“You think she took them?” I asked.
That sigh again. “Maybe. Jerome can be very persuasive. He almost talked me into believing that phone call wasn’t important.”
My eyes flew to hers. “Which phone call?”
“The night Maureen disappeared, the phone rang around midnight. Our ring, I’m sure of it, but it stopped almost immediately. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Fell right back to sleep. It wasn’t one of you kids, was it?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. Claude or Brenda wouldn’t have called that late, and I sure didn’t.”
Her face drooped. “Jerome said I must have imagined the phone call. Damn him.”
I thought about all the reasons the sheriff would want to dismiss the possibility of a phone call. “Do you know Sheriff Nillson very well?”
Her eyes came at me like hawks. “Not as well as your father does.”
I rocked back on my heels. “They work together.”
She shook her head. “Before that. All you kids think your parents didn’t exist until you were born, but Jerome, your mom and dad, me, we all went to high school together.” Her expression grew distant. “I knew Jerome was going to be a police officer or a principal one day. Even back then, he got off on telling people what to do.”
She moved her body like she was coughing, but she didn’t make any noise. “Jerome and Gary didn’t get along much in high school. Your dad was a snob, I hate to say it.” The way she looked at me, her mouth tight, I could tell she didn’t mind saying it at all. “And Jerome was as working class as they come. But your dad came around to Jerome’s way of seeing the world, didn’t he? Nice and close to the ground, where the snakes are.” Her jaw worked, but no words came out for a few beats.
“Of course, you could say the same thing about most everyone in Pantown.” She laughed, a hollow sound, a winter wind through clawed branches. “That’s how I know someone out there knows what happened to Maureen. Nothing happens in Pantown that someone doesn’t know about. Tongues wagged when my husband left me, you better damn well believe it, but I suppose I deserved that. Maureen certainly never forgave me.”
I frowned. Maureen never talked about why her dad had left.
Mrs. Hansen slumped, like the air had suddenly gone out of her. She pointed in the direction of the stairs. “You said you were here to get your shirt from Maureen’s room. You might as well go on up.”
She took the tumbler, still full of water, from me. I was grateful she didn’t follow me to Maureen’s room, though it made my heart hurt to think of where she would go. There was so little space left. She was burying herself alive. Maureen’s room, as messy as it was, felt like the only place I could breathe in the whole house.
I started at Maureen’s drawers. I didn’t locate a diary, but I found the shirt that I’d let her borrow so long ago it wouldn’t fit either of us anymore. I tucked it in my back pocket so I could show it to Mrs. Hansen if I ran into her on the way out. Then I ran my hand behind her vanity mirror, scoured the corners of her closet, shuffled the sticky stash of lip gloss on her nightstand. Nothing. I flopped on her bed and stared outside. Claude’s house was directly across, his bedroom window matching up almost perfectly with Maureen’s. He’d had to tell her to pull her shades on more than one occasion.
The only place left to search was under her mattress, exactly where I kept my diary. I shoved my hand between her box spring and mattress. It seemed too cliché, too teen-girl-normal for someone like Maureen to not only keep a diary but to tuck it in her bed, but there it was, a hard angle that bit my fingers. I tugged it out. It was a college-ruled spiral-bound notebook, a slobbering, rabid-looking dog sketched on the front cover above the words “Open at Your Own Risk.”
I ran my hands over the image. I didn’t know Maureen could draw.
What else hadn’t I known about Maureen?
I opened to the first page. It contained two bleak sentences, scribbled so heavily that they scratched through to the next page.
If I disappear, I’ve been murdered. Don’t let him get away with it.
BETH
The men’s voices overhead grew louder, like they were coming closer.
Beth hadn’t thought much of him when he visited the diner. He was just a man she recognized from the background of her life. Sure, he’d sometimes wait for a table in her section rather than take an open one. Her skin had prickled, the way he always kept one eye on her even when he was talking to other people, when he thought she wouldn’t notice.