Chapter 41 After
After
My lawyer says I shouldn’t talk to you,” I tell Len, phone to my ear as I pour Barry his food.
“You called me,” Len says.
“I know. I’m just saying. I’m going rogue out of love and respect for you, I want that clearly established.”
Barry waits patiently, gobbets of saliva dripping to the floor. There’s a reason I have a designated drool mop.
Len sighs. “What do you need?”
“Nothing. Exactly,” I say. I adjust the phone and set down Barry’s bowl, then step away quickly so the sound of him inhaling his kibble doesn’t deafen Len. “It’s just—-I had the weirdest fucking conversation with Emily Hill today.”
“You are supposed to be staying away from the Hills,” he reminds me, irritation a burr in his voice.
“She cornered me in the bathroom. It was not my fault,” I protest. I head over to the table, where my laptop is sitting. “I think she knows a lot more about Meghan than she’s saying. What do you know about her?”
“Who? Meghan?”
“Emily. Obviously we didn’t know her when we were kids, but I’m having trouble finding anything.
She’s not on social media. She said she sells her paintings, but it must not be under her name, because I’ve tried everything I can think of and they’re not showing up anywhere online.
I mean, maybe she just has them in a couple physical galleries, but . . .”
“I don’t know what to tell you. There’s really nothing there to find,” Len says.
“She barely exists as far as official records are concerned. Homeschooled most of high school, no job history, basically zero income. She files her taxes on time and she’s got a driver’s license.
That’s the Emily Hill biography. Oh, and she went to art school. ”
“Which one?”
“Savannah College of Art and Design,” he says. “She was there for just under two years, looks like.”
“That would mean she dropped out when her father died,” I note.
“Yeah, I think that matches up. Listen, Audrey, I’ve got to go. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to share, or how long I’m even going to be in the loop, but I’ll tell you what I can,” Len says.
“Why? Don’t you want me leaving this alone?” I ask.
“Yeah, but if I don’t tell you, you’re going to break into FBI headquarters or some dumb shit like that,” Len says.
“Love you, too,” I tell him, and he snorts as he hangs up the phone.
I let Barry out back for his customary post--dinner business and then pull up Facebook again.
This time, I’m not looking for Emily. No one in this town really knows her, but she was at SCAD for two years—-she must have had friends.
An hour later, I’ve found a couple dozen of her contemporaries, and a few of them have even responded to my messages. I’m going for honest but vague:
Hi! I’m reaching out because I’m looking for some info on a former classmate of yours, Emily Hill. I wonder if you remember her?
I’ve got mostly negatives, and one suggestion to talk to a woman named Marie Hiscock. To my surprise, she replies to my copy--and--paste message almost immediately.
I knew Emily Hill. She was my roommate. Why do you want to ask about her?
I consider before I reply. I don’t want to come across as a stalker, and I don’t know whether this is going to get back to Emily.
I actually know her from when we were kids, and we recently reconnected. I feel like I can’t really get a read on her, and so I guess I’m looking for a vibe check or something, haha.
Vague. Let her fill in the blanks. I watch the dots of a message being typed appear and vanish a few times before the response comes in.
I’m not sure how much help I can be. Hard to get a read on sums her up pretty well. But if she’s anything like she was in college, I’d be careful.
Careful how? Why?
I don’t really want to put this in writing. Can you do a call?
I agree quickly. A few minutes later, I get a link for a video call, and when I connect, I find myself looking at a woman with frizzy purple hair and thick cat’s--eye glasses, sitting in a home office packed with succulents and crocheted animals.
“Hi,” I say awkwardly. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“I’m kind of curious why you’re asking about her. It seems like a lot if you’re just checking out a new friend,” she says. She sounds suspicious, and I wonder if she really wanted to hop on the call so she could see my face, make sure I wasn’t some guy stalking Emily.
“Can I be totally honest?” I say. She nods. “I met Emily again recently, like I said. We sort of—-I don’t know if hit it off is the right phrase, but we connected. But I can’t tell if she’s just a little bit odd or . . .”
“Or if you need to run the other way?” she says dryly.
“Pretty much. Normally I’d just go with my gut, but I was poking around and realized she’s not online at all, and I think I got a bit carried away.” I give a helpless shrug, impressed with my own improvisation.
She pushes up her glasses. “I haven’t seen Emily since she left school. So all of this is way out of date, and I don’t want to say that she’s a certain way. I mean, people change, right?”
“Right,” I say, nodding firmly. “I promise I’ll take everything with the appropriate grain of salt.”
She lets out a breath, like she still isn’t convinced this is a good idea. “I was Emmie’s roommate our sophomore year. I didn’t really know her that well freshman year, but I had the impression she was kind of a loner? There was a weird rumor about her, but I didn’t really believe it.”
“What was the rumor?”
She looks uncomfortable. “Critiques can get pretty brutal in class. You put your heart and soul into something, and then your professor spends twenty minutes shredding it, you know? Some of the professors seemed to enjoy making you feel like shit, and Emmie was in the crosshairs on the same day that another girl got told she was the second coming of Michelangelo, her piece is perfect, that kind of thing. And then said perfect oil painting mysteriously got stored improperly before it was dry. Totally obliterated. No one copped to doing it, but a lot of people said it must have been Emmie.”
“But you didn’t believe it.”
“She didn’t strike me as that kind of mean girl,” she says with a shrug.
“What did she strike you as?”
“She was homeschooled, right? She seemed like someone who had never learned how to talk to another human being. She was really smart and would know everything about a random subject and then she didn’t know the US had a civil war.
