Page 16 of Little Stolen Memories

“I missed my parents. They couldn’t afford to visit more than once a year, and as time passed, it became harder and harder to be so far away.”

She sat on the bed, and I took a seat beside her. “How long have you been back?”

“Guess it was 2009 or so. I moved to Lone Pine. In my first week there, I met a woman named Lelah. A couple of months later, we moved in together, and we’ve been roommates for the last ten years.”

I’d heard of it before, but I’d never been.

“Lone Pine’s in California, right?” I asked.

Cora nodded. “It’s a five-hour drive from here, which makes it easy for my parents to visit. Well, it was easy before my dad became ill.”

She went silent, and I waited, remembering how she’d hesitated when mentioning her father’s illness at my office.

I didn’t want to push.

“My dad’s in the hospital,” she said. “He … ahh, he has late-stage pancreatic cancer. I guess he’s known for several months, but my parents didn’t know how to tell me. Doctor thinks he has three, maybe four months to live, at most. Anyway, let’s talk about something else, okay?”

“Okay, sure.”

I thought about the best way to segue away from the topic of her father, and I uttered the first thing that came to mind.

“How did you meet your roommate, Lelah?” I asked.

“At a self-defense class. She was the instructor. She’s one of the toughest women I’ve ever met. I’ve learned so much from her.” Cora pushed up from the bed and walked over to her nightstand, where she removed a key, which was dangling from a rainbow-colored wrist coil. “This was my key to the cabin. It was the … uhh … key I had the night I … you know, the key I had with me that night. It’s been buried in this drawer of junk ever since.”

She handed it to me, and I slid the key into my handbag.

“Do your parents know I’m planning to go to the cabin to have a look around?” I asked.

“Yes, and they’re fine with it. They have too much on their minds to be bothered with anything other than what my father’s going through right now. I was passing by their bedroom the other day, and I overheard my father telling my mother his one wish before he passes away is for this case to be solved. It’s one of the main reasons I decided to hire you.”

“I will do everything I can to make that happen.”

“I have to say, when I left your office this morning, I felt different, like a weight had been lifted. For the first time, I found myself thinking about what it would be like to move past the guilt I’ve carried from that horrible night. I can imagine myself living a normal life.”

The guilt I’ve carried—a phrase I found interesting.

Cora had expressed guilt earlier over being the lone survivor of the attacks that night. But was there something more, an additional feeling of guilt she had not revealed to me yet?

“Before I take off, I thought I’d ask if there’s anything else you’ve thought of that I might need to know,” I said. “If there is, now is the time.”

Cora walked over to a small bookcase near the closet and removed her high school yearbook from the bottom shelf.

“Have you had a chance to look at it yet?” I asked.

“I’ve started. What I’ve seen so far has brought back a lot of memories I’ve forgotten about. I know you asked me to look at my classmates to see who you should talk to, but I’m not sure I can get through it.”

“Is there anything in particular that you found triggering or want to talk about?”

Cora sat down on the bed, flipping through several pages of the yearbook. She stopped, pointing at a photo of a teen boy. In the photo, he was in a classroom, stirring a pot of soup.

“This is Xander Thornton,” Cora said. “We were in culinary class together.”

I leaned in to get a closer look. What struck me first was the sheer size of the kid. Xander wasn’t just big—he was professional-football player big, which set my mind ablaze. He would have had no problem wielding a bat—or any other object for that matter.

“Xander’s a big guy,” I said.

“No one in our school came anywhere close to his size.”

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