The Girl I Used to Be (11 page)

He must see my hesitation. “I never forgot you. Is it so wrong for me to want to help an old friend?”

“Okay, you want to help?” I turn the ignition. “Then let's get started.”

 

CHAPTER 22

MORE VICTIMS

“So
do
you remember anything about that day?” Duncan asks as I drive us back to my house.

“If you had asked me last week, I would have said I didn't remember anything.” I sigh. “Not about what happened that day or anything before it. I didn't even really remember my parents. But ever since I came back to Medford, I've been having these little flashes.”

“Of what?” Duncan looks half-curious, half-horrified.

“Once it was of being in a snowy forest. I think that must have been when we had just started looking for the Christmas tree. And I can remember my mom reading to me. I even remembered where she hid a box of keepsakes.” Did I do the same thing, tuck away my memories, even from myself? “And after the memorial, I dreamed about seeing a bloody knife lying on the floor of a car.” My scalp prickles just thinking about it.

“Oh my God.” Duncan turns in his seat to me, his gray eyes wide. He echoes my thoughts. “Maybe everything that happened that day is still all there, inside your head.”

“If it is, I wish I could figure out how to get it out. I don't want to just wait around for a dream or some random phrase to make me remember. I want to know now.”

Duncan doesn't respond, just takes his phone out of his pocket. He starts tapping on it. The car is quiet for the remaining few minutes it takes me to drive home. What am I doing, spilling my deepest secrets to a stranger who isn't really even paying attention?

“Hypnosis,” he says as I pull into my driveway.

“What?” I turn off the car.

“Maybe hypnosis could help.” He hands over his phone.

He's pulled up an old news story from 1976. In Chowchilla, California, twenty-six children and their bus driver were kidnapped and locked in a moving van that had been buried in a gravel quarry. After they managed to escape, a hypnotist put the bus driver under, and he remembered the license plate number of one kidnapper's car.

But when I think of hypnotists, I think of country fairs or weight-loss ads. Not crime solving. I hand his phone back. “But that was a fresh memory. Mine's nearly fourteen years old. And I was only three when it happened.”

Duncan looks hurt. “It might be worth a try.”

When we go inside, I point at the couch. “Wait here. I'm going to get something.” I walk down the hall and come back with my mom's cigar box. I hand it to him.

“What is this?” he asks before he opens it.

“It belonged to my mom. It's got all her keepsakes. She used to hide it under the floorboards of her closet.”

His eyebrows go up. “You mean—here? In this house?”

“Yeah. It's been here all along. I think I was the only one who knew about it, besides my mom. My grandma didn't know.”

When he flips back the lid, right on top is the Halloween photo, the one I took from the bulletin board at the service. I had put it in the box along with my dad's program, never thinking anyone else would look at these things.

He picks it up. “Hey, I remember seeing this picture at the memorial. You have a copy, too, huh?”

“Um, I took it.”

He jerks his head back. “What?”

“I don't have any photos of just my dad or even of my family. I think my grandma threw away any photo with my dad in it after my mom's body was found. And she never talked about him.”

His eyebrows pull together. “But—that was someone's photo.”

Guilt pinches me. I ignore it. “Yeah, it was. But whoever put it up probably has lots of photos of my dad. I've got nothing.”

Duncan doesn't say anything more, though the way he twists his mouth, he doesn't have to.

I set the photo and the program aside and show him the begging note. “Have you ever seen that handwriting before?”

He purses his lips. “I don't think so.”

“I don't think it's Jason's, unless it really changed.” I unearth the old valentine and watch Duncan smile as he reads the childish insults. “But I do wonder about Jason. Look at this invitation to his wedding to Heather.” I pull it out. “Why would my mom crumple it up unless she still had feelings for him?”

“Wait.” He holds up a hand. “So you're thinking
Jason
might have killed your parents?”

“The cops told me that the first person they would have looked at would have been a lover. And I'm pretty sure there was something between them at some point.”

