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It’s a red pickup.
I drop the bags, freezing in place, and stare.
It’s too dark to see inside the cab, but I know it’s Noah. Neither of us moves for what must be close to a minute, until the window on the truck rolls down.
“Can I talk to you?” he yells.
“What do you want?”
“I just want to ask you a few questions. I haven’t slept in days.”
I scoff inwardly.Days? That’s nothing.
I’m still mulling how to play this when Noah points to the driveway. “I’ll just pull in. I won’t get out of the truck if youdon’t want me to.”
I have questions of my own, so why not? What’s the worst that can happen? He kills me? At least then my eyes would shut for more than ten minutes, and I’d be put out of my misery. “Fine. But I’m only answering your questions after you answer mine.”
I turn and walk toward the house, not bothering to hang around for his response. Noah waits until I reach the front porch before pulling in. He parks ten feet from the door and kills the engine.
“What can I answer for you?” he says quietly.
“For starters, you can tell me where the journal is.”
He shakes his head. “I wasn’t lying. There is no journal. Or if there is, I don’t have it.”
“How do you expect me to believe you when you had pictures of me and told me you didn’t know who I was when we met?”
“I had no idea one of those girls was you. It wasn’t like I spent a lot of time staring at the photos. They’re fucking creepy. But I did go through them after you left.” He reaches over to the passenger seat and holds a Polaroid outside the window. “Is this you, too?”
It’s dark, but the porch light shines enough to see it. I can feel a storm brewing inside me, yet I swallow. “Of course it is.”
“Why does it say Jocelyn underneath? They’re all labeled with that name. I never understood that.”
I’m supposed to be asking the questions, so I ignore his. “If I didn’t kill your father, then who did?”
Noah shrugs. “I always wondered if maybe it was my mother. Couldn’t blame her after what that bastard did to her. Though I never asked, and she never mentioned it. We just went on with our lives—my mother fell into a deep depression, and I tried to make the best of it after he was gone.” He shakes his head. “But it seems like there were plenty of people who had good reasonto kill him.”
“How is it possible that I didn’t know someone strangled him?”
“Did you ask anyone questions about what happened?”
I shake my head. I’d left Minton Parish for New York the very next day, with a whopping $600 saved from my shifts at McDonald’s. But the homeless shelter I stayed in until I landed a job was better than this place. “No, but it was on the news.”
He shrugs again. “I remember seeing it. Georgina Cobb was the reporter, a pretty brunette. She wore a blue dress on the news that day. I’m not sure why I remember that, but I suppose there are some things that stick with you forever. She said my father had been killed in a homicide, during a robbery. Don’t think they reported the specific details. But I’m positive they called it a homicide, because I asked my mother what the word meant. After, she unplugged the TV and told me not to turn it on for a while.”
I hate that I want to believe him. It makes me feel like the same dumb little girl who believed his father time and time again. I fold my arms over my chest. “I want all of the Polaroids. Not just the ones of me, but of all of the girls.”
“Okay. You can have ’em. What will you do with them?”
“Light them on fire and watch them melt. They should’ve never existed.”
He nods. “I’ll deliver them, or you can come by the house and pick them up. Whatever you prefer.”
My mind is a tangle of random thoughts. I don’t bother to try and organize them before spitting each one at Noah. “What’s the book you’re writing about?”
“Three estranged brothers wind up on vacation at the same resort twenty-five years later. They haven’t seen each other in more than two decades, so they think it’s a coincidence at first. But when one of them dies, and the body is found tied up in the exact way a young girl was found when they were teenagers, they realize there’s more to their getaway thanmeets the eye.”
He’s either one hell of an off-the-cuff liar, or he’s telling the truth. I shake my head, unsure what to believe anymore, and go quiet.