The Storm King(46)
When Chief Buck returned, he sat in the chair across from Nate and placed a cardboard storage box on the table between them.
“Do you have any objections to us recording this interview?” the chief asked.
Nate shook his head.
Chief Buck nodded to the mirrored glass and declared the date, time, and subject for the record. “Fourteen years ago, we interviewed you several times in connection to Lucy Bennett’s death.”
“In connection to her running away, actually.”
“At the time we believed she’d run away because—”
“Of the note she left her mother,” Nate finished. The note had shown up a few days after Lucy went missing. It’d been found under the Bennetts’ dining room table. One might suppose it’d been there all along and simply gone unnoticed in the chaos of Lucy’s disappearance. The letter itself had been vague and desperate and just what you’d expect from a teenage runaway. If you were inclined to believe Lucy was the kind of girl who’d flee her life, its few sentences would have confirmed the suspicion.
“Obviously, finding her body has forced us to reexamine the circumstances of her disappearance.”
“How do you explain the note?” Nate asked. Officially, the search for Lucy continued for weeks, but any urgency to the investigation had been sapped by the discovery of that letter. Nate wondered how much the chief now blamed himself for that.
“A ploy on the part of her killer, perhaps. A prank by children. A lot of people were in and out of the Bennetts’ house that week.”
“Surely you had the handwriting authenticated.”
“Why don’t you let me ask the questions, Nate.” The chief rubbed his eyes for some long moments. When he stopped and looked at Nate again, his face seemed freshly sharpened. He pulled six black notebooks out of the cardboard box and dropped them onto the table with a thud.
“These are Lucy Bennett’s notebooks. She wrote everything down. Everything.”
“They never found those,” Nate said, shaking his head. He and the others had worried about Lucy’s journals in the days following her disappearance. She was constantly scribbling in them. She never let even Nate read them. Everything might very well have been written in their pages. But she must have hidden them, because the journals never came up during the investigation, and Nate had searched for them himself.
“We only recently discovered them.”
“Really.” Nate didn’t believe it. They looked like the same kind of Moleskine notebooks Lucy used, but those were sold everywhere. The sheaves of cream-colored pages wedged between their black covers were worn, staggered like an old deck of cards. They clearly hadn’t been picked up at a bookstore yesterday, but Nate was sure this effect could be faked. The chief had anywhere from weeks to years to prepare for this conversation and ample time to construct useful props.
“They contain detailed accounts of your relationship with her and the crimes you committed at the time.”
“?‘Crimes’?”
“Vandalism. Breaking and entering. Destruction of property. Criminal mischief. Arson.”
Nate laughed, and this time it was the laugh that he sometimes paired with his ready smile. Pure delight. Because only a great actor could be a good liar.
“It’s all in here, Dr. McHale.” The chief patted the stack of journals.
“If those are her journals and anything like that’s in there, they’re probably just notes for her novel. You know she wanted to be a writer.”
“The events in her account match the dates of fires and floods and other incidents of vandalism around town,” the chief said.
Having their Thunder Runs come to light was undesirable, but not catastrophic. They’d been minors, and the statute of limitations had run out for nearly all of their transgressions. The burning of Adam Decker’s house could cause them trouble, but this seemed unlikely.
“Nate?”
“Sorry, just trying to figure out what Lucy might have been working on. I mean, I guess if you’re talking about serious damage, like arson, it’d all have been public knowledge. If something in the Lake catches on fire, everyone’s going to know by the next day, way before they read it in the paper. Hell, in a town like this, someone gets into a fender bender while grabbing their morning coffee at the SmartMart, everybody’s talking about it by lunch time.”
“She’s not just mentioning incidents; she’s describing how they occurred and explaining why you perpetrated them. You targeted specific people due to personal vendettas and committed some serious property damage as revenge.”
“Vendettas? Come on, Chief. Like I said, Lucy wanted to be a writer. Maybe these were exercises for her.” Nate pretended to think it over. “It sort of reminds me of those found-footage movies, you know? Lucy loved those. Remember The Blair Witch Project? I realize the whole genre’s pretty played out now, but there were a couple months when people thought that movie was real. Lucy loved that kind of thrill. That something that should be totally unbelievable could be rendered in a form that made it convincing. It just requires a little suspension of disbelief. Because the thing is, people want to believe the unbelievable. Putting it together like a book, making it look like a real-life journal of a real-life teenage girl using actual people and genuine events. It’s an interesting angle, if you think about it. The author as protagonist adds to the mystique.”