Or how to use a microwave. It was like all the normal patterns of just interacting and talking to a person never sank in, so there was always this weird stop--and--go feeling to all of our conversations.
And I wouldn’t say she was, like, politically conservative, but sex freaked her the fuck out.
I let my boyfriend into the room in the middle of the day and we weren’t even touching and she had a full--blown meltdown. ”
“Shit,” I say. Some of it tracks—-that not--quite--smooth pattern to conversation, the sense of a person who has been outside of society.
“Sometimes she scared me,” Marie says plainly.
“There was an edge to her. Like if she got set off the wrong way . . . I don’t want to say she was angry or, I don’t know, malevolent, but looking back, I think she had no idea how to deal with uncomfortable situations and emotions.
To be honest, I was glad when she dropped out.
” She rubs the back of her neck, looking self--conscious at having shared so much.
“Do you know why she did?” I ask. “It was right around when her father died, right?”
“Yeah. I mean, I assume that was why,” she says. “He died, she left school for a couple weeks, and she never came back. Her sister came to box up her things at one point and said she’d been in a car accident.”
“An accident?” I repeat.
“Yeah. She was okay, but her sister said she couldn’t make the trip. That’s the last we heard from any of them. I sent her an email just to say hey, but she never responded.”
I ask a few more questions, but she doesn’t have much more to offer. I thank her and hang up, and then, without much hope, I plug in “Emily Hill car accident” and a date range into a search engine.
To my surprise, I get a result. A tiny entertainment outlet has the stub of an article about the accident—-because Liam was driving.
Single--car accident, I read. Slick road, middle of the night, lost control, sister in the passenger seat.
Liam broke his arm. His sister was reported to have suffered serious injuries but was expected to recover.
It sounds worse than Melinda let on to the roommate.
I look at the name of the road. I know it. It’s not far from the Hills’ place. It’s barely more than a single--lane road, and it doesn’t lead anywhere you’d be in a hurry to get in the middle of the night, which raises the question of what they were doing out there.
I know Liam was using by then. Wagner’s name pops up in the article, saying drugs weren’t believed to be a factor, but it wouldn’t be the first time he bent over backwards for the Hills.
I tug on my lip. Something happened in those few weeks, obviously.
The simplest explanation, of course, is also the least exciting: Going home made her realize she was unhappy.
An unrelated accident made it so she’d have to miss more school anyway, and she realized she might as well drop out and call it quits.
Or there’s something tucked between her father’s death and that accident. A third factor, a hidden reason.
What happens when someone dies? The family converges. A funeral is arranged. The remains of a life are examined, divvied up, cleared out.
When my grandmother died, my mother spent a week with her siblings emptying her house. I remember her coming home with a box of letters—-love letters, and not from my grandfather. She had a whole life she never told us about, she’d said, laying the letters out on the table.
There was more than a box of love letters for the Hills to find.
That year, Andrew was still playing professionally. Melinda’s congressional campaign was gearing up, and Liam was getting buzz as an up--and--coming actor.
None of which would be impacted by having their next--door neighbor turn out to be a serial killer. But their father? That would have derailed everything.
I pull up the photo of Liam from the website again, looking not at Liam but at Emily—-what little of her I can see. This keeps coming back to her. She’s the one who never really left home. She’s the one who stayed in that place, and who left those marks on the wall, on the trees.
They knew. They had to. Emily sank into isolation and her own strange mind. Liam numbed himself with drugs. Andrew and Melinda—-they’d been older. Got out sooner. Emily said her father changed after her mother died.
On impulse, I send a quick message to Marie asking if she has any photos of Emily.
A few minutes later, she comes through. Just one: Emily and Marie standing together in a college dorm room.
Marie is smiling in a T--shirt sporting an 8--bit character I don’t recognize.
Emily looks like she’s just remembered she should be smiling but hasn’t gotten around to it.
She has one arm across her body, gripping the opposite arm tightly.
She looks like a deer in the headlights.
She’s strikingly young compared to the Emily I know, a softness to her features that has long since withered away.
I look between the two photos. There’s less than a year between them. Stacked together, Emily’s tense stance and stricken expression feel less like a bad photo and more like a bad omen. This was not a happy girl.
My phone chimes. It’s a text from Len. Check the news, he says. Making announcement now.
I pull up the local news, and right on the front page of the website is a link to a livestream of a press conference. There’s a man in a state police uniform talking. I recognize the FBI agent behind him, and Chief Wagner—-and Melinda is standing off to the side, too.
I barely hear the words: “Believe Mr. Butler acted alone . . . no further threat to the community . . . work in the days and months ahead to identify the victims.”
Melinda’s expression is perfectly somber.
Calm and in control, and why shouldn’t it be?
She’s succeeded. No one is going to be looking for reasons it might not have been Terry Butler, not when the bodies are on his land, the trophies in his attic.
How long ago did they plant those? I wonder.
How long have they been planning for a contingency like this?
You did good, Len texts. It’s over.
Next to the video, a live chat scrolls by, people adding comments. There are a lot of people watching. I hadn’t realized how much attention this was getting. God rest their souls, someone writes.
What is it about the PNW and serial killers????
FBI guy’s hott
And then, flashing by so fast I barely see it: They’re lying. Butler didn’t do it.
I scroll back up, but the message is gone—-like it was deleted as fast as it was posted. But I saw the username before it vanished. NoOneYouKnow.
Another way of saying stranger.