Two Sides to Every Murder, page 3
But then the podcast went viral and everything went straight to hell. Suddenly everyone we knew was talking about the Camp Lost Lake murders. And not just talking about them, but reading about them, studying them, looking up Lori Knight’s picture online, joking that she sort of looked like my mom, who was living under the name Lauren Karl at that time, and ha-ha wasn’t that so weird?
I can’t pinpoint exactly when our neighbors began to watch us just that much more closely; when Sam, Liza, and Hallie stopped putting me in the group chat. But I’ll always remember the night my mom shook me awake in the dark and told me in a whisper to get in the car, that there was some stuff she had to tell me.
Looking back, there were signs. Like how my mom refused to talk about my dad or any other member of our family. How her entire life seemed to start the year I was born, the same year we moved to the small town of Pittsburg—not Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but Pittsburg, New Hampshire. She always said her life before I was born wasn’t important, that being my mother was the only thing that mattered, that I was her “fresh start.” And yeah, okay, I got a little suspicious that something was up when she flat-out refused to get me a passport, or when I went looking for my birth certificate and she claimed I didn’t have one. But I never would have suspected the truth.
She didn’t do it. I know she didn’t do it. The night we went on the run she told me the bullet points: she’d been framed, the local cops zeroed in on her from the beginning, there was no way she would’ve gotten a fair trial. And she gave me a choice. She had to go on the run, but I didn’t. She said she understood if I wanted to stay behind, if I wanted to keep my normal life. She has and always will do anything to give me the life she thinks I deserve. But if I left, I’d never see her again.
I chose her. I will always choose her. But I don’t have to be happy about it.
We’ve been living out of a beat-up old pickup—the only car my mom could afford to buy in cash—for twelve months now, bouncing from one under-the-radar mountain town to another, staying in cheap rental houses when we have the cash, moving on before anyone looks too closely or asks too many questions. I can’t remember the last time I ate fried chicken or wore nail polish or swam. I can still draw, of course, and I’ve been taking high school classes online whenever we have access to computers and free Wi-Fi at a library, but I’m assuming Pratt expects their incoming freshmen to have actually graduated from high school, so there goes that dream.
That’s what today is all about: the stolen truck, the trip south. I’ve been trying to get Mom to come up with a way to clear her name for months now, but she won’t even talk to me about it, no matter how many times I bring up the topic, no matter how many defense lawyers I look up online. She acts like it’s over, like we just have to accept that this is our life. But I can’t do that. I want my real life back. And I want my mom in it.
* * *
• • •
We’re still a few blocks from Camp Lost Lake when I spot the blue-and-white cruiser sitting at the side of the road. My chest feels suddenly tight. Cops in general are not good. But cops here? Now?
Jack, oblivious to my terror, lifts a hand and waves.
“What are you doing?” I snap at him. “You can’t wave at a cop!”
He looks genuinely confused by my reaction. “That’s not a cop. I mean, it is, but it’s just Karly. She comes out to fish on our land sometimes. She’s cool.”
A shiver moves through me, and I have to grit my teeth to suppress it. It seems to take us forever to drive past Karly’s cruiser, and it might just be my imagination, but I feel like she studies my face extra closely. My mom and I don’t look much alike. We’re both fair-skinned, but I’m freckly and blond, and she’s much paler, with gray hair that she’s dyed brown ever since we went on the run. Even so, my cheeks flare. I’m sure that, any second now, this cop will realize I stole this car from my mom, that I’m on the run, that I’m notorious fugitive Lori Knight’s daughter.
I hold my breath, waiting to get busted.
But Karly just smiles like we’re friends and waves a little harder. Weird.
“Turn here,” Jack says suddenly, pointing out a narrow dirt road I’m about to drive past. I jerk my steering wheel to the side, taking the turn too sharply. Jack braces his hand against the top of the car and shoots me a look. “I thought you didn’t want to get pulled over?”
