Chapter 37
By the time Anna dragged herself downstairs to get Tylenol, she was almost fully awake, the bright sunshine outside shards of glass stabbing her eyes. Screw this headache. She drained a glass of water with the pills and leaned against the counter, willing them to work fast.
She’d stayed in Grandma’s room for a while after putting the notebook back, before finally going up to her bedroom where she stayed fully dressed under the sheet and browsed the yearbooks again.
Baby-faced Melissa in her softball cap proudly looking at Lila in their team photo.
Todd, his blond-brown hair and rose cheeks making him totally recognizable even as a teenager in braces in his class photo, one row behind Bonnie.
Windows into their pasts. People they were before. Changelings.
She saw Lucas in the background of some pictures.
Younger. Not weathered as he was now. Neater hair.
If Melissa hadn’t told her he’d worked at the school, she’d never have realized it was him.
She was drawn to the photos of Jamie too.
Another person she’d never have recognized.
A different boy. A different time. If anything happens to me …
you’ll know. She’d finally drifted to sleep with one yearbook still open, Jamie’s and Lila’s faces beaming out from the football field as dawn cracked the sky.
Maybe that’s why when she dreamed, it was of him.
It had been so vivid, and it wasn’t fading.
In the dream, she’d been walking with Jamie up to the house, eating doughnuts from a paper sack.
He was Jamie as she’d known him, the same track marks, same thin body.
A little twitchy. They were laughing. Sugar’s my new high, he’d said as he bit in.
She could still feel the sugar on her lips, it tasted so good, and when the jelly squirted down her T-shirt, it made them both laugh.
They came up the steps to the house, side by side, and Grandma was in her seat there, a light breeze blowing strands of hair free of her bun to tickle her face.
Hi, Evelyn, I’m Jamie, Jamie said. Grandma had smiled at him, but her eyes were curious, uncertain.
I think I know you, she said. The sad boy. I thought you were dead.
Anna had woken up, her head pounding and mouth dry, with a feeling that wasn’t the only strange dream she’d had in the night.
Other fragments and images flashed in her mind that she couldn’t quite hold on to.
Laughing with Melissa. Dry storms. Being out front with Grandma.
But her headache had consumed those and all she was left with was the more vivid dream of Jamie.
At least she hadn’t dreamed of the thing or the recording of the thing and all the shame of it.
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.