Next Girl to Die

by Dea Poirier

  “Butch still lives on the island, right?”

  He nods. “You gonna talk to him?”

  “I sure as hell am,” I say as I grab my keys.

  Butch lives in Calderwood Neck, on the northernmost part of the island. He owns a blue farmhouse I’ve passed a thousand times but never been in. In second grade, I befriended one of the Carver girls, Georgia. But my mom put an end to that. The Lanes, the Warrens, and the Carvers were off limits to us, though she never told me why.

  I approach the front door, and Butch pops his head around the side of the house. He’s got a hammer in one hand and a piece of wood in the other. Butch Carver is a small guy, not built wide and tall like many of the other men on the island. His name doesn’t suit him. He raises an eyebrow when he sees me. “Claire?”

  I nod. “Good to see you, Butch.”

  “Here to talk to me about my niece?”

  I shake my head as I approach. “No, sir. I was hoping I could talk to you about Chloe and Samantha.”

  He nods and walks over, waving for me to take a seat on one of the benches pushed up against the porch railing. “Why are you here about them?”

  “When’s the last time you spoke to both of them?”

  “Samantha, about a week.” He scratches his stubbled chin and stares off toward the tree line. “Chloe, though—it’s been eighteen, almost nineteen years.” His voice is as far off as his eyes.

  “Why is that?”

  “We had a big falling-out, and she decided she wanted to move to California. She went to stay with one of her friends, and she never spoke to me or her mother again after that.”

  “Weren’t you concerned that something might have happened to her?”

  “We were for a while. We spoke to Sheriff Dyer about it a couple of weeks after she left. We wanted to make sure she got there okay. She wouldn’t return our calls, and she shut her cell off. He said since she was over eighteen, there was nothing we could do about it. But he reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department. They confirmed that she was fine but that she didn’t want to talk to us anymore.”

  “What was the falling-out over, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  He shakes his head and looks down. “A boy.”

  “Who?”

  “Zach Miller,” he says. Zach is Mrs. Miller’s son. He’s a few years older than me; Rachel had a crush on him when she was in middle school and he was in high school.

  “And she’s never contacted you since?” I ask. Eighteen years is a long time to hold a grudge.

  He shakes his head. “No.” He furrows his brow and crosses his arms. “Why are you asking about Chloe?”

  My heart is heavy as I consider how to continue. With everything I’ve learned, it’s possible that the Jane Doe is Chloe. But I’ll need his DNA to be sure. There’s no way to ask for his DNA without alerting him. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. There’s a Jane Doe who was found in 2000.” I give him a rundown of how they found the match and what it means to him.

  For a long moment, he’s stoic, silent. “If I give DNA, could they test it to see if it matches?”

  I nod. “You or Chloe’s mother. I can have someone from the CSI team reach out to get the test run for you.”

  He looks down and crosses his arms. “If she’s been dead this whole time and we didn’t know—no one knew—” Red rings his eyes. He’s seconds from crying.

  “There’s nothing you could have done. My hope is that it’s not Chloe, that she’s safe in California like you were told.” Because if she’s not—what could that mean? Did Sheriff Dyer lie and never make the call? Could he have known what was really happening to these girls? Or worse—was he involved?

  I head back to the station and call to arrange the DNA match for Butch. A few minutes later, right as I’m digging into an autopsy report about a Jane Doe, Noah knocks on my door.

  “You know you don’t have to knock,” I say as I smile at him.

  “Oh, come on, it’s part of that southern charm you love so much,” he says as he winks at me, handing over a cup of coffee.

  “Thank you.” I take the coffee. I have to admit I’m loving this daily ritual we have. “Can you shut the door?”

  He nods and shuts it before sitting across from me. “What’s up?”

  “I’m going over the autopsy and the info that we gathered in Rockland about the Jane Doe that might be Chloe. It all seems pretty familiar: age estimated sixteen to nineteen, blonde, strangled, and”—I lower my voice—“a piece of flesh removed from her lower back.” Barbara mentioned the MOs being similar, but seeing it laid out like this, there’s no denying that this fits the pattern perfectly.

