Photograph, page 15
When I turned around, I saw a cat on the hood of one of the cars in the parking lot. With its wet fur clinging to its bones, it looked like a large skinny rat. We eyed each other for a while, neither one of us moving, but the cat finally won the staring contest. I moved off, leaving it alone.
Everywhere I go these days, I see cats. It’s like they’re following me. Watching me. In ancient Egypt, cats were supposed to be symbols of good luck, but I didn’t feel particularly lucky.
I didn’t go back to my room. My footsteps led me to the empty lot out back where the wing of the motel ended. I came around the corner of the building. The rain poured through an overhead security light in silver streaks. Where the gravel ended, a dark band of trees stretched like a burglar’s mask between me and a few vacation cottages. Only a couple of house lights were lit at this hour, staring back at me like golden eyes.
In my mind, I saw Dawn West.
Was she a ghost?
She ran from the trees in front of me, long sandy hair blowing wildly, her face screwed up in terror. It was so vivid it felt real. She was being chased. I stood rigid and terrified as she ran toward me, but when she was only a few feet away, an explosion made me cover my ears as the gun went off. The life went out of Dawn’s eyes in an instant. Before she fell, I saw what it meant to die, saw that instant when you cross over to the other side. Her body pitched forward, and then it disappeared, melting into nothingness in one of the glistening puddles.
Because none of this was real.
I was alone.
If the vision had lasted a few seconds longer, I would have seen the man with the gun right behind Dawn. I would have seen who he was. But no. He was already gone. He was lost in the night.
I shivered as the rain soaked me.
My thoughts wandered to Jenny Curtis. I remembered the things that Maro had told me about twin shadows. Here I was, hunting for a killer in Michigan, trying to put a name and an identity to the man in the woods.
But what if a killer was hunting me, too?
I took a step toward the trees, then stopped. My eyes narrowed. I heard the snap of a branch underfoot, of something moving in the woods. A squirrel, a rabbit, a fox? Or was it something else? I knew my way around nocturnal beasts, and I knew what they could do when they set their sights on prey.
My experience told me that this was not an animal. This was a man.
The sensation rippled up my spine that someone was spying on me. I drew my Glock from my pocket—it’s always with me—and held it out in the rain where it was visible in the gleam of the overhead light. I wanted whoever it was to see it. Carefully, I backed away, keeping my eyes on the trees, until the wall of the motel gave me cover. At that point, I turned and walked back to my room.
I went inside, breathing hard, trying to manage my nerves the way my self-defense instructors had taught me. I closed and locked the door, and I turned off the lights. Better not to let anyone see which room was mine.
Jesus!
I was acting crazy. No one was out there. But I thought again about Maro forecasting an inevitable collision between me and the man who had tracked me through my prior lives. As I sat in the darkness, a premonition flashed through my mind with absolute certainty.
He’s coming.
Finally, I was ready to open Dawn’s box of memories.
It had been shut up for a long time. The transfer back to her parents was dated on a white label, with the police surrendering the box in 2002, three years after the murder. From the look of it, Gretchen had been telling me the truth. She hadn’t opened it since then.
I cut through the tight tape seals with a pocketknife. When I peeled back the flaps of the lid, cheap perfume wafted up at me. This wasn’t Dawn’s ghost showing up again. The police had emptied her nightstand of personal effects, and the contents included a small bottle of Tommy Girl perfume. It had tipped over and leaked over the years. But smelling it made me feel as if I’d rubbed a lamp and let a genie emerge like a cloud into my motel room.
The box was full to the top. Everything inside felt sacred, made spiritual by the murder. I didn’t like the idea of the big hands of a detective like Phil Potter pawing over the intimate possessions of a teenage girl. I took each item out slowly, with reverence, trying to let the contents talk to me and tell me about Dawn. It was strange how the simplest items took on a deeper meaning with time. A nail file. A plastic box of multicolored barrettes. Two crumpled dollar bills. A pencil with an eraser shaped like a kitten. A velvet jewelry box with one cubic zirconia earring inside pretending to be a diamond. A couple of old music CD cases. Backstreet Boys. Dixie Chicks. The disc for Wide Open Spaces was missing.
Dawn had bought lipstick, but she hadn’t used it. It was still in its original package. She wore Secret roll-on antiperspirant. She read books by Sarah Dessen and Judy Blume, and she had a well-thumbed paperback of the first Harry Potter novel. Of course. Schoolbooks, too. A Norton Anthology of English Literature. An American history book. Introduction to Trigonometry, its pages filled with messy scribbled notes. A science book called Fundamentals of Practical Biology.
But what did any of this tell me about her? Nothing, really. This was the ordinary life of an ordinary teenage girl.
I kept digging.
I had so many questions for Dawn.
Why were you so scared that night? Why didn’t you tell your parents? Or the police? Did you talk to anyone else about what was going on in your life? Did you have a boyfriend? Were you in love? Did you have vices no one knew about? Did you know why you were being chased?
I unfolded a stapled set of two pages and found an old math assignment—trig identities written out in red ink, the answers done with a girl’s precise, confident flourishes. She’d written her name in big curly letters on the top of the page. Dawn West. The math may as well have been a foreign language to me. I’d never been good at any of that. But this girl was smart. She’d done it all in pen, nothing crossed out.
