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“I don’t think Giselle McKendrick committed suicide. I think the person who wrote these letters killed her and made it look like suicide.”
“You said she’d be sorry. And I’m sure she was … sorry that she ever met you.”
“You won’t get away with this, Milo! We’ll find proof and you’ll be punished!”
“I just wish I were going with someone I was crazy about,”
Someone could see you from across a crowded room and, like the song says, fall madly in love with you.”
“I don’t have time to be in love, anyway. It’s not on my parents’ schedule.”
Jess laughed. “Cath, I don’t think your parents are half as bad as you make them sound. I think you’re the one who drives you crazy, not them.” Cath laughed, too. “You could be right. I can’t seem to shake twelve years of goal-orienting, that’s all.” It was wonderful to hear her laugh. Jess couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard Cath laugh like that.
“Is there anything you don’t know how to do?” she asked him. Trucker grinned. “Yep. Get rich.”
And for the first time in a long time, the thought of returning to Nightingale Hall didn’t make Jess sick with anxiety.
When they reached Nightingale Hall, it seemed to Jess, for the first time, welcoming. They had left the parlor and library lights blazing, and a nearly full moon overhead bathed the hill in a soft, silvery glow. The wind had gone to sleep, allowing the oak branches overhead to form a peaceful, protective canopy. Nothing about the place seemed frightening.
Jess took the windbreaker. A sudden sense of dread came over
There weren’t any “right” questions. She had already asked the questions, and Daisy had given her the answers. And Daisy had told the truth, Jess was sure of that. Sickeningly sure.
As she turned and ran down the hill, the short, full skirt of her dress whipping out behind her, Jess thought, I want to go with her. I want to run down the hill, too, and up the road for miles and miles until I’m so far away from here that I will be able to forget Nightingale Hall and what we did to Milo Keith. But she knew there was no place far enough away for that.
It wasn’t a piece of paper. It was a … photograph. Of a girl. A beautiful girl. Even with the eerie distortion caused by the flowing water, turned a garish yellow by the flashlight’s glow, Jess could clearly make out the features. The girl in the watery photograph was Giselle McKendrick. And the photograph fluttering in the creek had been defaced with the same ugly black slash mark that marred the smaller photo found by Jess in her room.
Milo wasn’t a criminal. Milo was a victim. Their victim, and they would have to make it up to him somehow.
She realized, too late, that she should have hidden the fact that she’d guessed the truth. Maybe she would have had a chance, then. He knew the minute he looked at her. She could see it in his eyes.
But from everything she’d heard about Giselle, she believed college had always been in Giselle’s plans. A momentary loneliness and terrible sense of loss had made her temporarily dependent upon Trucker. That was understandable. But Jess was certain that even if Giselle’s father hadn’t pulled himself out of his grief and tended to his daughter again, sooner or later Giselle would have ended her dependence on Trucker. In fact, going off to college had probably been her first step in that direction. And Jess would bet anything that Giselle had left willingly, maybe even eagerly. She had probably
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“I think watery graves are kind of romantic, don’t you?”
Jess knew she couldn’t outrun him. She could fight him, but he was heavier, stronger than she was. She had nothing in her hands but her high heels and although she glanced around frantically, she saw nothing she could use as a weapon.
When she tried later to explain what happened next, no matter how carefully she put it, it came out wrong. Because there wasn’t any way for it to come out right and still make sense.
the wet photograph of Giselle ripped free of the rock holding it hostage, lifted itself up out of the babbling creek, and whooshed through the air to plaster itself across Trucker’s face. It molded itself to his features like a second skin, blinding him and effectively sealing off his air passages.
When he fell, his hands still digging and scraping at the dripping wet picture of Giselle McKendrick forming a death mask over his face, he fell hard, backward, into the creek. There was a loud, sharp crack as his head crashed into the round, smooth rock that had held the photograph prisoner only moments earlier. Trucker’s feet thrashed in the water once, and then he lay still. The flashlight in his front jeans pocket cast its eerie yellow glow upward, illuminating, where his face should have been, an eight by ten glossy photograph of a beautiful blonde girl with bright blue eyes. She was
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HER EYES FIXED ON the photograph smiling up at her from Trucker’s lifeless body, Jess sank to her knees. “Thank you,” she whispered, “thank you, Giselle.”
“I knew it was him,” he said of Trucker. “We were the only two in the cellar with that trunk. I knew I hadn’t taken the letters. So last week, I went back home to do some investigating. When I described Trucker to Giselle’s father, he said it sounded exactly like the guy Giselle had been dating, who’d said his name was Brandon. McKendrick didn’t like the guy at all. He said he’d taken too much control over Giselle’s life at a time when she was especially vulnerable. Her father blames himself. Said if he’d been paying more attention …”
The only person to blame is Trucker.”
And then, just as they turned to leave, there was a sudden gust of wind. The soft whisper of wet paper pulled their attention back to the creek. They watched in shocked silence as Giselle’s photograph slowly peeled itself away from Trucker’s face, lifted itself up, and flew swiftly through the air, up the creekbed until it was out of sight.
When Jess could find her voice, she whispered, almost to herself, “She put the shadow on my wall, too, and the footprints in the hall leading to my room. She was trying to tell me …”
But silently, she added, “’Bye, Giselle. Rest in peace.”
When they reached the clearing behind Nightingale Hall, something in the air … a sudden, hushed stillness, stopped them in their tracks. They lifted their heads and listened. And as they stood there, the big old brick house seemed to shudder, as if sighing heavily, and then settle back on its haunches peacefully.
“Giselle found justice, and the house is satisfied. It isn’t waiting anymore.”
