Page 70 of The Perfect Hosts
Will do. And check your email.
Jamie navigates to his email and opens the message from Greta.
I widened my search, and there’s a mom-and-pop hardware store in Snowcap, ID, and they have record of double-headed nails, duct tape, ball bearings, zinc wire, and PVC pipingbeing purchased within a month by the same individual, but not on the same day. Bad news is we don’t know who bought them—they were paid for with cash. Working on getting a search warrant so we have access to surveillance.
Snowcap, Idaho,is less than two hours from Nightjar. Smart, Jamie thinks. If this is the guy, he purchased the bomb-making material out of state using cash, which makes things a bit more difficult to suss out. Too bad the perpetrator didn’t realize that most stores keep track of the exact items sold and when. Now they need that surveillance footage.
He is restless but can’t make a move until he has that arrest warrant in hand. He pops a few aspirin and stares down at the school yearbook and the black binder that holds Juneau’s case file that he brought in from the car. Which one to open first? Both will release a Pandora’s box of memories, all unwelcome. He hears Juneau sigh in his ear.What’s the point?she asks.It’s been too long. Aren’t you tired, J. J.?
He is. But he also needs to know what happened to his sister.
Jamie takes a seat at the small Formica table and opens the black binder. On the first page is a plastic sleeve that holds a large photo of Juneau. Her final school photo. She’s looking into the camera with her large dark eyes, a slight smile on her face that shows her dimple.Ugh!Juneau says.I hate that picture!
Jamie smiles, showing his own dimple. Juneau hated every single photo taken of her. He thinks this one is a good one. He flips the page and is thrust into a familiar world of police reports and interview transcripts, and there are hundreds. Sheriff Colson and the other officers were thorough, this much is clear. They interviewed teachers, classmates, business owners, guests who stayed in the hotel—no one remembered anything of note. Then came the interview with his mother. The notes were nearly incoherent; his mother was so grief-stricken, so scared, that shewas little help to the investigation. There are photos of the blue Lynx station wagon sitting abandoned on the gravel road. Jamie reads through the forensic report: Jamie’s fingerprints and his mother’s were found in the car. He had forgotten about that, getting his fingerprints taken for comparison purposes. There were two other sets of partial prints also found in the car, one set thought to be Juneau’s, the other unknown. The same goes for the DNA found, but to date there have been no matches.
Jamie turns the page and is met with the image of his swollen, disfigured face. He winces at the memory, runs his tongue over his dental implants, put into place when he was eighteen and his jaw had fully developed. Up until then he wore a removable retainer with prosthetic teeth that never quite fit his mouth. He doesn’t linger long on the photo and flips the page to his interviews. There were at least a dozen of them, most conducted by Sheriff Colson who was a deputy at the time, but in each he said the same things: He didn’t know who took Juneau; he didn’t know who beat him up; he didn’t see or hear anything. The exception was in the final interviews he gave before he and his mother moved away—a last-ditch effort to squeeze any additional information out of him. It took place in their motel room, and Sheriff Colson sat across from Jamie at this same table, his mother sat on the sofa, looking anxiously at them both, willing Jamie to remember something, anything.
And then, miraculously, Jamie did remember something. He was lying in the ditch, pain radiating through his hip, his heart nearly pounding out of his chest, listening to the crunching of feet coming toward him through the grass. There was a bright light, a flashlight maybe, making it impossible to see the face of who was coming toward him—he was big, monstrously tall, and broad-shouldered—all of which he mentioned before. Then he remembers the flashlight catching a glint of silver. The silver tip of a fawn-colored cowboy boot with elaborate stitching. Of what? Jamie remembers his twelve-year-old selfsqueezing his eyes tightly shut trying to picture the design.“An owl?”Jamie said it as a question.
“An owl?”Colson repeated.
“Yes, an owl. It had wings and eyes, but it didn’t look like a real owl, more like...”Jamie hadn’t been able to quite put it into words.
“More like the suggestion of an owl?”Colson had asked, and he had agreed.
