Murder Road (16 page)

Eddie was still in Iraq when he started seeing things that weren’t there. Someone standing just outside the shower door. A figure in the sunbaked distance, waving at him. One night he woke up with the cold metal of a gun pressed to his temple, the safety being clicked off. But there was no one there.

He talked to an army doctor about it. I didn’t know anything about the inner machinations of the military, but somehow Eddie was discharged with a vague medical condition on his record and a prescription that eventually ran out. He didn’t have enough money for expensive psychiatrists or treatments, and he was too ashamed to ask for more help from the army, so he went home to live with his parents and got a job fixing cars. He was physically fine, so the army was done with him. Case closed.

He didn’t feel the gun pressed to his head anymore, but he heard dogs barking where there were none, and he had dreams in
which he woke up to find his limbs gone. The shame of feeling like he was crazy stopped him from talking to any more doctors, because it was supposed to be over.

He told me about his “head problem,” as he called it, early on. It wasn’t something that happened all the time—just now and then. “I’m fine until I’m not,” was how he explained it. “And then I’m fine again.”

“Why do you think it happens?” I asked him.

“According to the army doctor, my brain thinks someone is trying to kill me,” Eddie replied. “Because for a long time, someone
was
trying to kill me.”

I didn’t know what it was like to be in the army, to be deployed. I didn’t know anything about what happened in Iraq aside from what Eddie told me. I didn’t know what it was like to wake up with the feel of a phantom gun pressed to my head.

But I
did
know what it was like to have someone try to kill you. My father had done it plenty of times.

So I told Eddie the things I’d never told anyone else. I told him about my father knocking my mother’s teeth loose, about him pulling his belt from its loops and hitting her with it as she crouched in the corner. I told him about how if I made a sound—or even if I didn’t—my father would come for me when he was finished with my mother.

I told him about the night we’d left, about my mother pulling me from bed and putting me in the car, about how we drove and drove through the smoky night and I begged her to go faster. I knew, just as she did, that we had exactly one chance to get out of there. That our lives depended on how fast she could drive.

I told him about how we changed our names, our identities, so
that we couldn’t be found. How we had gotten by for a while, just the two of us. Then my mother was gone, and there was just me.

Eddie had listened, and then he had said, “So your name isn’t really April Delray?”

“It is,” I told him. “But that wasn’t the name I was born with. That girl is dead.”

Eddie hadn’t questioned that, and when he spoke, his voice was flat. “I understand.”

He knew what it felt like to leave your past self dead and buried, to leave the body of the person you had once been by the side of the road and drive away.

Eddie had left behind his childhood self. His birth mother had had him young, and had rarely been home, usually leaving him with neighbors. (“There was something wrong with her,” Eddie said. “No one would ever tell me what.”) When he was six, she abandoned him completely. He went into the system, and his parents adopted him.

He vaguely remembered his birth mother through the haze of fear and rejection, the stress-induced fog of waiting for her to come home, then going to live with strangers. He didn’t even have a photo of her. The little boy he had been had disappeared.

And then he’d left his old self behind once again when he was deployed overseas.

I hadn’t planned to keep running forever. For a long time, I didn’t plan anything at all. People with normal lives didn’t understand how you could live from day to day, from meal to meal, without ever thinking about what was ahead. People like me didn’t think about career trajectories, property values, or retirement plans. I didn’t even think about children, except to feel
choking panic at the idea of getting pregnant by mistake. It was part of the reason I only dated forgettable men who didn’t want anything from me and were easy to repel.

I would have killed April Delray, too, if I had to. If it was the only way forward, I would have left April by the side of the road, alongside the identities I’d used in the past. But after I met Eddie, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be her, this girl who was with a man she had just met and yet somehow knew so well.

When I met Eddie Carter, I saw someone who was so different from me, yet whose darkness mirrored my own.

Reader, I married him. Because it should be me or no one.

By the time we got on the road to Midland early the next morning, Eddie was feeling better. He cracked a joke as we took one of the roads out of town that wasn’t Atticus Line, heading for the interstate by the main roads instead of Atticus Line’s deserted emptiness. “If we actually get there, should we just make a run for it?”

