Next Girl to Die
Page 7
I sigh. If the phone was tossed, or even if the murderer has it but the phone is off now, it’ll be impossible to find.
Since the last location isn’t going to do me any good, the next thing I need to know is who she was talking to. I match up phone numbers on the statement between the list of friends I have for Madeline. There’s only one that I can’t match, and it’s the last number that texted her, at 12:15 a.m. I call the number, but it goes straight to a generic voice mail: no clue as to the owner. It takes me a few minutes to put in a request to find out who owns the number. It kills me that requests like this take days or weeks. The whole damn system is lacking a sense of urgency.
I look over the rest of the location tracking, trying to follow Madeline’s movements. She left the house at 12:20 a.m., walked toward the school, stopped at the cemetery, and then headed downtown to the park. What the hell was she doing at the cemetery in the middle of the night? Back when I was in school, kids would skip class and hang out there because it was the only place you wouldn’t be spotted—unless you wanted to hang out in the woods, that is.
On Madeline’s laptop, I continue searching for connections. Though Ryder was on the surveillance footage downtown, I can’t find any link between them. They’re not friends on social media; no messages shared. I want to tread lightly there until I have an actual solid reason to bring Ryder in. So far, it doesn’t add up, and if I can’t make my case for why I need to speak to him, then it’s too early to pursue.
My mind keeps slipping back to Margo Lane on the surveillance footage. I need more of a background on Margo. I don’t remember much of her from when I was a kid. The guys at the station were able to give me a little info, but my mom and Margo were friends in high school—she might have details I can’t get anywhere else. According to everyone I’ve spoken to, Margo never leaves the house, and if that’s the case, what was she doing downtown?
I walk outside before I dial my mom’s number. I can’t dig into the hard questions over the phone, but I’m saved the trouble of asking. The moment she picks up, she insists on swinging by the station to grab me “so we can chat.” Though I don’t really have the time to waste, I know she’ll give me more dirt in person. And right now, that’s what I need to connect the dots in this case.
After fifteen minutes, my mom’s jade-green Jaguar rolls to a stop in front of me. The windows are down, and she leans back against the leather seat with a silk scarf tied over her blonde hair, like a fifties movie star. The afternoon sun warms the air slightly, bringing what feels like a winter morning firmly back into fall territory, and she’s clearly relishing it.
Mom comes from money. She’s got enough to last our family for generations, enough to have a maid, a groundskeeper, and a chef. She could have a driver, too, but that’s the one thing she’s always refused. A woman should be able to drive herself. She loved to remind me of that when I was growing up. Something about being able to get yourself out of any situation. I’m not sure what she got herself into in the past that she couldn’t get out of. I never asked.
“Come on, Claire-Bear,” she says in a singsong voice. I hate the nickname because Rachel came up with it. She was obsessed with Care Bears when we were kids. She’d draw their symbols on my stomach with markers, and Mom would throw a fit. That’s what Rachel told me, anyway. I was too young to remember.
I climb into the car, my slacks sliding too easily across the leather seats. “Hey, Mom,” I say as I buckle myself in.
She smiles. “I’m going to take the long way home.” I know it’s so she can avoid having to see the park again. She must have heard about what happened, but I will not be bringing it up. It’s always struck me as odd that Rachel’s killer chose the small park closest to downtown. There’s a much more secluded park past downtown that’s normally empty since it’s tucked behind the high school. It seems like a smarter place to dump a body. The significance of that isn’t lost on me. The killer is saying, Look at me; look at what I can do. Hell, most of this island would make for a great dumping ground. Up north, we’ve got the quarries. I doubt anyone goes up there until the summer. There are plenty of wooded areas where a body would never be found. That’s what really sticks out to me—anyone could see the locations to hide a body on this island.
“You can drive however you want. I was hoping we could talk anyway,” I say.
Her hands tighten on the steering wheel, her knuckles as white as pearls. “Please, nothing about the ugliness from last night,” she mutters as she accelerates. Her face is tight, the way she looks when she smells garbage or has to deal with something unpleasant, as she calls it. That’s the face she always makes when she has to deal with me.
I shake my head. “No, nothing like that. What can you tell me about the Lanes?”
For a moment, it looks like she’s chewing the inside of her cheek, something that’s not a usual tic of hers. But her typical tic is booze, and it’s not like she has any of that in the car. “Why on earth are you asking about them?” she asks as we drive through downtown and pass the high school. This route will take us past the quarries. It will take almost half an hour to reach my parents’ house, but this means my mom can’t dodge the question. I bet she’s regretting this now. Cornering her like this is a rare gift. I’ll use it to the fullest.
“A few people brought them up today, and I realized there’s a lot about them I don’t know. Why are they shut-ins?” I ask, tempted to pull out my notepad, but I know if I do, she’ll be sealed up tighter than a brand-new hull.
She shakes her head and makes a tsk sound. “It’s their own doing. That saying about making your own bed and lying in it. It’s just a shame that poor girl, Jordan, was caught in the middle of it. Born in the middle of it, I should say.”
“I’m going to need more to go on than that,” I say.