“Look, you're talking about Jason. That guy's just a blowhard. Not a killer.”

“Then what about Sam? It's clear she was in love with my dad. You saw how she cried over him at the funeral. Maybe those were really tears of guilt.”

“Sam?” Duncan makes a face. “She's as thin as a straw. I mean, she seems pretty tightly wound, but I can't see her hurting someone.”

“In Portland, the detective told me it could have been a woman, if she was motivated by some strong emotion, like hatred or even panic.”

Duncan shakes his head. “Hey, look, I've known Jason and Sam since I was a kid. And they're not killers. Do you really think one of them snapped fourteen years ago and then just went back to being normal?”

Why did I ever say yes to him? He may be cute, but he's so nice that he can't believe other people could be not so nice. “Then what do
you
think happened?”

“I think your mom and dad must have crossed paths with a serial killer. Some crazy guy in the woods.”

“Serial killer implies a
series
of murders. If it was a serial killer, then why weren't there more victims?”

“Maybe there were.” Duncan picks up his backpack. “Last night I was trying to figure out what happened. It turns out there are websites that keep track of unsolved murders. You can sort them by year or geographic area. So look at this.” He hands me a printout showing a girl with long dark hair parted down the middle. “This is Angie Paginini. She lived in Grants Pass.” Grants Pass is about a half hour away. “A year after your parents died, she left her high school play rehearsal, but she never made it home. Two days later, her body was found in a park—a
wooded
park. She had been stabbed to death. She even looks like your mom.”

I regard the photo critically. Maybe. Or maybe they only look alike because they're both girls from the same time period with the same hair color. All I say is, “But it wasn't just my mom who died. It was both my parents.”

“That's happened before, too.” He slips another piece of paper into my hands. “Six months before your parents died, another couple in their twenties was killed in Northern California. Shot to death in their sleeping bags. Right on the beach. No sexual assault, no robbery, no known motive, and no suspects. Just like your parents.”

Medford's only thirty minutes from the California border. But it's a much longer drive to the coast. And—“That was a gun, though. Not a knife.”

“Nobody knows how your dad was killed,” Duncan points out. “And I was reading that serial killers will sometimes just use whatever's available.”

“It's hard to believe that my parents were killed by some random stranger. I mean, why would a serial killer murder them and then let me live? But if it was someone my family knew, they might have felt a connection to me.”

“Serial killers don't murder every single person they come across.” Duncan's eyes look stormy. “They pick their targets. Maybe your parents fit and you didn't.”

Or maybe Duncan just doesn't want to believe it could be someone he knows.

I think of foster homes where I lived in fear but smiled for the caseworker. Or where the house was a pigsty unless a visit was scheduled. If I've learned anything in the past ten years, it's that a lot of people have one face in public and another in private.

 

CHAPTER 23

BEST FRIENDS

I bounce from foot to foot as I wait for Duncan in the Medford Public Library reference room. Our plan was to start by researching what happened back then, but now I've got something even more interesting to tell him.

“You're not the only one who can Google,” I say in a low voice as soon as he walks in.

“What do you mean?” He looks wary. He's keeping his voice quiet, too, even though we're the only ones in the room.

We're standing so close together that I can feel the heat of his body, but I don't let myself think about that. Instead, I say, “Did you know there's one job that the FBI thinks is so linked to serial killers that they've created a whole task force for it?” Still buzzing with what I read online last night, I don't wait for him to answer. “Long-haul truckers.”
Just like Jason.

“Truckers?”

“The FBI thinks that serial killers who work as long-haul truckers have killed more than
five hundred
hitchhikers, hookers, and people whose cars have broken down. They say it's the perfect cover for a serial killer. Truckers work by themselves, and they're always on the move. They can pick up a victim in one state, kill them in another, and dump their body in a third.”

