Photograph, page 17
“Oh! Seriously? I mean, everybody assumed—are you sure? I never heard that.”
I said nothing for a while as Kaslan fidgeted in his chair. Then I went on. “Dawn was killed nine days later. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence, does it? What were people saying at school? Did they think her death was connected to what happened to the Daughertys?”
“The police didn’t think so.”
“What about you? What did you think?”
“Me? I was just a teacher. I didn’t have anything to do with that.” I didn’t get a lily-white smile this time. His voice sounded harder and colder, and he checked his watch again. “I really do need to go, Shannon.”
“Sure.” I pushed myself out of the plastic chair, and then I grabbed my phone from my pocket. “One last question, Rick. Do you recognize this woman? Do you know who she is?”
I showed him the picture of the young Faith Selby.
The beautiful blond on the dirt road, turning back to look at the camera, a hypnotizing smile on her face.
“Dawn took this photograph,” I added. “Whoever this woman is, she and Dawn knew each other, but I haven’t been able to identify her.”
Rick glanced impatiently at the woman’s face, then did a double take. He obviously didn’t expect to know her, but he did. “Oh my God, that’s—that’s Lara. I haven’t seen her in decades. What does Lara have to do with any of this?”
TWENTY
I felt like I was standing by the ocean in Daytona Beach with a rogue wave crashing over my head. “Lara?”
“Lara Lovell.”
The name rolled around in my head like a fragment of a song you’ve been trying to identify for days.
Lara Lovell.
She was a stranger but not a stranger.
Just find out who I am, Shannon.
Nine months ago, I’d tried to do that, and I’d failed. Now here I was, a thousand miles from home, and I finally knew the identity she’d concealed. Faith Selby had begun her life as a woman named Lara Lovell.
If only I’d found the truth sooner.
Would Faith still be alive? Would Kate still have her mother in her life?
“What can you tell me about her?” I asked Rick.
He continued to stare at my phone as if absorbed by the face in the photograph. This time his white smile looked genuine. Whoever Lara was, she’d been special to him. Then he shook himself back to reality and handed me the phone.
“Lara and I were good friends here at school. We were both first-timers. First-year teachers.”
“Was it that same school year? Right before Dawn was killed?”
Rick shook his head. “No, this was the previous year. Lara was brought in to teach art. Painting, ceramics, design, that kind of thing.”
“Photography?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. Lara was an avid photographer. She took amazing pictures. She put them up all over her classroom. On weekends, she’d get up before dawn and drive out to the empty lands around the state to get the best light. Sometimes she’d spend an hour or more on a single exposure to get it exactly right. A lot of times, she wouldn’t get back home until well after dark.”
“Sounds like you knew her pretty well.”
“I did,” Rick replied. He was silent again, remembering. “Lara was very special. Incredibly empathetic. She had this amazing ability to be liked immediately by just about everyone. Men were drawn to her. I mean, you can see in the picture that she was beautiful, but it was more than that. She had an attractive soul; she was the kind of person you wanted to get close to.”
“Was she from around here?” I asked.
Rick rubbed his chin. “No. She was from Michigan, but as I recall, she grew up farther north. A small town on the lake. Frankfort, I think? Jobs were scarce for teachers up there, so that’s why she came down here. The previous arts teacher in Devil Creek retired, and the school posted the job. Lara was new to the field, but she already had her master’s in education. So they got a smart, talented teacher for dirt cheap.”
“That would have been the fall of 1997?”
“Sounds right.”
I stared at the picture on my phone. Lara was very special. Incredibly empathetic.
It was easy to imagine a lonely fourteen-year-old girl asking her new teacher for help with art and life. So Lara and Dawn went out to the empty Michigan roads one weekend in October that year, and Lara began to show the girl how to use a camera.
Dawn, in turn, snapped a photograph of Lara Lovell.
“You never answered my question,” Rick said. “What does Lara have to do with any of this?”
I let out my breath in a long sigh. “The woman murdered in Florida this summer was Lara. She was living there under a new identity.”
Rick’s face tightened with dismay. The news seemed to come as a genuine shock. “Lara’s dead? Oh my God, I can’t believe it. That is so incredibly sad. Why would anyone kill her?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” I switched my phone to show him the photograph from Millennium Memories. “Lara took this picture at the Thunder Mountain Motel. It was the same night Dawn was murdered. Do you have any idea who the little girl is? Did Lara have a younger sister or a daughter?”
“Not that I knew of,” Rick said. He studied the photograph as if it were a postcard from an old friend. “She had no siblings, and her parents were both dead. They were much older. One had a stroke, the other a heart attack, both gone within six months of each other. I think that was what made Lara very attuned to emotions in others. She was young, but she’d gone through a lot. She was already alone in life.”
Easier to disappear that way, I thought.
“So Lara and Dawn must have been close,” I said.
“Thinking back, yes, they were. I’m not sure I could have told you that before, but seeing her picture again, I remember the two of them having a strong bond with each other. Lara thought Dawn had so much potential. She told me that Dawn had one of those student-teacher crushes on her. Not romantic or sexual, nothing like that. But when a teenager finds a mentor, they can pour so much emotion into that relationship.”
