Murder Road (23 page)

For a second, the darkness was total, sucking us all down. Then a red light came on. Beatrice had pressed a button next to one of the tanks.

She and Gracie worked quickly. I didn’t watch; I focused on the door I was holding, even though there was nothing to see. The back of my neck was still cold. I strained my ears, listening.

Minutes ticked by. The sisters bickered under their breaths, trying to remember the correct sequence, hissing about canisters and fixing agents. I felt time narrow down to a fine point as I waited, knowing it was coming. And then I heard it.

There was a sound outside the classroom door, as if someone was standing there, waiting, shuffling as they lingered. I heard Gracie’s harsh intake of breath.

“If they come in here, they’ll know we’re in the darkroom,” she
whispered. “When the red light goes on, a sign lights up above the door that says
darkroom in use
.”

In the red light, we all looked bathed in blood. Whoever was outside already knew we were in here. She seemed to always know where we were, wherever we went. But the Snell sisters didn’t know her like we did.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Eddie said, his voice flat. “Just keep working as fast as you can.”

They did, and seconds later I heard a soft creak as the classroom door drifted open, as if by a gentle hand. My palm was slick on the doorknob, and I closed my eyes, listening to her steps outside the door—the touch, maybe, of a rubber sneaker sole against the polished floor. There was the scrape of a chair, or maybe a desk, moving. I pictured her long hair, her eyes. The way she’d screamed at us in the dark that night, grabbed Eddie and tried to drag him from the car.

“What do we do?” Beatrice sounded panicked. I had never heard her sound afraid before.

Eddie’s voice was calm, and in the darkness behind my eyes, I wondered what he looked like. “Keep going,” he said. “As fast as you can.”

She was outside now, only a foot away through the door. I was cold, so cold. I thought she might try the doorknob, but she didn’t. Instead, I felt the gentle brush of something against the door, a scraping sound. One of the girls made a soft whimper in the back of her throat.

“She won’t hurt us,” Eddie said softly. And even though my pulse pounded in my throat, I didn’t think she would, either. If she wanted to, she would have done it already. Could she enter one of
us and make them kill the others, like she had done so many times on Atticus Line? Perhaps she could. She could certainly force this door open, whether I held the doorknob or not. And yet she didn’t try.

The scraping continued, and then there was silence. A strange, sinister smell. Something popped, too loud. I wondered what she was doing out there.

The Snell girls were breathing hard as they worked, close to panic. “We have to dry the negatives,” Gracie whispered, her voice shaking. “There’s a—a dryer thing. There’s only four negatives. But the dryer makes noise.”

“Do it,” Eddie said.

I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t have to. I kept my hand on the knob and listened to her outside, doing something I couldn’t figure out. There was a tinkle of glass. Then the cold started to recede. “She’s leaving,” I whispered.

There was a repressed sob, which sounded like it came from Beatrice. I admired her restraint. It was hard not to scream when Shannon Haller was only a few feet away, dead and not dead at the same time.

The dryer whirred, painfully loud. When one of the girls clicked it off, we heard another footstep in the hall and the classroom door opened. “Is anyone in here?” a voice said.

It was a man’s voice. A real, live, actual man. Even though we were about to be caught, the sound of it was comfortingly sane. Still, we all froze, and I kept my grip on the doorknob.

There was a minute’s pause, and then the man’s voice came again. “If you’re in here, say so. You won’t be in trouble. I just want you to leave.”

I opened my eyes and turned to look at the others. Beatrice was frozen in place, and Gracie had a strip of negatives in her hand. The negatives wavered in the air as her hand shook.

Eddie was standing still, his brows furrowed in confusion. The man outside must be able to see the sign lit up above the darkroom door, but he didn’t come to the darkroom. Instead, we heard him come into the classroom and straighten the chairs, grumbling under his breath. He was the janitor, doing a daily sweep of the building. He had to be.

There were more footsteps, accompanied by more grumbling. Then the classroom door closed and the janitor was gone.

“Oh my God,” Gracie breathed. “I think I’m going to pass out.”

“What do we do next with those?” Eddie motioned to the negatives. His voice was tight and calm. Iraq calm.

