by D. L. Wood
“They also seem pretty worried about you and your involvement with the Cartwright case and that Dr. Beecher.”
“I don’t know about worried. Honestly, they’re probably just tired of it. Ready for me to move on,” Dani said. A pang of guilt struck as she realized that, once again, most of their dinner had been consumed with the details of her day—her visits with the Chief and Dr. Beecher, and what she had uncovered in the diary.
“They’re the ones that brought it up tonight. And they sure asked you a lot of questions for people who are tired of hearing about it.” Chris pursed his lips, looking thoughtful. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t blame you for taking the copy of the diary out to Dr. Beecher.”
“You don’t?”
He lifted his head from his hand and shook it. “If it could help the guy, why shouldn’t he see it? If he’s really innocent, it might be his last chance.”
“Exactly. What harm could it do?” But as she said it, and took in his dark eyes watching her intently, she remembered who he was and where he worked, the thought sending a nervous flare through her. “I, um, wasn’t planning on bothering the Chief with all that, though. About seeing Dr. Beecher at the prison.”
“I imagine not.”
“But, now that you know, are you going to tell him?”
He shrugged. “I don’t see why I need to. It’s not my case. Not anymore, since they decided not to reopen it.”
Dani felt the corner of her mouth turn up.
“Besides,” Chris continued, “if Beecher or his attorney do anything with that copy, the Chief’ll find out soon enough.”
“He won’t be happy you didn’t say anything.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell him that I knew. Are you?” he asked, his eyebrows rising.
Dani rolled her lips inward, sealing her mouth shut, and shook her head.
“So, there you go.” He poured more tea into his glass and looked questioningly at her with the pitcher raised.
“No, thanks,” she said. She couldn’t deny that there was a certain something about him that intrigued her. The breeze picked up again and she caught the scent of cloves coming off his skin. It was becoming clear why Sasha and Amy had labeled him the town’s most eligible bachelor.
“What’s next for you?” he said.
“What? You mean tonight?”
“Just in general. I know the reunion is tomorrow.”
Right, the reunion. The reunion I don’t have a date for. The reunion I’m going to walk into alone.
“Oh, tomorrow’s a full packing day. I’m going to try to do a few more rooms before the reunion. Then once that’s over, I can really focus on finishing it up before I leave on Thursday.”
“You sure you can’t use a hand?”
Could she? She paused longer than she meant to before answering. “No, really. Thanks.”
“Well, call if you need boxes moved or whatever.”
“I’ve got friends here that have been bugging me to do just that since I arrived. I’m covered, really.”
“And I’m not a friend?”
Dani chuckled at first, thinking he was flirting again, but quickly broke off when she caught the surprising and somewhat disproportionately hurt look on his face.
“Um, sure you are,” she said, trying to smooth it over. “I’m just saying I’m not going to take advantage of a new friend when the ones who have owed me for decades are available.”
“It’s not taking advantage if—”
The porch door slid open and Sasha stuck her head out. “You guys doing okay out here? We’re digging into the ice cream. Peach today—it’s really good.”
Chris slid off the bench and stood. “I’ve had enough of Willett’s homemade ice cream at the Grille to know that you don’t want to miss it, and that it doesn’t last long. You’d better move fast,” he said, eyeing Dani teasingly before slipping inside the door, leaving her alone on the bench, wondering what in the world had just happened.
13
Chris left Sasha’s before anyone else, giving Dani the opportunity to read Sasha and Willett the riot act for trying to throw her and Chris together after explicitly promising not to. They both protested despite the obvious porch abandonment, with Peter and Amy giggling off in the corner about it until Dani turned on them, accusing them of being co-conspirators. But in truth, her righteous indignation was only shelled out half-heartedly. She hadn’t minded being on the porch alone with Chris. Hadn’t minded it one bit. Other than the odd little exchange at the end where he seemed to get his feelings hurt, they had gotten on really well. And she had probably misread that anyway.
Thoughts of their conversation and the way his mouth was a little crooked when he smiled were still rolling through her brain as she pulled into her driveway well after nine thirty. But when she turned the car off, reality set in and she put the brakes on her reminiscing. This is ridiculous, she thought, practicality beating out romanticism as she made her way to her door, her arms laden with the leftovers Sasha had insisted she take with her.
Spending any time at all thinking about Chris Newton is absolutely pointless. What are you going to do? Date him long distance from Boston?
“You’re being an idiot,” she said aloud to no one, as she inserted the key into the garage’s side door lock, then froze.
The hair she had plucked from her own head before leaving earlier, then wedged between the frame and the door upon shutting it, was gone. Her makeshift trespass warning had been triggered.
Someone had been there.
Though her senses hummed, a calm borne of her training settled through Dani as she set the leftovers down, unlocked the door and pushed it open with a long, drawn-out squeak. The weak, motion-sensor light of the overhead garage door unit flicked on and she stepped inside, her pistol drawn. She had been carrying it with her since the scare of the other night, just in case.
