Next Girl to Die

by Dea Poirier

  “I was hoping for a few minutes with Madeline, if you don’t mind.” I take a step toward the door. I’m not going to force my way inside, but seeing as he hasn’t invited me in, I’m not sure he’s going to let me talk to her at all. It’s been nearly a month since Madeline was last questioned. Sometimes people remember new details after the cloud of grief lifts. It’s important that I talk to her sooner rather than later. She could be the key to solving this case.

  He glances back over his shoulder, deep into the house. To his left, back in the living room, a TV is droning on.

  “I’ll just be a minute, really,” I say when he still hasn’t budged. “It’s important to make sure she hasn’t thought of anything else that could help with the investigation into Emma’s murder.”

  He hesitates, and for a moment, I think I’m going to have to press him harder, but he waves me in. “I’ll go get her,” he says as he heads for the stairs.

  “Actually, I think it might be easier if I talk to her in her room, if you don’t mind.” If there’s anything about Madeline’s life—or Emma’s—that she doesn’t want her father to know, those details aren’t going to come out in an interview if he’s there. I’d just have her come to the station, but that tends to spook witnesses. And seeing as she’s the daughter of the mayor, that would go over like a fart in church.

  He shows me up the stairs and knocks, and once Madeline has given a mumbled agreement to the interview, I slip inside. Mayor Clark stands on the landing for a moment, peering in the room. I offer him a smile before saying, “It’ll be fine, really. I’m sure if she needs you, she’ll call you up.”

  Madeline’s room is quite large, big enough to house her queen-size bed, a small sofa near the bay window, and three dressers. Each dresser is topped with cheerleading trophies and pictures of her with friends. The walls are a soft lavender that seems to glow, even with the gray light streaming in from outside. Between two windows on the far wall, an ornate wooden cross hangs. The bed isn’t made, and there’s a pile of clothes sitting on the end, like I caught her in the middle of doing laundry.

  Madeline sweeps her long blonde hair over her shoulder and flashes me a half smile. She’s around five foot three, an inch or two shorter than me. Her blue eyes are piercing, an almost cerulean blue. It unnerves me how much this girl looks like Rachel, but I can’t let it show.

  I start to introduce myself, but halfway through Detective, she interrupts me.

  “You’re investigating Emma’s . . .” She stops and looks at the floor, digging her toes into the carpet.

  “Yeah, I am. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? I know you’ve already been interviewed, but I’m hoping that maybe you’ve thought of something else since you spoke with the other officer.”

  “I don’t mind,” she says, finally looking back at me.

  “You okay, Maddy?” her dad calls up the stairs.

  She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, Dad, fine,” she yells back. Once his footsteps trail off downstairs, she shuts the door and slumps on the edge of her bed. “He’s been so overprotective lately.”

  I brush off the comment about her father. I can see why he’d be overprotective. “When did you and Emma become friends? I heard that you were really close.”

  She digs her thumbnail into her quilt. “Yeah, we were best friends. But we really only became friends like a year ago.”

  “A year ago?”

  “Before that we just weren’t really friends with the same people.”

  “Is there a reason for that?” I ask as I take notes.

  She chews her lip and looks toward the door, like her dad might be standing outside listening. I wonder if he does that often.

  “Madeline, I’m not going to tell your dad anything you say. You don’t need to worry about that. But we need to figure out who did this to Emma, and you might know something that could help,” I urge, but I’m careful to keep my words from being too forceful.

  “I don’t want it to sound like I’m talking shit about her, because I’m not.”

  “I understand,” I say, and I really do. I struggled with the same balance after Rachel died. Everyone always wanted to remember the best of Rachel. Some days, all I could remember was the bad, and no one else seemed to know that Rachel existed.

  “Emma and I weren’t super close until she started coming to church. She joined up with the choir group. I’m in it too. She had a really good voice. She was trying to keep herself occupied. So she didn’t slip up again.”

