“You really think she could have done it?”
“Matt was with us that night. We were playing music in my garage after football practice. He didn’t go home until like midnight. But we hadn’t done that in months because Greta was all over him about spending every waking second with her. It seemed pretty strange that the one night he gets to hang out with us, her uncle ends up dead.”
“Did you tell your dad?”
Nate shook his head.
“Not at the time. Only later, after Matt died, did I start to connect the dots. I didn’t know Peter personally, but I heard he was a drunk and just fell in the water and died. I was seventeen and still so naïve. After Matt, though… everything changed. I changed. I quit the football team, got involved with drugs for a while.
“I moved to New York and started writing for an alternative newspaper, smoking a lot of dope. I wrote articles about Matt, but only a few of them were ever printed. I stayed away from Marquette for about five years, and then I came back. My older brother had a son, and my mom had been harping on me to come home for a visit. I was running away from this place, running away from Matt’s death and the injustice. And honestly, I was mad at my dad. Mad he didn’t go after Greta and make her pay.”
Nate leaned forward and half-heartedly shuffled the magazines together.
“Now that I’m older, I understand. Our justice system isn’t interested in guilt and innocence. It’s politics. Who’s got the biggest bank account? My dad’s as helpless as I was all those years ago. He suspected Greta too, but he couldn’t prove it — and she had money to ensure that if you so much as mentioned her name, you’d get your ass sued. He swore if we ever had physical evidence, she’d go down, but we never did.”
“What about DNA? I mean, I’ve heard about cases that were decades old that are getting solved now. Is that an option in Matt’s case or—?”
“I’ve asked my dad that too. But even if they found Greta’s DNA on Matt, it wouldn’t prove anything. They were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“But if they found her DNA on the murder weapon…” Bette insisted.
“Except they never found the knife. There was no knife at the scene,” Nate told her.
“But how could she have gotten rid of it? If she killed him and returned to a party within a half hour, where could she have hidden it?”
Nate smiled kindly.
“I hear you, Bette. And believe me, I asked those same questions after it happened. My friends and I scoured the park, the streets between there and Martin’s party. We looked through people’s trashcans. We even went out to the dump and spent half a week walking through garbage and looking for a knife or bloody clothes. Nothing. We never found a thing,” Nate confessed.
“And that never made you wonder if it wasn’t her? If maybe it was a wanderer sleeping in the park that night? A homeless guy or—”
“This is Marquette, Bette. Back then we had exactly one homeless guy, Ralph Simpson. His father owned the bowling alley and Ralph had mental problems. He slept on park benches and the beach. In the winter, he went home to his parents' house. People called him the local idiot. We’re not so crude these days, but the man wouldn’t harm a fly. That was the extent of our vagrant population around here.
”Not to get on my soapbox, but people love to blame the homeless people and, nine times out of ten, they’re the victims, not the perpetrators. Plus, my dad and his deputies interviewed half the town. If there had been a stranger in the area that night, they would have heard about it. People were devastated over Mat’s death, devastated. Everyone wanted that murder solved. People would have turned in their grandparents if they thought they were involved.” Nate’s voice rose as he spoke.
The customer who had walked in peeked around a bookshelf as if to check that everything was okay.
“Hi, Janie,” Nate called, waving.
“Hey Nate. Everything good?” The girl, no older than twenty, glanced at Bette.
“Yeah, we’re good. Grab me if you need help.”
Janie gave him a thumbs up and returned to the shelf.
“The teenagers in this town seem to think I’m the loony uncle they have to keep an eye on,” he laughed.
“Were you at the party that night? The one Greta went to?” Bette asked, returning to the subject at hand.
Nate nodded.
“Martin Bayshore, another senior in our graduating class, threw it. He got his older brother to buy us a keg of beer. I was plastered. It’s one of those things I’ve regretted. I don’t remember Greta leaving and coming back. I have one memory of her from that night. She was sitting on a sofa in the living room, and this girl from our class that everyone called Babbling Brook, because she never stopped talking, was bending Greta’s ear about some nonsense. Greta had this glazed look in her eyes like she’d tuned the girl out hours ago.” Nate shrugged. “I don’t know if that was before or after Matt died.”
“Did Greta have any friends? Anyone she was close with other than Matt?”
Nate shook his head. “Not a single one.”
“Matt’s sister said he was getting ready to break up with her. Do you know why?”
“The excuse was school, but Matt mentioned something weird to me the week before he died. He said he’d found out that Greta’s dad wasn’t dead. Apparently, Greta had told him her father committed suicide, but somehow Matt found out her dad was alive and in an institution downstate.”
“He wanted to break up with her for lying?”
“Nah.” Nate shook his head. “He realized he was in over his head with her. The lie just revealed a side to Greta that he hadn’t seen. Everyone else had seen it, but Matt had blinders on. He was starting to see the real Greta, and frankly she scared him.”
48
Then
Crystal tried to pull the window up, but it had been nailed shut. It didn’t budge. She forced her fingers under the frame and tugged.
Greta had left her untied and undrugged. She’d arrive anytime. Crystal never knew when, nor which, Greta would appear. The angry child who recalled life in the old farmhouse, death and blood and a cruel psychotic father. Or the soft Greta who stroked Crystal’s hair and spoke to her as if they were sisters. Or the adult Greta, the scorned wife whose eyes flashed with jealous rage.
They were all dangerous, all unhinged, and Crystal knew if she didn’t escape soon, she, too, would feed the monster in the forest, the fictitious beast who probably lived only in the mind of the insane woman who’d been groomed to believe it would devour her.
Crystal stared at the floor searching for a ridge or a loose board. But the planks were smooth and firmly locked together.
Heaving, she pulled the bed aside and got on her hands and knees. Near the wall, she felt a slight give in a board. She stuck her fingernails into the crevice and gently pried it up, shocked when the board lifted. A small metal box lay in the dark cavern beneath the board.
The box, once silver, was now streaked by rust.
It screeched quietly as she lifted the lid.
A spiral notebook lay inside, along with other items; trinkets, a bracelet made from pink and white plastic beads, a single pearl earring, a stick of bubble gum hard and flinty beneath her fingers. In the corner of the box, she dug out a misshapen gold ring with two stones, one a half moon diamond and the other a ruby in the shape of the sun.
Crystal opened the book and saw big loopy writing that took up two lines rather than one. It was a diary, and on the inner cover were the initials MRC.