It was quiet inside the garage. She squatted down to look underneath the only vehicle in it, her mother’s Honda Accord. Nothing.
Using her free hand, she unlocked the interior door leading to the kitchen and pushed it open. The house was also quiet, with only the hum of the refrigerator droning away. The light from a lamp she had left on in the living room spilled through into the kitchen, bathing the room in a soft glow. Everything seemed to be in place.
Flicking on the overhead lights as she went, she moved room to room until she completed a sweep of the entire house. Unlike the intrusion of the day before, this time there were no odd, little suggestions that tampering had occurred. As far as she could tell, whoever had been here—and someone had definitely been there because that hair did not remove itself—had simply entered…and then what?
And why?
They weren’t stealing. They weren’t vandalizing. They hadn’t been squatting here, as Chris had suggested. Dani had checked with the property manager who insisted there had been no indication of a break-in since March. There was only one thing that had changed.
Me.
Whoever was doing this was interested in her. In her, or in what she was doing there. But it was hard to imagine she had attracted a personal stalker at some point between arriving in Skye a few days ago and the first break-in. That just didn’t seem plausible. Nor did the idea that anyone cared enough about the settlement of her parents’ estate to break in to learn more. No, there was really only one possibility that made sense.
Someone was deeply interested in her investigation into Jennifer’s murder.
Or afraid of it.
Half an hour later, Dani settled into her father’s recliner with a cup of cocoa in hand, her mind spinning, analyzing the possibilities. Cocoa on a hot July night in Alabama was an odd choice, granted, but there was something comforting and calming about the chocolatey concoction, and she sipped it slowly as she thought.
Who would even know I’ve been looking into Jennifer’s murder again?
It only took a second to realize those prospects were endless. She had been s
een going in and out of the police station. It was a small town and her obsession with the case and Dr. Beecher’s innocence was general knowledge—at least among the people who had been around back then. People liked to talk. Assumptions would probably have been made.
But the diary? Who would know about that?
That list was long too. Everyone at the station would know by now, as well as anyone they had gossiped to—a spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend and so on. For that matter, if Chris and Willett had been talking about her at the Grille, it was possible that mention of the diary, or at least her renewed interest in the case, slipped out then, and could have been overheard by any number of busybodies. And then there was everyone in the D.A.’s office…
Frustrated, and wanting answers she couldn’t divine, she reached for the case file and set it on her lap, running a hand over the typed label on the front that read, “Homicide. Cartwright, Jennifer. 7/8/1995.” The word “SOLVED” in large, red letters was scrawled diagonally beneath the label. A twinge of guilt pricked her over the fact that she still had the file, but not enough to make her put it down.
She glanced at her copy of Jennifer’s diary on the coffee table. Certain that the key to figuring this all out lay somewhere within or between the diary and file, she set the empty mug on a side table, crawled onto the floor and began spreading the documents out, sorting by date, relevance and connection. She was going to take it all apart, compare everything, sift through every fact and detail—present or missing—and find something that would break the case open. Because something had to be there.
It just had to.
14
Primary report. Scene report. Witness statements. Inventory of evidence. Autopsy report…
The file contained nothing new. She had heard it all before, read it all before—for goodness’ sake, part of it had come directly from her.
The primary report listed the victim as Jennifer Joan Cartwright, homicide, found July 9, 1995. Date of death July 8, 1995. She was fifteen. There was a physical description that matched what Dani remembered from that day: blond, blue eyes, medium-length hair, denim shorts, white top, Skechers. Clothes spattered with blood. Apparent blunt force trauma to the head, later confirmed by the coroner.
There were photos of the scene and a report with a diagram, marking where Jennifer’s body had been found, and measurements giving its distance from the riverbank, gravel road, fence, etcetera. Blood spatter just feet away from the body evidencing the likely scene of the murder was indicated on the diagram, as well as a few other random blood deposits in the area. There was also a notation that Jennifer’s bicycle had been found on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, several yards down the riverbank toward the water, as if someone had tossed it over in an effort to hide it. They had taken fingerprints from the bicycle and dusted the shed, even though there was no indication any part of the crime had occurred there. But from what Dani remembered, nothing useful had come from either—just Jennifer’s prints on the bike and the Pitts’ prints and dozens of partials with no matches from the shed, likely from all the adults and kids in and out of it over the years. They had even eventually tried to get prints from the room over the Pitts’ garage where the migrant worker had stayed, but by then weeks had gone by and Mrs. Pitts had already given it a good scrubbing.
Dani found her own name at the top of the first witness statement. Danielle Lake. 15 yrs old. 1108 Applegate Lane, Skye, AL. 205-555-1777. The paper was smooth to the touch as she passed her fingers over the words, written by the officer who had interviewed her. She still remembered sitting in the small room at the station, wrapped in a blanket, shaking, her parents on either side of her as she recounted the horrible experience. She couldn’t remember the officer’s name, but according to the report, it was Officer Jim Weston.