Yes, I could see that with a girl like Dawn. She idolized Lara. She spilled her secrets to Lara.
And when she was scared, she ran to Lara for help.
“What about Lara’s personal life?” I asked. “Was she involved with anyone?”
“I don’t recall her mentioning a boyfriend. I think I would have known. I was as good a friend as Lara had in Devil Creek. Of course, there was nothing romantic between us, for obvious reasons. But I was able to open up to her in ways I couldn’t with anyone else. I drank a lot in those days as I struggled with my sexuality. I didn’t always make good choices, and Lara was a terrific listener. And very loyal. There are some people you meet, and you know that you could call them up in the middle of the night and they’d drop everything to be there for you. That was Lara.”
“Did she date much?”
“Hardly at all, although I know she got plenty of offers. Getting to know someone, doing the hard work, that wasn’t really for her. She was sort of naive and idealistic that way. Lara had this idea that she would know the love of her life as soon as she met him. Like they’d meet, and the chemistry would be there from the beginning. I told her life didn’t work that way, but she believed it.”
I kept piecing the puzzle together. I was so close.
So close and yet still so far from the answers.
“Where did Lara live?”
“She had an apartment in Benton Harbor.”
“Were you surprised when she left town after Dawn’s murder? Did you talk to her? Did she tell you anything about what had happened?”
Rick’s brow furrowed. “See, that’s what doesn’t make sense to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Lara was already gone long before Dawn was killed. She hadn’t lived in the area in over a year. The voters turned down a special assessment, and the school board made cuts throughout the district. Several young teachers got laid off. Lara was one of them. I survived, probably because the board thought math was more important than art. Lara moved back to Frankfort at that point. We exchanged a couple of emails, but I didn’t see Lara again after she left town.”
“And yet she was at the motel in Devil Creek that night.”
Rick shrugged. “I can’t explain that. It’s a long drive to get here from Frankfort. She was only at the school for a year, and she didn’t have many friends other than me. Frankly, if she was in town, I’m surprised she didn’t call me. I don’t know why she would have come back here.”
But I could think of a reason.
Only one reason made sense.
Lara came back to Devil Creek to take Dawn away.
“Lara Lovell,” Chuck Kimble murmured, turning yellowed pages in a thick folder on his desk. It was the murder book on Dawn West, accumulated over more than two decades of investigation.
I sat opposite Kimble in the Devil Creek Public Safety building, which was located three blocks from the high school. The Berrien County Sheriff’s Department maintained a substation on the building’s ground floor. I’d walked there from my meeting with Rick Kaslan.
“Is Lara in the police file about Dawn’s murder?” I asked. “Was she on Phil’s radar screen at all?”
“I don’t remember the name.” Kimble flipped through more pages. “I’m looking at a list of Dawn’s teachers that Phil put together, and she’s not on it. But Phil put the list together from Dawn’s most recent school year. If Lovell was laid off a year earlier, Phil wouldn’t necessarily have made the connection. It also looks like Gretchen didn’t mention Lara as someone Dawn was close to.”
I shook my head. “She may not have known. Teenagers don’t always tell their parents who they’re talking to. But I’m willing to bet Lara and Dawn stayed in touch even after Lara left Devil Creek. In fact, my guess is that Lara was the most important adult relationship in Dawn’s life. Gretchen admitted that they were focused more on Gordon’s problems than on Dawn. If Dawn needed someone to confide in, and she didn’t feel comfortable talking to her parents, here was a smart, empathetic teacher who really cared about her.”
“And you think Lara was staying at the motel that night?” Kimble asked.
“She took the photograph, so I assume so. But there’s one way to find out for sure, isn’t there? You should have the motel records from back then.”
Kimble nodded, then slipped on his reading glasses. He switched his attention from the folder on his desk to a Bankers Box sitting on the floor. He bent over in his worn leather chair, rifling through the box, until he found a two-inch stack of index cards, each one with a piece of paper stapled behind it. The stack was held together by a black binder clip, which Kimble removed and put on the desk.
“Wayne Donalds didn’t exactly keep high-tech records at the motel. They checked in each guest on an index card and kept the cards in a little metal box. We isolated the cards for everyone who was at the motel that night, and Phil divided the follow-up work among the rest of the team. Most of the guests were still there, so we talked to them after the murder. But a few had already left, so we had to track them down one by one. We drove out to talk in person with anyone who lived within a couple of hours.”
“Frankfort’s about three and a half hours away,” I said.
“Right. Too far. But Phil might have sent the local cops out there if he wanted to get an in-person interview.”
Kimble turned pages in the stack, peering at the names written in the block print of the motel owners. He went through about ten of the cards, then stopped and looked up at me.
“Wayne didn’t always take down addresses. Even if he did, I’m not convinced he asked for identification to confirm it. It’s that kind of place. So if Lara Lovell didn’t want anyone to know she was there, we may not find her. Or she may have been staying with someone else, and their name is on the register, not hers.”
