Last Girl Ghosted(62)

“What was her name? The girl who died?”

He hesitates. More details he doesn’t want to discuss. Maybe it’s better for him if the past stays buried. Maybe he doesn’t want to say her name. Finally, he hands over the file.

“Everything is in here.”

“Does anyone else know what we did?” I ask.

“The man who helped me in Records has passed on,” he says, a note of finality to his voice. “Miss Lovely is gone, too.”

Miss Lovely, the woman who took me in, gave me a safe and comfortable home.

“I guess that leaves Joy Martin.”

Joy Martin. The librarian at The Hollows Historical Society, and Miss Lovely’s closest friend. She knows everything about this town; but she is a keeper of secrets.

“Sometimes it’s better to leave old selves, old lives, old mistakes behind,” he says.

“I tried. It’s caught up with me.”

He looks down at the article.

“What did you tell Bailey Kirk?” I ask.

“I told him what was in the public record. Nothing about you or what we did. But I got the feeling he already knew. What we did, maybe it only could have happened in a small place like this, without the eyes of the outside world on us. If the ATF or the FBI had been involved, it would have been impossible. But the case was small; it never made national news. Still, if you looked closely, dug through paperwork, it probably wasn’t hard to figure out.”

“He’s looking for connections between me and the missing women. His trail to Mia Thorpe is cold.”

Jones offers a thoughtful nod.

“And what do you think the connection is?” he asks.

“Loneliness, a dating app we all used called Torch, trauma in our pasts. One of the missing women also lived here, Melissa Farrow. Did you know her or her family?”

He squints into the middle distance.

“The name rings a bell. Was there a fire? Yeah—that was it. Her parents were killed. She went to live with her grandparents. Tragic—a long time ago.”

“Do you have access to any of the old files from the incident?”

“I can ask the chief. He might let me take a look. There’s only one other person alive who knows the whole story of what happened there that night. Who knows about you, and what was done to protect you.”

My throat goes dry, and I can’t find my voice.

“Your father.”

My father.

Out the window, that northern cardinal perches on the fence. I focus on his bright red body. I wish I was a bird and could fly away.

My father is alive. Dead to me. But still drawing breath.

“Have you talked to him?” he asks when I say nothing.

I shake my head. My father. The man who killed my brother and my mother. The man whose actions are responsible for the deaths of so many others, including a nameless girl who, thanks to me, was neither born, nor died, but who existed just the same.

My ghost. Or am I hers?

“There’s nothing to say.” My voice sounds tight and small.

“I understand,” he answers, letting the silence expand. Then, “My father wasn’t a good man either. We were estranged for most of my life.”

“But your father wasn’t a monster,” I say. “A killer.”

“There are all kinds of monsters. People inflict all kinds of pain.”

That’s very true. I know it well.

“Anyway,” he goes on when I stay silent. “I went to see my father before he died. In my mind, he was this behemoth, you know. This giant pain giver. A towering person, with hands like paddles and this face distorted in rage. I was scared. Even though I was a middle-aged man, had a son of my own, I was shaking when I went to see him.”

He walks around from his desk, and sits heavily on the other end of the couch. I turn toward him.

“But in the end, he was a tiny sliver of a man, barely a bump in the bed, pale and bald, with just this whispery voice. I sat next to him—for a while. I looked through this photo album he had by his bed. Weird. He left my mom when I was a kid. We never heard from him again. But this album was filled with pictures of me—in my football uniform, at my police academy graduation. There was even a wedding picture. Turns out Maggie had been sending him pictures of me over the years. You know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘I’ve made mistakes. I’m sorry.’”

We both sit a moment, the words hanging on the air.

Jones clears his throat, leans forward onto his thighs. “Too little, too late, of course. But still. There was something healing about that. That he was just a man who made mistakes, who didn’t know better, whose own father probably beat the crap out of him.”

I look down at my hands. I don’t want to see the pain on Jones Cooper’s face.

There’s music coming from somewhere above us, a heavy rock riff through the floor. “Your father. He was—sick,” Jones says.

“I know.”

“I’m not saying that you can or even that you should forgive him. I’m just saying that he might have some words for you that would help you not just run from the past, but resolve it. Understand it. Come to terms.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Isn’t it?”