  “Jesus,” he says and blows out a hot burst of air from his nose like a bull. He passes me a muffin.

  I nod. Noah may have really been onto something about these bodies dropped in the bay.

  “I found something for you.” Noah slides a folded piece of paper across the desk to me.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” I joke as I grab it. As soon as I’ve got it in my hands, I open it up. Inside I find a rough, streaked photocopy of an article.

  Rash of Runaways Rocks Vinalhaven

  March 13, 1981

  The small town of Vinalhaven, Maine, has been suffering from an alarming pattern. In the past six months alone, four girls have run away, leaving their friends and families heartbroken.

  I’ve reached out to Sheriff Dyer for comment . . .

  I look up at Noah, my eyebrows raised. “Where did you find this? How?”

  “Well, it goes on to say the sheriff confirmed all the girls were fine. They’re over eighteen and wanted to move. There’s nothing anyone could do about it. You can’t drag an adult back to the island. There were just so many that ran away or moved away during that time: Camille Norton, Bessie Smith, Delilah . . .” He trails off.

  I scan the article again, looking for names. The Carvers, Thayers, Smiths, and Nortons all had girls leave. One of the names catches my eye, though: Dovey Thayer. She’s one of my grandmother’s nieces—I guess that’d make her my cousin, but I never knew her. My grandma never mentioned to me before that she’d moved or run away.

  There’s a missing piece, a connection I’m starting to feel. “I’m going to talk to my grandma. Maybe she can tell me something.” Were some of these girls victims and not runaways?

  He leans over the desk and gives me a feather-soft kiss on the cheek. “Text me if you need anything.”

  “Thank you. I will.” The butterflies in my stomach when he’s this close to me make me feel like I’m thirteen. He floods my senses. His woody smell, the brush of his stubble against my cheek, the heat of his breath—it all works together to make my head swim. “I’ll try to be at the hotel by five.”

  He offers me a smile and grabs his coffee. “You better be, or I’ll come get you,” he says with a playful laugh.

  When Noah leaves, I expect to hear the door shut, but instead a dark figure looms over me, and I find Mayor Clark glowering at me. Dark circles hang beneath his bloodshot eyes. His cheeks are sunken, his skin sallow and waxy. He looks like—well, he looks like his daughter died less than two weeks ago. It’s clear from his greasy hair and thick stubble that he hasn’t been taking care of himself, not that I blame him. I wouldn’t be in any better of a state.

  “How can I help you, Mayor Clark?”

  He swings the door shut, and red creeps from his collar. On the left side of his neck one of his veins throbs insistently, making it difficult for me to maintain eye contact.

  “You’re supposed to be solving Madeline’s murder, not schlepping around town with your mainlander boyfriend,” he seethes, his fist clenching at his side.

  It takes far too long for the words to register, because I’m convinced I didn’t hear him properly. By the time I finally come to my senses with a reply, my heart is pounding, anger stabbing the back of my mind. My thoughts circle dangerously, like sharks. It’s so tempting to hurl an insult before I think it thr
ough.

  “Excuse me? What did you say?”

  “You heard me,” he snaps. “You’ve been all over town with that backwater reporter while you should be tracking down Madeline’s killer.”

  I push all of the air trapped in my lungs out at once. Though anger builds inside me like a toxic cloud, I won’t let it out. I know he’s angry. He’s hurting. It’s not the first time a family member of a victim has yelled at me. I know better than to lash out. It will only make this worse.

  “We’re doing everything we can to find Madeline’s killer. I’ve been here every day, sometimes twelve hours a day, trying to solve this. The other officers are working on it as well.” I’d tell him about the other girls, that this might be a serial killer, that I was nearly killed in a fire, but we’ve all agreed to keep it under wraps. It will only cause panic, and that’s the last thing we need.

