Next Girl to Die

by Dea Poirier

  I grab a fresh cup of coffee and a sandwich from one of the shops on Main Street. For a few minutes, I make small talk with Mrs. Miller, but I head out quickly when I figure out she saw nothing last night. I leave with a warm coffee, a bag of food tucked under my arm, and a head full of fresh gossip. Most of it was the kind of crap my mom would blather on about over tea, but she did have some gossip about Noah. Something about him actually being a reporter for CNN trying to expose the seedy underbelly of our small fishing town. Mrs. Miller clearly believed this, so I just bit my tongue. But I know for a fact he doesn’t work for CNN; he has an eclectic writing résumé, spanning everywhere from Vox to the Washington Post. The front door jingles behind me as she calls goodbye.

  As I push through the station doors, my phone vibrates, and I glance at it, finding an email. The phone company is finally getting back to me about the request for the number that texted Madeline the night she died. John Warren is the registered owner—Ryder and Allen’s dad. Which one of their phones is it? It surprises me since I haven’t found any links between Ryder and Madeline. But do I really think the phone belongs to John Warren or Allen? Not likely.

  An idea pops into my mind—sometimes you can link a social media account to a phone number. I navigate to Facebook and type the number in. The page loads so slowly it’s as if time has skidded to a halt. After what feels like five minutes but has probably been more like five seconds, an account for Ryder Warren appears. All signs have been pointing to Madeline having a boyfriend, and this connects some dots for me. Even if they weren’t dating, they were in contact the night she died. He may have answers that I can’t get from anyone else.

  I knock gently on the frame of Sergeant Michaels’s door. He glances up and points toward the empty chair. “Sit, sit,” he says as he finishes typing.

  “I need to talk to you about Ryder Warren.”

  He pulls his hands back from the keyboard and crosses his arms. “Why?”

  “His phone was the last number that texted Madeline before she died.”

  He bristles and thumbs the end of his nose. “That damn kid. He wants to be trouble. He wants everyone on this island to hate him.”

  His reaction surprises me. “Oh?” I expected him to start listing all of his crimes one by one. It sounds like he’s ready to defend Ryder.

  “Don’t get me wrong: he’s gotten into some trouble. Shoplifting, cutting class. Deep down, though, he’s a good kid. He babysits for Ellen. He’s even helped at the church a few times when no one was looking. He’s trying to get attention in a family full of kids. It happens.” He shrugs. “So you think she snuck out to see him?”

  “Possibly. I need to talk to him. But I wanted your take on how to handle this with Allen.” I’ve never had to toe the line like this and question the family member of a fellow officer.

  Sergeant Michaels scratches his stubble and leans back in his chair. “I’ll talk to him, give him a heads-up. You need to call his parents to arrange a time for Ryder to come to the station.”

  I nod. “If you’ve got their number, I can handle that.”

  “Please, just make it clear that he’s not a suspect and that you think he may have just seen her downtown the night she died.”

  “Sure.” That’s not how I would normally handle the situation, but under the circumstances it’ll have to work. I try not to make a habit of saying that someone is or isn’t under investigation, because things can change quickly, and new evidence could come to light.

  “I’ll email you their number after I talk to Allen,” he says as he starts typing again.

  “Thanks.”

  I head back to my office and shut the door. Allen’s always had a stick firmly planted up his ass when it comes to me. He thought I was a stuck-up bitch in high school. His favorite nickname for me was Princess Calderwood.

  It takes about twenty minutes for the sergeant to get the number to me. When I call, it goes straight to voice mail. I leave a short message urging Ryder’s parents to give me a call, and I hope that they’ll do it quickly.

  CHAPTER 9

  While I wait for the Warrens to get back to me, I plan to retrace Madeline’s movements. I start in my car on her street and follow the path she took toward the cemetery. Being back here, I see Rachel everywhere I go. Her ghost lingers in every shadow, the memory of her written on every street. It’s as close to a haunting as my life is ever going to get. It’s time for me to visit Rachel—well, her grave, anyway. I’ve never said goodbye to her properly. My mom didn’t want a funeral, and I could never bear to come here on my own.

  The cemetery is a block from the school, which is pretty poor planning, if you ask me. Instead of skipping school at the mall or wherever mainlander teenagers skip school, here they’d just walk around the cemetery and smoke, at least when I was in high school. Looking back, I cringe at how disrespectful it was.

  At the end of a road lined with pine trees is the cemetery. Its bounds are ringed with a wrought iron fence, with tombstones appearing amid a field of dead grass and maple trees long since robbed of their foliage. I pull off into the spare bit of grass just inside the gates to park. The church never bothered to put a lot here. If they haven’t bothered so far, chances are they never will. Things here rarely change.

  I’m painfully aware of how close I am to Rachel. There’s a twinge at the back of my mind, and my stomach sours with unease. My hand tightens on the steering wheel, and I glance to my right. The rows of headstones stretch all the way to the back fence.

  Wind whips around me, rocking the car back and forth, as if urging me out into the graveyard. “Fine,” I grumble and pop the door open.

