Page 8

CHAPTER

8

LINDSEY

Present Day

“I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU’RE angry Mr. Fadley—”

“Don’t patronize me, damn it,” Dad bellowed. “We’ve been dealing with the police and their condescending bullshit for twenty-four years. And I’m not someone who needs to be handled. We still have no idea who you found at the lake. The papers have been plastering my daughter’s name everywhere.”

“As I said when I spoke to you several weeks ago, the press somehow got wind of things—”

“And how the hell did that happen?” Dad demanded. “How is it that a bunch of reporters figured out something like this before we had been told anything?”

Lead detective, Lieutenant Jane Higgins looked contrite. “That’s one of the things we’re looking into. We take leaks in our department very seriously.” She sounded pissed off.

“Leaks?” Dad scoffed. “It’s more like a fire hydrant. Though, I shouldn’t be surprised. Mt. Randall’s police department’s ineptitude is as well known as the town’s goddamned Apple Festival.”

“Your daughter’s case has always been taken with absolute seriousness, Mr. Fadley. I can assure you that my predecessor, Sergeant O’Neil, worked tirelessly to find Jessica. And I will do the same. I will find answers.” Lieutenant Higgins looked at my mother and me, her somber expression kind. I liked her, even if my dad didn’t seem to. She turned back to Dad. “I told you that as soon as the DNA test and autopsy came back I would contact you and your wife, and that is what I did.”

Lieutenant Higgins was relatively calm, despite her obvious frustration. It was her frustration that I found encouraging.

She was on the smaller side—barely five foot five and probably weighed less than 120 pounds. But she had a demeanor that commanded discipline. She reminded me of my high school gym teacher, Ms. Phelps—short and feisty. She came across like a woman who got stuff done. She had the air of someone who was tenacious and methodical. I had done some Googling after hearing she had taken over my sister’s case and she had a decorated career. She had come to Mt. Randall after a decade of work in the aggravated assault unit in Raleigh. She had been awarded the Criminal Investigation Award and the Honor Award for Public Service. She had been promoted to lieutenant and for some reason, thought tiny Mt. Randall was a good place to transfer to, though I couldn’t figure out why.

Things had been in chaos since Mom called me. I had gone home instead of going back to work. I had called Marnie in a daze, telling her I was sick. I felt numb and hadn’t been thinking straight.

The remains weren’t Jess’s.

They hadn’t found her.

Even though it was late, I had found Lieutenant Higgins and another officer who introduced himself as Stanley James, the Family Liaison Officer, already at the house talking to my parents.

Mom was a mixture of devastated and relieved. Dad, on the other hand, was furious. I had never seen him act like this. Dad didn’t express extreme emotions. He was calm, agreeable, usually a little distant. But Jess seemed to bring out the lion in him. This was a side to my father I had never experienced before. He was normally smooth-talking and relaxed, while Mom was high-strung and overprotective.

“Mr. Fadley, I acknowledge that a lot of mistakes were made in the early days of your daughter’s disappearance—”

“Hmph, that’s an understatement,” Dad muttered and I was a little embarrassed at how blatantly rude he was being.

Lieutenant Higgins was calm. “Precious time was lost due to delays in reporting. There was a communication breakdown between departments. The FBI should have been called in. But I can assure you, things are different now.”

Dad crossed his arms, his expression unyielding. When he didn’t respond, Lieutenant Higgins continued.

“We’re going back to square one in terms of the search. Now that remains have been found, we need to be incredibly thorough, particularly at Baneberry Lake. The usual things like dogs and sonar equipment weren’t used back then because the police were looking for a missing woman, not a murdered one,” Lieutenant Higgins said gently. She appeared regretful as soon as the words left her mouth, and my mom let out an anguished wail.

I wanted to intervene. Not only because Dad seemed ready to lunge at the well-meaning lieutenant, but also because Mom was getting more and more upset. I had never been put into this position before—where I was the one who would have to keep things together. I often left it to my parents, particularly my mom, but now, they were barely functioning. I wondered if this was what it had been like twenty-four years ago. I had been kept away from this part, but I felt a twinge of déjà vu all the same.

“You police don’t know your asses from your—”

“Dad, don’t,” I interrupted. Dad acquiesced and didn’t finish what he was about to say.

“As I said, Mr. Fadley, I understand your anger. If it were me, I’d be mad as hell.” Lieutenant Higgins had a soothing way about her. I could tell she had, unfortunately, been in this position a lot. I imagined speaking to a victim’s family was never easy, but she handled it well. “But, please remember, I am not the officer who originally dealt with Jessica’s case. And you’re absolutely right about how things were handled back then. But, I assure you that I don’t operate that way. Technology has come a long way since 1999. Investigative procedure too. I promise I’m doing everything I can to find your daughter.”

