Page 54 of Murder Road

The waitress put two plates of shrimp and rice in front of us. “I’m guessing it didn’t work,” I said to Carla.

“God, no,” she replied. “It was doomed to failure, starting with the fact that half of us snuck alcohol to camp. Shannon was my cabin roommate. We’d do the stupid Frisbee games, then drink vodka after lights out.” She gave us a smile that didn’t have much humor in it. “Vodka has no smell, so no one knows you’re drinking it. We were just young and stupid enough to think that nobody noticed. In fact, nobody cared.”

I pictured two girls in a cabin in the early seventies, sunburned and half-drunk. “Except for the dry-out part, it sounds fun,” I said.

“Oh, it was,” Carla agreed. “The funny thing is, we’d both signed up with good intentions. I’d been arrested for a DUI, and Shannon had a baby she wanted to dry out for. But once we got to dry-out camp, we forgot about all of that.” She sighed. “You said you think she might have ended up north somewhere? Why are you looking into this?”

I gave her one of my best smiles. “We’re on our honeymoon,” I said. “It turns out the town we’re staying in has an unsolved mystery of a murdered girl from 1976. We thought we’d try our hand at solving it.”

Carla’s eyes, lined with black eyeliner, looked from me to Eddie and back again. “That’s a strange honeymoon,” she said, her voice flat. She’d been excited at first that someone was interested in hearing about her friend. Now she was thinking twice.

“It’s kind of a hobby,” Eddie said. “We heard the locals talk about the mystery. There’s even a legend that the girl’s ghost haunts the road where she was found. We got caught up in it and thought we’d try to solve it. I guess we got tired of playing Scrabble.”

When you’re lying, use as much of the truth as possible. When he had to, Eddie was as good at it as me.

“A ghost?” Carla straightened a napkin on the table. “Jesus. In all this time, I never thought about Shannon’s ghost being somewhere, wandering around. That’s gonna keep me up at night.”

“The girl in Coldlake Falls was found with a letter jacket from Midland High,” I said.

“Sure, Shannon had one of those.” Carla adjusted the napkin again, unaware that she had just made Eddie and me sit up straight in our seats. “She dropped out of high school in grade ten, but she got the jacket from some boyfriend or other. Wore it one day and never gave it back. I loved Shannon, but you had to watch your things around her, especially nice things. She had a habit of taking them.” She finally stopped fidgeting with the napkin and put her hand to her cheek as a wave of emotion came over her carefully made-up face. “My God, it’s been so long since I talked about Shannon. Since I thought about these memories. Sometimes I feel like she wasn’t real. She was gone one day, and it was like she was erased. No one even cared.”

“Why not?” Eddie’s voice was gentle. “Did she have family?”

“Her mother was dead,” Carla said. “She stayed with her father sometimes, but they fought. He got mad when she got pregnant with no boyfriend in the picture. She’d met a guy at the movies one day, and a couple hours later, she was pregnant. She said she did it because he seemed nice.” She sighed again. “She never saw the boy again, didn’t even have his last name. Her father said she should have an abortion. Shannon said no.” Carla shook her head. “She had a hard time when the baby came. She tried to stay sober, but nothing ever took. She was doing drugs, too. I mean, there was no question that she was kind of crazy. But I liked her because I was crazy, too.”

“Crazy how?” I asked.

Carla raised her eyes to mine, ready to be defensive. Whatever she saw there made her change her mind. I didn’t judge crazy. I never would. I knew it too well.

Carla shrugged, closing off the question. “She didn’t talk much about it, but I knew she’d had episodes. She’d been given medication, but she hated it and stopped taking it. She’d tried to kill herself twice before we met.” She pressed her lips together briefly. “I’m not going to go into my life, but let’s just say we understood each other. And I’ve been much better since Prozac came along.”

“What happened to her?” Eddie asked.

Carla shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“We want your version.”

There was a pause. Carla pressed her hand briefly to her cheek again, then dropped it. “We kept in touch after dry-out camp. She was the person I called whenever I felt like the rest of the world didn’t understand me, would never understand me. When I thought it was all too hard. I was that person for her, too. She was trying to take care of her baby, but she was having a rough time. He got taken and put into foster care, and she wanted to get him back. When she was in her right mind, she knew she needed help.” She looked into the distance again, her face hard. “She got clean. She told me she’d been clean for nearly three months, and I believed her. She was going to take some courses, get a job, turn her life around. Things were going to change, she said. She was determined.”

We waited. “And then?” Eddie asked.

“And then she stopped calling. When I called, her phone was disconnected. I thought maybe she hadn’t paid the bill, so I went to see her. And I found out she was gone.”

“Gone,” I said.

Carla nodded. “She’d left, saying she was going on a trip to find herself. She was going to have one trip to see the country, to live life. Then she was going to come home and get her kid back. The phone bill and the rent on her apartment were due, so the landlord had moved in and the phone had already been shut down. And that was the end of Shannon, forever. I never heard from her again.” She turned her head and looked at us, her jaw twitching. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that Shannon just took off and never came back. You’re thinking she was irresponsible, an addict, and a bad mother.” She leaned forward, eyes blazing. “I know she was sober, that she was planning to come home. No one has ever believed me, but I know. She was planning to start a real life, a happy life, one that included her son. You think she left her kid for twenty years and never came back to find him? She didn’t. Because she’s dead.”

I thought of that unidentified body in a ditch at the side of the road, all those years ago. A body with a Midland High jacket. If you wanted to lose the real world and find yourself, Hunter Beach was a place to go.

Was it possible that the Lost Girl was Shannon Haller? The dates matched and the jacket matched. But hundreds of people had a Midland High jacket. And the police weren’t even certain that the jacket had belonged to the unidentified girl.

Maybe we were chasing shadows.

“Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to kill Shannon?” I asked.

That got us a bitter smile from Carla. “What do you want me to say? Let me guess. ‘No one would ever have wanted to hurt Shannon! She was so beautiful, so kind! She rescued baby animals!’ ” She shook her head. “Here’s the truth, honey. Before she got sober, Shannon was a liar, a thief, and an addict. She neglected her baby and she liked to get wasted. She didn’t work often, and when she did, she blew the money. She was sick in the head, like I was. Anyone could have killed her—a drug dealer, an ex-boyfriend, someone she stole from. She was the kind of person the world just throws away.”

“But you cared about her,” I said.

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