Bette looked at her, startled.
The park where Peter Budd had fallen to his death. The park Weston and Crystal had visited so recently.
“Is that far from here?”
Frannie shook her head. “Less than a ten-minute drive. Follow the coast road and it ends right there at the park. Some beautiful hikes, but make sure to wear comfortable shoes.”
“Thanks,” Bette told her.
After Frannie returned to the bar, Bette flipped open an album. The first page revealed a five by eight photo of Matt Kelly. It looked like a senior picture. Matt wore a collared shirt, and his shaggy hair had been tamed and tucked behind his ears.
The boy bore an even more striking resemblance to Weston Meeks in the large picture. It wasn’t the same man, not at all. Matt was young and fresh faced with bright green eyes. But his wavy blond-brown hair looked similar to Wes’s. They had similar strong square jaws and wide smiles that revealed slightly imperfect teeth. Matt had a small gap between his two front teeth. Weston didn’t share that trait.
Beneath the picture, printed in bold letters on white, it said: Matt’s Senior Picture — 1974.
Bette flipped to the next page. She saw Matt straddling a motorbike. His younger sister, Lisa, sat in front of him. More pictures followed. Matt wedged between his two parents as an adolescent, holding a very serious-looking puppy covered in brown and black spots in his arms. Bette saw pictures of Matt lying on the floor as his younger brother and sister crawled over him. Pictures of Christmases, Easters, Fourths of July with Matt holding up sparklers and wearing a blue, red and white t-shirt that matched his younger siblings’.
Halfway through, she came to dance and prom photos. The last one in the book included a young Greta Claude. Her hair was short, a pixie-style cut that highlighted her large gray eyes and sharp, bony face. It was an odd hairstyle for the 1970s, when most girls had kept their hair long and straight. Other pictures of Matt’s friends revealed as much. Greta wore a long black dress that hugged her narrow frame. It made her pale skin look ashen and her light hair almost white.
The next page included Matt, Greta and their school friends. Again, Bette noted the contrast between Greta and the other girls. Greta’s peers wore long pastel dresses, some with fuller skirts or shoulders. Their hair hung long, and a few of the girls sported the puffy curls that would appear in heaps during the eighties.
Matt’s all-American boy appearance only added to the strangeness of Greta. He wore a white tuxedo and a mischievous smile. Greta’s mouth was set in a thin line, and she narrowed her eyes at the camera.
Bette wondered if the person behind the lens felt unnerved by the intensity of her glare.
She flipped through the rest of the book and started on the second album. This one included newspaper clippings carefully pressed behind the clear pages.
The first showed a grainy picture of a forest trail. The headline, Local Boy Slain in Bishop Park, jumped out in black block letters.
“I remember that.”
Bette looked up, startled at the sound of Frannie’s voice.
“Sorry to be nosy,” Frannie apologized, sliding Bette’s food onto the table.
“Did you know him?” Bette asked.
Frannie nodded.
“We weren’t friends. Matt was a jock. You know how teenagers love their labels.” Frannie rolled her eyes. “I was in the band and took art classes. Lot of good those talents did me.” Frannie laughed, gesturing at the bar.
“Such a waste of life… I don’t have kids myself, but I have two nephews and I love them more than my dogs, and damn if I don’t love those little fleabags something fierce. I can’t imagine what his parents went through. They were on the news a lot the first couple of years. His mother could barely speak. It was just terrible.”
“What did kids at school think happened?” Bette asked.
Frannie frowned and touched the article, shaking her head.
“I heard a lot of rumors. A few kids said he’d gotten involved with drug dealers and they murdered him over a debt. For a while, people were saying maybe he was seeing some other guy's girl, and the boyfriend killed him out of jealousy.”
“But he had a girlfriend, right?”
Frannie scowled and nodded.
“Frannie, I need another Bud when you get a second,” a man at the bar called.
“Give me a minute,” Frannie told Bette, hurrying over to the bar, pulling out two glass bottles and setting them on the counter in front of the guys.
When she returned, she again looked at the clipping.
“The third theory, and the most popular, was that his crazy girlfriend murdered him because he broke up with her,” Frannie continued. “After his death, Matt’s best friends insisted he planned to dump her.”
“Did that seem realistic, though? His girlfriend murdering him?”
Frannie croaked a laugh. “Not for most sixteen-year-old girls, but the one Matt Kelly was involved with would have been my first choice. Greta Claude had a mean streak.”
“What makes you say that?” Bette asked.
“I took the same art class as Matt and Greta. We painted landscapes one year, and I remember Matt complimented another girl’s painting. Penny’s. The next day we came into the class and Penny’s painting was shredded on the floor. Greta did it. I know she did. Penny was just devastated. Her mother had cancer, and Penny had told everyone the day before she wanted to give the painting to her mother as a birthday gift. Instead, it ended up in the trash bin.”
“What makes you think Greta did it?”
Frannie rubbed her neck and looked toward the lake through the window. “I saw her. I didn’t know it at the time, and I never came forward. I regret that now. It might not have mattered, but… Anyway, I was outside practicing the trombone after school, and I saw somebody in the classroom. I figured it was Mrs. Lincoln, the art teacher. I walked over to say hello. I peeked in and spotted Greta. She was standing at the front of the room, staring at everyone’s paintings. Mrs. Lincoln had hung them to dry. I ducked before she noticed me, but the minute I saw Penny’s painting torn up the next day, I knew Greta had done it.”
Bette frowned, trying to imagine a teenage girl shredding the painting meant for another student’s sick mother. It made her think of her own mother and Crystal.
A trickle of despair slipped down her throat.
“Order up,” a man called from the kitchen.
“Duty calls,” Frannie told her. “Need anything with your burger?”
Bette swallowed her grief and shook her head.
“No, I’m all set. Thank you.”
She pushed the album aside and pulled her plate toward her, but couldn’t find any desire to consume the food. After half-heartedly eating a few French fries, she returned to the photobook.
Each page contained another article.
Within two months of the killing, the headlines grew smaller and started to appear on page six or page nine. They detailed little in the way of new leads, and not a single one identified a suspect or person of interest.
A few heated editorials had been clipped — angry citizens demanding justice for Matt Kelly.
Nate Montgomery, Matt’s best friend, had written an editorial. He practically accused Greta outright, not using her name but mentioning how most murders were committed by the significant other of the deceased, and pointing out that Matt’s girlfriend had fled Marquette within weeks of his murder. He demanded to know if they all could expect to commit murder and move away to avoid justice.
Bette wondered how Sheriff Montgomery had felt about the letter, considering his own son had written it.