I didn’t want to break that sense of shared reality, but I had to. “Cody, I’m hoping you can help me with something.”
“Anything you need,” he said immediately.
“Did you know a girl named Jessi Walker?” I asked. There was silence on the other end of the line. “I think she was friends with Oscar.”
“Yeah,” Cody said finally. “I know Jessi. Knew her, I guess. I haven’t seen her since— God. Must be almost twenty-five years. Why are you asking about Jessi?”
“There’s a chance she might have been one of Stahl’s victims,” I said.
“Jessi’s not dead,” he said. “Is she?” Uncertainty made his voice crack.
“She was reported missing. After she left town no one ever saw her again,” I told him. “My dad said she hung around with Oscar, and I figured if she spent time with Oscar, she must’ve spent time with you.”
“We were friends,” he said, sounding disturbed.
“What can you tell me about her?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think she ever talked about herself much. I got the sense she came from a bad background. She hitched into town and charmed Marsha into offering her a shift. Inside a week she had a second job at the diner and she was even helping out in the office at the mill on the weekends, which is where Oscar and I met her. She was—the word that springs to mind is vibrant. Funny and brash. She had these moments of sweetness, too. You really think she’s dead?”
“Yes. I do.” I didn’t say how I knew. Let him think it was instinct.
He let out a long breath. “Jesus. We all assumed she just left. She always said she wasn’t going to stay long. She hitchhiked sometimes, I know that.”
“Did you see her the day she left town?” I asked.
“No. I was pissed, actually. I knew she was leaving but she didn’t say when, and she didn’t say goodbye. Just took off.”
“Do you know anyone who might have?”
He paused. “Oscar,” he said.
“Yeah, I was kind of afraid that was what you were going to say,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “What was their relationship like?”
“In one word? Messy,” he said. “Oscar was always magnetic to women in a way I didn’t understand. He had this way of making you work hard to impress him, so that when he did throw a scrap of approval your way it was addictive. The more he ignored girls, the more they seemed to fling themselves at him.”
“And Jessi was like that?”
He grunted. “The opposite. She was the one who wasn’t impressed. And he was the one who got obsessed. I never saw Oscar fall for someone until Jessi. Or after, either.”
“Were they ever actually together?” I asked, trying to imagine Oscar in love. But then, I’d never known the side of him that he showed everyone else. From the beginning, he’d taken one look at me and realized there was no need to charm me. I was no one. I was alone. He didn’t need to bother with masks.
“I wouldn’t say together, exactly. Sex, yes; relationship, not so much. But something was going on there,” Cody told me. “Things changed between them all of a sudden a little while before she left, but Oscar didn’t talk about it. And we weren’t exactly the kind of guys who had a lot of heart-to-hearts about our love lives.”
“Right,” I said. I scratched at an itch on my jaw. I’d been hoping Cody would tell me that Oscar barely knew Jessi. That there was no reason to talk to him. But it sounded like he was right in the middle of everything. “Do you remember when she actually left town?” I asked Cody.
“I don’t remember exactly. Late August, I think? Definitely the end of the summer. She was only in town three months or so.”
“Thank you. That helps,” I said. It was a start, at least.
“You really think Stahl might have killed her?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But it looks like a possibility.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you all right, Naomi?”
I started to answer automatically. But in this tiny slice of shared reality, I didn’t want to lie to him. “I keep feeling like I’m going to wake up and realize you never found me,” I said.
“I have that nightmare, too,” he said. “But I did find you. You’re alive, and you’re safe, and you don’t need to go chasing Stahl’s ghost. Focus on living.”
“Thanks, Cody,” I said.
“Take care of yourself, Naomi.”
We said our goodbyes. I hung up and sat with the phone cradled in my lap, letting my awareness seep slowly outward again.
A few minutes later, I walked to Ethan’s door. He opened it before I even knocked and beckoned me in.
“Get anything?” he asked. He had files pulled up on his computer—notes on Stahl, it looked like, and a map of the peninsula with dates and names scrawled on it—possible missing victims, maybe.
“A bit,” I said. “He didn’t know she was missing. He said she took off suddenly, but it wasn’t surprising.”
“And when was that?”
“Late August,” I said.
He frowned. “You’re sure?”
“He was pretty sure. Why?”
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Because if Jessi Walker was alive and well in August, there’s no way Stahl killed her. His mother had a stroke in late July. He spent two months on the East Coast to help her while she recovered.”
“That can’t be right,” I said. “Maybe Cody got the dates wrong.”
“Or Stahl had nothing to do with Jessi’s death,” Ethan said.
I sat heavily on the bed, cupping my head in my hands. If Stahl hadn’t killed Jessi, he wouldn’t have gone out to the woods to visit the body. He would have had no reason at all to be in Chester, to be off the trail and happen to stumble into me. And no reason to kill a random little girl eating a peanut butter sandwich who hadn’t even seen him.
“They saw him,” I whispered. “Liv and Cass.”
“They saw someone,” Ethan said gently. “Eyewitness testimony is unreliable even with adults.”
“Then Stahl didn’t attack me,” I said leadenly. They’d been wrong and I’d lied, and the wrong man had gone to prison because of us. Because of me.
“We don’t know that. It doesn’t prove anything either way,” Ethan said, but I could see in his eyes that he was certain now.
I stared at him. “That’s what you thought all along, isn’t it? You never really thought it was Stahl.”
“I thought it was a possibility,” he hedged. “But it didn’t seem likely. The way you described the cave, you had trouble getting into it. Stahl was a big guy. He could have shoved the body in there, but he’d have trouble accessing it later. He’d want someplace he could get into and out of easily.”
“Then why go along with the whole theory? Why even tell me about the quiet summer?”
“Because you wanted it to be true. I thought it would help you open up and talk to me. And then it let you accept my help. And like I said—I didn’t think it was impossible that it was true. I was hoping it would be. You’d have your answers.”