Page 35 of What She Saw

“I don’t want people to forget about those women.” I avoided the wordvictim. The term dehumanized the women and made them faceless.

“You’ll make a small splash, but no one will care for long.”

“I don’t make small splashes. Mine are big and messy.”

That prompted a small smile.

“I’d like to think my articles matter.”

She sighed and stared at me a long moment before unlatching the hook on the screened door. “Come on in.”

I followed her into the dimly lit house. It had low ceilings and white walls that needed a fresh coat of paint about a decade ago. On those walls were dozens of pictures of a young blond girl. In all the photos, she was holding a guitar and smiling.

“That kid came out of the womb singing. And she was playing her daddy’s guitar by the time she was four. Such talent. She was convinced she’d be a big success.”

The girl was Laurie Carr, later known as Blue Guitar Girl. From what I’d learned about Laurie, she’d been nineteen when she vanished. She’d made several demo tapes and wanted to sing in Nashville. She’d thought the festival would be her big break. She’d sung a duet onstage with the lead singer of the Terrible Tuesdays, a five-man rock band. The band had done well on festival circuits for about five years but disbanded by 2000. A local news station had been filming, and they’d captured Laurie and Joe Keller’s set. Laurie had been good and maybe could have gotten a contract. Maybe.

I followed Ms. Carr. The sofa was threadbare, the coffee table covered in old magazines, the carpet shag. The avocado-green kitchen dated back to the 1980s.

“I made lemonade this morning,” Ms. Carr said. “Care for a glass?”

“Sounds great.”

She pulled out two mason jars from a dark-grain wooden cabinet and a pitcher of lemonade. The bright yellow wasn’t found in nature, but I wasn’t going to argue.

She set two glasses on a round kitchen table and motioned for me to sit. I lowered to the chair, letting my backpack drop to the ground. The lemonade was tart and made my lips pucker.

“It’ll put hair on your chest,” she said.

“Like the Depot coffee?”

“Better. Vodka adds a bite to the sweetness, if you need a little.”

“No, this is fine.” I set the glass down. “Again, thank you for seeing me.”

She rattled the ice in her glass. “Nobody ever asks me about Laurie anymore.”

“I’ve seen a video of her singing at the festival. As rough as the tape is, you can’t miss she was great.”

“She was special.”

“What prompted her to go to the Mountain Music Festival?”

“It was a chance to sing. My brother, her father, didn’t have money for fancy lessons, but that never stopped her. Then she saw the poster for the festival in the Waynesboro shop where she worked. The day of the festival, her car was in the shop, so she took the bus to Dawson and then started walking toward the site. Finally, one of the band guys picked her up.”

“Joe Keller.”

“Joe told me he’d warned my girl to be careful, but she was so sure that she had life figured out.”

“She couldn’t have known.”

“She would’ve loved playing for a big crowd. I can’t imagine how good that must have felt for her.” She rose and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the freezer. Unscrewing the top, she offered me a sip, but I declined. She put a healthy dose in her lemonade.

“I understand you helped raise Laurie.”

“Her mama ran off when she was five, so I stepped in to help.”

The similarities among Laurie, Patty, and me weren’t hard to miss. “You reported Laurie missing, right?”