“It was one of the biggest scandals in a long time.” Her words are clipped, but there’s a gleam in her eyes that tells me she’s relishing this chance to gossip. She pats down the back of her scarf. It’s still as tight as it can get without choking her. She clears her throat with a little eh-em sound, the way a teacher would to quiet down a class. “Henry and Margo were originally married to other people. Henry was married to my best friend, Violet. And Margo was married to my cousin, Richard. Violet and Henry had twin girls, such precious things. Well, around the time the girls turned two, Violet called me. It was the most upset I’ve ever heard her. She heard from Jane that someone had seen Henry going into the Tidewater Motel with Margo.” She clears her throat again, and I swallow hard as I try to keep up. It’s hard when she’s talking about people I don’t know and can’t imagine.
“A few people had mentioned it looked like Margo was pregnant. Turns out the baby wasn’t Richard’s. She came clean with it shortly after finding out. She’d been having an affair with Henry. It destroyed Violet and Richard. Violet took the girls and left the island. Richard ended up leaving a few years later. But the Lanes stayed. A few months after everything went south, they got married, and Jordan was born. They kept to themselves after that. I’ve heard all kinds of strange rumors about why.” Her lip curls like she’s smelled something bad. “But it’s probably just because everyone hates them for what they did.” She turns to look at me, pain in her eyes. “Good people don’t do that.”
We’ve been driving for about ten minutes, and we’re deep into the most wooded part of the island. Tall spindly pine trees line either side of the winding road. In a few minutes, we’ll pass one of the dirt roads that lead to the quarries. I swear I spent nearly every summer swimming in those quarries.
Does anyone even still come out here? I wonder.
“There have been all kinds of strange rumors about them over the years.” Her voice is so quiet I barely hear her over the wind whipping in the open windows.
“What kind of strange rumors?”
“Drugs, drinking, crazy things. For a while there was a rumor that they did something to their daughter. You remember Jordan, right
? That girl was trouble. She disappeared during her senior year,” she says and shakes her head. I do remember Jordan, but I don’t remember her disappearing. She moved away after senior year; that’s what I thought, anyway. “Disappeared?”
She shrugs. “They say she ran away, but who knows. Margo has always had a temper.”
“What about the Warrens?”
She glances at me out of the side of her eye. The Warrens, from what I remember, are one of the few really large families on the island. Six kids: five boys and one girl. I went to school with four of them. The youngest two, a boy and a girl, I barely ever spoke to.
“What about them?” she asks in a voice so sharp it makes me wonder if she’s got a personal grudge against them.
“Catch me up on them. I’m trying to get a feel for the families left on the island,” I say, the lie coming out as smooth as a new sail.
“It’d be easier to just tell you the few people that moved away, or the new people that moved here over the years. Most of the founding families still have kin here. And I doubt that will ever change,” she says, a bit of a barb to her words.
“Indulge me.” I know if I keep pressing it, eventually she’ll give in. She loves having information, and she loves even more proving she has that information.
“Matthew and Jacob moved away. Ellen and Scott, they all get by just fine. Somehow Allen made it into your police station. Ryder, their youngest, is a little hoodlum.”
I almost laugh at the word hoodlum. I’ve never heard my mom use it before, and the word is thick when it rolls off her tongue, as though she’s never said it aloud.
“What exactly is Ryder doing?” I ask, uncertain what exactly someone has to do in Vinalhaven to reach hoodlum status. It could mean anything from shoplifting to skipping church.
She bristles. “Skips school, shoplifts—he even stole a car once. He’s always smoking.” She shakes her head and glares out the window. “He’s just disrespectful.” It doesn’t take much to be disrespectful in my mom’s book, so that’s not entirely definitive.
Maybe I need to talk to Ryder about that missing boat. “Whose car did he steal?”
“Father Samuel’s car, but he refused to press charges. Instead he said he wanted Ryder to come to church. I don’t know if he ever did.” She looks at me, her lips pursed. “But I doubt it. You need to be careful around that family. They’re bad news.”
But I’m already very aware of that. I’m curious just how aware of that fact she is.
“I saw a car that looked very similar to yours downtown the night that Madeline died. Were you downtown?”
She bristles and makes a dismissive noise. “Of course not.”
Which is what I expected her to say—my mother has always had a problem telling me the truth. She doesn’t see me as a detective. I might as well be a little girl playing dress-up to her. “It’s pretty clear there is a Jag on the video. No one else on the island owns one.” I drop the line into the silence, the soft edges of my words not quite calling her on the lie but coaxing her to either dig her heels in deeper or give it up completely.
“Oh, that’s right. I think I swung back by the church late to pick up my phone. I forgot it.”
“How long were you there?”
“Probably five minutes or so. I just grabbed my phone and left,” she says glibly.
“Can anyone confirm that?”
Her head snaps to the side, and her gaze narrows on me. If I were twenty years younger, that stare would be enough to level me—hell, it’d probably be enough to make a grizzly back off—but I hold my ground.
“I’m sure my phone records would confirm it. Those GPS things track everywhere you go.”
I nod. That they do.
