Next Girl to Die

by Dea Poirier

It’s likely for the best that my mother stepped aside. Father Samuel smiles at me, deepening the lines on either side of his mouth. Though he doesn’t look his age, with the lighting I suddenly notice the spiderweb of lines around his eyes. It occurs to me that he’s been on the island as long as I can remember, and he may have some information on Sheriff Dyer that could help me.

  “Did Edmond or Jeb Dyer attend church here?” I ask. I don’t remember if they were ever at a service I attended; it was far too long ago.

  He nods. “Yes, and their children—until their parents passed on, that is. Frank hasn’t been since his father died.”

  “Frank is Edmond’s son?” I ask, confused. I don’t remember who Frank’s parents were. He’s in his early sixties, I’d guess. I’m not sure I ever saw him with any family.

  “No, Frank is Jeb’s son. The last names get confusing. When he was eighteen, he wanted his mother’s surname. I suppose he had a falling-out with his dad. That poor family had a wealth of issues. I wish I had been able to help with some of them.”

  “When would you say Frank stopped attending?”

  For a moment he’s silent as he thinks. “I’m not sure. It’s been at least ten years.”

  I nod. “And the other kids?”

  “Edmond’s daughter moved off the island about thirty years ago. And Jeb’s daughter, Delilah, left in the seventies, though I can’t really remember when it was exactly.”

  Did they really leave the island? With things as muddled as they are here, I can’t help but wonder how many young women actually managed to escape this place. “Thank you for your help, Father. And happy Thanksgiving.”

  He holds up a hand to stop me as I start to stand. “There is something that I just remembered. It may be nothing, but a few nights I’ve seen a man hanging out behind the church. Each time I startle him and scare him off. But I haven’t been able to tell who it was.”

  My stomach shifts with the knowledge. That could be our guy. I’ll have Vince keep an eye on the rear of the church during patrols.

  “Thank you. Until we figure out who that is, please don’t let anyone use that exit.”

  I walk back through the church clutching my cell phone. I need to call Sergeant Michaels and tell him what I know. I push open the doors of the church and escape outside. The wind is frigid. What was a blue sky when I came in here has been swallowed by a blanket of gray. Tiny flakes of snow have just begun to fall from the clouds. The sun has been blotted out by the thick cloud cover darkening the sky toward the heart of the island. I find Sergeant Michaels’s contact info and call him as I duck inside my car.

  CHAPTER 25

  No part of me wants to go back to the Lanes’, but Margo might have met Sheriff Dyer while she was working at the hospital. I need to unravel the threads of the Dyers and figure out where they’re leading me. She might not even talk to me again, but I have to try.

  Low gray clouds have settled over the island, and small white flakes fall, twirled by the wind. An eerie silence always settles over us when it snows, and today is no exception. It’s so quiet my blood whooshes in my ears as I walk up the path, and every crunch of acorns beneath my feet sets my teeth on edge.

  Deep in the bowels of the house, I hear something shatter, and a man spits a curse. I stand outside the door, waiting to see if I can hear anything else. When no other sounds follow, I assume it was an accident. The stairs creak: someone climbing them slowly. Once the sound fades, I knock.

  There’s a window to the right of the door. Margo sweeps the curtains out of the way to peer at me. Her eyes tighten, and she glances over one shoulder. I’m not entirely sure she’s going to open the door this time. Eventually, the lock clicks, and she slinks out onto the porch like a cat.

  “You’re back,” she says, not quite surprised, and lights a cigarette. The smell of booze wafts off her like bad perfume. I’m not sure if she’s drunk or if it’s just bleeding from her pores. She doesn’t waver on her feet; her eyes aren’t glassy. To me, it doesn’t look like she’s been drinking at all, but she stinks like she bathed in gin.

  “Can we talk for a few minutes?” I ask as I pull out my notebook.

  “More questions about Jordan?” she asks in such a way that I expect her to roll her eyes, but she doesn’t.

  “No. I was hoping I could talk to you about your time at the memory hospital.”

