Photograph, page 10
It’s okay, Dad. I forgive you.
No. He’d fired the first shot, but I’d won the battle. I’d destroyed him. Eviscerated him. I’d amputated his legs and cut out his tongue. At the end of it all, I felt like the worst human being on earth. The only thing I wanted to do was apologize, but I couldn’t bring myself to utter those words. I couldn’t take any of it back. More to the point, I didn’t want to take it back.
My dad got up slowly from the table. He didn’t look at me. He was scared of me. He walked away, and for the first time, my never-changing, always-young father looked old. I thought about running after him, but I stayed where I was.
Remember? There are lines you cross that you can’t uncross.
When I was alone again, when he was gone, Rina came up to me. “Holy crap. You okay, hon?”
“No.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. Thank you.”
She patted my hand and let me be. I stared out at the relentless ocean, throwing waves at the beach one after another like a heart beating. But all hearts stop sooner or later, and the ocean goes on.
Jesus. What did I just do?
My phone began ringing.
I assumed—I hoped—it was my father calling from his car, but it wasn’t. There was no name on the caller ID, and I didn’t recognize the number. If it was spam, the caller was about to have a really bad day.
“What?” I said sharply as I answered.
“Is this Shannon Wells?” a raspy male voice asked.
“Yes, who is this?”
“Ms. Wells, my name is Chuck Kimble. I’m a detective with the police in Devil Creek, Michigan. It’s on the lake just north of Benton Harbor. You posted a question on a true crime blog about the murder of a teenage girl at a motel. I think you’re talking about a cold case that’s been sitting on my desk for a long, long time.”
I spent half an hour on the phone with Detective Kimble. By the time we were done, I knew I needed to go to Michigan. I called Kate and gave her an update about what I’d discovered and what I was doing. I let Rina know that I couldn’t take on any new clients for the next few days. Then I went upstairs to my hotel apartment and stuffed clothes in my bag to hit the road.
I didn’t call my father.
Before I left, I took my laptop out to the balcony. Detective Kimble had sent a link to the website for the Thunder Mountain Motel on the outskirts of his small town. I expected a lot to have changed in a quarter century, but whoever owned the motel hadn’t made upgrades a priority. It looked untouched by time. There were enough pictures on the website that I could tell immediately that this was the motel in the photograph that had appeared in Millennium Memories. Even the pop machine in the parking lot looked the same.
Dawn West.
That was the name Chuck Kimble gave me. He sent a yearbook photo of the girl who’d been killed.
Dawn West had been a sixteen-year-old high school student in Devil Creek. According to Kimble, she was a bookish loner, no real friends, the kind of girl who did well in school but kept to herself. Teachers said she was creative and smart, good in most subjects, equally a whiz at math and art. The picture showed a girl with a long, plain face, a few freckles, troubled by a little bit of acne, but pretty in a way that would blossom into beauty as she got older. Which she never had a chance to do. Her hair was sandy blond, long and parted in the middle, in need of some body and curl. Her blue eyes looked uncomfortable; her yearbook smile looked false. She didn’t like being the center of attention.
On August 7 of the year 1999, this sweet young girl had been shot in the head behind the Thunder Mountain Motel.
Somehow, for some reason, Faith Selby had been there, too.
ELEVEN
I decided to drive to Michigan, not fly, eighteen hours in my Honda dead north from Daytona Beach to Benton Harbor. Long drives don’t bother me. I like to drive all the way through, only stopping every few hours for a cat nap and a Snickers bar at a rest stop. Give me half an hour to recharge, and I’m good to go.
So I put my SUV on cruise control and blasted my Spotify playlist of Maroon 5. My route took me north to Jacksonville, then west to Lake City to pick up I-75 heading into Georgia. Within three hours, before noon, I’d crossed the Florida line. To be honest, there haven’t been too many times in my life when I’ve left Florida. I’m a sunshine girl, and I like it that way. My father drove me to meet my grandparents years ago, and I’ve taken Caribbean cruises a couple of times out of Port Canaveral. But otherwise, my idea of a vacation is Miami or Naples or Key West, and even that doesn’t happen very often.
Something strange happened when I crossed out of Florida. Call it an omen. I felt as if I were driving into darkness despite the sunny morning. If this had just been about me, I think I would have turned around and gone home. But Kate Selby was my friend, and she needed answers about her mother, so I kept going despite the shadow of foreboding that gripped me like a fist squeezing my gut.