  My boots sink into the grass, and I walk slowly down the rows of graves. If it were anyone else I were visiting, I’d bring flowers, but Rachel would hate that. She hated everything Mom loved. Mom loved fresh flowers, so Rachel loathed them. Her grave is ten feet from the back fence, the headstone made of newer granite, which seems out of place surrounded by markers that look ancient.

  I take off my jacket, laying it on the ground so I can sit. Even through the thick material, the earth chills my legs. I know what I need to say to her, why I came here, but my tongue may as well be tied in knots. My guts twist.

  It’s now or never.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can keep your secrets, Rachel,” I whisper, my words weaker than I’d like. A shiver runs down my spine, but it’s got nothing to do with the weather.

  “If no one else got hurt, I would have taken them to my grave. But I can’t do this anymore—not when other lives are on the line.”

  A tear runs down my cheek, turning icy in seconds. “God, I miss you.”

  Once we hit our teen years, Rachel and I fought constantly, always at each other’s throats. Some days, I thought only one of us would make it out alive. Turns out I was right. I lean forward, plucking a long strand of grass from the dirt, and I slowly wrap it around my finger again and again until the tip tingles.

  A shadow moves in front of me, the silhouette of a man, and I jump up. My heart pounds, and I try to catch my breath.

  “Shit, I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t even know you were back here,” Jason says.

  He’s the last person I expected to see. Hell, I didn’t even know he’d left the station.

  “It’s okay.” I grab my jacket off the ground and dust it off. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Today is my mom’s birthday. I was stopping by to visit her,” he says, brandishing a bouquet of daisies. “You all right?”

  I wipe my cheeks automatically, ridding them of any evidence I’ve been crying. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Just here to see Rachel.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I shake my head. “No, but thank you.” I start heading back toward the fence. I’ve said everything I came here to say. After all, I came here to see if there were any clues to why Madeline stopped here before she was killed.

  “Claire, I know it’s hard. I’m he
re to talk if you ever need to,” he calls after me.

  I offer him a wave and throw a thank-you over my shoulder for good measure. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’ve got to figure this out on my own. Looping around the outside fence, I check for any hint that Madeline was here. At the end of the fence, toward the tree line, there’s a small jacket balled up on the ground. I bag the jacket without touching it and search nearby. There’s no sign that anyone has been near this jacket, not so much as a footprint on the soft earth. She wouldn’t just leave this here on a cold night, but it’s clear she wasn’t taken here—it’s not likely, anyway. I head back to the station with the evidence. I’ll need to see if it belongs to Madeline and if it leads me anywhere.

  CHAPTER 10

  With a cup of coffee in hand, I walk to the station, leaving my rental car at home. There’s no reason to use a car downtown most of the time. The house I’m renting is within spitting distance from the station, so when it’s not bone-chillingly cold, I’m going to take full advantage of that. Low fluffy clouds roll across the sky above me. The air is so crisp and clear it’s almost sharp. I pass the row of buildings that make up downtown, the locals waving at me as I pass. I wait across the street from the station as several cars pass by. Finally, once it’s clear, I walk as quickly as I can, mindful of the steaming cup of coffee still clutched in my hands.

  I throw the station door open, trading the cool air for the balmy warmth inside. Mindy waves at me as I pass through the waiting room on my way back to my office. Folders from the second round of interviews Jason did wait on my desk. One is from the witness who found Madeline’s body, and the rest are from some of her other friends at school. I pore over the folders, searching for anything that might help. Madeline snuck out nearly every night, and at least one night a week, she met her friends in the park, but I’m still not sure what she did the rest of the time. If her nights with friends were anything like mine at that age, they were meeting to pass around a bottle of liquor, smoke a little pot, and bemoan their parents or teachers. But none of her friends had planned to meet her that night.

  So what was Madeline doing in the park? She must have been meeting Ryder.

  Though the officers asked all the right questions, there’s nothing in here of substance. She didn’t have a boyfriend, not that anyone knew of, anyway. She wasn’t going out there to meet with any of her friends. No one has let a word slip about what she might have been doing. After the kids have had a few days to breathe, I’ll ask a few more questions. Someone has to know something about this girl. I check my phone again to see if I’ve missed the Warrens returning my call. I haven’t, so I call to leave another voice mail.

  As I wait for the Warrens to call back, I flip back through the interviews and the details of the cases. There’s a common thread between Emma and Madeline that has my interest piqued. They both volunteered at the Pen Bay Medical Center, the closest hospital to the island. I need to reach out to their volunteer coordinator and see what I can find out about their time at the hospital. I search online for the main number for the medical center and call.

  “Pen Bay Medical Center. How can I help you?” a woman asks after two rings. Her voice is strained, like she’s stressed or recovering from a cold.

  I introduce myself before jumping in. “I need to ask a few questions about volunteers who have worked for the hospital in the past. It relates to a case I’m working on. Do you have a volunteer coordinator you can transfer me to?”

  “Uh . . . can you hold, please?” she asks.

  “Of course.”

  The low, chiming notes of a classical piece filter through the phone after she places me on hold. After a few minutes the line clicks, and she comes back on. “I’m going to transfer you to Aidan McConnel, the hospital director. He coordinates the volunteer program.”