“From what Rick Kaslan told me about her, she was probably alone,” I said. “But if she came to the motel with someone else, that’s important to know. Whoever that was may have been the man who got cropped out of the photograph. Either he knows something about that night—”
“Or he’s our killer,” Kimble said.
“Exactly.”
Kimble grunted as he turned the pages. He examined each index card, making separate notes on a yellow pad for anyone—male or female—whose address was in the vicinity of Frankfort. I squirmed impatiently, because he didn’t ask for my help to expedite the search. We were still in cop / private detective mode. PIs like me didn’t get to touch the sacred records of the police.
However, twenty minutes later, when he was two-thirds of the way through the roster of guests, Kimble finally whistled.
“I’ll be damned.”
He placed the card and attached paper sideways on his desk, and I craned my neck so I could see. The handwriting was large, and the name that Wayne Donalds had written was unmistakable.
L. Lovell
Below the name was an address on Ninth Street in Frankfort, Michigan. Lara had paid for the motel room with a Visa card, and the motel owner had written the details under her personal information.
Kimble noted the date on the card. “She checked in that same day. Time’s listed as six thirty in the evening.”
“Just her?”
“Just her. Donalds scribbled a one on the card and circled it. On other cards, he wrote two, three, or four depending on the size of the party. Lara was alone.”
I stared at the card and the name. Lara had come to the motel, just as I suspected. And then what? I tried to re-create the scene in my mind and fill in the gaps. Lara checks in at the Thunder Mountain Motel. It’s early evening, but still in the midst of summer daylight. Hours later, after dark, she’s out in the parking lot taking a picture of a little girl in front of the Coke machine.
What happened in between? Did she see Dawn? Did she stay at the motel? Or did she go somewhere else?
I thought about her love of the rural lands outside Devil Creek.
So maybe she leaves the motel to visit some of her old haunts. She has her camera with her; she’s out on the dirt roads. She comes back to the motel late, after dark, and parks her car. As she heads to her room, she spots a little girl standing at the Coke machine, and she realizes it’s a great moody picture in the rain.
She snaps the photograph.
Little did she know how that photograph would change her life.
Later, in the middle of the night, Dawn slips out of her house and runs for the motel, with a backpack that suggests she wasn’t planning to go back home. Did Lara already know she was coming? Had they set up a rendezvous at three in the morning? Or did Dawn get scared when she saw a car near her house and decide she had to see Lara right away?
I tapped the piece of paper that was stapled to the index card.
“You said the police talked to everyone. Was Lara still at the motel after the murder? Did anyone talk to her?”
Kimble flipped up the index card and read the notes on the attached sheet.
“No, she was already gone. The room was empty when we checked it.”
“Her address is listed on the registration card. Did Phil get the local police in Frankfort to follow up with her?”
“Actually, it looks like Lara called us,” Kimble said.
“She called the police herself?”
He pointed at the handwritten text on the accompanying sheet. “Yeah. The next morning. She got transferred to Phil directly. These are his notes. Lovell told him she heard about the murder on the morning news and realized it was at the motel where she’d been staying. She said she was on a road trip and she’d been planning to stay the night, but she got a call from her landlord in Frankfort midevening who told her that her cat was sick. So she got back in her car and went home. She was gone by ten o’clock, well before the murder. According to Phil’s notes, he asked the woman about Dawn West, and Lara said she didn’t know the girl and hadn’t seen anyone matching her description at the motel. She said that was her first time in Devil Creek.”
“So she lied.”
“She lied. There was no follow-up after that. I’m sure Phil didn’t see any reason to dig deeper. Nobody around here made the connection to a young teacher who’d left town a year earlier.”
I tried to wrap my head around it.
After Dawn’s murder, Lara ran. She lied to the police, left her whole life behind, and disappeared forever. That was the moment Faith Selby was born.
Why go to such extremes?
Only one explanation made sense. Lara knew she was in danger. She’d seen the killer, and the killer had seen her. Was that all it was?
No. I was still missing something. Lara Lovell—Faith Selby—didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who would back down from a fight. She knew Dawn; they were as close as sisters. She’d driven more than three hours to see her when Dawn was in trouble. If she’d been a witness to Dawn’s murder, I couldn’t see her letting the killer go free just to protect herself. She’d take the risk, she’d climb over barbed wire, to make sure that man went away for his crimes.
And yet she didn’t.
Why did you run, Lara?
“Is there anything else in Phil’s notes?” I asked, frustration creeping into my voice.
“Just her job. Phil asked Lara what she did for a living.”
“What did she say?”
Kimble read a single word scratched in the notes. “Photographer.”
TWENTY-ONE
Kate Selby stared at the photograph of Lara Lovell. Her mother. I watched her emotions changing like kaleidoscope colors through the small screen of my iPhone. She smiled, but her smile had the quality of broken glass. She was overwhelmed, awestruck, hurt, angry. I understood how hard this had to be for her. There was her young mother on a Michigan dirt road, looking back at the camera with a magical smile on her face. But this was a mother she’d never known, who’d never introduced herself to her. A stranger. Instead of the practical accountant who hid her artistry in a box in the attic, this woman had made her living taking pictures.