I turned the pages over and saw a different handwriting, a different ink. A letter grade: A++. Then a brief note below it:
Terrific work as usual, Dawn. See me after class, okay? I want to discuss something with you.
—RK
Underneath the note, in her same red ink, Dawn had drawn a heart surrounded by little stars.
RK, I guessed, was Rick Kaslan, her teacher. And now the principal of Devil Creek High School. When I glanced at the date on the assignment, I saw that it was from January of 1999, months before the summer murder.
Why would Dawn keep a single assignment like this in her nightstand?
And why had she drawn the heart below the note?
I was nearing the bottom of the box.
That was when I saw a few dozen glossy folders, the kind used by photo labs when developing prints. These were Dawn’s photographs. My heart thumped with anticipation, because her pictures were as close to a diary as I was going to get. I laid each of the folders out on the bed, looking at the processing dates and flipping through the pictures like playing cards as I sorted them into calendar order. Most had been 24-exposure rolls. The photos had been sealed up for years, so they hadn’t faded over time, the colors still vibrant.
I started with the most recent rolls first. Dawn had developed film only a month before her death. The envelope was dated July 1999, when school was out, when she was on her own in the town of Devil Creek. I expected to see pictures of friends, of weekend road trips to Chicago or Kalamazoo, of Dawn making faces for the camera. But I was disappointed. Almost nothing of Dawn’s personal life showed up on film. She was a nature and wildlife photographer, doing close-ups of leaves and blackberries, of driftwood on the Lake Michigan beach, of cardinals perched on a tree branch. Each shot looked carefully framed, no errant out-of-focus pictures. I suspected she had used a tripod and staged each photograph before squeezing the shutter.
It made me a little sad to feel the loneliness in these photographs. Did Dawn not have a life with other people? Had she not thought her own life was worth recording on film? I saw the outside world through her eyes, but nothing of her inner world. Regardless, at sixteen years old, her skill was impressive. The girl who was good at math was good at photography, too. She wasn’t just technically proficient—the light perfect, the f-stop exactly right—but she also had an instinct for the artistic components of a photograph that would make you stop and stare.
I kept going backward roll by roll until there were only three folders left on the bed. They dated to October and November 1997, not quite two years before Dawn was killed. Looking at these photographs, I had the impression that she was just starting out on her hobby. The pictures were rougher, not as mature, not as composed, the focus occasionally off, the exposure sometimes a little too dark or a little too light. She was still learning.
Gretchen had said: We gave her a camera for Christmas when she was fourteen.
Her subjects in most of these early pictures were the same—the beach, the trees, the birds, and the bees. However, in the oldest roll, I saw something else, something that made my heart flutter with an extra thump. Cornfields. Dirt roads. Dawn had shot an entire roll of film in an area that didn’t match the rest of her portfolio.
I slowed down, picking up each picture, carefully looking for details that might give me a clue where they’d been taken, because this roll felt like the answer I had been searching for. I didn’t find the location of the pictures, but I found something else. Something more important.
A shadow.
The photograph I held in my hand showed a rutted road leading arrow straight toward the horizon, and a tall human shadow cast by the setting sun cut across the road like the silhouette of a giant.
Dawn was not alone.
I turned to the next photograph, and there she was.
I saw the woman who had cast the shadow. She stood on the dirt road, her back to the camera, but she’d twisted around to look over her shoulder, as if Dawn had called to her. She wore a black down vest over a white turtleneck and black jeans. Her feet were in hiking boots. She had a camera in her hands, and I knew the brand without looking at it.
Konica.
The woman was a timeless beauty, in her mid-twenties, with lush dark hair down to her shoulders, a tall athletic frame, sunny features, and a smile so warm I could feel it like brandy in my chest a quarter century later. The focus was not perfect. If I’d scanned the picture and zoomed in, I wouldn’t have seen more details. The woman’s features didn’t match perfectly. They’d been changed over the years by someone who wanted to leave her past behind.
But that didn’t matter. I knew.
It was Faith Selby.
PART TWO
BLUE EYE
EIGHTEEN
The next morning, Detective Chuck Kimble picked me up in the motel parking lot in his green Pontiac.
We were heading south of St. Joe to meet his predecessor on the Dawn West case, Phil Potter. Phil had agreed to talk to me, but only if Kimble came along for the ride. I didn’t know if that was Phil’s idea or Chuck’s, but I was the outsider in this town, so I wasn’t in a position to argue.
Lake Michigan came and went beside the highway in a splash of sapphire blue. Kimble wore sunglasses to drive, so I couldn’t see his eyes. He wasn’t exactly a chatterbox. We’d gone five miles before he said a word, and when he finally spoke, it was to ask if I’d mind him putting on the radio. Up until that point, the car had been silent. I said sure, and he surprised me with his musical taste, which was classical.
I have a hard time restraining my mouth, so I said, “Berlioz? Really? I would have figured you for a Taylor Swift fan.”