Maybe I was just freaked out by Maro’s warning.
Either you will kill him, or he will kill you.
Believe me, I had my Glock in the car.
I drove for hours, watching the country transform the farther I went. First the insane traffic of Atlanta. Then the Tennessee mountains near Chattanooga. I had a quick dinner at a country bar in Nashville, and by then it was dark outside. I made it to Kentucky. I slept for two hours—longer than I expected—in a park near Louisville, and as the night went by, I drove through Indiana, where the South became the Midwest. By the time I was near I-90 and the Michigan border, the sun was rising on a new day. I’d made good time.
I stopped. Ate. Slept some more.
Then I took a detour.
Detective Kimble wasn’t expecting me in Devil Creek until tomorrow. As I drove through South Bend, Indiana, a highway sign told me that I wasn’t far from Notre Dame. That made me think of Olivia Curtis and her mother, Jenny Curtis. When I checked the maps on my phone and saw where I was, I decided to head east on I-90. The small town of Angola was only a couple of hours out of my way.
What was I expecting when I got there?
I really don’t know. I’d never been to Angola before. In my odd fantasies, I thought I would drive into the heart of town, and the streets would be familiar to me. I’d think to myself: I know this place. I’d be overwhelmed by memories of another life. But nothing like that happened. By noon, I was driving among the brick buildings downtown, past the Soldiers’ Monument at the heart of the traffic circle, going up and down the cracked-asphalt streets past nineteenth-century houses with pretty green lawns. The town didn’t look familiar to me at all.
If I really was the reincarnation of Jenny Curtis, I felt no echoes of living and dying in this place.
But I was here, so I wanted to know more about her.
My first stop was at the town’s old Carnegie Library. From the outside, it looked nothing like a Carnegie, and it wasn’t until I went inside that I saw that the expanded library had been built around the original facade. The Carnegie walls were actually inside the building, which made me feel like the library itself was a time machine taking me back to earlier days.
With the help of a librarian, I found microfiche copies of the local Herald Republican newspaper dating back to 1995, which was the year I’d given Maro in my regression. I started in January reading each copy of the newspaper. I had no idea exactly when Jenny Curtis had been killed, only that it had happened while her daughter, Olivia, was in college at Notre Dame. I didn’t even know if Jenny Curtis had died in a home invasion the way I remembered. All I really knew was what I’d read in the acknowledgments of Olivia’s book, which was that her mother had been killed in Angola. She didn’t use the word murder. Jenny Curtis could have died in a traffic accident.
But regardless, I felt sure her death would have made the local paper.
The first article that gave me an ominous little shiver did not involve Jenny Curtis at all. In late July, on page three of the paper, I noticed a story about a burglary that had occurred at a home on Prospect Street. The owners, Thomas and Nettie Morse, had been visiting relatives in Cleveland, and they’d come home to find a back window broken. Cash, jewelry, and Mr. Morse’s vintage coin collection had been taken, with losses estimated at almost two thousand dollars.
The police had no suspects.
Two weeks later, it happened again.
I saw another article—also on page three—about a burglary on Williams Street on the north side of town. The homeowners had been at church on Sunday morning and returned home to find several hundred dollars in cash missing from the nightstand in their bedroom. Also taken was a Smith & Wesson Model 10-10 revolver and a box of cartridges.
Somehow, I knew—I knew—that I would be reading about that gun again very soon.
In early September, there it was.
The article was on page one this time in a big bold headline. Angola Woman Shot, Killed in Burglary. In the middle of the front page was a large photograph captioned with the name of Jennifer Curtis, forty-four years old.
I stared at her picture, which looked like a cropped version of a photo that had been taken when she was dressed up for some special occasion. Her husband, Chris, had probably been standing next to her, because I could see a man’s arm around her shoulders. Jenny was a blond, her hair curly and short, and she wore cute round glasses. A pearl choker adorned her neck above the lace collar of her blouse. Her smile was big and happy.
Looking at her, I wanted to feel some glimmer of connection. I stared at her blue eyes and tried to imagine myself staring into a mirror, with those eyes and that face staring back at me. But Jenny Curtis was no more real to me than any other stranger in the newspaper.
So how could the details of her last moments be buried inside my head?
I noticed the September date of the paper. It was hard not to do the math. My own birthday was in June the following year. Nine months later. If you really believe that souls can be reborn, well, the timing was perfect. For all I knew, my mother and father had been in bed that morning, having sex, making me, at the exact moment that Jenny Curtis was facing down a teenager with a revolver and begging for her life.
