Page 47 of What Lies in the Woods

“What is it you’re looking for?” Kimiko asked.

I hesitated—could I chance telling her? It was worth the risk, I decided. “It was a set of numbers and letters. Four numbers followed by four letters. She had them written down on a sticky note.”

She nodded and walked out of the room. I stared after her, uncertain if I should follow, but a minute later she returned with a crumpled envelope. “She left this in the recycling,” she said. “She was always taking notes on whatever was nearby.”

There were more numbers on this one, in an exacting column. Twodozen. It must have been before she narrowed it down. The state codes were from all over the place—as far as Oklahoma. If she’d eliminated everything but Washington and Idaho, I had eleven entries to work with. That was more manageable. “Thank you,” I said.

“What do they mean?” she asked. When I didn’t answer right away, she crossed her arms. “Did someone kill my daughter because of those numbers?”

“The police say it was suicide.”

“Do you believe that?” she asked bluntly.

“No,” I said, realizing as I said it just how certain I was. “I don’t know who would want to hurt her. But I know she found something before she died. A—a secret. She wanted to tell me, but she didn’t get the chance. I need to know what it is.”

“You should tell the police,” Kimiko said.

I looked down at the numbers in my hand. All the logic and sense in the world said I should call Bishop right now and tell her everything, even if that made me a suspect. But letting go of these secrets felt like letting Liv go. Letting go of the last thing I had of her that was ours alone. Hers and mine and Cass’s. One last bond. “I can’t,” I said helplessly.

The familiar shame of the lie shivered with new hope. If one of these numbers belonged to Stahl’s missing victim, then I’d told the truth, even if I hadn’t known it. It would be proof that it was him, and that I hadn’t gotten the wrong man arrested.

Kimiko sighed. “You were a good friend to her. But she’s gone. You take care of yourself first. The dead don’t need our help.”

“I need to do this,” I said.

Kimiko only nodded. When I walked out she stayed, running her fingertips over the empty space where Olivia’s things had been, as if beginning to map the shape of her absence.

It was quick work to match the case numbers with names, but from there my progress ground to a halt. The women in the missing-persons listings ranged in age from eighteen to forty-six. There were blondes and brunettes, white, Black, and Latina. None were named Persephone, but I hadn’t expected they would be. Any of these women could have been Persephone—or none of them.

Except that Liv had been sure.

The dates for their disappearances covered a range of almost a decade. If I looked only at that “quiet summer,” two years before the attack, there were four possibilities, but I couldn’t assume that Persephone was Stahl’s victim. Or, if she was, that he’d killed her that summer. No one knew how many unknown victims might be out there or when he might have killed them.

I started searching for the names with various combinations of keywords. Most of them had doppelgängers on Facebook and the like, cluttering up the results. Here and there I found articles or posts about the women I was looking for and scoured them for any information that might be relevant. April Kyle was from Spokane and liked the outdoors; she’d run off with an older boyfriend. Marjorie Campion had three children and a dog and was a known drug addict. There were women who seemed made to disappear into the cracks and those whose vanishing had turned communities upside down, and all of them were just as thoroughly gone.

I bookmarked another article and flipped to the next tab I had open,a forum post from a girl trying to find information about a missing aunt. I rubbed my eyes and checked the name—they were all blurring together. Jessi Walker. Nineteen when she disappeared, though her family didn’t ever file an official missing-person report, because she’d packed her bags. A few weeks passed before they realized she was gone for good. The niece writing the post got a Christmas card and a birthday card from Jessi, and then she went silent. They’d been close and the niece was certain that something had happened to her.

Jessi Walker’s niece wasn’t sure when she’d actually gone missing. Sometime after April, two years before my attack. I’d looked up how long it would take for a body to become a skeleton, and my best guess was that it would have happened within a year or two of lying in the Grotto, so that matched. And that was the “quiet summer.”

It was all just guesswork. How had Liv figured this out?

I started to bookmark the page and close it out, and then I froze. I hadn’t looked at the username the niece had created to post on the message board.

Persephone McAllister.

The name on the dead woman’s bracelet wasn’t hers. It was her niece’s. A remembrance of the girl she left behind but never forgot.

I pulled up the case entry again, heart beating fast and hard. The attached photo showed a young woman in a cotton sundress, smirking a little at the camera. She had brown, wavy hair and a slender build—Stahl’s type. The look in her eye hinted at an urge to wander, a restlessness that had wound its brambles around my own heart.

It was her. It was Persephone.

“Found you,” I whispered. She smiled that coy little smile at me, her weight balanced on her back foot, entirely aware of the camera. I almost felt like I recognized her. Like if I passed her in the street, I would have waved. I’d been nine years old when she left home, and she was nineteen—a decade older, not someone I would have spent any time with.

A decade younger than I was now. Had Stahl offered her a ride?Had he dragged her into the woods, hidden her away where no one could find her?

I shuddered. I understood what Cass meant, now, when she said she wanted to tell Persephone that she’d had a daughter.He’s dead,I wanted to whisper to those bones.

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