I rolled down my window and shouted into the wind. “We’re just going to check out Midland, Lost Girl! See if there’s anything there! We’ll be back before dark, I promise!”

Eddie shook his head as I rolled my window back up. “We’ve got a three-hour drive,” he said. “Find some good music, would you?”

I turned on the radio. When I didn’t hear static like I had that first night, I relaxed a little. We found a country station, then switched to classic rock, changing stations as we moved out of range of one and into that of another. We talked about music as we
watched the countryside go by, green and monotonous. We listened to radio ads for businesses we didn’t know, located on strange streets we would never go to. We snacked on bologna sandwiches and Yoplait kept in a small disposable cooler Rose had dug out from under her kitchen sink, explaining that Robbie used to carry it to keep his lunch cool at work.

Despite everything—our ripped-up back seat and our hijacked honeymoon—I felt strangely buoyant for the first time, like I was bobbing on the surface of a lake. Eddie and I compared how many states we’d been to. He told me about going to the local water park when he was a kid, scraping his knees on the concrete on the side of the pool because there were no ladders to get out and how he still remembered the feeling of the chlorine stinging his skin. I told him about my first kiss at fourteen, when I realized too late that the boy hadn’t spit out the gum in his mouth. My reenactment of my reaction made him laugh hard, his eyes squinting closed and his hands going tight on the wheel.

We didn’t see any ghosts on the road. Maybe we should have kept going, all the way home to Ann Arbor. But neither of us suggested it.

Midland was mostly suburb. We passed a Denny’s, a movie theater, and a cream-brick mall with a gold-and-glass centerpiece and an arched entryway announcing
midland mall
. The neighborhood surrounding the mall was only half-built, new houses and spindly trees rising out of weedy heaps of construction dirt. Past that was an older neighborhood of bungalows with increasingly unkept lawns, and past that were streets lined with trailers.

Eventually, we found a few streets that were what passed for a downtown. There was a run-down pub, a used-record store, a
tiny bookstore. The mall had sucked the life out of this area, draining it steadily, and there were few people here at this time of day. Eddie parked in a streetside spot and we got out to feed the parking meter.

We’d agreed that the police station was the best place to start. It was a long shot, but if we were charming enough, we might find a local cop who was willing to talk about missing person’s reports from the seventies. We’d also passed the high school on the way to downtown—if the police wouldn’t help us, we’d try the high school principal. The Lost Girl had possibly been wearing a Midland High jacket. Maybe, at the high school, someone knew of a student who had disappeared.

But as we stood on the downtown street, looking up and down, both of us were distracted by different things.

“There’s a library,” Eddie said. His gaze was on a surprisingly pretty brick building with a green lawn and garden and a sign that said
midland library
above the doors.

I was staring in the other direction, at the bank on the corner. It was a branch of the same bank we used in Ann Arbor. I turned and followed Eddie’s gaze. “You want to go to the library?”

Eddie was squinting behind his sunglasses, frowning. The heat wasn’t so bad today, and a warm breeze moved over us. “Librarians know everything,” he mused. “Let’s try there first.”

“Libraries are boring.”

He shrugged. He had a lot more patience than I did. “What do you suggest?”

I pointed to the bank. “We need money, right? I’ll go do a withdrawal.”

My voice was steady. Casual. And Eddie was already
distracted. “Good idea,” he said. “We need to get through the next few days. You go, and I’ll try the library.”

I nodded, my throat suddenly so thick I didn’t trust myself to speak. We split up, and I gave myself only a few seconds to watch him walk toward the library with his long, easy stride. Then I turned and walked to the bank.

Pushing my sunglasses to the top of my head, I filled out a withdrawal form and waited in line for the teller. I kept the withdrawal amount small—two hundred dollars, even though the account I was withdrawing from had a lot more in it than that. Eddie thought I was withdrawing from the account my paycheck went into, and I didn’t want him to get suspicious.

