44.1644° North, page 1
Table of Contents
What This Book is About...
44.1644° North
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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About the Author
Also by Josh Lanyon
44.1644° NORTH
The decades-old disappearance of twenty-one-year-old teaching student Deirdre O’Donnell is the Holy Grail for true-crime buffs—and Skylar Brennan, the host of the Ugly Town podcast, is no exception. In fact, on the mean streets of the internet, he’s considered an expert on the case. (In law-enforcement circles, he’s viewed as just another crackpot amateur sleuth.)
Every February, the remote New Hampshire village of Woodlark holds a candlelight vigil for Deirdre. Family, friends, and “supporters” of the long-missing girl gather at the spot where she was last seen. This is Skylar’s first vigil, and his fans are really looking forward to meeting him—though maybe not as much as the anonymous person who emailed him coordinates to Deirdre’s grave.
44.1644° North
Josh Lanyon
Prologue
She was not afraid of the dark.
But now, beyond the ominous red flash of the Saturn’s hazard lights, her flashlight beam seemed to feebly poke and prod at the shroud of night enveloping Route 112.
It was very dark.
Unnaturally dark.
Uh, hello, Deirdre. This near total absence of light was as natural as it got.
Primordial. That was the word.
Really, it wasn’t the color of night. It was the woods spooking her. The forbidding black line of sentinel trees that seemed to swallow every sound—her boots crunching on the snow, her brisk, steady inhalations, the crisp rustle of her parka.
She felt like she was being watched.
And that would be because the woods were full of things watching her: deer, rabbits, squirrels. Things that were much more afraid of her than she was of them.
Bear. Occasionally. But there hadn’t been a fatal bear attack in New Hampshire since the 1700s. She knew because her family used to summer about forty miles from here.
Technically within walking—or running—distance. At least, for a girl who ran marathons.
But not at night. Not in February. Not in the snow. Not alone. She was not crazy. She was not drunk.
That was not to say she could necessarily pass a breathalyzer test. The way things were going, better not risk it.
Still. She knew this was not a great idea.
Her dad would have a fit if he knew. Is this the advice you’d give one of your students? That’s what he’d say. And no, this was not the advice she’d give one of her students. Especially since her students were kindergarteners. Kindergarteners rarely got nailed for DUIs.
She huffed a shaky laugh. What did it say that she’d rather brave the unknowns of a winter’s night in the White Mountain National Forest than face what lay behind her?
And just that, the memory of her compounding troubles, made her heart flinch and recoil.
How? How did I get myself into this?
How do I get myself out?
Dad would say, The O’Donnells don’t run from their troubles.
She was not running. She was choosing a strategic withdrawal. A tactical retreat.
You’ve the blood of Irish kings and queens in your veins, girls.
Probably not. But they were named for Irish princesses. All four of the O’Donnell sisters: Grania, Grace, Eva, and Deirdre.
She was no princess, but she was strong. She was smart. She would figure this out.
One day it might even be funny.
Fingers crossed.
Gosh, it was quiet out here.
In a dark, dark wood…
She’d been reading that to the kids last Friday, and she smiled faintly, remembering their shrieking delight at the ending. It never failed.
It’s not like she was in the middle of nowhere. Not really. She could see a few scattered window lights, porch lights through the trees. She could ask for help at any of those homes. Better, though, to put some distance between herself and the crash site. Just in case the sheriff’s deputy returned.
She needed somewhere warm and quiet to spend the night. It had been a few years since she’d traveled this road, but she was pretty sure there would be lodges, motels down the highway a bit.
Tomorrow she’d retrieve her car and deal with whatever there was to deal with. Everything always looked brighter in the morning. She just needed a good night’s sleep—something she hadn’t had in…weeks?
Impossible to make important decisions, life-changing decisions when you were this exhausted.
Now that the initial heart-pounding surge of adrenaline had passed, she was starting to feel the aches and pains of the crash. And the cold… The cold really sucked the energy out of you.
Well, the best remedy for that was to keep moving. The white circle of her flashlight beam bounced playfully ahead of her.
She’d kill for a cup of hot coffee. The stop for lunch at that diner felt like a week ago.
The quiet was getting to her. The crack of every tree branch under snow sounded like a gunshot.
How far had she gone? It felt like miles, but the spot where she’d gone off the road was only just out of sight. Maybe she’d flag down the next car that came by. If she could get to a phone, that would simplify things.
After all, she’d been camping a million times. She loved the outdoors.
She began to sing one of those goofy old songs her dad loved, raising her voice in defiance of the ringing silence around her.
“When Irish eyes are smiling…” The air tasted of snow and pine. “Sure, it’s like a morn in spring…”
Overhead, the tufted stratocumulus layer of clouds drifted, pulled apart, and for a few encouraging seconds, the waning moon glowed warmly, brightly off the snow banks, gilded the tree tops.