Funny that I don’t even remember his name or what he looked like, when I can remember every agonizing detail about Jennifer.
But what she did recall about the interview with Officer Weston with stark accuracy was the cold metal table she sat behind and stared at continuously because she was too afraid to look up at him, and the frantic scratching of his pen against paper, as he scribbled notes while she spoke. Of course, the interview had been recorded too, though the tape wasn’t in this copy of the file. But Officer Weston seemed to have gotten a thorough account down by hand—from the beckoning honeysuckle bush to her coveting Jennifer’s Skechers.
Then there was the autopsy report, with all its gory details. There were only two things it mentioned that Dani had not seen herself when she discovered Jennifer: the blunt force trauma to the back of Jennifer’s head; and that a one-inch wide, three-inch long section of Jennifer’s hair had been cut from the back, leaving jagged ends, as if someone had inefficiently sawed it off.
The police had kept the bit about the hair under wraps, so that Dani only first learned about it during the trial. Dr. Beecher’s attorney had argued that the fact that the hair had never been recovered—and certainly had not been found in Dr. Beecher’s possession—was evidence of his innocence and that another person was the murderer. But it hadn’t worked. The jury was apparently more convinced of his guilt by the finding of Jennifer’s bracelet in Dr. Beecher’s nightstand. It hadn’t mattered that the other piece of jewelry missing from Jennifer—the twisted-vines ring which the diary now explained had been given to her by a secret boyfriend—had never been found either, which Dr. Beecher’s lawyer also argued pointed to another person.
According to the notes from Jennifer’s parents’ interviews, they thought she was spending the night of July 8th with Kendall—Kendall only lived a five-minute bike ride away—so they didn’t think anything about it when Jennifer didn’t come home the next morning. According to Kendall’s interview, she apparently knew nothing about that, but said that it wasn’t unusual for Jennifer to just show up and spend the night, so maybe that’s what Jennifer had planned on doing and just didn’t get a chance to ask Kendall before she was killed.
Jennifer’s parents also told the police the twisted-vines ring was something Jennifer had purchased for herself several weeks before her death at a little craft market in town. From the diary, Dani knew that wasn’t true, and soon Jennifer’s parents would know it too. Her heart ached at the thought of Jennifer’s parents learning that their daughter had lied to them about the ring, and apparently so much else. The realization that they had not known their child as well as they thought they did would certainly sting, would still cut to the bone even after all this time. Not to mention how hard it would be to learn that their daughter had been afraid to tell them about the person she had come to love for fear of their disapproval.
Will her parents make the connection that, if Jennifer had trusted them more, that if they had known these things about her, they would have had someone to point the police to?
Of course they would, and Dani knew the guilt of that would weigh heavily. Would it make them doubt what they had maintained all along? The Cartwrights had always been staunch believers in Dr. Beecher’s guilt, actively seeking his conviction. Now what would they think with a boyfriend, secrets and a potential stalker in the mix during Jennifer’s last days?
The one thing that Dr. Beecher’s conviction had brought the Cartwrights was closure. Now, the unearthing of the diary would undo that as well. Initially, Dani had thought that returning Jennifer’s diary to them would be like giving them back a small piece of their daughter. But now, she realized it might actually achieve the opposite, taking even more of Jennifer away as they were forced to accept that they hadn’t truly known her.
Pain. So much pain surrounding this tragedy. Pain that was seemingly never going to end.
A swell of righteous anger rose within Dani, her hands clenching the pages of the copied diary harder, the sheets crinkling beneath her grasp as she thought of the person responsible.
The person who had murdered Jennifer Cartwright and gotten away with it.
The person who had robbed her de
ar friend of his family, reputation and freedom.
The person who had been her singular obsession for the past thirteen years.
The person she was going to nail.
15
Dani spent the night scouring the documents to no avail. She finally went to bed at three in the morning, frustrated, her sleep plagued by the crushing weight of the realizations she’d had the night before. After a rough two hours of sleep, she finally gave up, rolled out of bed and flipped open her laptop. If her discovery of this diary was going to cause more pain, it wasn’t going to be for nothing.
She drafted a quick email to Larry Holmes, Dr. Beecher’s attorney, even though part of her felt she was betraying Dr. Beecher by bypassing him. But what if he decided this wasn’t worth pursuing? She couldn’t let that happen.
Dani did her best to explain the situation to Mr. Holmes, outlining what she had read in the diary and the potential opportunities she believed those revelations presented. She indicated she would be happy to provide him a copy of the diary for his review. There was obviously no way she could mention the case file or offer it to Mr. Holmes without betraying the Chief’s trust. But Dani was fairly certain that between the trial, discovery and just general talk, Mr. Holmes was probably already familiar with the information it contained. After reading the email several times, she clicked “Send,” slapped the laptop shut and shuffled off to the kitchen to make breakfast. As it was a Saturday, she didn’t expect to hear back from him until Monday at the latest, but her heart was a bit lighter for having reached out.