Jamie looks up from the binder. He had all but forgotten about this detail. After he told Colson about the boots, he and his mother moved away, and he’d never heard another word about it. But Colson clearly had not forgotten. He had printed off pages and pages of pictures of boots that might have matched Jamie’s description. Now, he examines each, but none of them are quite right.
The rest of the binder chronicles tips that have come in over the years and the follow-up conversations that Colson and other deputies had; nothing came from any of it.
Jamie closes the binder and sets it aside, and a dark cloud of melancholy settles over him. It’s his own fault. He knew stepping back into this world would be painful. He reaches for the yearbook and skims through the pages until he finds Juneau’s school photo, the same one that’s at the front of the binder, then finds his own and shakes his head. He thought he was so tough, so much better than his classmates. He wonders what could have happened if he’d tried a little harder.
He finds the photo of Laura Holt with her smattering of freckles and wishes he remembered her. He flips through the pages until he comes across the spread dedicated to the football team. There’s a group photo of the team together, decked out in their gear, standing in rows shoulder to shoulder, but there is also another photo that causes Jamie to sit up in his seat. It’s a picture of Wes Drake with seven other boys. They are dressed in their football jerseys but are wearing jeans and cowboy hatsand holding—unbelievably—shotguns. That sure wouldn’t fly in this day and age. The caption reads “Senior gridders take aim at a state title.” The photo credit is listed as Juneau Archer. Jamie pulls the book close to his face to get a better look at Wes who is a head taller than and twice as broad as his teammates. He’s certainly slimmed down over the years, Jamie thinks, and that’s when he notices what Wes is wearing on his feet: metal-tipped cowboy boots.
But everyone else on the team is wearing boots too. Every single person in Nightjar probably has at least two pairs in their closet. His cell buzzes, and Jamie looks at the clock. It’s nearly ten thirty. He considers letting the call go to voicemail but thinks twice. It might be Greta or one of the deputies with some info for him. He flips the phone over, and it’s a number he doesn’t recognize. “Hello,” he says cautiously.
“Agent Saldano, this is Laura Holt. I’m sorry I’m calling so late, but I just wanted to tell you I remembered something. About Juneau. It’s probably nothing...”
“No, no, that’s okay. What is it?” Jamie asks, trying not to get his hopes up.
“I completely forgot about it, and I never mentioned it to the police, but I did see Juneau about a month or two before she disappeared. It was at the Dairy Ranch. She was behind the building, eating an ice cream cone.”
“Was she with anyone?” Jamie asks, his pulse quickening.
“Not at first,” Laura says. “Like I said, it probably doesn’t mean anything, but she was behind the building, and then someone came up to her.” Laura pauses, as if hesitant to continue. Jamie wants to hurry her along, tell her to just say it, but doesn’t want to scare her away.
She takes a deep breath, then continues. “They talked for a minute, and then they started kissing. I think it was Wes,” Laura says. “Wes Drake.”
Chapter 34
Lucy
Madeline takes a step backward and eyes the doorway behind Lucy.
“I knew this was coming but...” Madeline says shakily. Lucy can hear the fear in her sister’s voice, and this gives her a little thrill. Not normal, she tells herself, but then again, Lucy has never been normal. She gently shuts the door, and it closes with a soft click.
It was hard growing up with such a beautiful, accomplished sister. Stepsister, Lucy reminds herself. Though they weren’t related by blood, they were undeniably connected to one another. Lucy’s father forced Madeline and Madeline’s mother on her, and that was just the way it was. No one asked how Lucy felt about their new domestic situation; there was no consultation, no discussion, but eventually the kid grew on her.
And now she’s going to be a mother. She has all the things that Lucy wants—or thought she wanted. When Madeline came home last month, Lucy saw the bruises. She saw firsthand what Wes was doing to her little sister. Then she saw the pictures hidden in Madeline’s file drawer, the horrid bruises, the dead look in Madeline’s eyes as she stared into the camera. Lucy would never let a man do to her what Wes has done to her sister.