“You can hear the angels sing…”
All too soon, the light faded and shadows fell once more. The trailing threads of clouds rewove themselves into a tapestry of darkness and silence.
Chapter One
“I don’t agree with your theory,” the drunk guy in the blue T-shirt said. “The idea that Deirdre would just happen to climb into the wrong car with the wrong guy is too far-fetched. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
I get this a lot, and I smiled politely. “If I told you that an anonymous woman hitchhiking at night in the White Mountains was found murdered, would you say that was too much of a coincidence? Would you even think twice about it?”
We were wedged into a table at the very crowded, very noisy Swiftwater Pub outside the village of Woodlark, NH (population 892—though this weekend that number would swell to something over one thousand). It was on a lonely stretch of mountain highway in this rural outpost off Route 112 that Deirdre O’Donnell, a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts teaching student, had vanished off the face of the earth almost two decades earlier.
The drunk guy—short sandy hair, florid face, a boyish fortyish hitting his flabby fifties—scowled. “Yeah, but Deedee wasn’t an anonymous woman. I mean, what are the odds that she of all people, would get into the wrong car at the wrong time?”
“Have you ever seen Disappeared?” Kind of a rhetorical question. Most people crowded into the bar area were true-crime buffs and had seen episode six, “Road to Nowhere,” more than once. In fact, that 2010 showing had been Deirdre’s introduction to most of the country, which until then had been largely ignorant of the 2004 disappearance.
To be honest, most of the country was still largely ignorant of Deirdre’s disappearance. In internet sleuthing circles, Deirdre was the grand dame of missing girls. In the real world? Just one of currently over five-hundred-thousand missing persons.
“What about it?” Blue T-shirt—had he introduced himself? Everybody was starting to blur together—demanded belligerently.
It always took me aback how personal this was for so many internet sleuths. How deeply, fiercely invested they were in their theories.
I said, “Most women who disappear—and these victims are usually, by far, women—got into the wrong car with the wrong man at the wrong time.”
Blue T-Shirt scoffed, “It’s too convenient. It’s too easy.”
“It seems that way to us: how could she, of all people? But that’s because we’ve been studying her, analyzing her case for so long. We feel like we know her. She seems like a personal acquaintance. Or even a celebrity. The idea that something like that, so tragically common, so mundane, could happen to her is hard to believe. It’s like hearing Rihanna was snatched off the road.”
Blue T-shirt’s face screwed up in disgust. “Bullshit. That’s not what I mean. That’s not how it is at all.”
I hung onto what I hoped was an expression of pleasant inquiry—or what my brother Kaj refers to as my teacher face. Says the guy with the marine biologist face. “Okay. How is it, then?”
“The boyfriend did it. Tommy Aldrich. Obviously.”
“Ah.”
In fairness to the Tommy Aldrich camp, boyfriends and husbands usually did do it. Just as, on the flip side, girlfriends and wives were usually su
Something about this particular case really brought out the kooks and conspiracy theorists. Maybe because of Deirdre herself. The enigma of the girl next door. Smart, pretty, fun, athletic, and responsible. The quintessential good girl. Struggling a little as she tried to navigate the contradictions and complexities of adult life, but nothing she couldn’t have weathered, nothing plenty of other girls before her hadn’t pushed through. A short run of bad luck that had suddenly, without warning, turned catastrophic.
“Don’t patronize me,” Blue T-shirt said. He was staring over my head, scanning the room. He nodded to someone I couldn’t see and jabbed his index finger at me.
What. A. Dick. As Bette Davis would have said. Or maybe she wouldn’t have said that. She’d have thought it, though. That I guarantee. Everybody was thinking it.
Anyway, the blue man was once more honoring me with his full attention. “You pod people are all the same. You think it’s about you. It’s not about you.”
I said mildly, “I agree. I don’t think it’s about me.”
“You’re one of the worst. Just because you’re an associate professor wannabe criminologist at some nothing junior college, you think you get to talk down to everyone. The truth is, you’re full of shit.”
In addition to (hopefully?) beer droplets, the blue T-shirt across the table featured a bloody-knife graphic and the words TRUECRIME IRL.
“You could be right.”
“In other words, you just say whatever shit you think will get you listeners.”
If I’d just wanted to argue with people who hated me on general principles, I could have stayed home. I mean, not that there was anyone at home who hated me. There was no one at home at all. Which was probably another reason why I came to this soiree.
I said, “In other words, you can think whatever you like. Same as me.”
“That’s what I thought,” Blue T-shirt said with bitter triumph and melted away into the crowd.
“What an ass,” said Hailey, the host of Coffee, Tea, or Murder?
“Tell me the whole weekend isn’t going to be like this.”
Hailey didn’t exactly laugh, but her lip curled. She was a tiny, fragile-looking thirtysomething with Raggedy Ann-style hair, multiple facial piercings, and black-rose tatts winding up her throat. She’d had the good sense to drop out of the “debate” early on.
