Page 55 of Forget Me Not

SIX MONTHS AFTER

It’s live.

I turn to the side, the buzz of my phone pulling me from sleep as I stare at the screen alight on the table. Then I reach out to grab it, squinting as I try to make sense of this text from my father until I bolt up in bed, a stitch in my chest once I understand what he means.

“Ryan,” I say, shaking his shoulder. “It’s live.”

He sits up quick, a sleepy smile spreading across his face. Then he gets up and pads across the room, grabbing his laptop from on top of his desk before bringing it back to the bed.

He hands it to me, my fingers tapping away at the keys.

“Front page,” I say, leaning forward as the article loads. “It’s on the front page.”

The first thing I see is The New York Times, the logo big and bold at the top of the screen. There’s a picture of Galloway just beneath it, that goldenrod shot I took on my first night there when the lighting was all eerie and still.

I read the headline next, a few sentences of summary, before eyeing my byline printed prominently below.

“Well?” Ryan asks, climbing back under the covers as I take a deep breath and start to scroll. “What do you think?”

I begin reading, this unbelievable story I pieced together.

The story that not only revived my career but, in the process, my whole life.

It’s a strange sensation, all this death, and me being the one to uncover it all the only reason my job was given new life—but at the same time, this is the whole reason I chose this profession.

To make sure lost girls are never forgotten.

My eyes start to water as I take in their pictures, the dedicated sections about each one—and not just a few sentences, not only how they met their ends, but all the wonderful ways they spent their short lives .

Their plans and passions, hobbies and homes.

Scanned excerpts from Marcia’s diary and those pictures of Natalie I found in that shoebox.

The shot of Katherine in front of her camper next to the one I took out in the woods as it sat swallowed in that sea of bright blue.

“Forget-me-nots,” Liam had told me, calling to mind those petals I once found crushed in Natalie’s pocket.

He had planted them for her in that secret spot they had shared, an effort to honor her memory the only way he knew how—and then they had spread, invasive under the right conditions.

Irrepressible and wild, just as my sister had been. “They were her favorite.”

I keep scrolling, drinking in the various shots of the property.

The plants and the shed, yellow tape wound around its busted-down doors.

My mom and I arrived back at the station in Draper just as Liam was being led to a cruiser, blue lights blinking as he ducked in.

Then we had pulled out behind them, trailing from a distance as we wound down south.

I think about pulling into Galloway now, finding the place crawling with cops like a colony of ants drawn to dropped fruit. Easing to a stop in my regular spot as an officer made his way toward us, gesturing for me to lower the glass.

“You can’t be here,” he said, elbows resting against the side of the car. Then I had glanced to the side, to Lily handcuffed in the back of a cruiser; Mitchell’s body veiled beneath a white sheet. “This is an active crime scene.”

“My name is Claire Campbell,” I said as I leaned over, one hand on the wheel as the other grabbed the diary from the floor of the car. Then I had thrust it toward him, his head cocked as he took it in. “This is my mother, Annaliese. We have some information you’re going to want to hear.”

I stared straight ahead as he looked down at the diary, then back up at me, before motioning for us to get out of the car. Then he had led us into the living room, Liam perking up as soon as we entered as his body sat slumped in Lily’s old chair.

“Where did you get this?” the officer asked, holding the book up in the air.

“I found it,” I said. “Pushed into the back of a vent in the guesthouse.”

“And how did it get there?”

I still remember that moment so clearly, my voice withering in the back of my throat as I realized, for the first time, that if Marcia never put the diary in there, then I had no idea who did.

“I hid it,” Liam said as I turned to face him, his gaze pulled to his hands clasped in his lap. “As a safeguard, I guess, back in 2002.”

I stared at him then, the very last piece clicking into place as I imagined him sneaking into the guesthouse after Natalie had died.

Pulling the diary from the depths of her duffel—their shared secret, his sole piece of proof—before walking to the vent and removing the cover, sliding it back as far as it would go.

