Snow Creek(51)
“Honestly,” she goes on, lingering on the word that liars have the hardest time saying with any volition, “I didn’t think much of what she wrote. It was the same kind of teenage angst Carrie and I reveled in when we were her age.”
“What did she write?”
“The usual. I wish my mom or dad would die in a car crash. That kind of thing.”
Her eyes widen some. She wants to say more. I want her to, too.
“All right, it seemed more like a list of ways to get rid of her folks. Not just I hate the world. I made a photocopy. Gave the entire book to the detectives in Port Angeles.”
She pulls a piece of paper from her purse and hands it to me.
She’s right. It is a list.
There are a dozen methods listed, detailing the different ways that Ellie could get rid of her parents. Some have stars against them. Some have been crossed out. It’s like she was trying to decide the best way. Her thought process, fantasy or not, seemed to err on the side of less violent murders. Poison was a possibility. It had a star. Overdosing on drugs also was underlined.
Drowning in a boating accident was the clear favorite. Two stars and two underlines.
She drew an arrow to combine the overdosing and the boating accident.
“It’s what happened,” Laurna says.
I scan her eyes. I think she might be right. I replay things I heard and saw. I think about how Sarah touched her brother, so tenderly. Too tenderly, I remember thinking. I remember the yelling that Ruth reported hearing the night after the memorial and how she told him to go back to bed. And how he leaned in to whisper in her ear. Something else struck me as odd: The first time I saw Joshua he was wearing the Miller beer T-shirt, and the next time she was wearing it.
But if that is Ellie, where is Sarah Wheaton?
I ask Laurna if I can duplicate her niece’s note, and she follows me to the copy room. While the old machine flashes to copy, I make plans to drive out to the Wheaton place.
“Are you staying in town?”
“At the Seaport Inn,” she says. “My husband and I. Hans thinks I’m being silly about all of this. Out of my mind, he repeated all the way here from Wenatchee. You don’t think I am, do you, Detective?”
I don’t know.
“Grief is powerful,” I tell her. “I also know sincerity when I see it. I’ll check it out. I’ll call you at the Seaport.”
She grasps my hand and squeezes. “Thank you. I wouldn’t bother you if I wasn’t so sure. My sister and her husband weren’t perfect, though they did the best they could.”
“No one’s perfect, but how do you mean?”
“Hudson was super strict. Wouldn’t let Ellie date. Talk to boys. Grounded her when he caught her. Carrie just let that happen. I guess she didn’t want for her daughter what she’d had for herself. She was pregnant when they married. She was seventeen when she had Ellie. Hudson was the other half of the equation, of course, but he really put the blame on her.”
Thirty-Three
After Laurna departs, I do what everyone does when they want to find out more about a potential date, a neighbor, or a teenage girl with a serious hatred for her parents. I track Ellie’s digital footprints on Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok.
I couldn’t get into her TikTok, but the other social media usual suspects are an easy enough pathway to find more information.
Ellie Burbank’s Instagram feed is not private and is filled with mostly those hook-armed full body shots or the duck-lips pose that girls are certain makes them look sexy. I study the photos. There is no denying that the face on my laptop looks an awful lot like Sarah. The head shape, facial features are right. Hair color is off, but I’ve had a fair amount of experience dyeing my hair. The other thing that strikes me is the amount of makeup. Where Sarah favored the no-makeup look, Ellie is a true believer in heavy application. No light touch for her. Her eyelids are pink and gold hues with glitter, and her lashes are blue and long enough to leave mascara trailings on the face of her phone when taking a selfie.
It could be her.
Her aunt would know better than I do, I think. Or maybe the tragic loss of her sister hurt Laurna to such a grave degree that she’s looking for a reason, or someone, to blame.
My pulse quickens a little as I read a post Ellie Burbank made last year.
My parents are so phony. Everyone thinks that they are good people. They go to church and act all perfect. If one of their friends knew the truth, they’d never talk to them again. I feel like a dumbass for ever looking up to them.
I scroll through others, more benign in content. Posts about her dreams or her crushes, mostly Bieber and Drake and a couple about Halsey. I scroll more and see rants about being homeschooled and how she’s so lonely being stuck studying in the kitchen with only one hour a day internet time.
I look at the timestamp on the posts. They were all uploaded between seven and eight p.m.
At least they let me do this without their eyes all over me. I know they have a net nanny or something like that on my laptop. I know how to empty my history, leaving just a few things that won’t tip off my feelings for them. They won’t let me have a smartphone. Ha ha.
Two things cross my mind. I wonder how it was so easy for me to get into Ellie’s Facebook page if she was so smart about keeping her parents out? Had she changed her privacy settings? And when?