  He crosses his arms and sighs. “Do you have any suspects yet?”

  “We have some people we’re looking at,” I say, because if I go as far as to say suspects, he’s going to want the list. He’s going to go after someone. I know what it’s like to need answers. I know what it’s like to want to fix it yourself, to do something because you’re so helpless.

  “Like who?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Of course you’re not,” he growls and heads to the door. As he reaches for the knob, he turns back. “Solve this, or I will end you.”

  I know he means my career. He’s closer to the truth than he realizes, though. If I don’t solve this, it will likely kill me.

  I trace a path up the long winding roads north, past my mom’s house, past the quarries. The further north I drive, the more civilization disappears as nature claims the island. Finally, the trees thin as I reach the coast and cross the small, narrow bridge to Calderwood Neck. My grandmother’s house, of course, is on Calderwood Point. She loves living out here. It’s her badge of honor, even though she married into the Calderwood name.

  Her grand Victorian overlooks the ocean. It’s from her side of the family, the Thayers. Thayer Manor, she’s called it jokingly. The original Calderwood home is about a block away, a twelve-room Victorian dressed in maroon and light blue. My grandma’s changed the color since I last saw her house; the siding is the color of a faded daisy, with teal accents around the windows and a wraparound porch. Even after all these years, it’s pristine.

  I ring the doorbell and have to keep myself from pacing the porch. It’s been over fifteen years since I saw her last. I didn’t even think to tell her I was back in town. She and my mother had a falling-out after Rachel died. I don’t know all the details, but I assume it had something to do with Rachel’s death. After that, Grandma wasn’t at Christmas or birthdays. I wasn’t even able to talk about her; there was no more Grandma and no more Rachel. In one fell swoop I lost them both. I’ve never felt so alone in my life as I did then. My parents didn’t seem to consider that I had lost Rachel and Grandma too. It wasn’t my loss, just theirs.

  She opens the door, and the sight of her takes my breath away. I expected her to be ancient, to be a brittle, frail old woman. But it doesn’t look like she’s aged a day. Her long blonde hair falls across her shoulders with a braided strand mixed into it. It’s hard to see her big blue eyes behind her thick turquoise glasses, but I know they’re there. The only thing different about her is that she’s started penciling in her nonexistent eyebrows since the last time I saw her. They’re darker and higher than they should be, making her look surprised. Or maybe she actually is surprised.

  “Claire?” she breathes as she grabs me and pulls me into a hug. Her paisley dress billows around me, enveloping me. My grandmother, Bea, has always looked like she’d fit right in at Woodstock. She’s too ethereal. She doesn’t belong on an island like this. A free spirit tethered to this island is a tragedy. After my grandpa died, I figured she’d travel, explore, but she never did.

  “Hey, Grandma,” I mumble as she squeezes me. She’s surrounded in a floral, powdery smell, a scent that brings me back to my childhood, back when I still had her and Rachel. My eyes tear up. God, I missed her. But I bite back the tears. I refuse to cry.

  “What are you doing here? Your mother is going to kill you,” she warns as she takes a step back, appraising me carefully.

  I roll my eyes. “There’s nothing she can do about it. I’m working here as the detective.”

  She waves me through the door. “Well, come on in. It’s cold enough to catch your death out there.” Once I’m inside, she offers me a warm smile and holds me by the shoulders. “I always knew you were going to do great things.”

  The air is thick with patchouli and something else, maybe vanilla. She’s always had the house decorated with rich colors. She told me it was Moroccan while I was growing up. I sit on the gold crushed-velvet sofa in her living room. Mismatched gauzy curtains hang on every window, dyeing the light spilling in orange and blue.

  “You want some tea or anything?” she offers.

  “No, thank you. I was hoping I could talk to you about something, actually,” I say, and my voice sounds much weaker than I mean for it to. This is one of those topics I never imagined I’d talk to my grandma about.

  She perches on a burgundy chair across from me. “Oh?”

