Stephen Markley - Ohio

“Did you?”

“No.”

Bill pressed forward in the booth, staring at the postcard and its looping cursive.

“Did you follow the sentencing for those guys from New Canaan? The ones who killed that little girl.”

He continued to stare at the postcard, and Stacey read only five percent of what went through him at that question. It was why he’d risked meeting her at all: to find out what she knew. After all, she too had been home the night of his return.

“A little bit.”

“The date when they killed her—it stuck with me because Lisa’s e-mails, her accounts, they all went dark at almost exactly the same time.”

He had spent years moving the pieces of this emotional puzzle around, trying to find any way to put it together so that he would not feel the puncture wound of guilt and the rot that spread from it. He would never forgive himself for his role in what happened, but ultimately that was beside the point.

“Between that shit and the thing with Tina, it was a hell of a year for New Canaan,” he said neutrally.

She watched his eyes for signs and tells.

“You know what else happened after they were arrested?”

Bill waited for it.

“Kaylyn. She disappeared. No one in New Canaan—not her mother, not anyone—knows what happened to her. And look at this…”

She set another scrap of paper next to the postcard, a photocopied blurb: You’re a real hot bitch, Stace. Great being your friend and setting up your spikes! Stay in touch. –K .

“That’s what Kaylyn wrote in my yearbook.”

The two sets of handwriting were similar, but not exactly the same. Probably half the teenage girls in North America had that bubbled, loopy style.

“You’ve lost me, Moore.” He couldn’t keep track of all the dots she expected him to connect, but he was gathering that this was not about what he’d feared. Something far weirder.

She sat back in the booth and raised one tattooed arm, rubbed a cheek so that it looked like she was pulling the flesh from her face. The wind picked up outside, and it made Bill think of a wolf’s howl. Blue lightning streaked the sky, its tributaries like all the random jags of the rivers feeding the Mississippi. It was beautiful, bright, and then it was gone. Followed by the roar of thunder.

“I started trying to track people down—anyone who might know anything about where Lisa might be. I was back in New Canaan almost every month. To see my dad when he got sick but also…”

“I might get scotch,” Bill interrupted. “I don’t know why I ordered this light crap.”

Her face spasmed, but the irk quickly passed. “Sure.”

When Bill returned with the glass of peat-smelling amber liquid, Stacey squeezed her notebook so that it formed an upside-down U.

“Who did you talk to?” he asked.

“A lot of people. It doesn’t matter. What’s important, Bill, is it all comes back to one person.”

When the name Todd Beaufort came up, Bill couldn’t help but let loose a grim chuckle. He would never get away from this guy. At some point they had to cut these ghosts down from the trees. Couldn’t just leave them all up there swinging. He listened to this story, drowning in the noise of the storm and looked out the window to the cars cutting through the flooding streets.

“Just listen. I know. I sound nuts. I feel nuts. Just… listen.” She flipped to another page in her notebook. She went through Beaufort’s history of sexual assault, this being the reason he never played a game for the Buckeyes. The young woman never pressed charges, but he had to transfer to Mount Union. His criminal record later included theft and forging prescriptions.

“So what?” Bill tasted his drink and enjoyed the warmth in the back of his throat and the burn in his stomach. “Beaufort was a dirtbag? If that’s what you came here to tell me, believe me, I knew that back when we were kids.”

“You were in New Canaan that night,” she said. “When I found Tina.”

The couple, talking in murmurs for so long, broke into laughter as bright as the woman’s dress. Bill twirled his scotch glass in clockwise circles.

“What the hell does that have to do with Lisa?”

She pulled a photo from her notebook and handed it to him. It was a picture of a piece of jewelry, blackened and charred, the metal clasp warped. “They found it on Tina when they arrested her that night.”

He examined the picture and handed it back.

“I swear to God that locket—it’s Lisa’s. I remember her wearing it. She used to keep pictures of teeny-bop idols in it. Like as a joke. Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Nick Lachey and all that Tiger Beat crap. Do you remember?”

He shook his head.

“So how did Tina have it? Because Todd must have had it. When she did whatever she did to him.”

“So you believe she did it?”

Because they’d never found much of Todd Beaufort, new ghost stories erupted in New Canaan. Tina was currently incarcerated and received mental health treatment at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, and kids wandered the woods trying to randomly dig up the supposed grave of the ex-football star who’d vanished one warm summer night, whose insane ex-girlfriend chopped him up and buried him there, according to legend. Because a storm had come blasting through in the early-morning hours, similar in size and ferocity to the one blanketing Chicago as they spoke, the police had to call off the search until it passed. Then the Cattawa overflowed its banks, spilling into the nearby woods. In the mud they found fragments of melted plastic, a gas can, DNA that matched Todd Beaufort’s, traces of his blood and hair in Tina’s car, but never a body. Tina Ross never told where she’d left him and all the search dogs and high-tech equipment proved useless. The flood had carried it all away.

“She did something to him,” said Stacey. “I’ve got no clue about the circumstances, but when I found her, Jesus…” On that night of the vortex, she’d seen Todd get into that same car, and when she found Tina alone, reeking of smoke, with a frantic misery in her voice, face, and eyes, she knew something terrible had happened. When Tina swung the tire iron at her head, Stacey had almost been ready for it. Like she’d been forewarned in a forgotten dream. “No, she wasn’t making fuck-all up.”

“So what the hell are you even saying?”

“Christ, Bill…” She picked up the postcard and thwapped it against her fingers. “How hard would this be to fake? For someone who knew Lisa? How hard would it be to buy postcards from Vietnam or Thailand online, ship them to one of those countries already written, and pay someone a few bucks to send them back? That same night, the night with Tina, I got a message from Lisa. How hard would it be to get into her e-mail? She only ever had one password, I know that: Romans58. And then, right around 2006, when it got to be a thing, start a few social media accounts for her? I found someone to check the IP addresses on all her e-mails to me. They all originated in Ohio. Mostly in New Canaan, but a few in—”

Bill began to laugh. He was no longer sure if he should be nervous because of what Stacey was saying or if the girl was just batshit.

“Don’t fucking laugh at me,” she snapped.

He immediately clipped himself, turning a final errant chuckle to a cough.

“Lisa didn’t leave. She didn’t go on some romantic fantasy jaunt, never to return. Todd killed her. I’m sure of it. And I think Kaylyn helped him. I don’t know what it was about or why or how it went down, but she was clever about it. She catfished Lisa back into existence before anyone had even heard of that word.”

How close she was and yet how far. She and Bill were both missing a few pieces, beginning with the videotape, the old camcorder kind, which Lisa found hidden in Kaylyn’s drawer of thefts and petty revenge. She was missing how Lisa agonized over what to do with it, who to tell, and just how gut churning it was to watch and then to own a secret like that. How it had eaten her up until it was all she could think about day and night. How she couldn’t go to the person she really wanted to tell because that girl’s brother was among the videotape’s demons. How she’d gone to Kaylyn, who she still had love for, and demanded she turn those boys in. How after hearing this, Kaylyn had lured her out to Jericho Lake under a pretense of explanation. How Todd was only supposed to scare her into handing over the tape.