“I understand that, I do,” Millie said with a sympathetic shake of her head. “But some of the best minds have tried to figure this out and couldn’t. How can you see something other people haven’t seen?”
“Because we have facts the police don’t have—”
“And why don’t they have those facts? Isn’t that an important part of policing? Having all the facts?” Millie waited for an answer. Maeve could tell she was losing her sister’s support and she tried to muster up everything she had to get her to see.
“Someone wanted to pin the murders on Peter Newell without the evidence matching up entirely. But with an eye-witness account, Timothy killed Peter in self-defense, and the Woodstock Killer case is closed.”
“And the killing stopped.”
“The killing changed.” Maeve raised her eyebrows as if Millie was supposed to get it and understand and follow her. “Come on. You can’t deny that we have time and obsession on our side,” Maeve responded. “We can do this. We can solve this and bring justice to upwards of dozens of people.”
Millie looked pained and she wandered to the bed and sat down on the corner, the mattress sinking with her. Outside the room, the group discovered something noteworthy and a rousing swell of approval and interest rose and fell.
“We have it narrowed down to a small group of possible suspects.”
“Oh, yeah?” Millie asked, but her interest was feigned.
Maeve nodded. She sat down next to her sister and put her head on her shoulder. “I said I’d help,” she acknowledged in a whisper. “I told him I’d help.” No one needed to say who him was. “And even though it’s selfish and fun, too, I think we actually can help.”
“You are good at this,” her sister conceded.
“It’s what I want to do,” Maeve said. “I went to school for this…this is my dream. And you’re right, I am good at this. I can see patterns and think of things other people didn’t. And all of us together? I mean, we’re teachers and housewives and SEOs and we’re all fucking good at this, Mills.”
Millie dipped her head and sighed heavily, her shoulders lifting and dropping in a big swoop. “I know. I know. Okay, weirdo. Tell me all about this case.”
The social club was happy to oblige.
They sat Millie down and began to run through the facts, carving out their suspicions early on and presenting the findings in chronological order. Millie tried hard not to snicker when someone brought out an easel and pad and wrote “Parking Lot” across the top to help steer away from ill-timed questions.
But, once Maeve and the other girls got on a roll, Millie’s smirk died away and she curled up into a ball, listening to the details presented in an unfolding manner, building upon each other.
It was terrifying.
The Woodstock Killer stalked his prey. Babysitters. He knew where they lived and he knew when they’d be away from home. And once the word got out that someone was tormenting the area’s babysitters, paranoia moved in quickly to the neighborhood and the media.
One night, a patrol car drove the neighborhoods with his lights on, stopping anyone and anything that looked suspicious. They drove up and down one particular street several times one night only to come back to it when parents called dead drowned girl in their bathtub—their babysitter.
He toyed with them. Their deaths were always by drowning or strangulation.
Kelly Donald, a sixteen-year-old girl, felt one night that someone was inside the house with her as she watched television in the upstairs living room, the children asleep downstairs. She heard footsteps in the hall and, once, a cough.
Terrified, she called her dad to come over and wait with her until the parents arrived home. The following day, a toy from the baby’s room appeared on her porch, abandoned and discarded next to a planter.
She didn’t come home from her next babysitting job.
“We have seven victims before the night of the Shelton attack,” Gloria instructed. Printouts with information about the victims, their names, homes, details of their case, hung along the open wall above the couch.
“The Woodstock Killer never hurt the children until the Shelton home. Before that, the children were always left untouched, and occasionally a few of them were the ones to find their babysitter dead.”
“He was changing, escalating,” Holly suggested. “We’ve talked about that before. Maybe killing the babysitters wasn’t giving him as much of a thrill.”
“It’s sick that moving to children would be a thrill—” someone said.
Kristy nodded. “Sick is what drives them. The sickness.”
“The crimes were never sexually motivated,” Maeve added to the group, steering them back on track. “That’s important because it’s rare. Or if they were, it would’ve been after-the-fact. Meaning, masturbatory.” Millie cringed. “Maybe once he got home, was comfortable. And he always bound their arms and legs and then strangled and untied them.”
“Never a shot fired?” someone asked.
Everyone slowly nodded.
“Shelton home only. Only the little girl. Furthermore, Peter was never found with a gun. But his family testified that he did own one. It went missing after the murders, but the mom swears she saw it after he was killed by Timothy Shelton. She checked his room because she was worried it would be gone. She wanted it to be there,” Gloria said.
“So, if we retract Derek’s original testimony and view Peter as completely innocent. Which…may be wrong, too. We just don’t know. If we do that, then the Woodstock Killer strangled Ginny and then shot Derek’s little sister, attacked Derek in the basement, but didn’t kill him, and left with the gun,” said Maeve.
A woman with bleached blond hair wrote a question on a Post-It Note and stuck it to the parking lot easel. She pointed at it, “Peter’s gun. What do we know about it?”
“Someone can get on that,” Gloria said.
“Who are your suspects?” Millie asked, now interested fully. She’d tucked her legs up under her body and positioned herself easily to see the pictures and maps pinned up to the walls.