“Sorry,” I murmur. But I feel better now that we’re off the main road. Less exposed. I’ve seen pictures of Camp Lost Lake online before, tons of times, but I’m still not prepared for how beautiful it is here. Green, tree-covered hills rise to either side of a low valley, like we’re tucked in a massive, leafy pocket. Small wooden cabins pop up here and there between the trees. Ahead, there’s a lodge with a pitched roof and circular windows, and to the left is the old camp director’s office, a lighthouse towering over it. Just beyond there’s the lake, deep and so clear that I can see the whole sky reflected on its surface.
“Damn,” Jack mutters, but he doesn’t sound awed—he sounds annoyed. I follow his gaze to the dirt parking lot tucked to the side of the office. It’s filled with dusty cars and, now that I’m paying closer attention, I can hear people in the distance, talking, laughing.
Oh no. This was not part of the plan.
“Park over there so they won’t see the truck,” Jack murmurs, nodding at a dirt road twisting off into the trees.
I take his advice and follow the road around to the other side of the director’s office. From here I can see that the patio behind the camp office is filled with teenagers rummaging through boxes and old camp equipment. A cleaning crew, maybe?
I scowl through the windshield. “I thought the grounds were supposed to be abandoned.”
“Yeah, I heard some woman from town is turning it into a bougie hipster retreat or something.” Jack glances at me. “You want to leave?”
I chew my lip. I can’t leave. If I go running back to my mom with my tail between my legs, she’s going to do everything in her power to make sure I’m never alone with her car—or any car—ever again.
This is my one shot. If I don’t take it, goodbye normal life. I would hate myself forever if I let a chance like this get away.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I came all this way; we’ll have to try to…avoid them. I guess.”
“Okay.” Jack sighs through his teeth. “What’s the plan? Are you still looking for this M. Edwards person?”
The name hangs in the air between us, ominous.
I ignored the How to Be a Final Girl podcast for as long as I could, but after everything that went down with my mom, I realized I needed to work up the nerve to listen. I wanted to know the whole story of what happened that night, not just the parts my mom felt like telling me.
After I did, I became something of a Camp Lost Lake obsessive. There isn’t a single thing about the case that I don’t know. And in all my research, the thing that truly surprised me is that I’m not alone in thinking the details don’t add up. There aren’t many people out there who don’t believe it was my mom, but once I started combing through true crime forums, I found a few other armchair detectives who doubted the official version of events. But none of their theories seemed quite right to me. Most of them were focused on figuring out what happened to Gia North’s video camera. Gia had been notorious around town for filming gossipy videos, and the theory goes that she caught something about the witch on video and that’s why she was murdered. But the killer would have destroyed the camera after she killed Gia, right? It seems silly to spend so much energy on it.
For the last year I’ve studied the case the way most high school juniors study for the SATs. I’ve read through every witness statement and police report and DNA analysis I could get my hands on. And I think I found the one clue that doesn’t make any sense, something no one else seems remotely curious about, maybe because the only mention of it was a single note at the very bottom of a photocopied, impossibly hard-to-read evidence list:
A camp key card with the name M. Edwards written on it.
Camp key cards were given out to campers on their first day of camp. Campers used them to get into the lodge and the cafeteria and their cabins, and they allowed the camp director, Miranda D’Angeli, to keep track of which campers went where and when. The murders happened two weeks before camp officially opened, so there weren’t any campers on the grounds. An old record of key card usage I found online showed only Mrs. D’Angeli, my mom, and a few other counselors using their key cards throughout the day.
The M. Edwards key card was only ever mentioned once, in that badly photocopied list of evidence collected the night of the massacre. It had been collected from the deck outside Mrs. D’Angeli’s office, but the key card usage record doesn’t show it being used at all that night. So what was it doing there?
The key card never seemed to be considered particularly important by either the detectives who investigated the case or the many podcasters, filmmakers, and true crime experts who’ve delved into the facts in the years since. So far, the only other person who even mentioned it was a cohost from the original How to Be a Final Girl podcast, and they just assumed some past counselor left their card on the deck and didn’t give it a second thought, especially since the evidence against my mother was so strong.