At her words, the fight seemed to leave my dad. He sat down in his chair with a heavy sigh. He ran his hands through his hair, gripping it at the scalp as if ready to pull it from his head. He stared down at the ground, his face ashen. If possible, he looked more horrified than before.

Mom had finally stopped crying. She wiped her now red, puffy eyes and turned to the lieutenant. “Can you tell us anything at all?” she begged. “Who was it, if it wasn’t Jessica? What poor soul was left out there for all this time?”

The truth sat poised on the tip of my tongue, but I held it back.

Lieutenant Higgins’s face softened. “I hope you understand, Mrs. Fadley, that I’m not at liberty to disclose that information. Another family has to be notified first. What I can tell you is that the remains we found were 100% not your daughter’s.” She once again addressed my father, as if to placate him. “We have an underwater forensic team coming in from Wilmington tomorrow. They’ll search Baneberry Lake with specialist sonar equipment that wasn’t available twenty-four years ago. We have a team out there right now, combing the woods. If there’s anything else out there, we will find it.”

We will find it .

I wanted to scream.

They were talking about my sister as if she were an object. Not someone’s daughter. Not someone’s sister. They were speaking about Jess, as if she wasn’t a person at all.

“It’s Tammy Estep,” I said, unable to stop myself from revealing what I already knew.

Everyone in the room turned to me in surprise. Lieutenant Higgins’ eyes widened imperceptibly.

I should have shut up. I’d already said too much. I had promised Ryan I wouldn’t tell anyone the things he told me. I wondered if he could get in trouble—if I could get in trouble. But I needed to let my parents, let Lieutenant Higgins, know that I wasn’t ignorant. That I had been finding things out, too.

“It was a blow to the head that killed her, right?” I said, my voice sounding surprisingly calm even to my own ears. But I hadn’t felt calm when Ryan had told me what his source had reported.

“Tammy died from blunt force trauma. There were clear fractures to the occipital bone at the base of the skull. According to the medical examiner, her head was practically caved in. Skeletal weathering and tissue markers put her date of death sometime in 1998. So she most likely died almost as soon as she went missing.”

“Lindsey?” Mom said my name as a question. I realized everyone was staring at me in confusion.

“I need to know how you got that information, Miss Fadley.” It was the first time that Lieutenant Higgins sounded aggravated. Her calm fractured slightly.

“I … I uh have my sources,” I stammered, inwardly cringing at how flippant I sounded.

“Tammy’s remains were found not far from Doll’s Eye Lake. Her body had been buried about four feet down, wrapped in an old, plaid wool blanket. The body was badly decomposed and was little more than bones, a few scraps of tissue and fabric strands that were clothing at one time. It was pure chance that she was found. This area has seen unprecedented wet weather. There’s been significant flooding and runoff into the lake. According to my source, the lieutenant in charge believes the body simply rose to the surface due to the ground being oversaturated. A couple of boys were out there fishing and one of them went to dig up some nightcrawlers to use as bait. Poor kid found a lot more than nightcrawlers.”

Ryan had sounded giddy as he relayed the facts he had been given. He’d been working on this story for so many years, to finally have new information was probably thrilling for him.

“They haven’t been able to find a murder weapon. But they’re looking in Doll’s Eye Lake itself again. I know they gave it a cursory inspection back in ’99, but this time they’re going to do it properly.”

There wasn’t time to hear anything else because I had needed to get to my family. Ryan seemed like he wanted to talk more about what all this meant. He was energized. Frantic even.

It’s not Jess, Lindsey.” He repeated that sentence several times, as if hardly able to believe it.

Lieutenant Higgins was angry. The vein in the middle of her forehead was standing prominent. “This is a very big problem, Miss Fadley. If someone’s feeding you confidential police information, I’m going to have to insist you tell me who.”

Crap, crap, crap. I was such an idiot.

“I … I don’t know—”

“Whose Tammy Estep? What does this have to do with Jessica?” Mom interjected, her voice quivering, taking the heat off me.

I waited for Lieutenant Higgins to insist I talk to her, but she never did. The issue with how I got my information seemed to be dropped for the time being. She glanced at Stan James, and there was an unspoken communication between them.