  “What I’m going to say needs to stay between us,” I say, and I wait for her to nod before I continue. “I’m sure you heard about the murder of the mayor’s daughter and Emma Carver.”

  She nods and purses her lips. “Poor girls.”

  “Because of their deaths falling so close to the anniversary, we think it might be connected to Rachel. But there are pages missing from Rachel’s autopsy, and the police report is spotty at best.” I swallow hard and try to gather my thoughts. “I can’t ask my parents about this. They won’t tell me the truth. So I was hoping you remembered something.”

  She shakes her head, and sadness paints her features. “You know, I think you might be the first Calderwood to try to help a Carver.”

  “Why is that?” I know my mom hates the Carvers, but she’s never told me why. There are so many pieces of Vinalhaven history that are a mystery to me.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “A story I think I need to hear,” I urge.

  She nods. “I suppose you’re right. Not long after the island was founded, your great-great-great-great-aunt married Abner Warren. They had a very contentious marriage. The families had been happy about the marriage, though, because it helped their two fishing companies merge, and they no longer had to compete. Abner started spending less and less time at home and more time on a boat. Your aunt got fed up with it and started seeing William Carver. She got pregnant while Abner was away, and shortly after he returned, she was found dead—drowned at the bottom of one of the Calderwood quarries. A week later, they found William in the same place.”

  “Jesus.” This town has more secrets than I expected.

  “After they both died, the families all split. The Warrens, the Carvers, and the Calderwoods were never on good terms again after that. There was a lot of finger-pointing.”

  “Mom’s not a Calderwood, though. Why would she care about the history of it?”

  “She and the other Millers always sided with the Calderwoods. So they’ve always had the same enemies.” She sighs and leans back in her chair. “Usually an awful thing like this will bring a community together. But no one wanted to bury the hatchet. Maybe with you on it, though, you can fix this. You can set some of these awful things right.”

  “I wish I could help more,” I say.

  “None of these girls deserved what happened to them. I couldn’t get any information from the sheriff when Rachel died. Maybe your mom and dad had an easier time. But they wouldn’t tell me anything.” Her face grows pale, and she looks at the floor. “I had a good friend who worked for the medical examiner’s office. When your mom found out I was looking into Rachel’s death, she disowned me, and your father
went right along with it.” Pain swims in her eyes. My mom robbed her of her family, and for what? “She wanted nothing to do with me anymore. I was just trying to find out who did this. Your mom wanted me to leave it alone. It’s partly my fault. When we got into a fight about it, I asked her if she even wanted this to be solved.”

  Why would my mom not want this solved? How could she really disown my grandmother over trying to solve Rachel’s death? All she wanted were answers.

  There are other questions I have to ask, questions about her niece. “Whatever happened to Dovey?”

  Her eyes go wide, like that’s the very last thing she expected me to ask about. “Why?”

  “I saw an article today mentioning that she was a runaway.”

  She nods and looks toward the windows. “Dovey never liked the island. She hated it, even. When she was little, sometimes it felt like as soon as she started talking, she was saying that she wanted to leave. At sixteen, she told me and your grandfather that she was gay. It was a shock, to say the least. But I accepted it. Some of the other family members, though . . .” She shakes her head. “Some didn’t understand. Every time I turned around, someone was giving her hell about it. As soon as she was eighteen, she took off.”

  I can’t believe she never told me about any of this. “When’s the last time you spoke with her?”

  “About two weeks ago.”

  “She’s not missing, then?”

  “Missing? Of course not. She just doesn’t want anything to do with this island. That’s why you’ve never met her. And it doesn’t help that your mother froze her out as soon as she left.” She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “You know as well as anyone how complicated families can be.”

  With the Jane Does we’ve seen so far, this is shaping up into a pattern that spans decades, generations. I need to find out which girls really did make it off this island and which ones didn’t. If it wasn’t Dovey, it could have been someone else. “The station doesn’t have any of the records of runaways from the eighties or nineties. Is there anything you remember from back then, a murder, anything?”