The teller took my slip and walked into a back room, then came out again as the printer buzzed. “I’m sorry, I can’t fill this,” she said, handing the form back to me. “The account doesn’t have any funds in it.”

I stared at her in shock. “Pardon?”

She shrugged. “There are no funds.” The printer finished and she tore off a sheet, handing it to me. “Looks like there was a withdrawal a week ago.”

I stared blindly at the printout of account activity. A week ago, there had been seven thousand dollars in the account. Then, a withdrawal of all of it. And now there was nothing.

My heart raced and I felt my pulse in my neck. The money was gone. My secret money. The money I had been relying on to keep me afloat, just in case.

“Did you not do this withdrawal?” the teller asked, mildly curious at my obvious panic.

I shook my head. My voice was a croak. “No.”

“Oh. Well. It says here it’s a joint account, so maybe it was—”

“I know who it was.” I shoved the paper back at her. “It’s fine. I’ll do a withdrawal from a different account.” I’d have to use the account my paycheck went into after all.

“You’ll need to do a new slip.”

Twenty minutes later I exited the bank and stood on the street, my mind racing.
Think, April, think. You’ve dealt with surprises before.
For a moment the old panic rushed over me, mixed with hurt and a searing, cleansing blast of anger. That money had been promised to me. It was supposed to be mine.
Mine.

I gathered myself and walked slowly toward the library. I waited out front for a while, sitting on the stoop next to the garden. From here I could see the front door of the Midland police station, a squat concrete building with glass doors. Nothing was happening there; it was quieter than the library was. Maybe I should try the police station alone. Some men responded positively to requests from women who looked like me, especially if I could convince him I was helpless.

I was about to try it when the library doors opened and Eddie came out. He had a piece of paper in his hands. When he saw me, he grinned, raising the paper so it could flap in the breeze.

“I told you,” he said. “Librarians know everything.”

What he’d found was a classified ad in the back of the local Midland newspaper in November 1977.
SHANNON HALLER, PLEASE COME HOME
, it read.
I last saw her in Midland in March 1976. Twenty-six years old, long brown hair. If you are Shannon, please call, I am worried. If you know Shannon please call Carla.
Then a phone number.

I stared at the photocopy Eddie had taken. “How did you find this so fast?” I asked. I pictured him wading through a pile of old newspapers.

“Luck,” Eddie replied. “I took a shot that someone might have looked for her. Also, the Midland paper was only published once per week back then. And the classified section was less than a page long.”

Maybe this wasn’t the Lost Girl. Maybe this was a completely different girl who had disappeared from Midland in 1976, a month before the Lost Girl’s body was found. Maybe Shannon Haller had
simply left town, gotten married, and started a new life without telling her friend Carla. But it was something.

We walked to the phone booth on the corner, and Eddie dialed the number from the classified ad. “It’s ringing,” he whispered to me, the phone to his ear. “We’re lucky today.”

“Grow a mustache and you could be Magnum, P.I.,” I said.

He waggled his eyebrows at me, then schooled his features as someone on the other end picked up the phone.

The woman who answered wasn’t Carla, but her daughter. The phone number was still Carla’s—Midland was that kind of town—but Carla wasn’t home. She was at her job as hostess at the Wharf, a seafood restaurant. The daughter was very helpful and had no problem giving her mother’s information to the polite man who had called out of the blue. Carla’s last name was Moyer, she had three teenagers, and she had worked at the Wharf for nearly ten years. Lunch hour was usually pretty busy, but since it was a weekday, it would be quieter and we might luck out if we wanted to talk to her.

“Did you get some money?” Eddie asked after he hung up.

My throat tried to close again, thinking of what had happened at the bank. “Yes,” I said.

Eddie smiled at me. He was in his element, I realized. He was having fun.

“Let’s go have lunch,” he said. “I’m in the mood for seafood.”

Shannon is dead,” the woman across the table from us said. “She’s been dead since 1976. I didn’t let myself believe it at first, but now I do. In the back of my mind, I think I’ve always known she was dead.”

