Page 37

“He said occasionally things get missed, even when everyone involved has the best intentions. Sometimes people fall through the cracks.”

“Funny thing about those cracks,” Bristal says. “Most of them are teenage-girl shaped.”

Fifteen

Saturday morning I’m sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor in the linen closet, my computer in my lap and Bristal’s knees touching mine as she runs her fingers over the black foam triangles.

“I had an acid trip that looked just like this,” she says, and I’m very thankful that the soundproofing works and my mom didn’t hear that.

“I need you to focus,” I tell Bristal. “We’ve got to record a new opening for the podcast, and I need to have the monument ep edited and published by Monday morning.”

“Technically you don’t have to,” she contradicts me. “The publishing schedule is an arbitrary goal that you set for yourself.”

“Set for us,” I remind her, giving her knee a nudge with mine. “It’s to keep both of us on task.”

“By which you mean me,” she says, shoving back. Her kneecaps are bonier than mine, and I wince. “But don’t worry, Lydia Chlamydia, I’m going on that little road trip with Cousin Larry and ODOT this afternoon.”

“Right, the roadkill episode,” I say under my breath.

“AKA the best episode,” Bristal says.

She’s quiet for a minute while I pull up the recording software, and I glance up to see that she’s staring at the ceiling, her mouth gone slack.

“Bristal?” I ask, suddenly worried that she has some sort of medical condition I don’t know about. The last thing my dad needs right now is a Jamison girl going comatose inside a soundproofed closet at his house. Actually, that sounds like a really horrible public relations nightmare.

“Bristal!” I say again, reaching over and tapping her shoulder.

“Sorry.” She shakes her head and her eyes come back into focus. “It’s just if you stare really hard at the tip of one of these triangles, things get funky fast.”

“I need you to—”

“What are we going to do about Denise Halverson?”

I sigh and close my laptop, aware that we’re not going to get any work done until we address the elephant in this small, cramped room. “I don’t know,” I admit. “I tried to find her on social media.”

“Me too,” Bristal says. “I checked Facebook first, since it’s for old people. But I didn’t find any Denise Halversons that are the right age.”

“I looked, too,” I tell her. “But if she got married and didn’t list her maiden name, there’s very little chance of finding her.”

“Right,” Bristal agrees. “I tried looking just for women named Denise that live in the area, but then I thought that was probably stupid, because she literally got the hell out of Henley thirty years ago after only being here a few months.”

“She’s not going to list it as where she’s from,” I say.

“So what do we do?” Bristal asks.

“I don’t know if there’s anything we can do,” I tell her. “I ran this down in the first place because I wanted to get all the facts straight for the tornado episode. I spotted inaccurate data, and I wanted to know why. Now I know, and I’m just not convinced it’s worth following up on. We’ve got an actual murder to cover, remember? And your lead about the family treasure could be a real angle. I don’t want to waste time running down dead ends.”

Bristal’s face had been getting harder as I spoke, the dim light inside the closet shadowing her deep eye sockets. Her jaw muscles are pulled tight and ticking, the edges of her lips flattened into a thin line of anger.

“Because it’s easier? Because with Boggs you already know something has gone bad, you just have to jiggle the body some more and see if something shakes loose? You’re just like Foxglove and everyone else back in the nineties—you don’t care enough to look for this girl and find out what happened to her.”

“Because I’m not convinced anything did,” I shoot back.

Bristal makes a show of banging her head against the foam walls. “I swear, I spend much more time with you, Lydia Chass, and this is not the only padded room I’ll ever be in. A girl flat-out fucking disappeared and nobody gave a shit.”

“Paul and Erin did,” I argue.

“Oh yeah.” Bristal smacks her forehead. “I forgot. They made posters. I bet they didn’t even buy stencils for the lettering.”