Page 75 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
@badprincess:I’m talking to @brentmann
@spinn_doctor:I don’t see you guys. Do you know how to do a duck call?
@highasakyle:did you find Lydia’s grave??
@skyediva:ummmm ... did anyone just hear that??? It sounded like a wolf??
@brentmann:I don’t speak duck
@gustagusta:hello? @goodnightsky? Did you find Lydia’s grave, or what?
@goodnightsky:It’s not Lydia Faraday. It’s some Vales
@hannahbanana:the Vales are there???
@goodnightsky:some of them are
@spinn_doctor:Bingo
@spinn_doctor:Jackpot
@highasakyle:which is it, Bingo or Jackpot?
@spinn_doctor:it’s Lydia Faraday
@goodnightsky:where???
@spinn_doctor:right behind you
@spinn_doctor:turn around
Our group was gathering on the hill, flowing to where Sofia was shouting her discovery: half a dozen gravestones marked with Lucy’sfamily name, indicating half a dozen of her buried relatives. A few graves down from Lucinda Vale Ellis, b. 1945, d. 2009, was a tombstone slightly apart from all the others, as if it had some contaminant associated with it. It was inscribed simply with the initialsLRF.
We were stunned.
The coincidence, if it was a coincidence, was extraordinary. The Shady Glen cemetery was belted with swaths of untouched hillside and plenty of open land for burying whole generations of dead bodies. Yet somehow Lydia Faraday’s body wound up spitting distance from a cluster of Vales.
Alex Spinnaker and Skyler Matthews took photographs of every headstone. There were six Vales in all, some dead half a century. We thrilled at each name, sensing in each another mystery, another online thread to unravel.
There was no sign of police activity at Lydia Faraday’s grave. Not that we’d really expected any; in some ways, we’d instead been looking for reassurance, proof that Lydia Faraday was where she should be. But Evie Grant pointed everyone’s attention to the bouquet of blue hydrangeas resting next to Lydia Faraday’s headstone, visible in the photographs that Skyler had posted to our server.
@badprincess:what’s up with the flowers??
At home we clutched our phones, refreshed our browsers, and maximized the grainy hydrangea image. They were bundled in what looked like newspaper, hardly wilted, and arranged with precision.
A gift for the ghost of Lydia Faraday.
@badprincess:helllooooo
@badprincess:Who brought the flowers for LRF?
Nobody knew. But for a second all of us unraveled a length of road in our imaginations, traveling down the slick of moon-skimmed streetsto Lily Lane until we skidded to a halt at number 88—where, behind the iron gates, the Vales’ garden erupted in color. Where newly painted trellises dripped with beaded roses and clutches of azaleas nodding off among their branches. Blue hydrangea bloomed like fat fists on great arms of green swaying faintly in the breeze, as if to the rhythm of secret music.
Seven
We
Lucy Vale refused an invitation to appear on our podcast, even though Skyler Matthews approached her directly. That summer Lucy took on shifts at the Granger Dairy Queen after senior Rory Adams got caught trying to manufacture CBD oil in the deep fryer. The Dairy Queen was always staffed with Echelon girls, possibly because it was a short walk from Byron Lake, where so many of the Sharks served as lifeguards. All summer long we gave our orders to an indifferent Savannah Savage, eagerly fed Bailey Lawrence our tips, and accepted coils of pillowy soft serve from Lucy Vale, thrilling when we grazed fingers over the counter.