The Wharf had high ceilings, dim lighting, and deep booths. Fishing nets and paintings of boats decorated the walls, but to see them you had to squint. Weekday lunch hour meant there were a few tables of retirees spaced through the large dining room. It was a relatively new restaurant, built just outside the orbit of the mall.

Carla Moyer was somewhere in her forties. Her dark hair was cut to her shoulders and worked over with a curling iron, her bangs carefully pieced out and sprayed. She wore black dress pants and a black satin blouse with shoulder pads. Rimless glasses were tucked in the breast pocket of her blouse. When we told her we had found her ad from 1977 and wanted to talk about Shannon, she had immediately taken a break and joined us in a booth as we ordered lunch.

“Why do you think she’s dead?” I asked her.

Carla looked past us into the distance, recalling. “We met in rehab. Actually, it was called a ‘dry-out camp,’ if you can believe that. You signed up and went to summer camp for a week, cabins and all. No booze and no drugs. You went cold turkey while you played Frisbee and took canoe rides with your fellow campers. And when you got home, you were supposed to be cured. That was the kind of rehab you could get in Michigan in the early seventies.”

The waitress put two plates of shrimp and rice in front of us. “I’m guessing it didn’t work,” I said to Carla.

“God, no,” she replied. “It was doomed to failure, starting with the fact that half of us snuck alcohol to camp. Shannon was my cabin roommate. We’d do the stupid Frisbee games, then drink vodka after lights out.” She gave us a smile that didn’t have much humor in it. “Vodka has no smell, so no one knows you’re drinking
it. We were just young and stupid enough to think that nobody noticed. In fact, nobody cared.”

I pictured two girls in a cabin in the early seventies, sunburned and half-drunk. “Except for the dry-out part, it sounds fun,” I said.

“Oh, it was,” Carla agreed. “The funny thing is, we’d both signed up with good intentions. I’d been arrested for a DUI, and Shannon had a baby she wanted to dry out for. But once we got to dry-out camp, we forgot about all of that.” She sighed. “You said you think she might have ended up north somewhere? Why are you looking into this?”

I gave her one of my best smiles. “We’re on our honeymoon,” I said. “It turns out the town we’re staying in has an unsolved mystery of a murdered girl from 1976. We thought we’d try our hand at solving it.”

Carla’s eyes, lined with black eyeliner, looked from me to Eddie and back again. “That’s a strange honeymoon,” she said, her voice flat. She’d been excited at first that someone was interested in hearing about her friend. Now she was thinking twice.

“It’s kind of a hobby,” Eddie said. “We heard the locals talk about the mystery. There’s even a legend that the girl’s ghost haunts the road where she was found. We got caught up in it and thought we’d try to solve it. I guess we got tired of playing Scrabble.”

When you’re lying, use as much of the truth as possible. When he had to, Eddie was as good at it as me.

“A ghost?” Carla straightened a napkin on the table. “Jesus. In all this time, I never thought about Shannon’s ghost being somewhere, wandering around. That’s gonna keep me up at night.”

“The girl in Coldlake Falls was found with a letter jacket from Midland High,” I said.

“Sure, Shannon had one of those.” Carla adjusted the napkin again, unaware that she had just made Eddie and me sit up straight in our seats. “She dropped out of high school in grade ten, but she got the jacket from some boyfriend or other. Wore it one day and never gave it back. I loved Shannon, but you had to watch your things around her, especially nice things. She had a habit of taking them.” She finally stopped fidgeting with the napkin and put her hand to her cheek as a wave of emotion came over her carefully made-up face. “My God, it’s been so long since I talked about Shannon. Since I thought about these memories. Sometimes I feel like she wasn’t real. She was gone one day, and it was like she was erased. No one even cared.”

“Why not?” Eddie’s voice was gentle. “Did she have family?”