Kimble’s head swiveled to look at me. His dark eyebrows arched behind his sunglasses.
“Joke,” I said.
His lips twitched, but not enough to be called an actual smile.
“Are you a Swiftie?” he asked in his sober rumble.
“Not so much, but props that you know what they’re called.”
“I have a fifteen-year-old daughter,” he replied.
“Ah. Got it.”
Five more miles of silence passed, except for the bells of Symphonie fantastique. It was obvious that the conversation between us was not going to continue unless I continued it. “So do you have just the one daughter? Any other kids?”
“I have a son too. He’s twenty. He goes to college in Ann Arbor.”
“How long have you been married?”
“I’m divorced,” Kimble replied.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. We’re both better off. Cops make terrible husbands.”
He was right, but I figured it would be tactless to agree with him. “What are the names of your kids?”
“Jack and Jill.”
“Seriously?”
“That was my ex-wife’s sense of humor.”
I didn’t laugh, but actually, it was pretty funny. I doubted that I would ever meet Mrs. Ex–Chuck Kimble, but I had the feeling I’d like her. I hunted around for something else to say, but I’d run out of small talk. I resigned myself to forty more miles of silence, but Kimble turned the tables on me.
“So I did some homework on you,” he said.
“Oh?”
He nodded but didn’t add anything more, which was fine. Homework meant he’d talked to the local Florida cops about my background, and that meant he knew about my assault. He didn’t patronize me with the usual that-must-be-rough nonsense, which I appreciated. He just wanted me to know that he knew. Honestly, I could tell by the way he looked at my scar.
I wasn’t surprised that he’d been doing research on me. Smart cops don’t let a PI into their territory without knowing something about them. Even so, I didn’t particularly like that he knew my story. If he knew, then Phil Potter knew, and most of the other cops in Devil Creek probably knew, too. Once people hear that you’ve been a victim of a violent crime, they tend to assume that’s what defines you. They put Crime Victim in capital letters as your identity.
“You lost your mother, huh?” Kimble added.
My, my. He really did do his homework. He didn’t use the word suicide, but he didn’t need to. There was no other reason to bring it up.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What about your father? Is he still around?”
“He is, but we’re not very close. He and my mom divorced. It wasn’t long after that she—”
Kimble nodded. “Yeah, the scars from that run pretty deep. My folks divorced, too. I guess it runs in the family for me. Got any siblings?”
“No. It’s just me. What about you?”
“A younger sister.”
“Are you close?”
This time he actually smiled. His sister seemed to be a soft spot in the otherwise hard world of Chuck Kimble. “Yeah. Seems like siblings are either super close or they don’t speak to each other at all, right? We were the close ones. We told each other everything. My parents were busy screaming at each other, so I sort of feel like I raised Bug myself. We lived together for years after I moved to Devil Creek and before I got married. I don’t see her much now that she’s on her own, but we still talk most days.”
That was a lot of words to come out of his mouth, which otherwise didn’t have much to say.
“Bug?” I asked.
Kimble chuckled. “If you’re an older brother, it’s pretty much required that you give your sister an awful nickname.”
“Well, nickname or not, you’re lucky,” I said. “I wish I had that. After me, my mom decided she was one and done. I didn’t mind, because we had each other, but with her gone, I feel the absence now. I can’t pick up the phone to call her anymore, and I don’t have anyone else.”
I really hadn’t intended to say any of that. I wasn’t sure why I was opening up to this man. But I guess if someone shares with me, I share right back. It occurred to me that this was an old trick in a police detective’s repertoire, and I wondered if he’d been fishing to get me to talk about myself.
Did he even have a sister?
“By the way, I found Faith Selby,” I told him.
He peeled off his sunglasses. “What?”
“I found a picture of her in Dawn’s things.”
“And you’re only telling me this now?” Kimble asked.
Sharing time was over. We were back to business.
“I only found the picture last night. I didn’t think you’d want me to call you at two in the morning.”
“Where did you get Dawn’s things?”
“From a box her mother gave me. Phil Potter gathered it all up from Dawn’s bedroom after the murder. Three years later, Gretchen asked to get it back. It’s been sealed up since then. She never looked inside.”
A little hiss escaped between Kimble’s lips.
“You didn’t know?” I guessed.
“Phil never mentioned it when I took over the case. I want to see that box.”
“Sure. When we get back, I’ll grab it from my room.” Then I pulled out my phone and opened up a digital copy of the photograph I’d found of Faith Selby. “This is the picture. Dawn took it. It was in a roll of film dating back almost two years before she was killed. Obviously, Faith is much younger here. She changed her look quite a bit, but it’s definitely her.”
Kimble steered the Pontiac onto the dirt shoulder of the highway. He took my phone in his hands and studied the photograph. He squinted and had to hold the phone close to his eyes.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Well, Dawn did. They were out there taking pictures together. Just the look on Faith’s face, the casualness of the shot, makes me think they were friends. Her mother and her brother both thought Faith looked familiar, but they couldn’t place the face. I figure I’ll drop by later and see if they recognize this woman. Faith would have been in her mid-twenties back then. The question is, Who was she, and what did she mean to Dawn?”