But here’s the thing: there’s no record of anyone named M. Edwards working at the camp in 2008. I know; I checked.
My theory is that M. Edwards is an old Camp Lost Lake counselor who dropped their key card when they were sneaking around camp the night of the final murders. I think this might be the person who stole a bow and arrows from the archery shed, killed Gia and Matthew, and framed my mom. Gia’s body was found near the key card. Maybe she took it on purpose, maybe she even meant for it to be a clue for the cops.
Archery is a niche skill, even at a camp like this. One of the reasons people were so willing to point the finger at my mom was because she used to be a really great archer, and the bow used had belonged to her late husband, Jacob Knight. Jacob was the archery instructor at Lost Lake, and his initials, JK, were carved into the side. He was the first victim the night of the murders. I’m also pretty sure he was my dad.
Before the podcast, whenever I asked about my dad, Mom would get this really sad look in her eye and say something like “I don’t like to think about that time in my life. You’re my family now. You’re my second chance.” And any follow-up questions I asked about her first chance made her go all quiet and distant.
But then the podcast came out, and it made it impossible for her to keep her past a secret. She would’ve been married to this Jacob Knight guy when she got pregnant with me, and about a year ago I found a picture of him. We have the same nose.
But anyone could’ve stolen that bow. And I have to believe someone else had the archery skills to pull these murders off. I think it’s this M. Edwards person. But I can’t prove that until I figure out exactly who M. Edwards is.
That’s why we came here. The murders happened a few years before everything in the world was digitized. If I can sneak into the old camp director’s office, there’s a good chance I can find hard copies of their files. Getting M. Edwards’s full name won’t entirely prove my mother is innocent, but it could point me in the right direction.
After a moment, Jack inhales like he’s gearing up to say something big, and asks, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
I glance at him. He’s always understood my need to know what happened that night. It’s weird of him to pull back now that we’re so close. “I have to do this, you know that. I have to know the truth. It’s the only way I can get my life back.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just…” He shrugs and glances out the window.
“It’s just what?”
“You only get your life back if you prove your mom didn’t do it, right? What happens if…”
He doesn’t finish his sentence. Probably because he doesn’t have a death wish.
“My mom didn’t kill anybody.” I’m so angry, I force the words through my clenched teeth.
“I don’t think that, I swear,” Jack says. “All I’m saying is…C’mon, Reagan, the evidence against her is bad. If she didn’t do it—”
“She didn’t do it,” I interrupt, glaring at him. “This M. Edwards person did.”
Jack lifts a hand, placating me. “Okay.”
For a moment, we’re both quiet. There’s a distant, muffled rumble of thunder, a reminder that, even though it’s sunny now, there are storm clouds waiting on the horizon, threatening rain. Despite myself, I shiver.
Finally, Jack sighs and says, like he can’t help himself, “It’s just…if you’re so sure M. Edwards is the real killer, why not call the cops? They still have an anonymous tip line for the murders, I looked it up. All you’d have to do is call the number and leave a message telling them what—”
“I already did that. Months ago.”
“Then shouldn’t we wait for them to investigate? That’s the right thing to do.”
The word right hums through me. It’s such a Jack thing to say. As though doing the right thing should protect me somehow. My hands tighten around the steering wheel until I’m gripping the vinyl so hard I feel my knuckles go numb.
Doing the right thing hasn’t exactly done me any favors. Before the podcast went live I got the right grades and I hung out with the right people, and where did it get me?
Woken up in the middle of the night, dragged away from my nice home, my good friends, and my whole respectable, upstanding life.
I can taste the tears in the back of my throat. This is the part that still gets to me, even now, a year later: I’d really thought that being good and doing the right thing would be enough. Maybe it sounds naive, but back then I didn’t know any better. I really thought if I did what I was supposed to do, then everything would turn out okay. It makes me angry, now, that I was ever so stupid.