  “Thanks,” I say, but she transfers me so quickly I doubt she heard me at all.

  “This is Aidan,” a man says, his southern accent thick on his words.

  I give him a quick explanation for my call. “I was hoping I could talk to you about Madeline Clark and Emma Carver.”

  “I’m not sure how I can help. They haven’t volunteered in six months.”

  That can’t be right. “Six months? I thought they’d volunteered more recently. I was told Madeline was there two weeks ago.”

  “No, six months ago I asked them both not to come back,” he says, drawing all his words out much more slowly than I’m used to.

  I quirk an eyebrow at that. Two girls who’ve never been in any trouble in Vinalhaven were asked not to return to a hospital they were volunteering at? “Can I inquire as to why?”

  “Emma and Madeline were stealing Adderall. When we discovered the theft, we asked them not to come back.”

  Jesus Christ. “Was the theft reported to the authorities?”

  “No, I didn’t want to hurt their chances of getting into a good college over something like that. I hoped that asking them not to come back would sort of scare them straight. You know?”

  “How much did they steal?” Static crackles on the line, and I pull the phone away for a second to be sure I didn’t lose him.

  “They stole around fifty tablets.”

  “Over how long of a period?” I ask. Fifty tablets is a lot for personal use. Were they selling them?

  “We suspect it was within a two-week period. One of the nurses alerted me that a bottle had fewer tablets than it should have had. It appeared that they took someone else’s key card to get into the prescription room. Our security guy, Craig, staked out the room and caught them in the act.”

  Taking a key card to steal Adderall makes me wonder if they’d done it before. Stealing fifty tablets in a two-week period seems like quite a bit for a first try. I’d bet they stole smaller amounts that went unnoticed before they were finally caught. But I file those details away in my mind.

  When I’m silent for a long moment, he asks, “What is all this about?”

  “I’m sorry to inform you, but Madeline and Emma were both victims of a homicide.”

  “They’re dead?” he stammers.

  “Yes. I know this must come as a shock.”

  “Of course it comes as a shock; they were just girls. Oh God, what happened?” His voice is pleading, every syllable of his words trembling as he speaks.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t go into any of the details because it is an open investigation. While the girls volunteered there, did you ever notice anyone showing an unusual interest in them?”

  He clears his throat, like suddenly he needs to sound more official. “No, not that I recall.”

  “Have any of your volunteers ever made any complaints about staff being inappropriate or trying to see them outside of the hospital?”

  “No, there’s never been anything like that. We have an incredibly clean record,” he says.

  “Is there anything else that you think could be of help to the investigation?” I ask.

  “Not that I can recall. But I’ll think about it. If you give me your details, I’ll ask around and see if anyone else comes up with anything.”

  I give my details to Aidan and end the call. While I may not have discovered anything about the killer, he gave me some information about Emma and Madeline I never expected. If they lied about their whereabouts for six months, what else did they lie about? And if they were also selling Adderall, that could have gotten them into some trouble.

  After I’m done typing up my notes on the call with Aidan, I head out of the station and walk onto Main Street. Now that I’ve talked to Aidan about Emma and Madeline’s connection to the hospital, I need to speak with Father Samuel at the church to see if he knows anything about their time in choir together. As the cold afternoon air whips against me, my phone vibrates, and I glance at the screen as I pull it from my pocket.

  “Hey, Mom,” I say as soon as the call connects.

  “Claire! I need you to get over here right away!” she says, her voice verging on panic.
r />   “What’s wrong?” My mom isn’t the type to call and tell me to get over to her house ASAP unless there’s something really wrong. Her words wrap around me like a vise. Is there something going on with my dad? He’s had some health problems recently, chest pains, mostly, but I figured they were just a symptom of being cooped up with my mom. My heart hammers and my breaths quicken as I fish the car keys out of my pocket and throw open the door of my rental car.

  “Just get here as fast as you can,” she says before ending the call, and I swear right before she hangs up I hear a strange voice in the background.

  With my hands trembling, it’s difficult to get my key in the ignition. I head west, through downtown past the station, and up the road that will lead me to my parents’ house. Adrenaline burns in my bloodstream as the wood-frame houses lining the street give way to pine trees and lush landscape. I press my foot hard against the accelerator, and the car lurches forward. The drive would normally take fifteen minutes, but I make it in seven.

  As I turn into the driveway, the pebbles skittering beneath the tires, my heart is thrumming away in my throat. A seed of panic was planted in me the moment my mom called, and now it’s blooming in full. The house is in one piece, exactly the way it looked the last time I was here. I can’t see a single thing wrong, not from out here, anyway. Crime scenes always give me a bad feeling, a sickness that grows in the pit of my stomach; here, there’s nothing. But that doesn’t mean there’s not something wrong on the inside.

  “Mom!” I call as soon as I slam the car door.

  She opens the door for me, a gin and tonic clinking in her hand, a delicate slice of lime balanced on the edge. My mother has always been a drinker, not a drunk, not a lush. That being said, she likes to be seen with drinks. Presentation is everything to her, and this is how she wants to be presented.