She said, “I mean, seriously, Tommy? He might as well suspect Pat.”
Pat—Patrick O’Donnell—was Deirdre’s father. He too had his… Well, fans was hardly the word. But even more people suspected Pat of doing away with his daughter than they suspected Tommy, and with even less reason. Like Tommy, Pat had an unbreakable alibi and, unlike Tommy, zero motive. Not that either of those facts ever discouraged the hardcore conspiracists.
“It’s going to be a long weekend.” I was mostly thinking aloud. It was a long flight from LA to Lebanon, and a short but trying drive from Lebanon to Hastings. Nor had I been sleeping well. Not since that anonymous email had dropped into my private inbox a month ago.
Hailey laughed. “Nah. Your fans don’t know you’re here yet. You’re going to have a blast. You’ll see. You’re going to be a regular from here on out.”
“Yeah, not so sure about that.”
“You want another drink?”
“If I do, I’ll be sleeping on the table.” It was going to be a long weekend, no matter what Hailey said, and I needed to pace myself.
“Probably more comfortable than your bed tonight. I stayed in one of the guest cottages the first year I came for the vigil and, I’m not kidding, it took my chiropractor three months to put my spine back in alignment.”
“I believe you.” My brief glance inside the little ice box designated for my use supported that. I added glumly, “It was all I could get by the time I made up my mind to come.”
“Yeah, I want to hear what changed your mind about showing up this year. Save my seat.” Hailey slipped off the tall wooden stool and began to push through the crowd. Coffee, Tea, or Murder? is a very popular podcast. Her progress was slow.
I sighed, toyed with the idea of stepping outside for a breath of fresh air—between the roaring fire at the far end of the taproom and the press of bodies bundled for the ski slopes, it was very warm. The air didn’t get much fresher than a February night in the forests of New Hampshire. But if I got up, I’d—literally—lose my place at the table. It had been standing-room only for the last hour or so.
A male voice to my left said, “That wasn’t a bad argument you made.”
I glanced around and gazed into a pair of light and lively eyes. The eyes were the best feature of an otherwise pleasant but nondescript face. High forehead, rectangular jaw, pointed chin: symmetrical to the point of monotony. No, wrong. The smile that accompanied the words was terrific.
I blinked in the radiance of all that good use of time and dental floss. “Yeah? Thanks.”
Like me, this guy was somewhat older than the late-twenties-early-thirties crowd. I was thirty-three. I thought he might be a bit older. The faint lines around his eyes weren’t all due to laughter. He had dark brown hair, light maybe-blue eyes, and was a little over average height with an athletic build.
In short: just my type.
He was saying in an easy baritone, “Other than the fact that there’s no data to suggest hitchhiking is an exceptionally dangerous endeavor.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve seen that 1974 CHP report.”
“And according to the FBI—”
I finished, “Less than a thousand rapes and murders along the interstates between 1979 and 2009.”
“Correct.” He smiled again and offered a tanned, well-shaped hand—class ring, no wedding band. “Rory.”
It suited him. It also didn’t ring any bells for me. We shook hands. “Skylar.”
“Ah. Skylar Brennan. Ugly Town, right?”
“Right.”
“I’ve listened to you a few times.”
I waited to hear more, but that seemed to be it. Not exactly effusive. In fact, downright noncommittal, but that was okay. I wasn’t here to build my fan base.
I felt it was only right to point out, “Anyway, less than a thousand rapes and murders is still a lot of rape and murder.”
“I don’t disagree.”
I couldn’t help a little snort. “Then you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“You people do argue a lot.” There was no denying the appeal of that smile. All the same…
I tilted my head, giving him another, closer look. “You people? You’re not one of us?”
He avoided my eyes as he sipped his beer. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?”
“I’m more of an observer than a participant.”
“That’s how it starts.”
“It’s how most things start.”
“True. But you’re a true-crime fan?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Should you really admit to being a fan of true crime?”
“Good point.”
Hmm.
Hailey returned, drinks in hand, and introductions were shouted across the table. If possible, the noise level had gone up a couple of decibels in the last five minutes.
She looked at Rory, looked at me, and in answer to her silent inquiry, I shouted, “Rory’s making the argument that violent crime wasn’t all that common along the interstate back in 2004.”
Hailey, who shared my theory that Deirdre had most likely climbed into the wrong car at the wrong time, leaped into the fray. “Okay, but Route 112 is not an interstate highway. Maybe the rates for homicide and sexual assault are higher on back roads and country lanes.”
“Maybe. Do you know of any data to support that?”
Why did I feel like Rory had probably seen the data?
Hailey shrugged. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Rory didn’t exactly wink, but his eyes got a little twinkly when he was amused. And he seemed to find us pretty amusing. Saving up stories to share at the next office party?
