Photograph, page 11
“I went down that road years ago, Shannon. No, whoever the killer was, he wore gloves. I asked about the possibility of DNA, but the police found no skin or blood that would have belonged to the person who did this. Jenny never had a chance to fight back.”
“I understand.”
Chris slid off one of his shoes and used his foot to stroke the beagle who was sleeping at his feet. “I’ll be losing this guy soon. He’s struggling. I got my first beagle shortly after Jenny was killed. For companionship. When I lost him, I found this guy. I’m not sure I’ll get another when he goes. Olivia thinks I should find a puppy, but I don’t know. It’s probably time to be on my own.”
“I’m sorry.”
He kept caressing the dog, a faraway smile on his face. I wondered if he was thinking about his wife. “May I ask you something, Shannon?”
“Of course.”
“Do you believe any of this? I’m not saying you’re lying. I don’t think you are. But do you actually believe it?”
That was a good question. I’d been asking myself that same question for days.
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
“I can’t. Not really. All I can figure is that years ago, someone told me the story. It lodged in my head. After I was assaulted, my brain began to replay that story whenever I fell asleep.”
Chris nodded. “It doesn’t explain the details, though, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
He stared at me with a wistful expression. We weren’t of the same generation, and there was certainly nothing sexual in how he looked at me. But there was a longing in his face nevertheless, and I realized what it was. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to think that his wife was living on in me. And I think he was a little disappointed that I was convinced there had to be a rational explanation.
“So what happens next, Shannon?” he asked.
I stood up from the chair. My coffee was done. Outside, the storm was already passing by us to the east.
“I don’t think anything happens next, sir. I’ve learned what I needed to learn, and there really isn’t anywhere to go from here. I’ve taken enough of your time. And it may not mean anything coming from me, but I’m very sorry for what happened to your wife.”
“I appreciate that,” he replied.
I began to head to the door, but then I stopped. There was one more thing I wanted. “Actually—and please feel free to say no—do you mind if I see where it happened?”
“Go ahead, if you’d like,” Chris told me. “It’s the room on the left at the top of the stairs. It faces the street. I confess, I’m not sure I can be in that room myself today, not after what you’ve told me. But go on up.”
“Thank you. I’ll only be a moment.”
I left the sunroom and faced the dark walnut stairs. Somehow I knew I was making a mistake by doing this, but an impulse drove me forward anyway. I heard my voice on the recording. He’s coming up the stairs. I took the steps one at a time, slowly, the way the killer would have done. In my hand, I felt the weight of the Smith & Wesson. The house was quiet. He was sure no one was home. He’d done this twice before, but he was scared anyway.
He didn’t know she was there.
The farther I went, the more I felt myself becoming him. Seeing the house through his eyes. I felt his presence with me, almost like he was inside me. My twin shadow. I reached the second story. I saw double doors that swung inside to the bedroom, and I pushed through them into the darkness. The curtains were closed. Only a crack of light came through from the cloudy day outside.
I could hear the sound of his heavy, frightened breath in my chest. The gun was slippery in his hand. My hand.
Money. Jewelry. Valuables. Get them and get out.
But oh shit, there she was. He wasn’t alone! The house wasn’t empty! In the shadows, he saw the woman in a robe, her face screwed up with terror. He heard her panicked voice. God, don’t hurt me! Take what you want! Please, I have a husband, a daughter! I won’t say a thing!
His arm trembled. I felt the weight of his panic, his indecision. He wanted to run. Go. Escape. Get away. But she’d seen his face. She was lying; she wouldn’t stay quiet. She’d tell the police everything.
He had the gun. That was why he had the gun.
Never leave witnesses.
He raised the Smith & Wesson, struggling to hold it steady.
She took two steps forward, pleading with him. The crack of light that broke between the curtains illuminated her face. He could see her clearly now. I could see her clearly. I saw every detail of her face as I pointed the revolver at her and began pulling the trigger.
But it wasn’t Jenny Curtis.
It was me.
TWELVE
Chris Curtis found me on the bedroom floor. I’d fainted, which was something I’d never done in my life. It turned out that Chris was a retired doctor, and he made sure I’d done no damage to myself in the fall. He offered, suggested, ordered me to go to the hospital, but I was pretty determined—determined, that’s me—to get the hell out of Angola as quickly as possible. I blamed the incident on lack of sleep, lack of food, and dehydration after my long drive.
I didn’t tell him about my vision.
I barely acknowledged to myself that my vision had changed again. Even worse, it had begun to make its way into my waking hours. This was new. This was different. I thought about calling Maro to tell her what had happened, but I was afraid she would tell me what I already feared, in places of my mind that I didn’t usually go. I’d made a mistake coming to Angola, a mistake finding out more about Jenny Curtis, a mistake, mistake, mistake going to her house and talking to her husband and seeing the bedroom where she’d been murdered.
Because you know what it felt like to me?
You know what I was really scared of?
That somehow I’d been passed the torch. That Jenny Curtis had been the target, the victim—but now it was me. I’d inherited her legacy. By standing in that bedroom, I’d set things in motion that I couldn’t stop. I was on a collision course with a man who was hunting me.
