Page 39 of Forget Me Not

“Here’s your coffee.”

I jump at the sudden presence of Bethany beside me, her body too close as she holds a mug by my side.

“Sorry,” I say, lowering my phone and taking it from her with trembling hands. “Sorry, thanks.”

“Cream or sugar?”

“No,” I say. “I drink it black.”

“All right,” she says, turning around to walk back to the counter until she stops, tilting her head. “Are you okay, Claire? You seem sort of jumpy.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lie, pushing the pad of my finger into a drip I spilled on the table, a feeble attempt at keeping them still. “It’s just this story I’ve been working on. I guess it’s got me a little on edge.”

“What’s it about?” she asks, and I look down at my phone, those initials still pulled up on the screen.

“I’m not really sure,” I say, the most honest answer I can currently come up with as I think about how it started as nothing more than a hunch, a nosy curiosity inspired by boredom and a simple desire to understand this couple who had graciously welcomed me into their home.

But then, slowly, it became so much more.

A nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right; finding that article and learning Marcia was missing.

All the little details that seemed so familiar and the sense of duty I felt to figure it out, a responsibility to see it all through…

but whatever it was I was searching for, whatever it was I had been expecting to find, I know for a fact it wasn’t this.

“Okay,” Bethany says slowly, eyeing me curiously from across the table as I think about these names that keep popping up. All these young, missing girls who seem to have only one thing in common.

That they all wandered into Mitchell’s vast web.

“Well, I’ll just be back there if you need me,” Bethany adds and I nod, attempting a smile before I twist back around, grabbing my notebook from inside my bag and flipping it open to where I left off.

I look down at the page, Steven Montague written at the top, and then I start to create a list. Adding all the other names I have underneath it.

Marcia.

Lily.

Katherine.

Natalie?

I turn back toward my laptop, my fingers furiously tapping away at the keys as I search Katherine Ann Prichard, Berkeley, 1983. Almost immediately, a flood of archived articles appear on the screen and I click on the first one I can find.

Berkeley freshman Katherine Ann Prichard was reported missing by her parents on Saturday, June 2, 1983, after her roommate, Denise Johnson, alerted them to the fact that she hadn’t been home in several days.

According to her parents, Prichard had recently bought a car, a 1978 GMC camper she purchased with the intention of traveling in the summer after her freshman year.

I stop reading, my mind back on the diary again. Marcia’s description of Mitchell’s camper and the way it would idle in front of her house, a prowler silently stalking its prey.

Investigators have issued a BOLO for the vehicle, which, at the time of this publication, is also missing.

There’s a picture printed beneath the paragraph, grainy and old like the one of the Rayburns I saw the other day, though the one on the screen now depicts a large car with a teenaged girl standing beside it, skinny hip leaning against the bumper.

She’s smiling wide, hair blown out in Farrah Fawcett curls.

The same lust for life I had identified in the image of Marcia framed in her parents’ hands, the one of Natalie at Galloway grinning with that grape.

I lean in closer, skin prickling as I take in the girl’s outfit. She’s wearing a pair of baggy blue jeans and an oversized sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, the word BERKELEY peeking out from behind crossed arms.

I tip back in my chair, lifting my hands to my head and massaging my temples before glancing down at my phone on the table.

Then I pick it up, wondering if I should call the police…

but at the same time, I know I don’t have enough.

Not nearly enough. Like Ryan said earlier, all this evidence is entirely circumstantial.

I have no real proof linking Mitchell to any of this, and I turn around now, staring at Bethany behind the counter as I think about all the things she just told me, the fact that it seemed like she knew more than she had wanted to let on.

I stand up quickly, making my way toward the front of the diner as my eyes scan my surroundings for an excuse to approach—and then I notice those tins stuffed full of teabags on the counter, the same ones I saw when I first walked in, so I grab one at random and push it toward the register.

“I’ll take one of these,” I say, smiling as Bethany looks in my direction.

She grabs the tin and I wait a few seconds while she rings me up before I keep talking, twisting my tone into something breezy and light.

“Hey, did you ever tell the police what you told me earlier? About Natalie going to Galloway even after she quit?”

“Yeah, of course,” she says, the cash drawer popping out with a bang . The sound makes me flinch but I try to ignore it, digging into my pocket to pull out a five. “I told them everything I knew.”

“Like what, exactly? What did you say when they brought you in?”

“That I was pretty sure Natalie was seeing someone,” she says. “That she could have been with him the night she disappeared.”

“You were pretty sure, ” I repeat. “But you didn’t actually know.”

“I mean, she did talk about sneaking out to see someone, but it was in such vague terms. Like she didn’t want me to know who he was.”

I nod, thinking of how Natalie had kept Jeffrey a secret from us, too.

“So, what did she tell you?”

“That he wasn’t in school,” Bethany says with a sigh, like she’s still disappointed after all these years, “so, of course, I figured he was older. That they used to hang out a lot in his car.”

I keep nodding, my head starting to swim as I imagine my sister’s hair being pulled from the root, the single strand they found stuck in the seat.

“Then they asked me about Jeffrey and I remembered seeing Natalie in his car one time,” she adds as I think of the fingerprints she left as she grasped for the handle, blood-soaked shirt crumpled into a wad. “People would go in there during parties to smoke.”

“Okay,” I say. “What else?”

“That was it.”

“That’s really all she told you about him?” I press, my desperation to keep digging making me pushy and frank. “I thought you guys were best friends.”

“We were.”

“I thought you were together all the time—”

“We were, ” she snaps, cutting me off, and I can’t help but clock the subtle hurt in her tone.

It still sounds so raw after all these years and I think back to that summer now, my assumption that Bethany was always around, and realize I might have been wrong about that, too.

“But then she started working at Galloway and everything changed. She got all distant.”

“The divorce—” I start, thinking about how Natalie distanced herself from me, too, but Bethany is already shaking her head.

“It was before that,” she says. “That’s why I was surprised to hear you’ve been hanging around there. That place did something to her.”

“ Did something, ” I repeat, a quiet discomfort starting to slip up my neck at Bethany talking about Galloway as if it’s somehow alive.

“It changed her,” she adds, finally grabbing the bill from my hand. Then I watch as she slips it into the register, the drawer snapping shut like lockjawed teeth. “It devoured her.”