  Her eyes go wide. “Can’t say I expected that.”

  “You had Jebediah Dyer as a patient while you were there,” I say, my words almost a question.

  She nods slowly as she takes a drag from her cigarette. “Yeah, I saw him a lot while I worked there. He was there for about three years. He had taken a bottle of sleeping pills, and after that he was never quite the same. I’d say he was lucky that didn’t kill him.” She shakes her head. “They said he had early-onset dementia after that, but who knows if the pills just whacked him out of his gourd.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “I was a geriatric nurse. Mostly, I did rounds, checked vitals, distributed medication—grunt work.” She lets out a low, phlegmy laugh.

  “Why’d you leave?” Grunt work or no, I imagine the pay would have been pretty good. Most people would kill for a job that pays really well around here.

  She crosses her arms, the cigarette dangling between her bony fingers. “It’s hard working somewhere where no one ever gets better. That’s the kind of place it is. I went into it knowing that’s what it was, but it still took a toll on me.”

  I can’t imagine working day in and day out with people you get attached to, only to watch them fade away. I’d rather deal with murder. It’s easier to be detached when you don’t know the victim. It might just be me, though. Other cops take it differently, maybe because they’ve never lost anyone.

  “Did he ever talk about any of the work he did?”

  She grunts the way you would when your grandfather tries to tell you the same story for the four hundredth time. “He loved to talk about the good ol’ days,” she says as she takes another long drag.

  “Anything in particular that sticks out to you?”

  “Honestly? I tuned him out most of the time. That’s what happens. These patients are so desperate to talk to anyone. They’re abandoned in places they don’t recognize, surrounded by strangers. They want to connect; they want you to know them. The problem is we know them, but they forget us. They learn your name, your job, and forget it all in the same day, the same hour.

  “There were a few times he’d say things that would scare me, though.” Her eyes are far off as she talks. “Out of nowhere, he’d grab me. His nails would dig into my arms. He’d nearly growl at me. I know by the way that he looked at me that he was talking to someone else,” she says as she taps on the side of her head. “He’d scream at me that I had to stop. I tried to ask him to explain. His eyes were always wide, filled with terror, like someone had hurt him.”

  The way she says it makes my blood run cold. “Do you have any idea who he thought he was talking to?”

  She shakes her head. “No. No one ever came to see him. I heard he had a bad falling-out with his wife, though. Some people said she went crazy. Other people said she left him and their son for some other guy. I assumed since he was yelling at me that he thought I looked like her.” She flicks the ashes from her cigarette. “It was really sad. Three years there alone, and he died without even knowing who he was. No one ever came to visit him. He always mentioned his son should visit after everything he did for him.” She sucks in air through her teeth and then lights a cigarette. “Toward the end, he thought his daughter was in the room with him. Though he always looked so sad; he never said anything to her. He’d just mention to me that she was there.”

  Why didn’t Frank ever visit his father? Did he know anything about these cases? My mind spins as I try to piece it all together. From what I can gather, Sheriff Dyer knew that girls were going missing from the island, many of whom ended up dead. So why didn’t he do anything about it?
The killings couldn’t have continued after Sheriff Dyer died if he’d had something to do with it—so should I be looking at Frank? Did he play a role in this or know something about it?

  I finish up with Margo, but she hasn’t got much else for me, and at the end of our talk, she makes it clear she doesn’t want me to come back.

  That’s just fine with me.

  CHAPTER 26

  October 2004

  She’s on the phone again. There’s a bathroom separating our rooms, but I can still hear her. If Rachel is home, she’s on the phone. There’s a constant droning from her end of the hall. When she’s not here, when it’s quiet, her absence is palpable—there’s a silent void where Rachel should be. I set my book on the nightstand and creep down the hall.

  What the hell is she even talking about? If you’re always on the phone, how do you keep finding things to talk about?

  I shouldn’t be surprised. Rachel always has something to say. Mom has always said Rachel and I are opposites—she’s a talker, and I’m a listener. While I’m sad, she’s happy. Night and day.

