The House in the Pines(7)

So, what exactly am I looking at here?” Dan had his glasses on but seemed bewildered by the video on Maya’s computer, and the situation in general. He’d woken at seven to find her pacing the living room, and now, rather than explain herself, she was showing him a video.

“Frank Bellamy,” she said as, on her screen, the couple entered the diner.

“Who?”

She and Dan had gone over their respective dating histories early on, but Maya hadn’t told him about Frank. She had tried to force him from her mind, along with the rest of that summer, the summer she either witnessed the murder of her best friend or lost her mind completely. “I met him after high school,” she said. “We sort of dated.” The relationship had lasted all of three weeks, ending the day Aubrey died—or, more accurately, changing that day into something else, a fear that warped every aspect of Maya’s life.

Dan raised an eyebrow and smiled sideways at her. “What is this, cyberstalking? Should I be jealous?”

“Just watch.” She wanted his unbiased eye. Dan was sailing through law school, as he was good at picking up on details that others might miss and understanding how they fit into a story.

“Tell me if you notice anything . . . off about Frank,” she said.

Dan’s smile faded as he took in her expression. He turned back to the video, settling back on their couch while Maya perched beside him, bare legs tucked beneath her. She couldn’t believe she was showing him this video.

She wanted, on the one hand, to forget Frank, as she had all but managed to do until a few hours ago. She wanted to reassure herself that she was imagining things, seeing connections where there were none. It would have been easy to have hidden the video, not just from Dan but from herself as well, and gone on acting like her biggest problem was running out of Klonopin.

But then Maya thought of the dead woman’s face, not so different from her own, only younger and probably more innocent. How improbable that both she and Aubrey, seven years apart, would drop dead in Frank’s presence. She had to imagine, or at least hope, that Dan would find it suspicious.

“She looks like you,” he said.

There was no denying Frank had a type.

“Bit of a rambler,” he said.

“He was a real storyteller . . .”

The woman on-screen pitched forward. “What the hell?” Dan watched Frank shake the woman by the shoulders, shouting without sound. “Wait,” Dan said. “She’s not . . .”

“Yes!” Maya hugged herself, squeezed the ends of her sleeves in her fists. “I looked her up. Cristina Lewis. She was twenty-two.”

“I don’t get it. What happened?”

Maya slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. But I think he . . .” She almost couldn’t say it after so long; she’d buried the words deep. “I think he did it.”

Dan’s eyes went wide. “Did what? Killed her?”

She nodded.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

He waited for her to go on. She swallowed. “Do you remember when I told you about my friend Aubrey?”

“Of course. The one who died.” He spoke gently, knowing this was hard for her.

Maya had told him about Aubrey, and that she was dead, but she hadn’t answered the one question everyone has upon learning someone’s died: How did it happen? Maya hadn’t wanted to talk about it then, but now she had to. “Aubrey died,” she said, “just like Cristina. She just . . . tipped over. I saw it happen.”

The incredulity on Dan’s face was encouraging. “What did the medical examiner say?”

“There’s this term for when they can’t figure out what killed a person. Sudden unexplained death. It’s extremely rare and almost always happens when the person is asleep. They just never wake up.”

“Wow. That’s . . . terrible.”

“But here’s the thing. Aubrey was awake when it happened. And she was talking to Frank.”

Dan leaned closer to the laptop screen, rewound the video, and rewatched the part where Cristina died. Then he watched it again while Maya watched him, hoping he would catch something she’d missed.

But when he spoke again, he sounded perplexed. “So how did he kill her?”

It’s like he has some kind of power . . . That was what she’d said to the police when she was seventeen, but now she knew better. She had to sound rational. “I never figured it out,” she said, “but if anyone was capable of it, it was Frank.”

Dan furrowed his brow. “The police didn’t question him?”

“They let him go.” Her shoulders sagged.

“Okay . . . and what about Cristina Lewis? What do you know about how she died?”

She heard the doubt creeping into his voice and tasted the old anger that had seized her whenever anyone—the police, Dr. Barry, her mom—didn’t believe her. “Here,” she said, pulling up a Berkshire Eagle article on her computer. “This is all I could find.” She watched him read the article, knowing it wasn’t going to help.

The article said that Cristina was from Utah, had been a painter, and worked as a ticket seller at the Berkshire Museum. Either her death was truly as inexplicable as it appeared, or not everything was being shared with the press.