She turned to us, her expression guarded yet determined. “I want to be straight with you, Mr. and Mrs. Fadley. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. We are coming at this from many different angles.” She looked at my dad who was still staring at the floor, his body tense. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with him. “Have you heard of the new podcast that’s out right now about Jessica’s case?”

Mom appeared puzzled, but I answered affirmatively. “Yes, I’ve listened to it.”

Lieutenant Higgins looked between my mom and me. “It’s great that people are invested in these cases, it helps keep pressure on to solve them. But it’s getting a little wild out there. The department is dealing with a lot of crackpots who fancy themselves detectives.” Lieutenant Higgins pursed her lips. “But they do highlight some interesting things. Such as the long-standing theory that Jessica’s disappearance is tied to the disappearances of the other missing girls from Southern State University, Tammy included. Unfortunately, back then, the idea that the disappearances were connected was disregarded, which makes no sense to me. But that means lines of questioning weren’t followed and evidence was definitely overlooked. I’m coming at this with a fresh pair of eyes, and I am finding links that investigators at the time didn’t. These cases needed a modern take to view it all clearly. And I can tell you that now we’ve found Tammy, I believe it’s only a matter of time until we find the others. It’s my opinion that whoever did this put them all in the same place. And the place matters—it holds personal significance to the perpetrator. More importantly, I think that these women all had a connection, not only to each other, but to the person responsible. These aren’t random crimes.”

Her words came down like a hammer. Lieutenant Higgins had admitted they weren’t looking for girls who were still alive. They were looking for bodies. And she expected Jessica’s to be one of them. And the person who took her from us was most likely someone she knew.

“Oh my god. Ben, are you hearing this?” Mom whimpered.

Dad finally looked up, his eyes hollow, as if his soul had been sucked out of him. “Yes, I’m listening.” His voice was devoid of emotion.

“You think they’re all out there at the lake? Including my Jessica? That’s what I told that detective back then. I knew my baby was there.” Mom was getting worked up again.

Lieutenant Higgins put a hand on my mom’s shoulder and it had an instant, soothing effect. “I want you to know, Mrs. Fadley, that finding Tammy has allowed the department to put resources into these cases for the first time in decades. It’s no longer a cold case. It’s been moved to active status. This is good news.”

Dad had gone deathly pale. “You think you can solve this?” he asked, his voice cracking.

Lieutenant Higgins gave him a kind but firm look. “I don’t think , Mr. Fadley, I know .”

Stan James spoke briefly to my mom, handing her a card, and telling her to call him if she needed anything. Then the two police officers walked to the door, Lieutenant Higgins opening it. A waft of cold night air blew in and I shivered.

Lieutenant Higgins looked first at me, then my mother, before her eyes settled on Dad. “As soon as I know more, I’ll be in touch but, I promise you, I will find out what happened to your daughter.”

Later, after my parents had gone to bed, I found myself standing outside my sister’s bedroom.

I had promised Ryan I would go through the boxes of her stuff to see if there was anything that might have been missed. But I didn’t want to take anything to him. Not yet anyway. The image of his eager demeanor when he asked if he could see Jess’s things had stuck with me. And not in a good way.

So, I crept into Jess’s room and pulled three large boxes from her closet. I knew, from what I overheard my parents say years ago, that the police had taken possession of the stuff in her dorm room right after her disappearance. They obviously didn’t think there was anything of note and so had quickly released the effects to my parents. But given how poorly they managed the case, I knew I needed to look for myself because it would only be a matter of time before Lieutenant Higgins would want them.

It felt strange being in her room. Everything was as it had been left all those years ago. Her stuffed toys were still on her bed, her clothes still hung in the closet, now out of fashion and moth-eaten. Her books were still lined up on the shelf waiting for someone to read them again. Everything remained, and would remain, untouched.

Given how obsessed I had always been with the sister I barely remembered, it would have been so easy to cross the hall and enter her sanctum in order to learn everything I yearned to know. Yet I had only ever dared a handful of times. It felt wrong to invade her space when she was no longer around to allow or deny it. It felt like wandering into a sacred space, not to be disrupted. As if the room were sleeping, on the verge of waking up. And there was a presence there that never went away. It disturbed me.

I went in, stopping once I reached the middle of the room, almost too frightened to move.

Panic unfurled in my gut and I felt a cold breeze on my bare arms even though the windows were closed.

There was rustling from somewhere followed by what sounded like something moving around in the closet. What was it? A mouse? Somehow the idea of a rodent was more appealing than the alternative.

And what was the alternative? That my sister’s room was haunted?

I wanted to laugh at the ludicrousness of the idea, but I couldn’t. Because right then, I swore I caught the cloying scent of jasmine in the air.