“There were only four exposures on the roll,” Beatrice said. “We can print them if we’re fast.”

“Do it,” Eddie said.

So the girls took paper from a stack on the shelf. Eddie moved to stand next to me at the door, so close I could feel his breath against my neck as liquids sloshed. It seemed like a long time before Beatrice said, “Okay, we’re done.”

She clicked the red light off, and I opened the darkroom door so we could all exit. I didn’t want to look at the photographs in there; I didn’t want to be in there for even one more second. I felt like I was suffocating.

“We need to get out of here,” Eddie said in his perfectly calm voice. “The janitor is still in the building somewhere, and he’ll probably be back.”

He moved to the door, but Gracie said, “The light.”

I turned to see her staring at the light above the darkroom door, the one that said
darkroom in use
. It looked slightly crooked.

“Bea, turn on the light,” Gracie said. Her sister walked back into the darkroom, and we heard the click of the switch. Nothing happened. The light didn’t come on.

I walked to the darkroom door, reached up, and touched the light. It tilted against my fingertip, and then it fell to the floor. The glass from the broken bulb scattered at our feet. Behind the disconnected light, the wall was burned and black, the outlet incinerated. There was a plastic-smoke smell in the air.

“Shannon,” I said. That’s what she had been doing outside the door. Of course she hadn’t tried the doorknob—she didn’t want to interrupt us. She didn’t want the janitor to interrupt us, either. Whatever was in those photos, she wanted them developed. She wanted us to see.

Beatrice made a strangled noise and grabbed her big sister’s hand. She had always been so bold and confident, but right now she looked young. She looked like a scared sixteen-year-old who had just seen something she didn’t understand. She stared up at the scorch marks on the wall, her eyes wet with unshed tears.

I took her other hand. It was cold, not with the presence of Shannon Haller, but with fear. I squeezed it, telling her I understood.

The four of us left the room in silence.

Twenty minutes later, Beatrice drove her car into an empty parking lot outside a closed Kmart. She pulled the prints from under her shirt, where she had hastily stuffed them as we made our escape from Coldlake Falls High School.

“So? Are we going to talk about that?” she asked, turning in her seat to look at the rest of us.

She had regained some of her composure, but she was still shaken. In the passenger seat, Gracie was pale and silent.

Oddly, I felt calmer than I had since I watched Eddie climb through John Haller’s window. The pulse in my throat had slowed, the sweat drying against my shirt. “I told you what happened,” I said. “You said you believed me.”

“Are you kidding me?” Beatrice’s voice was high-pitched with leftover adrenaline. “We did, but that was before—oh my God.”

“I think I might throw up,” Gracie said.

“I want to look at the photographs.” Eddie’s voice was calm. “We need to do that before we talk about anything else. Turn on the light.”

Dusk had fallen, and it was shadowy inside the car. Beatrice reached up and turned on the interior light, throwing us all into a glare.

There were four photos, so she passed them around, one to each of us. We all looked at our photographs, the ones that Eddie and I had broken the law for, the ones that we’d risked everything for.

“Mine’s unreadable,” Gracie said. She flipped her photo so we could see that it was a blur. “She must have moved when she pressed the shutter.”

“Mine’s Shannon with a girl I don’t recognize.” Beatrice flipped her photo, too. In it, Shannon Haller had her arm around another girl’s shoulders, big smiles on both of their faces. It was a lot like the photo I’d seen at her father’s house, though the woman was different. An everyday photo of a young woman hanging out with a girlfriend, taking a picture because they were having a good time.

I looked at my own photo, my hands cold. I couldn’t speak.

Eddie was silent, too, staring at the print in his hands.

“Well?” Beatrice’s voice was sharp with excitement. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

I was frozen, but Eddie slowly turned his photo around. It was of Shannon, by herself, standing on a set of concrete steps. She looked serious, solemn, her slim body held tensely. She was wearing jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, a backpack on her back.

“That’s my mother,” Eddie said, his voice low and raw. “I remember her face. That’s her.”

“Eddie,” I said softly, and he looked at me.

