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How many children do youhave?
Do you have any brothers orsisters?
I think of the friendships that won’t ever happen, the future marriages that will never happen, the children who won’t be born, the cousins who will grow up wondering what it’s like to have someone else who shares their family line.
A murderer doesn’t just destroy the person they kill. They obliterate a piece of humanity. Nothing draws people together like joy and celebration. Nothing shows how intricately connected we all already are like death.
When a person dies, particularly if they are murdered, everyone in their closest circle feels the agony of their loss. But it doesn’t stop with them. Each of them has their own circle, and what they are going through cuts through them. And then each of those people affects the people they encounter, and it continues on until every person has been touched, every person has been influenced in some way. Even if it is only the faintest touch of change, they are changed.
Murder is like taking a droplet of poisoned ink and dropping it into a pool of crystal water and watching it spread until every drop is tainted.
“I’m pretty sure I already know your answer, but you don’t happen to know where Cornelia’s Home for Unwed Mothers is, do you?” I ask when I’ve gotten over the initial blow of not having any of the information available to me that Ineed.
“I wish I did,” Grace, the librarian, tells me with a regretful expression. “I’ve never heard of it. It’s definitely not anywhere aroundhere.”
“Alright. Thank you.” I hesitate. “How about articles about the summer camp opening this year? Did those papers get stolen or damaged, too?”
Her eyes brighten and she straightens up like a thought has buoyed her. “No. Those papers are fine. They aren’t in the archives like these. Not yet. I keep recent copies available for a few months after they areprinted.”
“That’s fantastic. Can I see whatever youhave?”
She nods and hurries off, coming back a few moments later with several papers.
“This is everything I could find right off the bat. You’re welcome to bring them with you. I have other copies of all of these. There might be a couple of other things. If you can leave me a phone number, I can call you if I find anythingelse.”
“Yes. Please. I live in Sherwood, but I will give you my home number and I can get here in less than an hour. If I don’t answer, call Detective Garrison at the Cherry Hill police department to leave a message for me. If I’m not home, it means I’m probablyhere.”
I write down my home phone number and then take the business card detective Garrison gave me with his own information out of my pocket so I can write that down as well. I thank her again, take the papers, and leave the library with Sam and Xavier.
“I could have called Dean,” Xavier says a few minutes after we’ve left thedriveway.
“Why would you call Dean?” I ask. “He’s got his own case to deal with. I don’t need him to leave that to help me withthis.”
“No, I meant from camp. I didn’t have to get into the canoe with you. If the two of you had gotten eaten, I could have just called him. He would have gotten mehome.”
Xavier has an amazing talent for carrying long threads of conversations across hours and even days. He frequently forgets to catch people up with his thoughts, and sometimes even skips the entire beginning of the conversation altogether. It happens in his brain and he just figures he’s said it out loud. You learn to keep up after a while.
“I mean, yeah, that’s an option,” I shrug. “He would have made sure you got home. But that’s assuming you would know where he was and could call him. And the phone lines at the camp werecut.”
“Right.” He thinks about this for a few seconds. “Getting eaten as a group it is, then.”
“It’s always good to have a contingency plan,” Samsays.
Now it’s my turn to skip the beginning of the conversation. “The phone,” I say. “The phone lines werecut.”
“Yes. We just established that. I see the flaws in my plan,” Xavier says.
“No, that’s not what I mean. Mike specifically told us he was in his office working all afternoon and evening. That he fills out a lot of forms and makes phone calls. Now, I don’t expect that he was making phone calls as late as the campfire, but if we can find out when the last time he called somebody was, it can narrow down a timeline as towhenthose phone lines were cut. Then we can find out when the lines at the Barrett house were cut. That will give us a timeline of when the killer made contact with those locations,” Isay.
“That’s brilliant,” Sam says. “Let’s go to the police station. We can have Detective Garrison contact the phone company. They might be willing to just give over the records, but we might need awarrant.”
“I hope they’re feeling cooperative. We don’t have days we can waste waiting for the records,” I comment.
“Dean needs a car phone,” Xavier says, staring out the window so I don’t know if he’s saying it to us or just ingeneral.
“The phone company is going to get us the records as quickly as they can. I’m still going to request a warrant, just in good faith, but they think it’s important enough to get them to me without the delay,” Garrison announces as he comes into the conferenceroom.
“That’s great,” Isay.
