As she disconnected, she felt like hurling her phone across the office. She couldn’t believe how much she’d let him get to her.
Her next class was in just a few minutes, and she needed to cool down and to splash some water on her face, which she could sense was beet-red. After gathering her things, she hurried to the ladies’ room at the end of the hall.
As soon as she entered the small vestibule, she heard a noise coming from one of the stalls. She realized after a moment that someone was vomiting. The toilet flushed then, and a second later she heard the person emerge and turn on the water at one of the sinks. Phoebe stepped inside, expecting to find a student there, a girl with a painful secret perhaps.
But it was Val who was standing at the basin, dabbing at her mouth with a tissue. She made eye contact with Phoebe in the mirror for a brief second, then lowered her eyes and dropped the tissue into her purse. Was Val ill? Phoebe wondered.
“Hello, Val,” Phoebe said. “Is everything all right?”
“What do you mean?” Val asked curtly. She was fishing in her purse for something, and seconds later pulled out a lipstick.
“I just thought that—well, maybe you weren’t feeling well.”
“I feel fine,” Val said. She turned around finally, and Phoebe saw that she indeed had been sick. Her skin was white and waxlike, and her eyes were bloodshot, exactly the way they might appear if she’d just been busy hurling her breakfast into a toilet bowl.
“But thanks for asking,” Val said, turning back to the mirror. She uncapped the lipstick and swiped a plum color on her lips. “How are you doing, by the way? Still recovering from that nasty spill?”
“Much better, thank you.”
Val tossed the tube of lipstick back in her purse. “Well, have a good day,” she said.
“You, too,” Phoebe said as Val brushed by her. Val was dressed down a bit today, Phoebe noticed—black pants and a tight black jersey turtleneck. Simple dangling silver earrings. Clearly she wasn’t feeling at the top of her game.
Though she had ten minutes before her next class started, Phoebe parked herself in the corridor outside the classroom. She was hoping Jen would come early and she could ambush her, arranging a moment to talk again. But by the time the class officially started, Jen had yet to arrive. Ten minutes into the class, Phoebe realized she definitely wasn’t coming. But her friend Rachel was there, keeping her eyes glued to her laptop.
Phoebe used the same tack she had in the earlier class—a newsroom-style discussion about the campus situation and how it should be covered, followed by assignments for everyone. This group of students seemed equally engaged by the process. It’s taken a series of tragedies for me to figure out how to connect with them, she thought, but at least I’ve done it.
“All right, lunch beckons,” she said when class was over. “Writers need to eat, too.”
Phoebe packed up her things quickly and put her coat on. Was Jen purposely avoiding her? she wondered. Or was she off in a panic someplace because of Blair and Gwen’s arrest?
Phoebe hurried to her car. She’d been anxious to find the spot along the road where Hutch’s killer had parked, and this was finally a good opportunity. Alec’s words were still weighing on her, railroading her attention, but she needed to stay focused. Something was continuing to gnaw at her about Hutch’s death, and she needed to figure out what it was. Seeing the spot where the killer parked might provide a clue, she thought, or spark an idea.
She knew it would be tough for her to drive by Hutch’s place, but as she neared his driveway, the force of her reaction took her by surprise. A sob caught in her throat, and she choked back tears.
It didn’t take long to find the spot she was looking for—or where the police suspected the car had been parked. That was because of yellow police tape. The cordoned-off area was a deep dirt shoulder of the road about half a mile past Hutch’s driveway. Phoebe parked just beyond it, under two evergreen trees, and climbed out of her car. Michelson had better not drive by in the next five minutes, she told herself, or he might drop her in a vat of boiling oil.
After reaching the spot, she sidled up to the tape and searched with her eyes. There was room inside the tape for a car to park and be safely off the road, and though the car wouldn’t have been hidden from sight, anyone driving by at night would have only seen the dark hulk of its shape.
She lowered her eyes to the ground. There were no tire tracks, but the ground had been disturbed—almost as if someone had swept the dirt. At first glance it seemed that after returning to their car, the girls had driven it up the road a bit, returned on foot to the shoulder, and quickly swept the ground here. Pretty clever. But was that really something Blair and Gwen would have been smart enough to do?
Phoebe raised her eyes and let them roam the woods beyond the shoulder. She realized she must be standing fairly close to where she had fallen and passed out. She shuddered, remembering her desperate scramble in the dark.
She returned to her car and slipped into the passenger seat, trying not to jar her elbow. There was one more stop she wanted to make.
She headed back into town, rounded the college, and then drove north to the antique store, the Big Red Barn. There were just a few customers this afternoon. As she climbed from her car, Phoebe noticed that most of the Halloween decorations had been taken down, but some tired corn stalks were still leaning against the building.
Traffic whizzed by on the highway, and after waiting for an opening, Phoebe hurried across to the river side of the road and turned right, in the direction of the spot she’d stood in last week. It was deserted today, except for a red cardinal bobbing along a tree branch that had been stripped of its leaves. This, she realized, was the last place she’d seen Hutch alive.
She had planned to fight her way through the trees and underbrush to secure a closer look at the spot where Trevor Harris’s body had been found, but as she approached the woody area directly in front of the river, she saw that there was still yellow police tape looped through the trees. At the rate things were going, Phoebe thought, the cops were about to go through the county’s entire supply of it.
She returned to the area across from the Big Red Barn and perched on one of the gray weathered picnic tables. There was police tape here, too, blocking off an area farther ahead along the riverbank. The muddy Winamac chugged along quietly, clearly oblivious to all the misery it had caused.
Phoebe glanced around at the other tables and the two blackened stand-up grills. She wondered how long it had been since one of the grills had been fired up. And yet it was clear from the scuffed ground that the area was used frequently by picnickers and nature lovers. And someone else—there was a very good chance, she realized, that this was where Trevor had gone into the river. The access to the water was so much better here than by the wooded area. His body would have drifted away briefly and then been snatched by the tree roots farther down.
And Lily, too, Phoebe realized. Her body might have been snagged close to where Trevor’s body lay, reuniting the two briefly in death before it was dislodged several days later and made its way downstream.
If you were going to toss someone into the river, this would be a perfect place to do it, Phoebe thought. It was totally isolated. No one would hear any screams or the sounds of a struggle. Rows of trees lined the road, so that the bike path and the picnic area were blocked from the view of passing motorists. If Lily and Trevor had been murdered, it meant a car had been involved, just as with Hutch—and that the killer was pretty familiar with the area. And yet, she realized, Wesley hadn’t been taken to this particular spot.