CHAPTER TWELVE
Dusk had begun gathering over Elmsview by the time Selena turned into the sheriff’s department parking lot.
The last of the daylight stretched across the roofs in long copper bands.
Shadows had pooled beneath the maple trees along the edge of the lot, where fallen leaves scraped over the pavement whenever the breeze moved through.
The department’s front windows glowed against the deepening blue beyond them.
Kelly’s sedan remained where she had left it that morning.
Selena pulled into the space beside it and switched off the engine.
For several seconds, neither woman moved.
The drive back from Boyd Cutler’s house had been quieter than the journey out, though not unfriendly.
Kelly had spent most of it writing interview notes on her phone and reviewing the photograph Trina Vale promised to preserve.
Selena had called Arnold with instructions to begin checking Boyd’s whereabouts during the likely period of Ruth Keller’s murder.
One alibi had weakened the lead. It had not removed him from the investigation, but the school connection no longer felt as clean as it had before the interview.
Kelly gathered Boyd’s file from her lap. “I’ll type this up tonight and send it over.”
“Make sure the times from Trina’s statement are separated from anything we haven’t verified.”
“I will.”
Selena opened her door.
The cooler air felt good after forty minutes inside the car. She stepped out and stretched the stiffness from one shoulder while Kelly walked around the rear of the sedan.
A figure emerged from the department entrance.
Arnold Shaw wore a dark jacket over a pale shirt instead of his uniform. His blond hair had been combed into place with more attention than usual, and the uneven stubble along his jaw had disappeared. He stopped when he saw them, one hand holding the door behind him.
Selena took in the polished shoes and the faint shine along the front of his jacket.
“Are you off home?” she asked.
Arnold released the door and came down the steps. “I have a hot date.”
“Are you sure she exists?”
He placed one hand over his heart. “Your jokes are just as sparkling as I remember.”
“You sound nervous.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“You’ve shaved.”
“I do that sometimes.”
Kelly smiled beside her.
Arnold shifted his attention toward Kelly with visible relief. “How are you settling in?”
“It’s a learning curve,” Kelly said.
“I hope Selena isn’t a tough boss.”
“Technically, we’re the same level in the FBI.” Kelly adjusted the file beneath one arm. “But I’m here to help.”
The words were harmless on their surface. Selena still felt them catch.
She headed to the Eagleton office. Temporary or not, Kelly had been assigned there under her direction. The distinction mattered to the chain of command and to every local officer watching how the new federal team worked together.
Kelly may not have intended to challenge that. Intention did not make Selena like it.
She turned toward Arnold before the irritation showed in her voice. “Where’s Connor?”
Arnold shoved both hands into his jacket pockets. “Don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him since earlier. I think he was looking into Linda Mercer’s phone records to see when her phone was last pinged. Cheryl said he’d been on calls most of the afternoon.”
“Was he working from here?”
“He left a while ago. Didn’t say where he was going. And I’m off duty now!”
Selena glanced at the darkened windows of Connor’s office.
The missing-person report remained separate from the two confirmed murders, but Linda Mercer’s age and school history had drawn her too close to the pattern to dismiss.
If her phone had stopped moving near a known address, Connor might have something useful before morning.
Arnold checked his watch.
His expression changed.
“Late.”
Selena folded her arms. “Nice performance, Arnold, but I still reckon she doesn’t exist.”
He backed toward a pickup parked near the far curb. “I’d come back with a great retort, but I genuinely am late.”
Arnold laughed as he opened the driver’s door. A moment later, the engine started and the truck reversed from the space. He raised one hand through the open window before pulling onto the road.
Kelly watched the taillights disappear. “He seems nice.”
“Yeah. I’ve worked with him on a couple of cases now.” Selena leaned against her car. “He’s young and naive sometimes, but he has a good heart.”
“That counts for a lot.”
“It can. As long as somebody teaches him caution before the wrong person does.”
