“I was thinking about that,” Everett said. “If these were girls who caused trouble, they might have been in contact with the school district people, you know? Not just teachers and principals. Maybe that has something to do with this.”
“That’s right. Mary Elizabeth Sooner dropped out. That was in one of the articles you found. And then she disappeared less than a year later.”
“So he could have been hunting girls at school?” Everett grimaced at his own words as they finally reached the right unit. He crouched down at the lock to turn the digits to the correct code.
“Turn on your phone light,” he said, before rolling the garage-style door halfway up with a wince. This was always the worst part. The noise, echoing off concrete and metal siding. It was even more terror-inducing on the way out, when he couldn’t see who might be coming.
She ducked in and he followed, lowering the door again after them. “Sorry. I can’t leave it open or she might notice.”
“All these boxes!” she said. “Jeez, that’s a lot of stuff.” Everett pointed out the bulletin board, and she drifted toward it, pulling him along with her phone’s light. The scent of old newspapers and aging cardboard pressed in from the darkness.
The huge corkboard sat propped against file boxes on the cement floor. At first glance it was a muddle of photos and scraps and thumbtacks, but after examining it several times, Everett could see it had been an organized grid before extra notes had been piled on, obscuring the original lines.
“Wow,” she whispered. “This is spooky.”
It was spooky, but it felt less so today with his partner in crime.
“There’s Mary Elizabeth Sooner.” Josephine pointed to what looked like a school photograph of a white girl with big blond waves and a bow in her hair. “And Lynn Cotti.” This time she pointed to a photograph of a laughing teenage girl whose frizzy blond hair was in a high ponytail.
Everett leaned closer to look at the yellowed paper tacked next to her picture. It was the second page of the article he’d folded up and taken with him.
Though initial stories indicated she’d had an upcoming court appearance and might have left town to avoid legal problems, it has since been revealed that the court date was a minor issue involving a traffic ticket. Lynn Cotti has not been seen or heard from in the two years since. Her mother says it’s unlikely she would stay out of touch for so long. “She struggled a bit in high school, but she is a good girl. She came home every Sunday for dinner and games with her two little sisters. Gin rummy. Monopoly. Things like that. We always had lots of fun. She was arrested a few times, yes, but the stuff in the newspaper has been so wrong. My little girl has a family who loves her, and a room always waiting for her at home.”
Sadness sank into his skin. “It’s weird,” he said. “Those women were all young. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. It seems like there would have been a bigger deal made. Five women in four years? That’s a lot, especially in Herriman.”
“It seems like most of them were dropouts or druggies. Cops don’t care about women like that.”
“Even here? White girls?”
She shrugged. “When I started looking up information, there were a lot of articles about girls that disappeared in the ’80s and ’90s and no one cared. Some serial killer recently confessed to, like, a hundred murders, and no one ever bothered connecting them because of who the women were.”
Everett looked around, his skin crawling. “Seriously, are we in a serial killer’s lair?” He’d meant it as a joke, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, they both fell silent. He was holding his breath, and he thought Josephine might be too. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up until he couldn’t take it anymore and swung around to check the space behind them.
No one was there, though the flash of Josephine’s light off a mirror made him jump. “Whoever it is, he’s probably just an amateur detective.”
“Yeah,” Josephine agreed. “Or maybe a relative of one of the girls?”
“I guess we don’t even know that they’re dead. They’re only missing. Maybe they got the hell out of this town and never looked back.”
Josephine scowled, but she agreed it was possible. “But whoever made that chart didn’t think they were missing. Maybe because he knows they’re dead.”
“Still, he’s really old now. And the murders stopped a long time ago.”
“True.”