Gloria cleared her throat. She pointed to Maeve’s dining room table and someone close to there held up a black and white picture of a man in a real estate ad.
“This dude,” Gloria said, “worked in real estate and was selling a lot of homes in the area. Name is James Woodhaven. Worked strange hours and so couldn’t get pinned down with an alibi early on. Name was provided by neighbors who saw him slinking home late at night on some of the same nights of the other attacks. After the Shelton murders, James moved to California. Two years after he’s there, a college girl turns up dead, same MO.”
“And this guy,” Maeve interjected, walking over to a second photo, “is my favorite. Although, it would be anticlimactic since he’s already in jail. Arrested for murdering a babysitter three years after the Shelton girls died. He was also an assistant for the girl’s basketball team at Woodstock High and the first victim was—”
“Basketball player,” Millie guessed and Maeve nodded, impressed. “I’ve watched enough television.”
“Our other option,” Holly said, moving forward, “is Lance Kershaw.”
“Lance and Timothy were friends,” Maeve said with a knowing nod. “Business partners at the time of the murders. There’s more to that, but trust us, we can’t eliminate him and it makes Timothy’s death immediately relevant. Lance is still around, still in Portland.”
“Guys, guys,” Millie waved them off. “Doesn’t it freak you out that there are three men who fit this profile who live within a short distance from here? Three people that could possibly, according to you, kill people for fun or sport...”
“Or obsession,” Holly added.
“Right. Or a pure driven desire to kill without regard for others. That doesn’t worry you?” The question was directed at her sister, and Maeve looked to the floor, unwilling to engage. “Also, explain to me why you’re keeping this from the cops?”
“They don’t
kill for fun. Not most of the killers we see,” Gloria said rounding back to the first part of Millie’s rant. “They do kill out of compulsion. There’s a drive that tugs them. An addiction.”
Everyone in the room paused. Maeve was embarrassed by her sister the interloper who seemed bent on demeaning the work they were doing, and she was even more on edge since she’d allowed her to come in and be a part of this hunt.
The room was a display of their best thinking and problem solving—the maps and the conversations and the timelines. They were buried in possibilities and Maeve knew it was hard to see the forest through the trees, but the minds in that room would solve the case.
She didn’t want it for Derek. Not entirely. She wanted this for herself.
The Social Club was fun, but now it had purpose and need, and Maeve felt driven.
“Well, he’s not the only one with an addiction,” Millie added, and her tour through the ruckus was cut short, the women drifting back to side-conversations, Gloria retreating.
By nine p.m, the group was gone. All that remained was the detritus of a day spent solving crimes—food and drinks, and books bent open on the table, the floor by her television a temporary holding spot for all the information they had about murder number two. Millie wandered around and stared at the work taped to walls and scattered along any available surface.
“Is he coming over tonight?” she asked her. “That’s the plan. After I’ve kinda picked up some of this. I think it could be a bit overwhelming.”
“Do you think? A bit?” Millie asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Maybe we’ll go out to dinner. You want to come?”
“Am I invited?”
Maeve ignored her sister’s tone and continued. “What did you think of the work we’ve done?”
“Impressive, for sure,” Millie said. “It is. I don’t even…all of you together…”
“We’ve got patterns down. This guy worked within a section of houses all in this little bubble. He was clearly someone inside that neighborhood at the time. And it was fear. He worked off of their fear. His killing of them was completely rooted in this idea that they were afraid and he could control their fear. With Ginny—the Shelton’s sitter—she had a diary entry the week before that said she thought someone was watching her and Peter have sex in his car.”
“Okay. So, now we’re going through teenage girl’s diaries?”
“No. The police went through her diaries. We’re looking at the evidence.”
“Can you afford this?”
“Literally or figuratively?” Maeve stopped tidying the papers and spun to look at her sister directly. She was tired of the side-comments and the assessment that she was out of her mind. “What? Out with it.”
“No, you can’t afford this Maeve. You literally can’t afford not to go into work and pretend people are dying…”
“…real people are dying.”
“I’m worried about you.”
And Maeve knew her sister was right—she was wrong about the case and she was wrong about her concern, but she was right that Maeve was lost in the Woodstock Killer’s story. Somehow in the back of her mind, she thought if she could solve his case, she could ease his burden. And if she could ease his burden, he’d allow her fully into his life. If she solved the case, she’d earn Derek’s heart forever.
“I took a few nights off work. I have a savings account. I’m a real adult,” Maeve replied. “Besides,” she said. “A few weeks ago…I did a thing.”
Millie’s eyes widened and she seemed unwilling to learn any other bombshells that evening.
“You did what kind of thing?” her sister asked.
“I love criminology,” Maeve said by way of introduction, although she knew she was only stating the obvious. “My degree is pretty useless at this stage unless I want to go start out at the ground level working intakes at the jail. And that’s not my passion. I want to explore the facts of cases and predict criminal behavior…I want to spend my days making sure that in the future, we have fewer crimes, fewer criminals.”
“It’s a good speech,” Millie replied. “So, what did you do?”