Or maybe I was kidding myself, and all of this was crap.
I dragged my eyes away from the photograph and read the accompanying article. The police had made a connection between the murder at Jenny’s house on Wayne Street and the two earlier summer burglaries—or at least, they were investigating the possibility that the same perpetrator had committed all three crimes. The killer had fired three shots, one hitting Jenny in the head, two missing and going into the walls. The recovered bullets, according to the article, were consistent with the gun that had been stolen in the previous burglary.
But as before, they had no suspects.
I printed copies of all the articles from the newspaper and then left the library. My instinct was to head out of town, get back on the highway, and travel across the state to return to my original route into Michigan. But something made me reluctant to leave. According to the map, I was a three-minute walk from the address on Wayne Street where Jenny Curtis had been killed. Having come this far, I couldn’t leave without seeing the house for myself.
It was a gray Midwestern day. One look at the clouds in the western sky told me a summer storm was brewing. Even so, it seemed silly to get in my SUV in order to drive around the corner. I took the sidewalk on Park Avenue to Wayne Street and turned right, strolling past solid redbrick homes that must have been 150 years old or more. A brown cat followed me at a saunter about thirty feet back, turning where I turned, stopping where I stopped. It made me wonder if I was giving off some kind of cat-lady pheromone.
The address listed in the newspaper article was a two-story house, set back from the street on a gentle slope, with a green lawn surrounding it and a blue spruce towering over the roof from the backyard. Neat hedges and two large flowerpots fringed the walkway leading to the front door. On the second story, three narrow rectangular windows faced the street. I wondered if those were the windows for the master bedroom where Jenny had been killed.
The house hadn’t changed much in the years in between, based on the photo in the newspaper. Honestly, it probably hadn’t changed much since the 1860s. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the clip-clop of horses on the Angola street on a warm summer day, with the moisture of coming rain in the air. But I didn’t have time for nostalgia. I focused on the house like a private investigator. Wayne Street was the main thoroughfare in town, so if I were a criminal, I wouldn’t have come in via the street. Too easy to be seen. I would have ventured from a side street through the green yards, ducking among the mature oaks and elms and then quickly breaking the glass on a rear window and climbing inside.
I—I hear something. Glass. A window breaking.
I was thinking about all of this when a voice interrupted me. “Can I help you?”
When I turned around, I saw a tall man in his seventies crossing the street toward me, an old beagle taking cautious steps on a leash beside him. The dog gave me a perfunctory bark but didn’t look up to the job of watchdog anymore. Even so, the cat that had accompanied me from the library took a wary look at the beagle and scampered away.
The older man, unlike his dog, had defied time. He had a kind of Cary Grant elegance that had stayed with him as he aged, and he had the good looks to go with it—tall, with a bushy mane of silver hair, and a tanned, chiseled face. His smile at me was curious but warm. It had never occurred to me that the house on Wayne Street wouldn’t have changed owners many times in the past thirty years. I certainly didn’t expect that anyone living here now would remember a murder from decades earlier. But looking at this man, I knew—how exactly did I know?—that this was Chris Curtis.
I took a chance that I was right. “Mr. Curtis?”
He cocked his head, his dark eyes puzzled. “That’s right.”
“My name is Shannon Wells.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Shannon Wells. What can I do for you?”
I froze for a moment. How was I supposed to answer that question? Telling this man that I was the reincarnation of his dead wife didn’t seem like a promising conversation starter. But I was struggling to find any other reason for me to be standing in front of his house, wanting to know what he could tell me about Jenny Curtis thirty years after she’d been killed.
“I’m a private investigator,” I told him, buying some time. “From Daytona Beach, Florida.”
His eyebrows made crescent moons. “You’re pretty far from home. What brings you to Angola?”
Shit.
I should have lied.
I inhaled a deep breath and took the measure of this man and tried to decide whether he would think I was crazy if I told him the truth. Of course he would. Anybody would. Maybe I was crazy. But I’ve usually found if you want people to be honest with you, it helps to be honest with them.
“This is kind of a long, strange story, Mr. Curtis. Would you mind if we talked inside?”
He glanced at the dark sky. “It looks like it will be pouring down rain in a couple of minutes. Would you like a cup of coffee, Shannon? We can sit in the solarium and watch the storm as we talk.”