“But they're talking about truckers who kill strangers.” Duncan doesn't sound nearly as confident as he did last night “Not people they know. Not their best friends. So that would rule out Jason.”

“Maybe my parents were the start.” I drop my voice to a near-soundless whisper. “Maybe Jason killed them and then got a taste for killing.”

His mouth twists. “Thousands of people are truckers. Probably hundreds of thousands. Just because a few are serial killers doesn't mean they all are. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.”

Duncan liked the idea of a serial killer when he thought that meant it couldn't be anyone he knew. “All I'm saying is we need to look at Jason more closely.”

He finally nods. Reluctantly.

When I asked the librarian earlier, she told me the reference room had copies of all the high school annuals, one for each year. Now I find the section, then the annuals for North Medford and the year my parents graduated. I open it to the index. With Duncan leaning in, I run my finger down a column of tiny type.
Badger, Barrett, Beckstrom.

Benson, Naomi
. My mom's name is followed by a series of page numbers: 132, 244, 248, 273. I have only one photo of my mom, but this annual has
four.

I turn to page 132. And there's my mom. It's one of those first-day-of-school photos, the ones the photo vendor tries to sell you sets of. None of my foster families ever bought them, not even the cheapest package with eight wallet-size shots.

Duncan says, “She's really pretty.”

My mom wears a black top with a scoop neck. Her wavy brown hair falls past her shoulders. Her large dark eyes are focused on something to her right. Her lips are pursed, making her look either dubious or uncertain. I wonder what she was thinking.

On page 244 is a photo of the choir, dozens of people dressed in identical red robes. If my mom wasn't identified as being in the third row (
N. Benson
), I don't think I would be able to pick out her tiny dot of a face.

Page 248 reveals she was also in the National Honor Society. So she was smart. About two dozen people pose in front of an oak tree. My mom sits cross-legged in the first row. She wears jeans and a cream-colored cardigan with a shawl collar. Her smile is so wide her eyes are nearly closed. I lightly run my thumb over her face. A bubble expands in my chest, crowding my lungs.

Page 273 has the annual's only photo of my parents together. They're part of a crowd at a cafeteria table, all of them raising their milk cartons and juice bottles as if toasting the photographer. It's easy to pick out my parents. Not only are they in the middle of the photo, but they look exactly as I expect them to. They never had a chance to change.

Duncan points. “Hey, that's gotta be Jason.” Even back then, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, but his face was fuller, his arms thicker.

“And check out who he's looking at,” I point out. “My mom. Not the camera. Not Heather”—she's sitting next to my mom—“even though that's who he ended up marrying.”

The woman sitting on the other side of my dad looks familiar. Wide cheekbones, blond hair—it's Sam, with longer hair. She's half-turned toward my dad. He's sitting between her and my mom, but he's grinning at the camera.

“Who's that?” Duncan taps on a guy sitting next to Sam.

If he wasn't the only Asian-looking guy at the table, I wouldn't recognize him. He wears a faded T-shirt, and his hair hangs raggedly in his eyes. “That's Richard Lee. You know, the real estate guy.”

The only one I don't recognize is a guy with close-cropped orange-red hair who is sitting at the end of the table. “‘Ben Gault,'” I read aloud from the caption. “Do you know him?”

“I don't think so. Maybe he moved away.”

In the back of the annual, there are only two page numbers next to
Terry Weeks:
one for his yearbook portrait, the other for the photo in the cafeteria. I guess the kinds of things my dad liked—concerts and parties, hanging out at the river, driving a Trans Am too fast—aren't the activities that make it into the annual. He wasn't on a team; he wasn't in a play; he didn't sing in the choir.

I make photocopies of everything, and then Duncan puts the annual away. I go back to the librarian at the information desk. “Do you have old copies of the
Medford Mail Tribune
?”

“How far back do you want to go?” Her dark hair is cut in curly points that frame her face. “We have paper copies for the last year. Anything older than that is on microfiche.”