A gasp caught in my throat as the door slammed shut behind me and I jumped. I rushed over and pulled it back open, not wanting to be shut inside.

Wide-eyed with dread, I stood on the threshold, staring out into the silent hallway, willing myself to calm down. I was being ridiculous.

Taking a steadying breath, I turned and faced Jess’s room once again, giving myself a mental pep talk. I crossed the floor and turned on the bedside lamp. The filtered hazy pink light from the lamp shade made the shadows even deeper, but I didn’t dare turn on the ceiling light for fear of waking my parents up.

I forced myself to focus on what I came in here for and got to work. After a while, I realized searching through Jess’s things was futile. I hadn’t found anything that seemed to hold a clue as to what happened to her.

I was about ready to give up when I discovered a small photo album at the bottom of the last box. Given how scarce pictures of my sister were, I pounced on it immediately.

I sat down on her bed, flipping through the pages of the small, fabric-bound book, seeing pictures of Jess posing with women I presumed were from Southern State. Blurry photos of dim dorm rooms and the sunlit quad in the middle of campus. Pictures of a group of laughing girls laid out on the grass.

There was a photograph of Jess in a short cocktail dress, her dark hair layered around her face. Her arm was slung around a pretty girl with beautiful bronze blonde hair.

I didn’t quite know how to feel seeing proof of my sister’s life. My eyes stung and I blinked away tears, feeling incredibly emotional. Jess looked happy, though at times, I noticed, her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. And there was a tension about her features that was at odds with the laid-back nature of the friends beside her.

Toward the back, there were other photographs. Ones of our family. These were pictures I had never seen before. There were several of me as a little girl, staring up at my big sister with wide, adoring eyes. I struggled to breathe around the lump that had formed in my throat. It was clear that Jess and I loved each other. No one could doubt that by seeing how she held me close and how I hugged her tight. I wished so much that I could remember her better.

I turned the pages, finding photos of random things that must have mattered to Jess. There was a teddy bear on a swing, a tree, a flower. Then there was a close-up of my dad. It was so close I could see the tiny flecks in his brown eyes.

There were so many pictures of my dad.

Even more of my dad with Jess.

Mostly, they were from around our house. Simple captures of simple times. There was one of Jess eating a huge ice cream sundae at Carina’s Custard Stand downtown. It had been a Mt. Randall institution, only closing a few years ago. I knew that my sister had loved Carina’s hot fudge brownies and dad would take her frequently. I only knew this because my paternal grandmother made a comment about it once before she died. She asked me if Dad took me to Carina’s Custard, too, and I didn’t know what to say. Because no, he had never taken me.

There were a few that were taken at Doll’s Eye Lake, Jess holding a fishing pole, with an excited smile, an orange paddleboat bobbing in the water behind her. I knew she and Dad used to spend hours out on that boat when Jess was little. Mom said once, as if by accident, that it was their “special time.”

After Jess went missing, I had been desperate to go fishing with my dad. To spend time with him. I wanted to paddle out to the middle of the lake like he had done with my sister a hundred times. I begged him. I had even cried. But he always refused. Mom scolded me, saying it made him too sad to go back there and to stop bothering him about it. So I never mentioned the boat, or going fishing, ever again. And now his boat— their boat —stayed in the garage, rusting beneath an old blue tarp.

Once, when I was around fourteen, Dad had been working late and Mom had too much to drink, she told me how inseparable Jess and Dad had been. I knew, on some level, that their connection had been deep. It was the way his face crumpled at the smallest mention of my sister. It was how he hardly ever came to the end of the house where my room, and Jess’s, were. Sometimes he’d stand at one end of the hallway, his body sagging, as if he desperately wanted to venture there, but couldn’t make himself.

And it was in the way that he loved me—a superficial kind of affection—never the deep, abiding tenderness I longed for from my father. In some ways, it felt like he was too scared to love me fully in case something happened to me, too. Or at least that’s what I told myself.

Mom said they were always together, at least up until Jess went to college. She blubbered that that had been when everything changed. Jess stopped calling home. She refused to see Dad. Mom said she changed almost from the moment she moved into her dorm. She only came home briefly from time to time. And when she did, she’d go up to her room for a while and then leave without saying anything. That’s why it was such a pleasant surprise when Jess announced she was coming home for my sixth birthday.

She whispered, her words slurring, “Your father has never gotten over her rejection. He wouldn’t say it, but Jess destroyed him. She broke his heart. He’s never been the same since she went missing. He took it personally. Like he should have saved her. Like it was all his fault she was gone.”

