Chapter Forty-Eight
It took some convincing, but Jack and his team ultimately released Brad Paxton.
Jules’s ex-boyfriend is a lot of things, but a rapist and murderer isn’t one of them.
At twenty-one, washed out of college after an injury and his football days behind him, he’s clutching for the past, including Jules.
Her mother said he’s called the house several times leaving his number for Jules to call him.
Jules never did. It’s not because he cheated on her, not because he pressured her to do things she wasn’t ready for.
It’s more that if they hadn’t gotten into a fight at the concert that night, maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t have been on her own and taken by May Day.
Brad’s put on some weight, has a double chin, beer gut. “Why is the FBI watching your house? Is it about your sister?”
Jules nods, tells him to get home.
That was the easy part, the harder part will be dealing with her parents.
Inside, Dad is pacing the living room, a caged animal; Mom sits on the couch, staring at nothing.
“Why would the FBI think he’d take you?” her father asks, his tone desperate, like he can’t fathom another daughter gone.
Oddly, it’s Mom who’s more perceptive. “What is it you’re not telling us, Jules?”
It’s time. She sits next to her mother, pats the couch for her dad to join them. “We need to talk.”
Later, after she saw her father cry for the second time in her life, after her mother truly comforted Jules for the first time in her life, she heads upstairs, tired, emotionally hungover.
But also somehow feeling lighter. She’s told them.
Finally revealed her crushing secret. And she’s still standing, feeling not just lighter, but stronger.
It’s odd how that works.
She heads to her childhood bedroom, but stops when she sees the handmade sign on Clare’s door: PRIVATE: KEEP OUT. She smiles thinking about her plucky sister. Feels a wave of deep sadness. She hasn’t had it in her to go inside since Clare disappeared, but she pushes open the door tonight.
It’s a shrine. Left as it was after agents invaded her sister’s privacy and rummaged through her drawers, searched for a diary that could yield clues. Jules could’ve told them that Clare wasn’t the diary type.
On the mirror are photographs of Clare with her friends. One at the lake where the girls wore bikinis that they thought made them look grown-up. There’s a photo booth shot of Clare and a boy, she forgets his name. Clare’s pom-poms are on her shelf, next to a Beanie Baby.
Jules pulls a yearbook from the shelf, the one issued spring last year, right before Clare vanished.
Jules turns the pages absently, flipping past the year-in-review section.
It’s a photo montage—movie posters for Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, an album cover for The Sign by Ace of Base.
She flips to the page with her sister’s photo.
Clare looks like Jules, so it’s possible May Day confused her, abducted her to finish the job.
But Jules is much taller, her hair lighter. Could it really have been a mistake?
Jules continues to flip through the yearbook. There’s a candid photo of Clare and Amy, Clare’s next-door neighbor and best friend, sitting on the hood of a car, hugging each other in the pose. She wonders what happened to their friendship. They were the absolute best of friends, inseparable.
She flips the pages, looking for Amy’s class photo. When she finds it, she’s surprised that Amy’s face is scribbled over in ink pen. Next to it, in what she thinks is Clare’s handwriting, are the words:
Ho bag. Guidance Counselor Fucker.
What the—?
She flips quickly to the faculty photos, and her breath is stripped from her lungs. Across the face of Mr. Vanderman is a single word scrawled in the same handwriting:
Pedophile.