Chapter 21 Nicola #2
I cross the room, the balls of my feet cold against the hardwood floor, and resist the urge to snatch the paper away. “I wasn’t trying to draw her. It just happens, whenever I try to draw anyone. Doesn’t matter who it was supposed to be, it always ends up being her.”
She studies the portrait, and even though it’s just a standard drawing of a woman from the neck up, it feels like all my secrets have leaked onto that page. She presses her thumb to the corner, right above the strange stain. “I never asked, because it seemed too personal, but were the two of you…?”
“Yes.”
I’ve never told anyone before, except for my father.
I don’t know why I’m telling her now, especially since lying would be so much safer.
Maybe I want to be seen for once, for someone to understand how much Claire’s death impacted me.
None of the news segments at the time even mentioned my name; I was a “college roommate,” a “fellow art student,” even, from The Buffalo News, an “acquaintance.” Not that I wanted to be perceived as her partner, especially not in a small town where almost every closet boasted a red baseball cap, but the knowledge that they saw me as such a minor character in her life, a walk-on role, still rankles me.
Greer doesn’t look surprised. “Do you want to talk about it?”
For something that’s been locked away for so long, the words come easily.
“We started dating toward the end of freshman year. She didn’t want anyone to know because her parents, her father in particular, didn’t approve of ‘alternative lifestyles,’ and she would’ve done anything to please him.
But mine was fine with it.” A lump forms in the back of my throat.
“At least I thought he was fine with it.”
“Do you know why he targeted her?”
“I think…” I fiddle with the drawstring on my sweats.
“For the longest time, it was just the two of us. Family, friends, neighbors, they helped out here and there, but at the end of the day, the only people we knew we could count on were each other. When I moved away to college, I wondered if he might start dating someone. Part of me wanted him to, so I wouldn’t be responsible for him anymore. But he never did.”
I look at the portrait of Not-Claire. “I brought her home the summer after sophomore year, so she could meet him. She was distant, distracted—I remember that—but, otherwise, they seemed to get along well. Then one morning, I knocked on the guest room door, and she wasn’t there.
I wasn’t bothered at first. Claire used to disappear for entire days with her camera; I assumed she was wandering around town, snapping photos, that she’d be back by dinner at the latest. But at dinnertime, there I sat, staring at the empty chair across the table with that feeling, in the pit of my gut, that something had gone horribly wrong. ”
I told myself she’d caught a lift to the train station, was headed back to Cooper Union at that very moment.
I tried to push my anger to the surface: How could she leave without telling me?
Was my hometown that boring? Was she that disappointed with our workingclass life—our Walmart clothes, our Costco meals?
I called all our mutual friends, asked if any of them had heard from her.
I kept wishing someone would text me a photo of her barhopping back in the city—a photo that would’ve crushed my heart but at least proved she was okay.
But that photo, that message, that call, never came.
Not until a week later when she finally washed up on the shore.
“Did he just not like her?”
“Yes, but it was more than that. He didn’t… I don’t think he liked the thought of anyone in my life being more important than he was. He wanted to keep me for himself.”
Greer looks at me with—what is that?—pity? Her mouth opens, and I’m struck with a sudden, all-consuming panic at whatever she’s about to say. “You know how I told you my suspicion of your dad came down to a feeling?”
I nod.
“The first time I stayed for dinner, I let the camera crew take the cars back with them. Remember?”
I nod.
“Eleven o’clock rolled around, and I needed one of our PAs to pick me up.
I wandered out onto the porch and was about to dial the number, when your dad stepped up behind me.
” Her gaze shifts to the side, like she can’t bring herself to meet my eyes.
“He told me not to call, that he’d drive me back to the motel instead.
He already had his keys out. His pickup truck was parked in the driveway, and I don’t know what it was, but I took one look at that truck, and I knew. ”
I stop breathing.
“I knew that if I got in that truck, I would never get out again.”
The world lurches into fast-forward. “That’s not what happened,” I say.
“He offered everyone who came over a ride. Seriously, ask around town. He was the go-to guy when you needed someone to drive you to the airport or your car was in the shop for repairs. He saw a young woman who needed to get somewhere and volunteered to help.”
My dad never would have killed Greer Woods. The entire camera crew knew she was at our house; if she’d disappeared, it would’ve been too suspicious. He wouldn’t have taken that kind of risk—would he?
“You’re assuming the worst because you know, now, about the crimes he’s committed,” I insist. “You’re rewriting the past to make everything fit together. Like the photo of Niagara Falls.”
Greer doesn’t seem convinced. “When we were researching cold cases, deciding which one to investigate during our first season, I found it strange that the police hadn’t considered your father a suspect.
When you’re looking at victims, you want to assess if any of them are different from the others.
Claire was the only college student murdered, the only one from out of town.
The amount of violence involved—forty-one stab wounds—also made it seem like the killer had some kind of personal connection—”