“Nobody ever went in there,” he added. “Not until we started using it for workers a few years back.”

I blink back to the present, to Ryan’s warm body sitting flush by my side.

“Well,” he asks again, nudging my shoulder as I think about how I came back to the city six months ago, moving out of my apartment and in with him as I spent every second piecing this story together.

Ryan giving me his room while he crashed on the couch until slowly, silently, he started to sleep in here, too. “Are you happy?”

“I’m happy,” I say, actually meaning it for the very first time.

I turn my attention back toward the screen, all the pictures of evidence the police pulled from the floor.

Every single item stuffed inside of that bag had belonged to a person who had long been gone: Katherine’s sweatshirt, Steven’s license and deed.

The gun registered to a cop named Carmen who had been murdered back in the eighties, her cold case finally closed.

Then they had moved into the shed next, ripping up the rest of those bloated old boards to discover the remains of three separate bodies, just as Liam had promised they would.

One of the bodies belonged to Marcia Rayburn, a cheek swab provided by Liam proving they were mother and son. The second belonged to Steven Montague, the rightful owner of the land known as Galloway Farm before Mitchell stole it away.

The third body belonged to Natalie Campbell.

I stare at the picture of my sister now as I remember the strange sensation I had every time I crossed the shed’s threshold, the way Liam always hesitated before stepping inside.

How it felt like I could physically feel her at Galloway, a closeness between us I couldn’t explain.

We held a funeral for her, a proper one this time, and Jeffrey Slater was exonerated after twenty-two years spent sitting in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Bethany came forward, claiming Eric DiNello had coerced her testimony, leading her with questions designed to make her think that Jeffrey was the one my sister had been sneaking out to see—and it made sense, she said, because Jeffrey Slater had been in their system for years.

He was a drug dealer, a criminal. A known acquaintance of Natalie’s and an older man with a car, a car Bethany had seen her sit in before.

He was the simplest, most logical explanation.

I scroll down to his mug shot now, Eric DiNello’s, his crimes ranging from planting evidence in Jeffrey’s car—that blood-soaked shirt from Natalie’s fall, a single blond hair he had ripped from the root—to helping cover up an illegal drug operation and being an accomplice to five murders over the span of forty-one years.

Ironically, Mitchell hadn’t been lying when he told me he never killed anyone—not directly, at least. It had been Lily, all of it: Steven and Marcia, Carmen and Natalie.

Katherine, whose remains were found buried beside a decrepit old barn after my mother brought the cops there.

I look at Lily now, the very last picture at the bottom of the screen.

Those bleak gray eyes staring blankly into the lens.

I may never know if Mitchell was actually drugging her—if it was yet another method of his control, those teas tranquilizing her into a placid oblivion—or if she drank them of her own free will.

The police are still trying to piece her together, this neglected girl who simply started to rot.

Living her life behind a series of masks and stealing so many things, including a name, because she left hers as evidence at so many crimes.

I feel my phone buzz again and I look down at my side, the sound nudging me out of the moment. Then I reach out and grab it, swiping up to find a new text.

Turns out I’m named after my grandfather. Who would have thought.

I watch as a picture comes through next, a picture of Liam next to William and Jane Rayburn, both of them older but very much alive. They’re standing in front of a house, 1629 Hickory Road. The address I had found and passed along to Liam, urging him to meet his family.

The family he didn’t even know that he had.

I pinch my fingers to the screen and zoom in on his face, blue eyes crinkled as he squints into the sun, and think about how he kept his every last promise, backing up my claims of self-defense and spending a few weeks behind bars as the police worked to confirm that his story was true.

It had been hard to prove, of course, but based on the dates in Marcia’s diary, the timeline constructed from his mother’s own words, he was determined to have been born a month after Natalie, in September of 1984, still making him a minor on the day she had died.

It’s a good name.

I type back, smiling as I think back to the diary’s first entry, the single sentence that started all this.

I guess I’ll start with my name, Marcia, because most days, my name feels like the only thing that’s mine.