Had he always known? Had I? Shannon was a little too thin in the photo, her cheeks hollow, her eyes too large. But I saw the shape of Eddie’s nose, the angle of his eyebrows in that picture. I saw the tentative expression on her face, the quiet way she held herself. In death, Shannon was terrifying. But in life, she resembled her son. She was a woman who’d had hard luck and struggles, one who had made decisions both good and bad and paid for them. A young woman who just wanted a better life and wasn’t sure of how to get there. Lost, just like the rest of us.

“She brought you here,” I said to Eddie. “That’s why we can’t remember exiting the interstate.”

His voice was close to a whisper. “I’m so sorry, April.”

“She was looking at you,” I went on. “That first time, when she was in the back of the truck. And outside Max Shandler’s barn. I thought she was staring at us, but she wasn’t. She was staring at you. Only you.”

“What are you talking about?” Beatrice nearly shrieked.

“Bea, be quiet,” her sister said.

“She grabbed you from the car,” I said. It was falling into place now. “She reached across me and grabbed you, because it was you she wanted. It was so weird that no one had ever seen her like that, remember? The storm, and the light, and the way she banged on the car. It seemed so strange that no one else had ever seen that, but now we know why. Because she wanted you. When I was alone, she tried to kill me—but not when I was with you. She never wanted to kill you.”

“I’m so sorry,” Eddie said again. “You didn’t ask for this, but you got dragged in anyway. It’s my fault.”

I took the photo from my back pocket and handed it to him—the picture of Shannon and the little boy who was Eddie. He took it and looked at it for a long moment.

“I always thought I didn’t remember her,” he said, the words coming slowly. “I thought I didn’t know her face. But now I think it was because I was trying not to remember. I was trying not to recall her face—I’ve been doing it for years. I remember staying with neighbors, wondering when she would come home. Wondering if she would ever come home.” He put a hand to his forehead and rubbed slowly, closing his eyes. “There’s so much I don’t remember. The day they took me away—I don’t remember that. I worried about her so much, wondered if she was all right. I wondered if she had been hurt or was in the hospital. If she would ever come back for me. Then she didn’t, and I think I tried to forget everything.”

“I think she would have come back for you,” I said. “If she had lived. She wasn’t perfect, but she was trying. Carla said she was sober before she disappeared. She just didn’t get the chance.”

We were all quiet for a moment. Beatrice seemed to have calmed down, and she was biting her lip, her expression solemn. She and Gracie may not know all the details of Eddie’s story, but they could guess enough.

“She’s really pretty,” Gracie said.

Eddie looked at the photo of his mother holding him as a boy again, and then he raised his gaze to me. “April? Your photo.”

The picture in my hand felt like ice. I had the urge to tear it up, throw it out the window, as if that could keep everything the way it was in just this moment.

But we’d come all this way—so, so far from the road we’d thought we’d travel—and there was no other way to go but forward.

“There’s more,” I said.

Eddie nodded, as if he expected it.

“Take another look at that photo.” I pointed to the picture of Shannon standing on the steps. “She’s wearing a backpack.” I held up my photo. “And then there’s this.”

Shannon was smiling in this picture, too. She was standing with a man and a woman I didn’t recognize, her brown hair lifted by a breeze. Despite the smile, her eyes were shadowed and unhappy. But that wasn’t what mattered.

In the background of the photo was a familiar house, one that Eddie and I had visited a few days ago.

“Hey,” Beatrice said as she recognized it. “That’s Hunter Beach.”

Eddie’s expression went carefully blank as he recognized the cabin on Hunter Beach, the one the backpackers had been using since the seventies and were still using today. His mother was standing in front of it, posing with her friends.

She had been there in 1976, right in the spot we’d stood to talk to the kids around the fire.

I saw his face change when he saw it. Behind Shannon and her friends, a backpack was lying in the sand. A pair of sandals was tucked beneath it, a sweatshirt folded on top of it. Lying on top of the sweatshirt was a letter jacket from Midland High.

The photo had been taken after Shannon left home to find herself. She would have been carrying the camera, with the film in it, when she died.

“Her father had this photo in his house?” Beatrice asked, breathless. “Her
father
?”

“Oh my God,” Gracie said. “She’s the Lost Girl. The Lost Girl really is real.”

“Her father had her camera,” I said. “He was there when she died.”