Page 54 of What Have You Done?

‘What did the text say?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We have to find it first,’ Shelby says. ‘You have to make him tell you where it is!’ Her eyes are wild and her voice unnatural. ‘You have to get rid of it!’

Edward is tortured. ‘But is it the right thing to do?’ he whispers. ‘If he killed her—’ He can’t go on.

‘We don’t have a choice!’ she whispers back fiercely. ‘This is our son! We can’t let him go to prison for the rest of his life!’

‘He won’t tell me.’ Edward shakes his head in defeat. ‘I tried. In the car on the way home. You know how stubborn he can be. He denies everything. But he’s told so many lies.’

‘What are we going to do?’ she asks plaintively.

‘Maybe he hid the phone somewhere in that field where he went last night. I know where the field is; he told me. Maybe I’ll go out there and look around.’

‘How are you going to find a cell phone in a field?’ she whispers desperately.

‘I don’t know! Do you have any better ideas?’

But she didn’t.

Edward waits until dark, then gets in the truck, which they’ve searched but not taken away, leaving his shattered wife at home with their son, who is holed up again in his bedroom. He doesn’t tell Cameron where he’s going, or even that he’s leaving the house. Edward brings a strong flashlight with him. He drives out of town, and down the country roads to where Pickering Road intersects with Town Line, about ten minutes from Fairhill. He is relieved no one is around. It’s completely dark, except for his own headlights.

He drives slowly until he finds the field he’s looking for, right where Cameron had said it was. He sees the open gate, bumps into the field, and turns immediately to the right, pulling into the corner, which is sheltered on two sides by thick trees along the fence lines. He turns off the ignition and sits in the utter darkness, listening to the ticking of the engine. Nobody can see him here. Nobody would have been able to see his son and Diana in this truck either.

Slowly, with a feeling of dread, Edward gets out of the truck and begins to search. Perhaps the police have searched here already, if it’s not far from the field where the body was found; he doesn’t know. If they did, they didn’t find anything. If Cameron hid the phone, it’s probably somewhere along the fence line, not in the open field. He starts from the corner and goes first in one direction, then the other. He looks for hollow logs, large stones that seem to have been disturbed, anything. He looks for cavities in trees, hidden nooks in branches. He spends two hours searching, until he is frozen to the bone, but he finds nothing.

Finally, he gets back into the truck, defeated.

As Edward pulls left out of the field onto the gravel road, he spots the headlights of another vehicle far behind him, turning onto the same road. Shit, shit, shit. Where did they come from? It was deserted a second ago. Edward tries to remain calm. Maybe the other driver didn’t see him come out of the field at all. But he panics – he hits the gas and floors it. He wants to get the hell out of here. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s been anywhere near where Diana was found.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

ROY RESSLER IS on his way to town to pick up some ice cream to go with the apple pie Susan has made. He likes to have something sweet with the late-night news before bed. He’s hoping the drive will take his mind off his troubles.

At the end of his long driveway, as he’s turning left onto the rural road, he sees what looks like the lights of a vehicle coming out of one of his fields. It startles him. Nobody has any reason to be in his fields – they’re private property. He immediately thinks of Diana, so brutally murdered and left in another one of his fields along this same road. He sees the red taillights of the vehicle ahead of him and tries to catch up to it, but it’s too far in front of him and puts on an impressive burst of speed and disappears. By the time Roy gets to the crossroads in his old truck, there are three possible directions the other vehicle could have taken, and he has no idea which way it went.

Roy never makes it to the store. When he arrives at the police station, he’s got himself all worked up. He worries that there might be another girl, dumped in one of his fields, and he feels a terrible sense of urgency.

The detectives aren’t there, but officers from the state police are available to talk to him. He tells them what he saw, but he can’t give them a description of the vehicle at all. ‘There’s no good reason for anyone to be in one of my fields at night,’ he says anxiously.

‘Do you remember exactly which field it was?’ one of the officers asks him.

Roy nods emphatically. ‘Yes.’ He knows his fields like the back of his hand. He’s known them all his life.

‘Let’s go take a look,’ the officer says.

Roy gets into his truck and two officers follow him in a police cruiser. When they reach the field, they park on the side of the road and get out of their vehicles. ‘How far is it,’ the officer asks Roy, ‘from here to the field where you found her?’

‘Under half a mile,’ Roy says, ‘down this same road.’

The officer studies the entrance to the field with a strong flashlight. ‘Tyre tracks,’ he says.

‘I told you,’ Roy says, feeling vindicated. But mostly he’s afraid. If someone has dropped another dead girl on his property, he’s not sure he can survive it.

‘I’m calling Stone,’ the officer says to his partner. ‘He’s going to want a thorough search.’

Paula is quiet and thoughtful all evening. She’s worried about her daughter, Taylor. She saw her sitting alone again today at lunchtime, on a bench in the hall outside the cafeteria. She had her lunch beside her, and she was reading a book. Students passed her, going in and out of the cafeteria, without talking to her, without even seeing her. It broke Paula’s heart.

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