“Her mother was dead,” Carla said. “She stayed with her father sometimes, but they fought. He got mad when she got pregnant with no boyfriend in the picture. She’d met a guy at the movies one day, and a couple hours later, she was pregnant. She said she did it because he seemed nice.” She sighed again. “She never saw the boy again, didn’t even have his last name. Her father said she should have an abortion. Shannon said no.” Carla shook her head. “She had a hard time when the baby came. She tried to stay sober, but nothing ever took. She was doing drugs, too. I mean, there was no question that she was kind of crazy. But I liked her because I was crazy, too.”

“Crazy how?” I asked.

Carla raised her eyes to mine, ready to be defensive. Whatever
she saw there made her change her mind. I didn’t judge crazy. I never would. I knew it too well.

Carla shrugged, closing off the question. “She didn’t talk much about it, but I knew she’d had episodes. She’d been given medication, but she hated it and stopped taking it. She’d tried to kill herself twice before we met.” She pressed her lips together briefly. “I’m not going to go into my life, but let’s just say we understood each other. And I’ve been much better since Prozac came along.”

“What happened to her?” Eddie asked.

Carla shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“We want your version.”

There was a pause. Carla pressed her hand briefly to her cheek again, then dropped it. “We kept in touch after dry-out camp. She was the person I called whenever I felt like the rest of the world didn’t understand me, would never understand me. When I thought it was all too hard. I was that person for her, too. She was trying to take care of her baby, but she was having a rough time. He got taken and put into foster care, and she wanted to get him back. When she was in her right mind, she knew she needed help.” She looked into the distance again, her face hard. “She got clean. She told me she’d been clean for nearly three months, and I believed her. She was going to take some courses, get a job, turn her life around. Things were going to change, she said. She was determined.”

We waited. “And then?” Eddie asked.

“And then she stopped calling. When I called, her phone was disconnected. I thought maybe she hadn’t paid the bill, so I went to see her. And I found out she was gone.”

“Gone,” I said.

Carla nodded. “She’d left, saying she was going on a trip to find herself. She was going to have one trip to see the country, to live life. Then she was going to come home and get her kid back. The phone bill and the rent on her apartment were due, so the landlord had moved in and the phone had already been shut down. And that was the end of Shannon, forever. I never heard from her again.” She turned her head and looked at us, her jaw twitching. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that Shannon just took off and never came back. You’re thinking she was irresponsible, an addict, and a bad mother.” She leaned forward, eyes blazing. “I know she was sober, that she was planning to come home. No one has ever believed me, but I know. She was planning to start a real life, a happy life, one that included her son. You think she left her kid for
twenty years
and never came back to find him? She didn’t. Because she’s dead.”

I thought of that unidentified body in a ditch at the side of the road, all those years ago. A body with a Midland High jacket. If you wanted to lose the real world and find yourself, Hunter Beach was a place to go.

Was it possible that the Lost Girl was Shannon Haller? The dates matched and the jacket matched. But hundreds of people had a Midland High jacket. And the police weren’t even certain that the jacket had belonged to the unidentified girl.

Maybe we were chasing shadows.

“Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to kill Shannon?” I asked.

That got us a bitter smile from Carla. “What do you want me to say? Let me guess. ‘No one would ever have wanted to hurt Shannon! She was so beautiful, so kind! She rescued baby animals!’ ”
She shook her head. “Here’s the truth, honey. Before she got sober, Shannon was a liar, a thief, and an addict. She neglected her baby and she liked to get wasted. She didn’t work often, and when she did, she blew the money. She was sick in the head, like I was. Anyone could have killed her—a drug dealer, an ex-boyfriend, someone she stole from. She was the kind of person the world just throws away.”

“But you cared about her,” I said.

She put her hands on the table, as if she was about to push out of the booth and leave. “Yes, I did. I still do. You know why? Because we were the same, Shannon and me. I’m the kind of person the world throws away, too. The only difference is that I managed to live longer. I managed to get sober and raise kids and get a prescription for Prozac. Shannon got to die, and I got to work in this restaurant until they tell me I’m too old to hostess anymore. Shannon lost her gamble, and I won mine. Look around you. This, for me, is what’s considered winning.” She slid to the edge of the seat, then paused. “I hope you find the bastard that killed her. She deserved a shot, like me.”