Stacking the spiral notebooks, he added her journal and placed her mother’s letter carefully on top.
“What do you want that for?” she asked.
He frowned as he got up. “I’m not sure. I’d like to take a closer look, if that’s okay.”
She felt strangely protective of that note. But she was paying him to ferret out the truth and needed to provide whatever he might need. “Sure. Are you ready for the police files, too?” she asked as she stood. She had to get to work, or the next issue of The Stillwater Independent would be nothing but a collection of articles pulled from the Associated Press. She generally used AP to fill in on the national news front, but she always included a good selection of local stories.
“Not yet. I was hoping you could take me out to the farm.”
She was planning have a shower. “Now?”
“Why not?”
She considered letting him march up to Clay’s front door on his own and immediately rejected the possibility. “Clay’s not really someone you want to approach too boldly,” she said.
“Why not?”
“He’s had to fight for everything he has, and he’s been the target of a lot of suspicion and doubt.”
“So what are you trying to say? He’s dangerous?”
“No! He’s just not very welcoming to strangers.”
“He won’t talk to me?”
She contemplated the work still to be done at the paper and concluded that the next issue would be very short. “I’m saying I’d better go along.”
While Madeline showered in the main house, Hunter sat at the desk in his little cottage and read her mother’s journals.
Another day. Lee working over at the church, counseling someone. I don’t know who. Me alone with my thoughts and my child. I look into Maddy’s eyes and pray that somehow I can give her a better life than I’ve known. This morning, it actually seems a possibility. I grasp at such hope. If only for the money, the chance.
I’m afraid to breathe for fear I’ll miss some cue. I have to get away. That’s the only answer. I’ve known it all along, ever since then. But how and when? Satan will follow me. He’ll come for me. I hear my name. He comes for me now.
This entry made Eliza sound almost normal. But some of the others. They were so cryptic—especially the poems and journal entries that had survived Eliza’s penchant for burning. It was almost as if she was talking in riddles.
What was missing in her life? What cues was she watching for? And that part about having to leave. Was she talking about leaving the world? If not for her subsequent suicide, Hunter would’ve interpreted that line as leaving her husband. In light of the note Madeline had found in the secret compartment of her jewelry box, he still wondered.
I’ve known it all along, ever since then…
Since when?
He turned a few more pages.
There’s a worm in my apple. More than one. Worms everywhere. Maggots. Eating the flesh, revealing the rotten core. I pray to awaken from the nightmare, but this nightmare is my life. Ironically, a life my friends envy.
On the same page, Eliza had taped a newspaper clipping of a young girl who’d lost her life in a hit-and-run accident. Madeline’s mother seemed particularly distraught by this tragedy. She knew the girl, which would’ve made it painful. But she wrote about her for the next two years. Almost as if there was a personal connection, and yet the girl’s name hadn’t appeared in her journals before.
Katie Swanson, who’d been fifteen years old. A runaway.
“I’ll do it for her,” Eliza wrote more than once. She’d do what? And was “her” Katie or Madeline? There were times Eliza seemed to get them mixed up.
Hunter read Katie’s obituary, which was taped onto the page following the article.
She’d been born in Stillwater and raised by her mother. There was no mention of any surviving siblings. The funeral had been held at the Purity Church of Christ—Madeline’s father’s church. Reverend Barker delivered the eulogy.
Sliding the second box toward him, Hunter began to flip through the reverend’s large collection of sermons. Lee Barker seemed to admire his own work enough to save every sheet and to file each sermon meticulously by date.
Hunter was hoping he’d find the preacher’s notes for Katie’s funeral. But the only reference to the girl was a brief passage in the sermon the next Sunday.
May God strike the man or woman who took our innocent Katie from us. She was a beautiful girl, so full of life and so ready to do God’s will. I don’t know what I will do without her angelic service to me and this church.
The preacher had known her, too. And he’d apparently liked her. Hunter allowed himself a sardonic smile. Angelic by Barker’s standards must’ve been good indeed.
The next week’s sermon was on tithes and offerings, but Hunter saw no mention of her. It was in Eliza’s journals that her name appeared again and again. Madeline’s mother couldn’t seem to get over the tragedy of the girl’s death. She also referred to another loss—the suicide of a sixteen-year-old girl.
Had I spoken, I could’ve saved her. I tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t see. They thought I was crazy. That’s what he tells everyone.
Was Barker the “he”? And how could Eliza have helped? Because she could identify with the girl’s mental anguish?
According to what Hunter could piece together—there was no obituary or article that he could find—Rose Lee Harper had overdosed on sleeping pills.
“Wait…” he muttered, skimming a different section in which he spotted the girl’s name. She’d been found naked on the floor of her bedroom.
Naked? That struck Hunter as odd. He didn’t know of one other suicide in which the person had first stripped down. Especially not someone only sixteen years old.
The way Eliza had written the word naked was unusual, too. She generally wrote with a pretty, flowing script, as neat as he imagined her house would be. But NAKED stood out because it was printed and traced again and again until it made such a deep impression in the paper he could’ve read the word from the other side of the page.
He ran his finger over the engraved letters.
How well had Eliza known this girl?
He searched through the other journals but, unlike Katie, he could find no previous mention of Rose Lee.
It was possible she’d been on the pages that were missing. There were quite a few.