Kelly rested the Boyd Cutler file on the roof of her sedan while searching her bag for the keys. The parking lot had grown quieter. A phone rang somewhere inside the department, muffled by glass and brick. Beyond the road, lights appeared one by one in the houses climbing the lower slope.
Kelly found the keys but did not unlock the car.
“Selena… Do you fancy a drink back at the motel?”
The question came without pressure. That made Selena’s discomfort worse.
A drink would mean sitting across from Kelly without a case file between them. It would mean conversation after the work ended, perhaps in Eric’s reception office while an old horror film played behind the counter, or in one of their rooms with the motel curtains drawn against the lot.
Once, Selena had planned her movements through school to avoid being alone near Kelly Voss.
Now they were sleeping several doors apart.
“I have stuff to do,” Selena said. “Maybe another time.”
Disappointment passed through Kelly’s expression before she lowered her attention to the keys.
“Okay. No worries.”
Selena could have left it there. The invitation had been reasonable, and the refusal did not require explanation.
Even so, something in Kelly’s posture reminded her of the car ride to Boyd’s, when one memory about a gym teacher had briefly allowed them to speak like people with a shared past rather than opposing versions of it.
“Good work today,” Selena said.
Kelly raised her head. “Thanks. That means a lot.”
The answer sounded sincere.
Selena wondered whether either of them meant what they had said, or whether they were testing phrases that belonged to colleagues who trusted one another.
Kelly unlocked the sedan and placed the file on the passenger seat. “I’ll send the report before I turn in.”
“Don’t stay up too late. We have Blethan tomorrow.”
“I remember.”
“Good night, Kelly.”
“Good night, Selena.”
The car door closed. Kelly started the engine, waited for a county cruiser to pass, then pulled out of the lot.
Selena remained beside her own vehicle.
The department entrance stood behind her. Through the glass, Cheryl crossed the front office carrying a stack of folders. She did not notice Selena outside. The building seemed to operate without her, every person moving through a life that had been in place before she returned.
*
The Wilson Motel lay less than fifteen minutes away.
Selena followed Main Street through the center of Elmsview, passing the diner, the closed pharmacy, and the hardware store with stacked bags of salt visible through its front windows.
Traffic had thinned to a few pickups and a school bus returning empty to the county depot.
The route carried her toward the southern edge of town.
A familiar brick building appeared beyond the next intersection.
Elmsview High School occupied the same rise it had when Selena was a student.
Newer additions stretched behind the original structure, their flat roofs and broad windows altering the outline without replacing it.
The main entrance still stood beneath a stone lintel carved with the school’s name.
A flag moved above the front lawn, dark against the remaining color in the western sky.
Selena slowed.
The turn signal clicked before she consciously decided to use it.
She entered the parking lot.
Most of the spaces were empty. A maintenance van stood near the gymnasium, and three cars remained beside the teachers’ entrance. The football field beyond the school had no players beneath its lights. Aluminum bleachers rose along one side, pale and empty in the low evening.
Selena parked near the far end of the lot and shut off the engine.
The building filled the windshield.
At first, nothing moved inside. Then a cleaner crossed one of the upper corridors, visible for two seconds through a row of windows before disappearing behind a classroom wall.
Familiarity came in fragments.
The stone steps had been widened. Security cameras watched the entrance now. A covered walkway connected the main building to an extension Selena did not remember. The old science wing remained near the rear, though its windows had been replaced and the brickwork cleaned.
She could still locate the places that mattered.
Behind the vocational building, an alley of cracked pavement had once hidden students from the main yard.
Selena and Jessie Chase had crouched there during lunch with a cigarette Jessie stole from her mother’s purse.
Neither of them knew how to smoke properly.
Jessie inhaled too deeply, coughed until tears ran down her cheeks, then insisted they finish because throwing it away would be wasteful.
Selena had taken two more drags and spent the afternoon convinced every teacher could smell it on her clothes.