The rain did come minutes later, sheeting from the black skies with accompaniments of lightning and thunder. Inside the quaint sunroom that faced the street, it felt like night.
I told Chris Curtis my story. The whole story. Then I sipped my coffee and listened to the drumbeat of rain while Jenny’s husband tried to process what I had told him. To his credit, he didn’t throw me out into the storm, and he didn’t laugh at what I’d said. He did ask to see my driver’s license, and I didn’t blame him for that. At least he knew that I was who I said I was.
“Well, if this is a scam, Shannon, I confess I don’t see the upside,” he murmured. “I mean, I’ve heard about fake psychics preying on families, looking for money. If that’s the game, I’d think you would find easier targets than someone who lost his wife three decades ago.”
“I understand. It’s not a scam, sir. I don’t want anything from you, and I didn’t actually come here to talk to you. Honestly, I don’t know why I did come here. I was on my way to somewhere else, but when I realized that I wasn’t too far from Angola—well, I guess I had to see it for myself.”
Chris didn’t say anything immediately. He had a photo of himself and Jenny on the table near him, and I could see that it was the same photo that had been used in the newspaper article about her death. He picked it up, studied it with a broken smile, then put it down again.
“What is it you want to know?” he asked.
“I guess—the details of the crime. I told you what came out during my—during my regression. Was I right? Is that what happened?”
He picked up his own mug of coffee and studied me across the sunroom. Another roll of thunder made the old house tremble. “Yes, you were right. In fact, you seem to know things that, as far as I’m aware, never showed up anywhere other than in files the police kept. My wife had just taken a shower. She was in a robe when she was killed. Our phone line was cut. Those details were never released to the public. Also—”
I waited.
“Also, you said the killer was a teenage boy. The police never identified any suspects, but the idea of it being someone young didn’t really come up at all. Maybe that’s naive, but we didn’t think of bad seeds like that among our Angola teenagers. So you obviously didn’t pull this detail from something you read.”
“I suppose that means whoever killed Jenny was never found.”
Chris shook his head. “No.”
“Were there more burglaries in the area after that?”
“No. If you’re right about it having been a teenager, then maybe the shock of killing Jenny scared him into going straight.”
“Maybe.” I thought about it and added, “Did the police get any fingerprints? Or could there be evidence from back then that might have included DNA?”
No. He’d fired the first shot, but I’d won the battle. I’d destroyed him. Eviscerated him. I’d amputated his legs and cut out his tongue. At the end of it all, I felt like the worst human being on earth. The only thing I wanted to do was apologize, but I couldn’t bring myself to utter those words. I couldn’t take any of it back. More to the point, I didn’t want to take it back.
My dad got up slowly from the table. He didn’t look at me. He was scared of me. He walked away, and for the first time, my never-changing, always-young father looked old. I thought about running after him, but I stayed where I was.
Remember? There are lines you cross that you can’t uncross.
When I was alone again, when he was gone, Rina came up to me. “Holy crap. You okay, hon?”
“No.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. Thank you.”
She patted my hand and let me be. I stared out at the relentless ocean, throwing waves at the beach one after another like a heart beating. But all hearts stop sooner or later, and the ocean goes on.
Jesus. What did I just do?
My phone began ringing.
I assumed—I hoped—it was my father calling from his car, but it wasn’t. There was no name on the caller ID, and I didn’t recognize the number. If it was spam, the caller was about to have a really bad day.
“What?” I said sharply as I answered.
“Is this Shannon Wells?” a raspy male voice asked.
“Yes, who is this?”
“Ms. Wells, my name is Chuck Kimble. I’m a detective with the police in Devil Creek, Michigan. It’s on the lake just north of Benton Harbor. You posted a question on a true crime blog about the murder of a teenage girl at a motel. I think you’re talking about a cold case that’s been sitting on my desk for a long, long time.”
I spent half an hour on the phone with Detective Kimble. By the time we were done, I knew I needed to go to Michigan. I called Kate and gave her an update about what I’d discovered and what I was doing. I let Rina know that I couldn’t take on any new clients for the next few days. Then I went upstairs to my hotel apartment and stuffed clothes in my bag to hit the road.
I didn’t call my father.
Before I left, I took my laptop out to the balcony. Detective Kimble had sent a link to the website for the Thunder Mountain Motel on the outskirts of his small town. I expected a lot to have changed in a quarter century, but whoever owned the motel hadn’t made upgrades a priority. It looked untouched by time. There were enough pictures on the website that I could tell immediately that this was the motel in the photograph that had appeared in Millennium Memories. Even the pop machine in the parking lot looked the same.