  I press my back to the cold wall as I creep down the hallway. I’m careful that she can’t see me in the slit where her door is open. When she makes it this easy, it’s like she wants me to overhear.

  “It has to be sooner than that,” Rachel says, her voice strained.

  “We can’t. Not yet. I need a few more weeks to get money together,” a low voice replies. The voice startles me. I thought she was on the phone, but peeking through the slit shows me that Jacob is standing across the room from her. If our parents find out Jacob Warren is in our house, let alone in her room, they’ll bury Rachel out back next to the willow tree.

  “We may not have a few weeks,” she argues.

  “It’s not like you’re going to wake up and look nine months pregnant tomorrow. No one is going to have any idea.”

  “Please, it just has to be soon. I can’t take it much longer,” she says, and her mattress squeaks—she must have sat down.

  “I’m doing everything I can. But my family can’t know about this either.”

  “I don’t understand why your family would have a problem with me,” Rachel says with daggers in her words. It’s just like Rachel. She can’t imagine anyone not liking—no—loving her. She’s the crown princess of Vinalhaven; everyone is supposed to adore her.

  “It’s not like your mother is going to be excited about us being together or this baby,” he says, and there’s an edge to his words.

  “It just doesn’t make any sense why your parents would have a problem with me.”

  “I’ve told you before. My dad told me the last time a Warren married someone from this island, two people ended up dead. And we lost half our business. That’s when we had to start smuggling to survive.”

  “It’s just so stupid,” she says, her voice low. “Things have changed.”

  “It is. But it doesn’t matter. No one will be able to separate us. We’re in this together. It’s you, me, and this baby,” he says. “Shit, I’ve got to get home before they realize I’m gone.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to go.”

  “I know. Me too,” he says. “Meet me tomorrow night at the park?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  I wait in the hall, listening for the window. Once I’m sure that he’s left, I push the door open. Rachel’s got her hair pulled up into a messy ponytail, and she has on a T-shirt so baggy it could double as a parachute.

  “So you’re leaving?” I ask as I sit on the end of her bed.

  “You know I have to.”

  I knew it’d happen eventually. I always figured that she’d wait until she was eighteen before leaving. But her pregnancy changes everything. My parents wouldn’t help her with college. She’d be on her own. And Rachel’s not going to be any good at that.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll wait until after your birthday,” she says, as if that’ll make me feel better. But it doesn’t. My birthday is in three days. Is she leaving that fast?

  “I really don’t want you to leave,” I say, and the truth of it surprises me. I don’t want to lose her. I want her to be here, to be my sister again.

  She shakes her head. “One day you’ll understand, Claire-Bear.”

  CHAPTER 27

  My thoughts are still raw when I wake up. In the few hours I’ve been asleep, I’ve had nightmare after nightmare. In every single one, I’m pushing Noah away. Off a cliff, down a river in a boat—in the last one I kicked him off a roof. It’s enough to make my stomach turn. This time when I wake up, things are different; my heart is pounding, my skin sweaty, like I’m scared, not angry.

  What woke me up?

  I pull myself from bed, creeping across the ice-cold floorboards, and check my phone. There isn’t a single notification waiting for me on the screen. A bad feeling, as heavy as a stone, sits in the pit of my stomach.

  If it wasn’t my phone that woke me up, what was it?

  The sound of footsteps, loud and heavy, echoes from the living room. My heart creeps into my throat, and I grab my gun from the nightstand. With the cold metal pressed against my palm, I feel better. I throw the lights on and rush down the stairs—and find no one. The house is empty, silent.

  Am I going crazy? Maybe my mom was right about getting a dog.

  For good measure, I check the back door and the basement, but I find nothing and no one. Then I open the front door to check the porch—and my heart stops. A pink sweater is balled up right in front of the door. Someone left this for me.

  I run to the kitchen to grab a plastic bag and use it as a glove to put the sweater inside without touching it. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is the killer is taunting me. And this is from one of the victims. If that’s the case, I can’t afford to taint this evidence.