Crazy? Sure.
But I saw what I saw. My vision came through the eyes of my twin shadow, and now he had me in his sights.
When I was finally back on the highway, I felt a little better. The farther I got from Angola, the more what had happened to me began to fade and seem unreal. I laughed at myself, the way you laugh in the darkness to scare away the ghosts. I had to focus on an actual mystery, not one that was just a fantasy in my head.
That mystery was centered in the town of Devil Creek, Michigan.
It was evening by the time I arrived. The summer sun was waning. Before going to the motel, I did a driving tour of the town. Devil Creek was caught somewhere between suburb and city, between urban and rural, between large and small. The signs told me that ten thousand people lived here, but I had no idea where they all were, because I saw hardly anyone. Devil Creek hugged the shore of Lake Michigan, a place where the summer tourists came to play on the beach, but when I drove inland, I saw the town’s multiple personalities.
There had once been a manufacturing base here, producing God knows what. That sector had obviously gone away long ago, along with most of its jobs, because I found abandoned warehouses and weedy railroad tracks that hadn’t felt the rumble of trains in years. Graffiti covered most of the building walls. Rusting barbed wire fences tried to keep out the vandals, but the invaders had won, because I saw large sections of fence cut away and peeled back to let in trespassers. A muddy river raced like a snake through this part of town, heading for the lake, and I wondered if this was the namesake waterway of Devil Creek.
Not far away, I found where the small cadre of upper-class people lived. Every town had a place like this for its doctors, lawyers, and bankers. Big, multistory homes walled off from the real world. Huge green lawns watered by irrigation systems. Swimming pools and landscaped gardens where weeds didn’t dare grow. Gas-guzzling monster SUVs sitting like tanks in the driveways. If you didn’t have the money to be here, you didn’t dare come, as if an invisible dog collar would give you a shock if you crossed the border.
Where the developed land ended, the Midwest emptiness took over again. As night fell, I came upon mile after mile of dense forest and rows of ripe cornfields. Dirt roads, rutted from tire tracks in the rain, wound from the highway into the darkness of the woods. It was a place where change was measured in decades, not years. It was also a place of extremes, from the subzero winters and deep, deep snow to the blistering heat of summer. I smelled dust, pine, and flowers on the wind, I saw the fairy glow of lightning bugs floating in the air, and I heard the whispering rustle of leaves, as if the trees were gossiping about this stranger in their midst.
I remembered what Kate had told me about the remote settings in her mother’s photographs. I could easily imagine Faith Selby—whoever she was then—roaming this landscape with her Konica camera.
Finally, I pulled up to the Thunder Mountain Motel. It was located on the north–south highway that played peekaboo with the lake, half a mile from the water, with high sand dunes blocking the view. This was a visitor’s motel, a cheap overnight stay for someone who’d gotten tired of driving and wasn’t ready to push on a few more hours to Chicago or Detroit. A pizza place was next door. The motel, which was on the east side of the highway, backed up to a stand of evergreens, but I could see the lights of a few houses behind the trees.
I parked where Vince Marmaide had parked his white plumbing supply truck years ago. The very same spot. I got out into the warm, quiet evening. The motel was crowded with cars. It was August, the prime season for beachgoers. I could hear voices and televisions behind the closed doors, but no one was outside. The blue sky of daylight had given way to slate clouds with the darkness, and it had been raining hard for half an hour. Reflections shone on the wet pavement from the overhead lights. The Coke machine hummed, offering me a selection of regular, diet, and zero.
Déjà vu.
This was like Faith Selby’s photograph come to life. I pictured that little girl standing by the pop machine in her bare feet and damp hair. I wondered which room had been hers and whether she’d heard the shots when the murder happened. I was near the rear of the motel. Where the building ended, I found an empty gravel lot that led toward the evergreen trees. Standing there, I shivered as I got soaked. Litter tumbled across the ground with the lake breeze. Fast-food bags. A deflated beach ball. A torn condom wrapper. Back here, you couldn’t see the highway, which probably made it a popular spot for high school trysts and illicit drug sales.
This area right here, near the trees, was where Dawn West’s body had been found.
Dawn hadn’t been staying at the motel. She lived with her parents and brother in a rural house two miles away. She’d been wearing a bikini top, shorts, and Nikes. The police had concluded that she’d walked here from her house around two in the morning, but nobody knew why.
Had she been meeting someone?
A boyfriend?
A drug dealer?
The killer, according to Detective Kimble, had come from the woods behind her. No footprints. No evidence of a vehicle. No witnesses—or at least, no witnesses who would admit to seeing anything. The killer had fired two shots, one that missed, one that hit Dawn in the head. She died instantly.
Awakened by the noise, a motel guest had found her body only seconds later, blood still pooling on the dirty pavement.
Whoever had pulled the trigger was already gone.
I checked in at the office on the highway side of the motel. The owner and manager, Wayne Donalds, ran my credit card and gave me my key. It was still a real key, not one of the electronic cards you get in most motels now. Wayne looked to be in his seventies, and when I asked how long he’d owned the motel, he told me that he and his wife had bought it thirty-five years ago, when they’d had enough of the hustle and bustle of Chicago. His wife was gone now, but he was still running the motel and probably would until he keeled over.