  I remember the file mentioning that Emma was in the choir. “Slip up?”

  “Emma did drugs. She didn’t want anyone to know about it.” She looks down at her comforter again.

  I think back to the autopsy. There wasn’t anything on her toxicology to suggest that she’d been high in the few weeks preceding her death. “What drugs was she using?”

  “Speed, mostly. Meth if she had to. Adderall. Anything she could get that would keep her up. She hated sleeping, hated being tired. She just wanted to be going all the time.” Her lips twist and her jaw quivers, like she might be on the verge of crying. Though I offer to give her a break, she refuses. I jot down notes as she talks. While the words flow, she doesn’t look at me once.

  “She wanted to change, though; that’s why she started coming to church,” she explains.

  “So that was about a year ago?”

  She nods and picks at her nails. “Yeah, and that’s when we started to get close.”

  “Do you have any idea what she was doing out the night that she was killed?”

  “I can guess that she was trying to get drugs at the docks again. But I don’t know for sure.” She hangs her head, and I can see the war waging in her mind. Would things be different if she’d known?

  “Had she relapsed before?”

  “Three or four times. But it usually just took a week or two for her to get back on track.” She presses her lips together and sniffles. Grief wells in her eyes, threatening to spill over. Her gaze shifts from me to the wall, and it’s as if she’s lost completely behind her tears. My heart seizes as my mind flashes to Rachel. I won’t let it drag me back down, though. I can’t.

  “I just wish I’d done something, you know?”

  I don’t answer. But I do know.

  “Was there anyone at school she had problems with? Anyone who bullied her or anyone who showed unusual interest in her?”

  She shrugs. “Not really. There are a couple of girls who are bitches to everyone. The Arey sisters. But they wouldn’t hurt anyone. They just want everyone to be as miserable as they are.”

  “Was she seeing anyone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure about that?” I ask.

  “She wouldn’t have kept that a secret from me.” Her eyes darken as she says the words, like maybe she isn’t so sure she believes them.

  “Can you think of any reason that Emma might have been in the park the night she died?” I ask, switching gears.

  “She usually went to the docks if she was having a hard time—that’s where she got drugs. Maybe someone asked her to go to the park? Or she went there after she got what she wanted?” Her voice is high in pitch and nearly breaks. She wraps her arms tightly around her chest like she’s close to crying. I give her a minute before asking anything else.

  “Did she say anything else to you the night she died? Is there anywhere else she might have gone other than the docks?”

  “She just said the normal stuff. She was stressed about a chemistry test. I don’t think she’d go anywhere else. I’m surprised she went to the park at all.”

  “Did Emma have a scar or anything on her left shoulder blade?” I ask, hoping to get an idea of why the flesh was cut from her back. There’s a note about the flesh, but her parents didn’t know why it had been cut.

  “She had a tattoo there of an angel. I have one too. We got them together.” A sad smile quirks her lips. Her eyes shoot toward the door. “Don’t tell my dad, though. Our parents didn’
t know we got them.”

  I don’t ask how they both managed to get tattoos underage. So the tattoo was removed from her body. As a trophy? Or something else?

  “Is there anything else about her that you think I should know?”

  She crosses her arms and shakes her head. “I didn’t want anyone to know about the drugs, because she wasn’t some burnout druggie, you know? She was just doing what she had to do. She didn’t deserve this.”

  “I know, Madeline. I’m not going to take this any less seriously because she was involved with drugs. Whatever she might have done, she didn’t deserve this.”

  I finish up with Madeline. She doesn’t have much else of importance to say, but I listen anyway. It’s clear that she needs to talk. After I leave the Clarks’, I interview a few other friends of Emma’s, who give me more of the same details. Emma was a good girl, she didn’t get into much trouble, and other than maybe going to the docks, there was no reason for her to be out that night. After I’ve finished with the interviews, I pick up a rental car downtown that I’ll need until my car arrives and head back to the station. I type up my notes and add them to each of the files.