Dawn West.
That was the name Chuck Kimble gave me. He sent a yearbook photo of the girl who’d been killed.
Dawn West had been a sixteen-year-old high school student in Devil Creek. According to Kimble, she was a bookish loner, no real friends, the kind of girl who did well in school but kept to herself. Teachers said she was creative and smart, good in most subjects, equally a whiz at math and art. The picture showed a girl with a long, plain face, a few freckles, troubled by a little bit of acne, but pretty in a way that would blossom into beauty as she got older. Which she never had a chance to do. Her hair was sandy blond, long and parted in the middle, in need of some body and curl. Her blue eyes looked uncomfortable; her yearbook smile looked false. She didn’t like being the center of attention.
On August 7 of the year 1999, this sweet young girl had been shot in the head behind the Thunder Mountain Motel.
Somehow, for some reason, Faith Selby had been there, too.
ELEVEN
I decided to drive to Michigan, not fly, eighteen hours in my Honda dead north from Daytona Beach to Benton Harbor. Long drives don’t bother me. I like to drive all the way through, only stopping every few hours for a cat nap and a Snickers bar at a rest stop. Give me half an hour to recharge, and I’m good to go.
So I put my SUV on cruise control and blasted my Spotify playlist of Maroon 5. My route took me north to Jacksonville, then west to Lake City to pick up I-75 heading into Georgia. Within three hours, before noon, I’d crossed the Florida line. To be honest, there haven’t been too many times in my life when I’ve left Florida. I’m a sunshine girl, and I like it that way. My father drove me to meet my grandparents years ago, and I’ve taken Caribbean cruises a couple of times out of Port Canaveral. But otherwise, my idea of a vacation is Miami or Naples or Key West, and even that doesn’t happen very often.
Something strange happened when I crossed out of Florida. Call it an omen. I felt as if I were driving into darkness despite the sunny morning. If this had just been about me, I think I would have turned around and gone home. But Kate Selby was my friend, and she needed answers about her mother, so I kept going despite the shadow of foreboding that gripped me like a fist squeezing my gut.
Maybe I was just freaked out by Maro’s warning.
Either you will kill him, or he will kill you.
Believe me, I had my Glock in the car.
I drove for hours, watching the country transform the farther I went. First the insane traffic of Atlanta. Then the Tennessee mountains near Chattanooga. I had a quick dinner at a country bar in Nashville, and by then it was dark outside. I made it to Kentucky. I slept for two hours—longer than I expected—in a park near Louisville, and as the night went by, I drove through Indiana, where the South became the Midwest. By the time I was near I-90 and the Michigan border, the sun was rising on a new day. I’d made good time.
I stopped. Ate. Slept some more.
Then I took a detour.
Detective Kimble wasn’t expecting me in Devil Creek until tomorrow. As I drove through South Bend, Indiana, a highway sign told me that I wasn’t far from Notre Dame. That made me think of Olivia Curtis and her mother, Jenny Curtis. When I checked the maps on my phone and saw where I was, I decided to head east on I-90. The small town of Angola was only a couple of hours out of my way.
What was I expecting when I got there?
I really don’t know. I’d never been to Angola before. In my odd fantasies, I thought I would drive into the heart of town, and the streets would be familiar to me. I’d think to myself: I know this place. I’d be overwhelmed by memories of another life. But nothing like that happened. By noon, I was driving among the brick buildings downtown, past the Soldiers’ Monument at the heart of the traffic circle, going up and down the cracked-asphalt streets past nineteenth-century houses with pretty green lawns. The town didn’t look familiar to me at all.
If I really was the reincarnation of Jenny Curtis, I felt no echoes of living and dying in this place.
But I was here, so I wanted to know more about her.
My first stop was at the town’s old Carnegie Library. From the outside, it looked nothing like a Carnegie, and it wasn’t until I went inside that I saw that the expanded library had been built around the original facade. The Carnegie walls were actually inside the building, which made me feel like the library itself was a time machine taking me back to earlier days.
With the help of a librarian, I found microfiche copies of the local Herald Republican newspaper dating back to 1995, which was the year I’d given Maro in my regression. I started in January reading each copy of the newspaper. I had no idea exactly when Jenny Curtis had been killed, only that it had happened while her daughter, Olivia, was in college at Notre Dame. I didn’t even know if Jenny Curtis had died in a home invasion the way I remembered. All I really knew was what I’d read in the acknowledgments of Olivia’s book, which was that her mother had been killed in Angola. She didn’t use the word murder. Jenny Curtis could have died in a traffic accident.