The memory drew a smile.
Another followed.
Connor had been seventeen when a dare sent him across the football field during practice. He sprinted from the sideline in jeans and work boots, reached the quarterback as a play began, and tackled him before anyone understood what was happening. For one second, the entire field froze.
Then half the team chased Connor toward the parking lot.
Selena and Jessie watched from the bleachers, laughing so hard they could barely breathe. Connor cleared the fence near the equipment shed, lost one boot in the grass, and kept running without it.
He denied the story whenever Robert told it.
Those years had not felt precious while she lived through them.
School had been something to escape. Elmsview had seemed too small, its roads too narrow, its people too interested in one another.
Washington represented distance, importance, and the freedom to become someone no one here had already defined.
Selena rested both hands on the wheel.
How had she become this version of herself?
The answer existed in thousands of decisions that had once seemed temporary.
College. Quantico. Assignments. Marriage.
Divorce. Cases that ended and others that followed before the last one loosened its grip.
Each year had arrived with enough urgency to feel separate from the life accumulating beneath it.
From the parking lot, high school seemed recent and impossibly distant.
Her father must feel that compression more sharply.
Robert had watched his daughters become adults, leave home, return carrying anger towards each other, and spend years refusing to repair what had broken between them.
All because Diane believed Selena had abandoned her to be their father’s carer when he was ill a few years ago.
Selena had offered to pay to have him moved to Washington, D.C.
, but that just angered Diane even more.
She accused Selena of never wanting to actually get her hands dirty and help.
She pictured her father in the padded chair near the rear window, waiting for Connor to make his next chess move.
Maybe time did not move faster with age. Maybe people only noticed its speed once more of it lay behind them than ahead.
The thought remained in the quiet car.
Selena lowered the window an inch. Cool air entered, bringing the distant sound of a truck on the county road and the dry whisper of leaves moving across the school grounds.
For several minutes, she did not think about Karen Sloane’s ruined mouth or Ruth Keller’s body beside the desk. Linda Mercer’s missing car and whatever had happened to her stayed beyond the parking lot. Boyd Cutler, Trina Vale, the school records, and tomorrow’s autopsy could wait there, too.
Instead, memory moved into less comfortable places.
Kelly Voss had controlled two years of Selena’s life inside that building.
A glimpse of Kelly at the end of a corridor had been enough to change Selena’s route. Laughter behind her could tighten every muscle in her back. Lunch periods became calculations about where to sit, which bathroom to use, and whether a friend would still speak to her after Kelly noticed.
Kelly had made her feel invisible when other people were present and painfully exposed when they were not.
Small.
Selena had hated that most.
Her father eventually intervened. Connor handled Rick Hanson in his own way. The bullying ended, and time carried everyone outward.
Now Kelly sat across from Selena in briefing rooms, entered scenes beside her, and wrote reports under the same federal seal. They held the same credentials. They carried the same authority when they stepped through a door.
Equals.
The word should have settled something.
It did not.
Kelly had apologized. She had admitted what happened without hiding behind childhood or misunderstanding. At Boyd Cutler’s house, she had known when to press and when to hold back. Her instincts were good. The assignment could work if Selena allowed it.
That was the part she could not yet decide.
Across the football field, the maintenance van started. Headlights swept over the side of the gymnasium before turning toward the rear exit.
Selena started her car.
The dashboard lit around her, replacing the school windows with reflections across the windshield. She sat for another moment, then shifted into reverse.
There was no reason to go inside. The halls would be different. Locked doors, security desks, new photographs, new names on classroom walls. Whatever Selena had come to find would not be waiting there.
She drove toward the exit.
“I’m fine,” she said.
The words remained inside the car.
At the road, Selena turned toward the Wilson Motel. Elmsview High receded in the rear view mirror until the trees and houses hid it from view.
Ahead, the town lights marked the route through the darkening valley.
Selena hoped Connor had found better luck in his inquiries.