  CHAPTER 28

  A pinpoint of pain behind my eyes needles me. With every ebb, the dreams from last night fade away. Morning light edges around the curtains. Fear is still sharp in the back of my mind, but I push past it, because I have to. I don’t have the time or energy to think about it. I drag myself downstairs to the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee.

  I should force myself to get into the office, throw myself into work. If I do that, I won’t have time to think about how unnerved I am. I throw open the front door and search the porch, finding nothing this time, thankfully. I pull on my coat, my mug steaming in my hands. The frigid wind rushes around me, enveloping me as I take a seat on the porch step, mug in hand. Being outside helps me gather my thoughts, for some reason. For the first time in what seems like weeks, the sky is clear, bright.

  Noah walks up the sidewalk as I sip my coffee. “You doing okay? You never called me last night.” He leans against the porch railing.

  “I’m fine. I just needed some time.”

  “Some time for . . . ?”

  I sigh and clutch my coffee cup tighter. “It’s just all a lot,” I admit, though my brain begs me to keep the words bottled up inside. I feel like I’m getting so close to this killer, to figuring this out, but at the same time it could be so far away—and there are lives hanging in the balance. I catch Noah up on some of the things I’ve found out about Sheriff Dyer. “I’m questioning all these connections to the sheriff. It seems he played a major role in all this, but I can’t figure out if he helped commit any of the crimes or if he was covering for someone else.”

  “Well, he couldn’t have committed any of the recent murders. So those would have to be a copycat.”

  “A copycat by someone who knew him well enough to know the details of the crimes that weren’t ever released to the public,” I say, finishing his thought.

  I need to go talk to Frank and see if he can give me any information about his father. He has to know something. Or maybe he’s involved.

  A cold wind whips around me, but the warmth radiating from the cup keeps the chill at bay. Icicles sparkle, hanging from the roof of the station like crystal shivs. In the parking lot Noah and I
say our goodbyes. From right outside the door, I hear commotion in the station. This time of day, it’s normally dead. It’s enough to make the hair rise on the back of my neck. I heave open the door and find the guys throwing on their jackets.

  “What’s going on?”

  Sergeant Michaels emerges from his office. His plaid shirt is stretched tight over his broad chest, and his pants hang loose off his waist. His eyes are wide, far away, which is strange since he usually looks so focused. Something must have really gotten to him.

  “Got a call that someone saw a body on the beach,” Sergeant Michaels explains as he pulls on his coat.

  “Where?” A lump forms in my throat as soon as I’ve gotten the word out.

  “North of the school. Someone was walking their dog, stumbled on it,” he explains.

  Why the hell didn’t anyone call me? I almost snap, but I decide better of it.

  Jason, Sergeant Michaels, and I pile into a squad car just as the blanket of gray clouds rolls in and starts to spew sleet. Allen, thankfully, decides to stay put as we head for the beach. The car is thick with bad cologne, anxiety, and Jason’s nervous words as he calls the CSI team in Augusta. Those guys have been here so often we’re nearly on a first-name basis with them. We speed through downtown and past the school and pull off in front of the forest separating us from the stretch of beach where the body is.

  I pull my hood up and throw the door of the patrol car open. Freezing rain pelts my coat until I reach the tree line. Between the rows of pine trees, I get a reprieve from the weather. Jason and Sergeant Michaels follow along a few feet behind me. Heavy fog hangs over the dark waves, and an ice-cold mist is carried by the wind, stinging my face. A few feet of sand sit at the edge of the tree line before the usual rocky shore of the island takes over. A hundred yards southeast of us, I see her.

  My feet sink in the deep sand before I finally reach the rocks. The body isn’t big enough to be a woman, but it isn’t until I reach her that it really sets in that she’s a girl. Water has soaked through her purple hoodie, and her jeans have flowers embroidered on the seams. It looks like if her hair were dry, it’d be blonde. Her skin is so pale, so translucent, it’s unsettling. Around her jaw and neck there are bruises and small wounds, where the fish and crabs began eating her.