He gazed at the picture for several seconds longer before it clicked: the flowers, the makeup, the outfit. The prom, he’d thought, but it wasn’t.
It was her wedding day.
The last time Lizzie Ouellette had willingly let herself be photographed—or the last time that someone else cared enough to point a camera in her direction, and the more Bird scrolled back and forth through her feed, the more sure he was that it was the latter. Facebook profiles only told you so much about a person, but there was something incredibly lonely about this one. Some people didn’t post much online because they valued their privacy. But for Lizzie, it seemed more like she simply hadn’t bothered, because no one would care.
They cared now, of course. In the past few hours, Lizzie Ouellette’s timeline had come alive with comments. They read like macabre yearbook entries: I can’t believe it. RIP Lizzie. Lizzie we were never close but I know your having fun in heaven, stay sweet girl. Bird dutifully wrote down their names, but he was already certain none of them would be any help. These people didn’t know the girl, didn’t spend time with her. With one exception, a Jennifer Wellstood, they had never liked a single one of her photos or even wished her a happy birthday. Certainly, they would have no idea what she’d been up to in the last few days of her life, which was Bird’s job to piece together and proving near impossible. That moment at the house, just a few hours before—the barely suppressed snickering over that mole on the woman’s breast—had been the tip of a town-wide phenomenon. Somehow, everyone in Copper Falls knew about Lizzie Ouellette, but nobody kept company with her.
Even her own father wasn’t sure where she’d been that past weekend, what she’d been up to, why she would have ended up at the lake instead of the place she and Dwayne owned in town. Earl Ouellette had been Bird’s first interview, conducted in a corner of the police station, where the EMTs had left him just after dawn on account of the fire. Earl’s stubbled face and gnarled hands were smudged with grease and soot; as he talked, he kept scrubbing absentmindedly at one blackened knuckle with his thumb. Bird wondered if he might be in shock. By any reasonable measure, he should be. It was a hell of a thing for a man to bear, his livelihood and his family both gone in a single morning. Lizzie had been his only child. Earl Ouellette was now alone in the world. And yet . . .
“I don’t know what help I can be. We didn’t keep in contact much,” Earl said. He gazed straight ahead, his eyes bloodshot and glassy from the smoke, or grief, or both.
“Even with her living so close?” Bird asked.
Earl had shrugged. “Everything’s close here. The whole town ain’t but a mile end to end. Lizzie kept herself to herself. She always did, even when we was under the same roof.”
“At the junkyard?” Bird had passed by on his way here, just to see the charred remains of the single-wide that had been his victim’s childhood home. “That must have been hard. Close quarters. Even just for two.”
“She had her own room. I tried . . .” Earl paused so long that Bird thought that might be it, the whole sentence. I tried. But the older man coughed, retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket, spat a thick gob of brown mucus into it. “I tried to give her space,” he said.
Earl’s thumb passed back and forth over the soot stain. Working it.
“Have they figured out how the fire started?” Bird peered at him. Earl shrugged. “Haven’t heard. Could be anything.”
“You had insurance, I’m guessing.” He tried to keep his tone casual, but the man’s shoulders stiffened all the same.
“Ayuh.”
Bird didn’t press; the fire was a strange coincidence, but it wasn’t his to investigate. And anyway, Earl Ouellette had been dead asleep behind the wheel of his truck in the parking lot at Strangler’s for most of the previous night, as was apparently his weekly habit. Half a dozen people had seen him—or heard him snoring—which meant that Earl was officially off the hook for arson and murder alike. For several seconds, the men sat in silence. Bird was considering his next question when Earl Ouellette suddenly turned and stared directly at him. The old man’s eyes were an unsettling shade of blue, like an old pair of jeans bleached nearly colorless by years of wear.
“They asked where she went to the dentist,” Earl said.
“The dentist,” Bird repeated, then shook his head as the realization clicked. Shit. “Oh. To make an ID. They didn’t tell you . . . ?”