“I’m not really interested in what’s right,” I say, swallowing my anger. “I just want to get my mom off the hook and get my life back.”
“Okay, I hear you.” Jack levels me with a heavy look. “But this M. Edwards person, whoever they are, could still be out there. They could have a whole life, and I’m willing to bet they’d do anything to keep from being found out.”
June 12, 2008
The Day Before the Murders
Officer Karly Knight was perched on her regular barstool at the far end of the counter in the Lost Lake Diner, looking through her Key West brochure. She’d thumbed through it so many times that the corners were all dog-eared and soft, but she couldn’t help it. Every time she saw the pictures, she smiled.
In just a few weeks, she was going to be sitting on one of those white beaches, looking out over the impossibly blue waters, the Florida sun beating hot on her shoulders. She’d snorkel through reefs and take a kayak tour of the mangroves and wake up at dawn to go deep-sea fishing. She couldn’t wait.
“Did you know that forty-one degrees is the record low temperature in Key West?” she asked as Johnny D’Angeli, the guy who owned the Lost Lake Diner, leaned over the counter to pour fresh coffee into her cup.
“Is that right?” he said, good-naturedly. Karly had been filling his head with Key West facts almost every morning when she came in to grab coffee before her shift.
“And it’s only ever gotten that cold twice, once in 1981 and once in 1886,” Karly read from the brochure. “It says here that most days are in the seventies and eighties, no matter what time of year it is.”
“Sounds boring,” chirped a voice from below the counter. A moment later, Johnny’s pregnant wife, Miranda, appeared, holding her baby bump with one hand and a fresh sleeve of Styrofoam coffee cups with the other. “I think I’d miss having seasons.”
Karly’s smile tightened. She couldn’t figure out what Johnny saw in Miranda. Johnny was down-to-earth and no-nonsense, the kind of guy who always said what he meant. Karly appreciated a guy like that. Miranda might like hiking and camping and stuff, but she was also almost aggressively cheerful. She’d dated Karly’s older brother, Jacob, back in high school, and Karly never liked her much. Everything she said sounded like it ended in an exclamation point.
“Well, I think it sounds like paradise,” Karly said, turning back to her brochure. She hated how cold it got up here. Last January it dipped below zero degrees every day for a week. She’d wanted to move away from New York since she was seven years old, but, of course, she could never do that before, not with her mother’s condition.
Early-onset Alzheimer’s. Barbara Knight was diagnosed when Karly was seventeen years old. With her dad out of the picture and her older brother already away at college, she’d been the only one to take over her mother’s care. Instead of applying for colleges and researching majors, Karly had been talking to doctors, taking notes on treatment, researching drug trials.
But, a few months ago, she and Jacob finally sat down and had a little talk, and they both agreed it was his turn to take care of their mother, that it was only fair. In just a few short weeks, Barbara would move in with Jacob and his family, and Karly would retire on the beach.
Miranda said something about a missing sleeve of to-go lids and had disappeared below the counter again when a jingle announced the diner door opening, bringing in a flurry of chilly spring air. Karly shivered. It was already June and the temp still hovered around sixty degrees, a full twelve degrees lower than Key West’s average of seventy-two. She cupped her coffee with both hands, thinking of sand and sun and miles of blue water.
Her seventeen-year-old nephew, Matthew, slid his elbows onto the sticky counter beside her. “Hey, Auntie Karly,” he said, flashing a smile that she was well aware all the teen girls around here thought was impossibly charming. Matthew was a bit of a town golden boy, just like Karly’s brother had been back when they were in high school. Track-and-field star, top of his class, and something about his face made all the girls think that everything he said sounded deep. Maybe it was the eyelashes? As far as the rest of the town was concerned, Matthew could do no wrong. Jacob had been exactly the same way. Matthew even looked remarkably like his dad. At a distance, Karly sometimes mistook one for the other.