  Because of Emma’s likely visit to the docks the night she died, one detail in the file sticks out to me—a missing boat. Four days after Emma’s death, Paul Clark, the mayor’s brother, reported his boat missing.

  I head out of the station, climb into my rental car, and turn onto Main Street, hoping that there may be some connection between the missing boat and Emma’s murder. Paul’s house is on the nicest part of the island, where the houses are nearly the size of mansions. It’s where I feel the most out of place. Old money, the founding families: it’s where they all reside. Where I should reside—if you ask my mother. Everyone in these houses has roots that go back hundreds of years. Technically I do, too, but I like to think I snapped those roots thirteen years ago. This island has always felt like an intermission, a stopping point before I get to where I should really be.

  I throw open the car door and walk the brick pathway to the three-story wood-frame house. The house is as old as the settlement here, though it’s had additions, like nearly all the other houses at the north end of the island. This was one of the founding houses, one of thirteen total on the island. They aren’t marked or anything, but the teachers were sure to tell us about them in school. Some of the other kids were filled with pride at the idea that their ancestors had always lived on the island. Me, however—I wanted to see what the rest of the world held. As more and more of the families settled here, the number of houses grew. Each year only a few new houses are built.

  The large oak door looms in front of me. I eye the griffin knocker with its rusting edges. This close to the ocean, the constant salt in the air eats away at anything metal. It takes me a few moments of staring at the knocker to finally use it. I have to knock four more times before he finally answers.

  I vaguely remember Paul from my childhood. Seeing him here is almost startling. His features are sharp, so much so that it’s jarring. He’s rail thin, with wide shoulders. Though he’s got an oversize sweater, it does nothing to hide that fact. He might be the brother of the mayor, but I can’t find a familiar feature between the two of them.

  “Hello,” he says as he eyes me up and down. The way his eyes crawl my body makes my fingers twitch against my thigh. I’m not sure if he’s checking me out or sizing me up, but either way, if he keeps it up, I’m going to mace him. There’s always been something off about him, but I didn’t spend enough time around him to ever put my finger on it.

  “I’m Detective Calderwood,” I say. “I was hoping we could talk for a few minutes about your boat.”

  “Calderwood,” he says in a tone that’s almost a purr. “Claire?” he asks, as if there are any other Calderwoods on the island my age. Everyone on my father’s side ended up with boys, and they were all smart enough to leave and stay gone.

  “Yeah. Can I come in for a few minutes?” The idea of being alone with this guy makes my skin squirm, but I’ve been alone with much worse.

  He offers me what appears to be an attempt at a smile, but it comes off as more of a grimace. A look warning me of the lie he’s about to tell. “Of course, come in.” He waves me past. He guides me through the historic home, and the hollow echo of our footsteps on the wooden floors resonates around me. The house is sparsely decorated. What is here I’d guess was decorated by his mother before she passed.

  “Can I get you anything?” he offers.

  I shake my head. “No, thank you, though.”

  Paul ushers me into a formal sitting room that looks like it’s never been used. The walls are lined with bookshelves. The only part of the room that isn’t wood is a fireplace covered in slate. An antique red velvet sofa and a few chairs sit in the middle of the room on top of an ornate rug. From what I can see, the house is decorated like a dollhouse—an old, stuffy dollhouse.

  “Please, take a seat.” He gestures a little too broadly at the sofa.

  When I sit on the ugly, grimy sofa, a puff of dust billows out that smells like stale baby powder.

  “Sorry, we don’t use the room much,” he says, and I wonder who we is. As far as I know, he lives here alone. “So you had some questions about my boat. Did you find it?”

  “No, not yet. I was hoping you might have some information that would point me in the right direction.”

  “I’ll help however I can,” he says dryly.

  “Great.” I pull my notepad from my jacket. “When was the last time you saw the boat?”

