secret worth keeping.
Even if the affair had caused tension within the friend group, two of them had lost a child, and that shared loss fostered empathy.
“What happened after that night?” I asked.
“They all went their separate ways. He said a few of them hung around here and there, but that it was never the same.”
It was a lot to take in.
It felt like I was at a fork in the road, only this road had far more forks than one.
Turning to Rosemary, I said, “I think it’s clear that Audrey was the one to circle those faces. When she gave you back the yearbooks, did she say anything about them? Did she seem nervous after that?”
Rosemary looked up as if searching her memories. “I remember thinking she was a lot more restless than usual in those final weeks, and she wasn’t sleeping well. She kept checking her phone. I asked if she was okay, and she told me she was fine. I chalked it up to pre-college jitters.”
I thought of Sadie’s description of Audrey at the fast-food place.
The phone.
The tension.
Audrey was connected in some way to almost every person she had circled.
One of them had to be the killer.
“Did Audrey ever ask Dustin about his friend group?” I asked.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Were all the classmates Audrey circled present the night of the bonfire?”
“I’m not sure. Why don’t I give Dustin a call, see if I can get him on the phone?”
She made the call, placing it on speaker when he answered. I filled him in on everything that had happened since I arrived at the house, and when I finished, I asked the question Rosemary had been unable to answer.
There was a long pause.
Too long.
“Dustin, are you there?” I asked.
“I, yeah. There was … ahh, one other person there. I’ve been standing here trying to figure out the best way to tell you. The thing is, I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“That Anne would be so central to your investigation. If I knew, I would have told you that Anne was with us that night.”
Rosemary gasped, looking at me and mouthing, “I didn’t know.”
It was the biggest break in the case so far, and for a moment, I sat there, riveted, not knowing what to say next, and then it came to me.
“Who did Anne arrive with that night?”
“I don’t know. She was just there. Given how explosive everything was that night, and the fact we were all drinking, a lot of it is a blur. I don’t even remember her being introduced to any of us. It was maybe a week later when I read the article in the paper and found out she’d gone missing.”
“Did you talk to any of your friends about it?”
“We got together once, right after we heard.”
“Why?”
“Look, we may have been the last people to see Anne, and we didn’t want the police to think one of us had anything to do with it. We didn’t.”
“Let me guess, the pact you all made was more about Anne and less about Tilly?”
“I … yes. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Rosemary, who appeared to be in shock, looked at me and said, “If you don’t mind, I believe I need to have a talk with my husband in private.”
“Not at all,” I said, standing to leave. “If you think of anything else, please let me know.”
I walked to my car with one thing on my mind—the ring of names, all connected by a shared past.
All connected to Cambria.
All connected, now, to Anne Fontaine.