But regardless, I felt sure her death would have made the local paper.
The first article that gave me an ominous little shiver did not involve Jenny Curtis at all. In late July, on page three of the paper, I noticed a story about a burglary that had occurred at a home on Prospect Street. The owners, Thomas and Nettie Morse, had been visiting relatives in Cleveland, and they’d come home to find a back window broken. Cash, jewelry, and Mr. Morse’s vintage coin collection had been taken, with losses estimated at almost two thousand dollars.
The police had no suspects.
Two weeks later, it happened again.
I saw another article—also on page three—about a burglary on Williams Street on the north side of town. The homeowners had been at church on Sunday morning and returned home to find several hundred dollars in cash missing from the nightstand in their bedroom. Also taken was a Smith & Wesson Model 10-10 revolver and a box of cartridges.
Somehow, I knew—I knew—that I would be reading about that gun again very soon.
In early September, there it was.
The article was on page one this time in a big bold headline. Angola Woman Shot, Killed in Burglary. In the middle of the front page was a large photograph captioned with the name of Jennifer Curtis, forty-four years old.
I stared at her picture, which looked like a cropped version of a photo that had been taken when she was dressed up for some special occasion. Her husband, Chris, had probably been standing next to her, because I could see a man’s arm around her shoulders. Jenny was a blond, her hair curly and short, and she wore cute round glasses. A pearl choker adorned her neck above the lace collar of her blouse. Her smile was big and happy.
Looking at her, I wanted to feel some glimmer of connection. I stared at her blue eyes and tried to imagine myself staring into a mirror, with those eyes and that face staring back at me. But Jenny Curtis was no more real to me than any other stranger in the newspaper.
So how could the details of her last moments be buried inside my head?
I noticed the September date of the paper. It was hard not to do the math. My own birthday was in June the following year. Nine months later. If you really believe that souls can be reborn, well, the timing was perfect. For all I knew, my mother and father had been in bed that morning, having sex, making me, at the exact moment that Jenny Curtis was facing down a teenager with a revolver and begging for her life.
Or maybe I was kidding myself, and all of this was crap.
I dragged my eyes away from the photograph and read the accompanying article. The police had made a connection between the murder at Jenny’s house on Wayne Street and the two earlier summer burglaries—or at least, they were investigating the possibility that the same perpetrator had committed all three crimes. The killer had fired three shots, one hitting Jenny in the head, two missing and going into the walls. The recovered bullets, according to the article, were consistent with the gun that had been stolen in the previous burglary.
But as before, they had no suspects.
I printed copies of all the articles from the newspaper and then left the library. My instinct was to head out of town, get back on the highway, and travel across the state to return to my original route into Michigan. But something made me reluctant to leave. According to the map, I was a three-minute walk from the address on Wayne Street where Jenny Curtis had been killed. Having come this far, I couldn’t leave without seeing the house for myself.
It was a gray Midwestern day. One look at the clouds in the western sky told me a summer storm was brewing. Even so, it seemed silly to get in my SUV in order to drive around the corner. I took the sidewalk on Park Avenue to Wayne Street and turned right, strolling past solid redbrick homes that must have been 150 years old or more. A brown cat followed me at a saunter about thirty feet back, turning where I turned, stopping where I stopped. It made me wonder if I was giving off some kind of cat-lady pheromone.
The address listed in the newspaper article was a two-story house, set back from the street on a gentle slope, with a green lawn surrounding it and a blue spruce towering over the roof from the backyard. Neat hedges and two large flowerpots fringed the walkway leading to the front door. On the second story, three narrow rectangular windows faced the street. I wondered if those were the windows for the master bedroom where Jenny had been killed.
The house hadn’t changed much in the years in between, based on the photo in the newspaper. Honestly, it probably hadn’t changed much since the 1860s. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the clip-clop of horses on the Angola street on a warm summer day, with the moisture of coming rain in the air. But I didn’t have time for nostalgia. I focused on the house like a private investigator. Wayne Street was the main thoroughfare in town, so if I were a criminal, I wouldn’t have come in via the street. Too easy to be seen. I would have ventured from a side street through the green yards, ducking among the mature oaks and elms and then quickly breaking the glass on a rear window and climbing inside.