Mom curves around the winding roads with ease. Trees tower on either side of us, only parting for the occasional side street. She turns onto the street to her little neighborhood of large houses in varying shades of muted pastels. They all look exactly the same, save for the slight color variations. I swear they even have the same autumn decorations: cartoony scarecrows, hay bales, pumpkins. Each front door has a wreath made of sunflowers, mums, and tiny gourds. They’re all identical, like they bought them at the same place—they probably did.
We slide out of the car, and the wind picks up, lashing against us. Thankfully, though the sky is filled with gray clouds, it doesn’t seem like it’ll snow today; it’s warmed up too much for it. I follow Mom up the path and give my dad a little wave as he peeks out the second story window.
My mom force-feeds me cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea while we catch up. She drives me home late, the sky painted in pinks and purples, and the whole time I consider what she’s told me about the Lanes, the Warrens, and her presence downtown before Madeline’s murder. My whole life I’ve felt that my mother knows more about Rachel’s death than she’s let on, and now with her connection to Emma and Madeline, I’ll have to keep those details in mind as I investigate. After today, there’s something I am sure of—my mother is hiding something.
CHAPTER 8
Over the next couple of days, I help the other officers conduct interviews of Madeline’s friends, kids from school, Paul Clark, and anyone else who’s come forward with information. And at the end, I’m left with nobody but the people I saw on the surveillance video from the night Madeline died. Vince also followed up on the docks for me, and he didn’t learn anything of use either.
Since Ryder is the younger brother of a fellow officer, I’m hesitant to pursue him right away. Sergeant Michaels and I have decided not to mention that Ryder is in the video to Allen yet, as there’s no clear link between Ryder and Madeline. So instead I follow the other leads to the Lanes.
The Lanes’ house sits at the end of a street, where it’s clearly out of place. Here, the other houses are kept up and decorated with the same stupid harvest decorations all over my parents’ house. The house is overgrown, with paint peeling so badly it reminds me of an old sunburn.
This is a house I’ve never approached, never even snuck a peek inside. We’d skip over it on Halloween. As my mom put it, the Lanes are poison, and so is their candy. Rachel and I used to dare each other to knock on their door. Neither of us were ever brave enough, though.
I knock on the door after trying the doorbell three times and figuring out that it’s busted. From this angle, this close, the house is in much worse shape than I thought. Grime collects in the cracking, worn wood. Rust has eaten away every bit of metal on the house. It looks like a stiff-enough wind would turn this whole place to a pile of splinters.
A husk of a woman with red-ringed eyes cracks open the door. Where her eyes should be white, they’re yellow. Her waxy, sallow skin is taut over the dagger-sharp lines of her face. It’s clear she hasn’t been eating—not well, anyway.
“Margo?” I ask, unsure if this is the right woman. I’ve never seen her before.
“Depends on who’s asking,” she croaks.
“I’m Detective Claire Calderwood. I’m investigating the homicides of Emma Carver and Madeline Clark.”
She crosses her arms. Her hands are so bony they look like bleached talons peeking from beneath her robe. Blue veins rope beneath her translucent skin. “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she says and starts to close the door, but I stop it with my hand.
“Please, I have a few questions about Jordan,” I say. Since there’s no real consensus on what happened to her, I need to know that, at least. “We can talk here on the porch. I don’t need to come in,” I offer, because I have zero desire to go in this house. The air seeping from inside smells like a mixture of vinegar and old cheese. Musty and sour, it’s as thick as air on a summer’s day.
She glances back into the house, her face tight as she stands straighter. “We have to be quiet so we don’t wake up my husband.” She follows me onto the porch. “What about Jordan?” she asks as she pulls a pack of cigarettes from her robe and lights one.
“What exactly happened to her?”
“Are you sure she left on her own and that she wasn’t taken somewhere against her will?” What I really want to ask is, Why weren’t you concerned she was taken? Why was it so easy to assume she ran away?
“She left a note, packed her things. I doubt seriously that anyone made her do it.” She takes a long drag from her cigarette and squints toward the street.
I nod and jot that down. It’s still troubling that she doesn’t seem the least bit concerned. I know that all families have different dynamics, that not all parents would be as worried as my mother, but it still strikes me as strange. If I left a note, skipped town, and then didn’t talk to my mother in weeks, she’d send out a search party and then probably hire someone to drag me home. “Have you heard anything about Madeline?” I ask.
“Just because everyone hates us doesn’t mean we hurt that girl,” she says, her words barbed.
“No one said you did,” I say as I make eye contact with her again. “Speaking of that, though. What were you doing downtown last night?”
She narrows her eyes, but they aren’t quite focused on me. “I had to get some things from town. We normally have them delivered to the house, but we couldn’t yesterday.” Something inside the house thuds loudly, like someone falling to the floor. Her eyes go wide, and she glances toward the door. “I need to go.”
Since the visit with Margo gave me nothing, I head back to town. The bell dings behind me as I head into the café. I’ve debated stopping to get some real lunch, but there’s too much on my plate today. I’ve got to go over interviews and start making lists of all the other people I need to follow up with.