“I applied to grad school,” Maeve said with a drastic sigh. She hadn’t told a single person. Not her mom, not her dad, not even the professors she contacted to write letters of recommendation. She silently and stealthily sent off three different applications to get an advanced degree. “In Pennsylvania. Maryland. And California.”
“You…applied to grad school?” Millie asked.
“Yeah,” Maeve nodded. “Before Derek or the club…when it was just cold Italian food and sore feet. And I knew I needed to do something else…something that I loved.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked, scrunching up her nose in confusion.
Maeve’s phone chirped and she stole a glance over at the device while Millie looked over, too—motioning for her sister to answer.
“I did it and then I pushed it out of my head. I don’t know. I thought I’d wait to see if I even got accepted. But now there’s Derek and—”
“Wait, nope. That’s my sister radar on full blast right now. Like, when we’re little girls under the covers and you say to me, ‘If I’m ever about to make a really stupid choice for a boy, tell me and I’ll believe you.’ Well, it’s that time. There is a Derek, but if criminology is your passion and you researched and this is where you want to go. Then go. I’m looking around your apartment right now and I get a clear sense that you’re good at this. So, yeah. Do it.”
“It’s not that easy,” Maeve answered, emotional, although she didn’t entirely know why. “We’re good together.”
“You’re new together,” Millie said with a shrug. “New is almost always good. Until it’s not. Don’t substitute new people for old dreams. That’s not Confucius but it fucking should be.”
“And then sometimes the good stuff stays.”
“Also not Confucius, but you’re right,” Millie answered with a hint of sadness. “Sometimes it does.” She raised an eyebrow. “Have you told Derek that you might be headed to the east coast?”
“Don’t say anything,” Maeve pleaded. “I’ll tell him when I’m ready.” She swiped up her phone and checked the text. “He’d like to have dinner.”
“Good. Let’s have dinner,” Millie answered. She walked over to the door and grabbed her purse. Roger wagged his tail hoping for a walk and Maeve fed him a snack instead to tide him over until she could walk him later that night.
Her sister stood firm and tall by the doorframe, unwilling to accept anything other than “You tell him where to go, but make your decision based on the fact that I’m dying for fajitas.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Dinner was casual; they met at a little Mexican place on Burnside, hidden from street view with darkened windows, which added to the notion that it was far from the Screen Door fan base who a suffered a lack of imagination as they made their Portland reservations. After a few boozy margaritas, they walked down the street and caught a car to the Zipper on Sandy.
Millie rushed off to buy herself a s’mores kit to roast on the open fire pits outside while Maeve secured their spot at a small wooden table near the fire.
“The dinner date with my sister is the ultimate test,” Maeve offered. She wasn’t exaggerating.
“Do you think I passed?”
“It’ll be tough to tell until I get her text recap in the morning. Safe to say you still have time to earn more points.”
“What earns points with her?”
“That’s a fair question. Let’s look at what points you’ve already earned. You have a stable job. You aren’t living in a U-Haul with your cats…”
“Oh shit, tell me that’s a real story.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Millie walked back over with a bag full of marshmallows and chocolate, a grin on her face.
“I fucking love s’mores,” her little sister said, as she grabbed an open skewer and b
egan to layer the dessert pieces along the metal.
But when Millie leaned down, a flashbulb blinked and illuminated the area where they were sitting.
The trio looked up and in their moment of bewilderment, the camera flashed again and again. Derek shielded is eyes and Millie stood, on her guard, skewer brandished like a weapon.
“Go ahead and make a quick statement,” came a voice behind a lens of an epically sized digital camera. It reminded Maeve of the cumbersome machines carnival workers carried around in hopes to get you to spend money on their canned shots of awkward families. “News is picking up that the son of murdered hero Timothy Shelton is spending his time with a group of amateur detectives.”
“Is it?” Derek asked. The flash went off again.
A group near them stood up, and raised their hands in aggravation, attempting to step between the cameraman and Derek.
“Your dad’s service is in two days. Will you have solved his murder by then?” the trash-heap of a human continued, the flash popping again.
“This is Portland, man,” someone groaned from a table nearby. “Take your Los Angeles bullshit somewhere else.”
“Yeah! Leave him alone,” Millie shouted and began to stalk forward, the poker, with marshmallows secured, aimed in the man’s direction. He snapped away. Maeve pictured the photo now, her sister attacking the paparazzo with s’mores. It was endless entertainment if it weren’t for the fact that she was living the nightmare along with him.
“Poke him, s’mores girl,” someone else drunkenly heckled to the nervous crowd’s delight. A mixture of native and tourist diners under the night sky tried to laugh and heckle the photographer out of the Zipper and they eventually succeeded, a food cart owner chasing him away with a spatula to a round of hearty applause.
It was expected. When Timothy died, the media went into overdrive.
Portland didn’t want anyone to notice its celebrities, they liked to keep them shrouded from view, protected from gawking fans. Portlanders didn’t give a shit about famous people, but someone did, somewhere, and that group followed him to the outdoor café, intruding inch by inch into their evening.
Forgotten Obsessions (The Love is Murder Social Club Book 1) Page 16