I—I hear something. Glass. A window breaking.
I was thinking about all of this when a voice interrupted me. “Can I help you?”
When I turned around, I saw a tall man in his seventies crossing the street toward me, an old beagle taking cautious steps on a leash beside him. The dog gave me a perfunctory bark but didn’t look up to the job of watchdog anymore. Even so, the cat that had accompanied me from the library took a wary look at the beagle and scampered away.
The older man, unlike his dog, had defied time. He had a kind of Cary Grant elegance that had stayed with him as he aged, and he had the good looks to go with it—tall, with a bushy mane of silver hair, and a tanned, chiseled face. His smile at me was curious but warm. It had never occurred to me that the house on Wayne Street wouldn’t have changed owners many times in the past thirty years. I certainly didn’t expect that anyone living here now would remember a murder from decades earlier. But looking at this man, I knew—how exactly did I know?—that this was Chris Curtis.
I took a chance that I was right. “Mr. Curtis?”
He cocked his head, his dark eyes puzzled. “That’s right.”
“My name is Shannon Wells.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Shannon Wells. What can I do for you?”
I froze for a moment. How was I supposed to answer that question? Telling this man that I was the reincarnation of his dead wife didn’t seem like a promising conversation starter. But I was struggling to find any other reason for me to be standing in front of his house, wanting to know what he could tell me about Jenny Curtis thirty years after she’d been killed.
“I’m a private investigator,” I told him, buying some time. “From Daytona Beach, Florida.”
His eyebrows made crescent moons. “You’re pretty far from home. What brings you to Angola?”
Shit.
I should have lied.
I inhaled a deep breath and took the measure of this man and tried to decide whether he would think I was crazy if I told him the truth. Of course he would. Anybody would. Maybe I was crazy. But I’ve usually found if you want people to be honest with you, it helps to be honest with them.
“This is kind of a long, strange story, Mr. Curtis. Would you mind if we talked inside?”
He glanced at the dark sky. “It looks like it will be pouring down rain in a couple of minutes. Would you like a cup of coffee, Shannon? We can sit in the solarium and watch the storm as we talk.”
The rain did come minutes later, sheeting from the black skies with accompaniments of lightning and thunder. Inside the quaint sunroom that faced the street, it felt like night.
I told Chris Curtis my story. The whole story. Then I sipped my coffee and listened to the drumbeat of rain while Jenny’s husband tried to process what I had told him. To his credit, he didn’t throw me out into the storm, and he didn’t laugh at what I’d said. He did ask to see my driver’s license, and I didn’t blame him for that. At least he knew that I was who I said I was.
“Well, if this is a scam, Shannon, I confess I don’t see the upside,” he murmured. “I mean, I’ve heard about fake psychics preying on families, looking for money. If that’s the game, I’d think you would find easier targets than someone who lost his wife three decades ago.”
“I understand. It’s not a scam, sir. I don’t want anything from you, and I didn’t actually come here to talk to you. Honestly, I don’t know why I did come here. I was on my way to somewhere else, but when I realized that I wasn’t too far from Angola—well, I guess I had to see it for myself.”
Chris didn’t say anything immediately. He had a photo of himself and Jenny on the table near him, and I could see that it was the same photo that had been used in the newspaper article about her death. He picked it up, studied it with a broken smile, then put it down again.
“What is it you want to know?” he asked.
“I guess—the details of the crime. I told you what came out during my—during my regression. Was I right? Is that what happened?”
He picked up his own mug of coffee and studied me across the sunroom. Another roll of thunder made the old house tremble. “Yes, you were right. In fact, you seem to know things that, as far as I’m aware, never showed up anywhere other than in files the police kept. My wife had just taken a shower. She was in a robe when she was killed. Our phone line was cut. Those details were never released to the public. Also—”
I waited.
“Also, you said the killer was a teenage boy. The police never identified any suspects, but the idea of it being someone young didn’t really come up at all. Maybe that’s naive, but we didn’t think of bad seeds like that among our Angola teenagers. So you obviously didn’t pull this detail from something you read.”
“I suppose that means whoever killed Jenny was never found.”
Chris shook his head. “No.”
“Were there more burglaries in the area after that?”
“No. If you’re right about it having been a teenager, then maybe the shock of killing Jenny scared him into going straight.”
“Maybe.” I thought about it and added, “Did the police get any fingerprints? Or could there be evidence from back then that might have included DNA?”