  He looks away and furrows his brows. “It was sometime in late July.” He scratches his chin.

  I flip through my notepad. “I see here that you didn’t report that the boat was missing until October seventeenth, is that correct?”

  He rubs the back of his neck and looks at the window behind me. “Yes, that’s right,” he mumbles.

  “Why did you wait so long before reporting that the boat was missing?” I ask, sure to keep my tone even so it doesn’t sound accusatory. But it strikes me as really odd that it took him so long to report it missing.

  He wipes his hands together, then picks at one of his fingernails. “I wasn’t sure if it was missing. I didn’t use it a lot, so I didn’t notice for a while that it was gone.” I can smell the bullshit on his breath. How could anyone not realize their boat was missing for months?

  “How often would you say that you used your boat?”

  “It really depends. If the weather is great, every weekend. I’d been busy with work, though, so I didn’t have as many chances to use it this year.”

  “Is there anyone you’ve been in an argument with recently? Anyone you think might take the boat to get back at you? Maybe an ex-girlfriend?”

  He shrugs. “No one comes to mind.”

  “Anyone from work?”

  “I do tutoring and teach driver’s ed. I don’t think any of them did it.” He laces his fingers together, resting his hands on his knees. And I swear for a moment a hint of a smirk twists his lips.

  “What do you tutor?”

  “Bio, anatomy, any of the sciences, really.”

  “Has anyone failed recently? Someone might blame that on you.” A lot of times, it’s someone they know who does this. Someone they wouldn’t suspect of doing something like this. There has to be a trigger. He may not remember it now, but some event precipitated this.

  He presses his lips together but shakes his head. There’s only so much I can ask without him thinking I’m here to question him. The last thing I need right now is to get on the bad side of the mayor’s brother my first week back on the island.

  “Okay, well, thank you so much for your time. Hopefully we’ll track down who did this soon. If you need anything for making an insurance claim, just let me know,” I say as I push off the sofa. I walk toward the door, Paul trailing behind me. I stop when his hand touches my shoulder. I move away from him, out of his reach.

  “If it looks like one of the k
ids did it, I don’t want to press charges,” he says, and I look back.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s just a boat. I’ll get another one. It’s not worth ruining one of the kids’ futures.” His words lack conviction.

  “Did you ever have issues with teens on the island borrowing your boat?” I ask.

  He shakes his head weakly. “No, nothing like that.”

  “Were you ever worried they were hanging out near your boat? Or maybe considering taking it?” If he’s mentioning not wanting to go after the kids for possibly taking his boat, he’s got to have a reason for it.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. I don’t think they took it,” he says, his tone firm. Clearly he’s done with this conversation.

  I nod. “I’ll let you know as soon as we have any leads.”

  I’m still trying to process the conversation with Paul as I reach the walkway, but that’s when I see him. Noah leans against my rental, his arms crossed, head cocked. His hair is slicked back slightly, but it’s still rough enough to make me wonder if it’s on purpose.

  “Mr. Washington,” I say, nodding to him.

  “Detective.” He whips a small notebook from his pocket and takes a few steps toward me.

  I grind my teeth and continue to my car.

  “Is Paul Clark a person of interest in Emma’s death?”

  “No, he’s not. I’m here about an unrelated case.” Normally I wouldn’t comment at all. But sometimes not commenting leads to wild speculation, and in this case, I don’t want that. The last thing I need is the mayor pissed off because I didn’t shoot down the idea that his brother is a suspect in a murder investigation.

  “And what case might that be?”

  I stop walking and cross my arms. “A missing boat.”

  He raises a brow at that. “And a missing boat takes precedence over a murder investigation?”

  I bite my tongue. “I have no comment on that.”

  “You have no comment on the fact that the mayor seems to be extending his reach to find a missing boat for his brother instead of finding Emma’s killer?”

  I prop my car door open, and before shutting it, I say, “As I said, no comment.”