“So you must remember the murder,” I commented.
The motel looked like the kind of place that might have had more than one murder in thirty-five years, so I added, “The teenage girl? Dawn West?”
Wayne’s dark-brown eyes hooded with suspicion. He was a small man, slightly stooped, with long gray hair tied in a ponytail behind his back, giving him a high forehead. His wrinkled face was long and narrow. He was dressed in what looked like Walmart fashion, a cheap T-shirt and baggy jeans, and the stains and rips made me think he’d had this outfit for a long time. Neither Wayne nor the downscale motel screamed of money.
“Why are you asking about her?” he said.
I came clean.
“There have been a couple of murders in Florida this summer that might have a connection to the cold case up here. I’m working with the local police to see if we can figure out what ties them together.”
Okay, I didn’t exactly admit that I wasn’t a cop, but I also didn’t lie and say that I was. If he assumed it, well, that was on him.
“Shit,” he replied, drawing out the word with a scowl. “That’s the last thing I need, that case being dragged up again. When it happened, it nearly drove us out of business. People don’t make reservations at motels where teenagers get shot. Back then, the papers made it sound like we were ground zero for prostitution or drugs, like that’s why the girl was killed.”
“Was it?”
“No!” Wayne growled. “I mean, if stuff goes on behind the motel, there’s nothing I can do about that. Teenagers do what they want. But this girl, Dawn, she wasn’t staying here. My wife and I didn’t know who she was, never seen her before. Her getting killed had nothing to do with us. You ask me, the police tried to paint our place as the fall guy. Tried to hassle us out of business. But you know what? It’s years later, and I’m still standing.”
“What else do you remember about that night?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Not much. It was what, three in the morning? Diane and I were fast asleep. We didn’t even hear the shots. Next thing I know, guests are banging on our door, and police cars are screaming into the parking lot.”
“I’d like to know who was staying here. Do you still have registration records from back then?”
“I did, but the police took those years ago. They interviewed everybody that night, but a few of the guests had already split. Some of the booked rooms were empty by the time the cops got there. Can’t say I blame them.”
“So Dawn West could have been coming to see somebody in one of those empty rooms? I mean, the girl walked here from home a couple of miles away. It was the middle of the night. Sounds like she was meeting somebody.”
His face darkened. “There was never any proof of that.”
“I didn’t say there was. It’s just a thought. Well, I appreciate your time, Mr. Donalds. Listen, can I show you a picture of somebody? I want to know if you recognize her.”
Wayne didn’t say yes or no, so I dug out my phone and found a photo of Faith Selby that Kate had given me. I showed Wayne the picture. “This woman. Have you seen her before? I’ve got a hunch that she was at the motel that night. She would have been a lot younger, of course.”
He squinted as he studied Faith’s photograph, and I enlarged it to zoom in on her face. Wayne shook his head.
“She doesn’t look familiar, but after all this time, who knows?”
“Okay. Thanks. One more thing, and then I’m done, I promise.”
I hauled a copy of Millennium Memories from my travel bag and put it on the counter. Before I could even open the book to the page with Faith’s photograph, Wayne exhaled like he was spitting.
“Ah, goddamn it, that thing again.”
“You know the book?”
He rolled his eyes. “Hell, yeah, I know it. That book cost me half a dozen reservations this summer.”
“How so?”
“I’ve got a longtime regular,” Donalds explained. “Comes for a week in June every year. He’s been doing it for fifteen years or more. Guy’s a high school social studies teacher in Chicago. Loves history. He came here the second week of June all excited. Said he couldn’t wait until he came back, because he found the motel in a book of turn-of-the-century photographs last fall. He showed it to me, said he recognized the motel right away. I was like, ‘Yeah, big deal, so what,’ but this guy had already told the local paper about it. He thought he was doing me a favor, you know? But the paper did an article about the book and the photograph, and then they dredged up the murder, too, and all the shitty rumors about the motel. Three guests checked out early the same day. Three regulars with relatives around here called to cancel their summer trips.”
I whistled silently. “So the book and the photograph were featured in the local paper this summer?”
“Yup.”
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Donalds.”
I took my key and my bag, and I went back out into the rain.
I’d only been in Devil Creek a short time, but I’d already resolved one element of the mystery. I knew how an obscure book of photographs had led to the deaths of Bruce Falline and Faith Selby. A killer had opened up the local newspaper with his morning cornflakes and seen that years-old picture of a little girl at the motel staring back at him.
That told me something else, too.
The killer was close by.
THIRTEEN
Overnight, my new vision returned.
When I fell asleep, I switched places again with my twin shadow. In my mind now, I was him, going up the stairs to the bedroom where his soon-to-be victim was waiting. The Smith & Wesson felt heavy in my hand, and its hammer was cocked, ready to fire. I came through the bedroom door, and when I saw the face of the woman I was about to kill, it was my own face screwed up in fear.
Shannon Wells, not Jenny Curtis.
I awoke with a start, my head and shoulders lurching off the pillow.
