Girl in Snow(58)

Upon later examination—the diary was only half full, with little girl poems scrawled uselessly across each page. It told them nothing. But toward the end, a ragged edge: one page had been ripped out. They’d searched the car carefully. Found nothing.

They brought the art teacher in anyway. Took him back to the station house, where news vans waited, hungry and insistent. Russ refused each flash, staring into the recesses of the bright white lights, and thought: he had made two promises. One to his wife, and one to a ghost. He’d promised both he would protect the people they loved most. Russ thought of Cameron, how he’d pushed him on the swings at the very same playground Lucinda had been found on—that child gaze, alarmingly old. Russ knew, if it came to it, which suspect he’d relinquish to the greedy hands of the police: Ivan. He refuses to think too hard about why.



Now they have the art teacher in the same seat Ivan occupied yesterday. A sterile conference room. Various acquaintances of Lucinda’s shuffle in and out of the station house, each bearing useless information. Outside, news vans speculate.

Can you explain the notes we found in your car? the detective asks the art teacher.

The girls in my sixth-period class, the teacher says. They think it’s funny to pass notes about me. I think it’s inappropriate. I confiscated them.

One note reads, and I quote—Do you think he’d paint me like one of his French girls? Can you explain this, sir?

I told you. It’s this group of girls. Beth DeCasio and her friends. Kaylee, Ana. They think it’s funny. I don’t.

Okay. So—was Lucinda Hayes friends with these girls?

Yes.

Is it possible she could have participated in these games?

Yes, I suppose so.

Did she ever hint at an inappropriate relationship with you?

No.

Are you sure?

I mean, it could have been any of them. I don’t know.

So you’re saying: Lucinda could have written these suggestive notes, which you then took and kept in your car along with her diary, which just happens to be missing a page?

I didn’t know the diary was missing a page. I was bringing it here. And about the notes, I don’t know, okay? I don’t know.

You expect us to believe that?

I don’t know anything.



When Lee’s trial began to take shape, during the intricate volley of he-saids and she-saids—before they’d known that Hilary would refuse to testify, before Russ could fathom that his friend would simply pick up and leave—Russ confronted Lee.

Lee had gotten out on bail. Mostly, he stayed in the house with the curtains drawn shut. Outside, Lee was a pariah. A criminal. Dangerous. He was all these things inside too, but Cynthia’s form of cruelty was different from the points and stares the population of Broomsville showered on him as they ushered their children out of sight. Cynthia was cruel in the only way she knew how. Disregard.

Amidst the confusion of the trial, Cynthia took a part-time job at the craft store downtown. She could be seen through the window from the coffee shop across the street, picking through bins of beads, searching for crippling deformities—tumors bulging from smooth glass surfaces, bubbles in the center of gold-flecked orbs. She could be seen in the park for hours in the afternoon, pushing Cameron on the swings, his little hands frozen red, nose runny, in desperate need of a hot bath. She could be seen everywhere but her own home, where a monster took residence in her bed, beneath the quilt her grandmother had sewn by hand in a pattern Russ could dictate from memory. The force was under strict orders not to visit Lee.

Russ rang their doorbell like any other visitor. He had sat in the car outside for twenty-five minutes, hands in his lap, trying so hard to remember. All those lazy afternoons on the cliff, meals on that checkered tablecloth, never-ending games of gin rummy. How can you let all that go, even in the face of such incriminating evidence? You can’t. You can’t.

Lee opened the door, wide. Not surprised to see Russ, sheepish on the porch. Russ followed him inside, and they sat in the cluttered living room. Russ perched—dainty, like a woman—on the arm of the leather chair.

His heart, a patter. A gallop. A roar.

Please, Lee said, from the other side of the room. You’re my best friend, Russ. You have to help me. The evidence has to go. They’re trying to use the type of soil on her shoes to convict me. Please, for Cynthia. For Cameron. You have to help.

Lee walked right up to Russ. Came closer, closer. That gallop—that roar—Russ could kill this man. His oldest and dearest. But Russ kept still as Lee put one warm palm to Russ’s stubbly cheek. Cupped it there.

Protecting, always protecting.



Russ went in after hours. Late in the evening. It wasn’t hard to get into the evidence room, one of the Broomsville Police Department’s many failings. Russ knew the password from watching the receptionist type it in, and she kept the swipe key in a safe beneath her desk, which remained consistently unlocked.

It didn’t take Russ long to find the box. He pulled only the essentials: The bloodied blouse. (Plaid, silver buttons.) The pair of cheap cotton panties. (Unstained, but catalogued anyway.) Two high-heeled boots. (Both covered in the soft soil that caked the plains surrounding the stretch of highway Lee had patrolled, alone, on the night in question.)

Russ drove around aimlessly, evidence of Hilary Jameson’s assault shoved in his trunk like a body. Broomsville was so small that night, as Russ wound through suburban streets. All the houses were the same; new developments from the same contractor. Year after year. In the dusk, the peaks of the houses were miniature mountains. Russ drove in circles for hours until, finally, he stopped behind the public library.