She had passed out soon after that and it was the last time she ever dared mention Jess and her relationship with Dad.

I hated to admit that hearing confirmation of the bond between Jess and Dad had made me jealous. I wanted what they’d had. I wanted the fishing trips and Carina’s hot fudge brownies. During my preteen years, I tried to build that same kind of relationship with him. But it wasn’t the same. Sure, he always told me he loved me. He dutifully came to my school plays and attended every parent/teacher night, but there was a distance that I could never bridge. It felt as if he was doing what was expected of a father, rather than out of any real desire for closeness. We never had anything that was only for us like he’d had with Jess. We didn’t have special trips or inside jokes. On paper, we looked the part, but scratch the surface and there was nothing really there.

Jess and Dad had been so much more, and it was hard knowing I’d never have it. In many ways, I never felt good enough because I wasn’t her. His perfect Jess.

So, I forced myself to focus on the good stuff. To find a way to enjoy the relationship we did have, even if it lacked substance. But it was difficult. The jealousy, the feeling of inadequacy, was always there in the back of my mind. And it didn’t stop me from missing what I could have had if it weren’t for my sister.

Dad loved me in his own way, but it was more than obvious as the years went by that it wasn’t as much as he loved Jess.

I closed the photo album, not finding anything but heartache in its pages. Yet I couldn’t help but feel I was missing something. It was driving me nuts.

I put the tiny book in the box and started to lug it back into the closet.

I shoved it into the farthest corner. One of them—the heaviest box—hit the wall with a hollow thud.

“What the—?”

I dropped to my knees and pulled the box back out of the way. I lightly tapped the wall, searching for the hollow sound. I knocked a little lower until I heard the sound again. There was a definite void behind the drywall. I knelt closer, noticing a small square cut out, barely visible to the naked eye, as it blended in with the rest of the wall.

Using my fingernail, I ran it along the grooves and slowly pried a thin piece of drywall away, revealing a small cavity.

“Jessie, you sneaky girl.”

I turned on the flashlight on my phone and peered inside. There wasn’t much, only a small pile of papers. I pulled them out. Then, sitting on the floor of Jess’s closet, I looked through them.

On top was a faded printout of what must have been Jess’s classes at Southern State. Next to them were grades. The report was dated December 12, 1998. It seemed my academic, straight-A sister was struggling to get Cs and Ds. She was even failing her English class. There was also a letter from Pi Gamma Delta dated March 14, 1999, stating she was on suspension because of her low GPA and she was no longer an active pledge. There was another letter dated the following month from the administrator’s office informing her that she had a scheduled meeting to discuss her academic probation.

I put the report and the letters aside and saw a receipt from the registrar’s office. According to the slip of paper, she had audited Introduction to Statistics for the spring semester of 1999. I looked at the professor’s name and felt my stomach drop.

“Dr. Clement Daniels,” I whispered.

That was the name of the professor Ryan had said was involved with the other missing women. The same professor who, it looked like, had taught Jess statistics. Seeing his name among my sister’s secret things felt uncomfortable. My heart started to pound as I went through the rest of the items that had been hidden away.

There were tons of pictures. I didn’t understand at first why she hadn’t put these in her photo album until I realized what I was seeing. These were pictures of Jess, clearly intoxicated.

This wasn’t the Jess my parents knew and remembered.

I had no doubt she had put them in her hiding spot so our mom wouldn’t find them. Lord knows what would have happened if she had.

In one photo, she held an overturned Silo cup over her head, her top practically see-through with what must be beer, and her head thrown back in laughter. In another, her eyes were glassy and she was clearly drunk. She held up a shot glass to the camera.

I flipped to the last few pictures and I froze.

It showed Jess in a messy dorm room, a radiant smile on her gorgeous face. Her arms were wrapped tightly around the neck of a handsome boy with dark hair and a contagious, familiar grin.

My entire body started to tremble.

There was another photo of the young couple. The boy’s lips pressed to the side of Jess’s neck, his hands tucked into the pockets of her jeans. They were obviously smitten with each other.

And yet another of the two kissing at the edge of a large, very recognizable body of water. It was taken at an angle that they had obviously propped up the camera and put it on a timer. The Doll’s Eyes’ red berries grew at their feet. You could tell that, to each other, no one else existed.

I let out a sob and pushed the pictures away.

I should have taken solace in seeing my sister happy.

But I couldn’t. Seeing them filled me with a sadness that consumed me.

Because yes, my sister had obviously been in love.

Deeply in love.

With Ryan McKay.