She had to go back to ground zero, the axis around which all the other bodies revolved, the vertex at which all angles converged.
Misty.
The last thing Romy wanted to do was lay eyes on Misty’s frozen-in-time, forever-youthful face but she was possessed with the need to dig into what may have happened that she wasn’t remembering or was misremembering.
In her old bedroom, she scrounged through her dusty bookshelves, sliding out her high school yearbooks. There were four of them, one for each year she’d attended Glass Town High. She found her freshman book—when Misty was a junior, the last year of her life.
Legs folded in the lotus position on top of her musty-smelling braided area rug, Romy leafed through the book. In the middle were several collages of students doing extracurricular activities and hanging out on school grounds.
These middle pictures tended to be dominated by the popular clique and the students who were on the yearbook committee. It was almost as if those same two dozen people were the only ones who went to the school, which easily contained over five hundred students.
Misty wasn’t any of the things that usually guaranteed membership in the popular clique—a cheerleader, a clothes hound, or living in one of the big, new McMansions. But she was a Glass and dating Patrick Dugan, who was part of the in-clique, given his status as quarterback. The pair had been voted “Hottest Couple” as well as Junior Prom King and Queen.
Except for when Misty was featured prominently with those superlatives, she only appeared at the edges of crowd photos, always smiling but Romy felt Misty’s eyes were melancholic, with an older, resigned look about them.
The unwelcome idea flashed through her mind that, on some level, Misty sensed her time was nearing an end. The thought made a sore lump form in her throat, and then the tears came. She barely made any sound as she cried, but Mack sensed it anyway, and came trotting into the room, then sat next to her, guarding her grief, offering her stalwart comfort.
She found the junior class and Misty’s profile photo. For once, Misty wasn’t smiling. But she looked stunning, like those supermodels who never appear as beautiful as when their makeup-free, unposed faces are casually snapped with a Polaroid. Fat, pouty lips. Catlike, light blue eyes. Shining black hair that hung perfectly tousled yet appeared coolly unbrushed.
Underneath her photo was the tragically prescient quotation: Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. —Mahatma Gandhi
Misty’s yearbook entry was the usual high school mishmash of shout-outs and cryptic insider gobbledygook.
Mom&DadLoveYou, LauraLeeBFF, I Wanna Be a Cowgirl, SpringbreakFL Quiet down!!! Home games, Gooo Chieftains!!! Patrick, I LOVE YOU, The Glamour Pusses Emma, Naomi, Melinda. Ladies Night! Danny UR best brother ever. Dancing in the moonlight. Beers @ the Hollow. Camping @ Cherry Tree Hill. Grandma, Grandpa, Love you! WildNFree. AR&AJ
At the end was Misty’s email address.
A thought began to work through Romy’s mind, crawling and then accelerating until it came to clear-headed fruition.
Taking the yearbook with her, she went to Nana’s room, Mack trailing, and sat down at her laptop. She logged out of her email and put in Misty’s address, which used the same extremely popular email provider that half of the country used.
His cloud password is Misty Glass. He’s had that password for everything since high school.
If Heath’s password was Misty’s name, then…
In the blank bar for a password, Romy typed “heathasher” but the message “incorrect password” appeared in red. She tried “HeathAsher” and got the same result. Then she tried each variation ending with a one and 01. Finally, the account locked up with the message, “Have you forgotten your password?”
On social media, Misty had either never had an account or it had been deactivated. But it was easy to find Patrick, though if he hadn’t been friends with Gillian, Romy would never have recognized him.
Patrick Dugan, onetime quarterback, prom king, and general “stud” of the school was now an overweight, mostly bald man. He was only twenty-nine or thirty but easily could pass for being in his forties. Kind of shocking, really.
Romy sent him a friend request and a message asking if he could chat. Since she had numerous people from high school in common with him on her friends’ list, she was fairly confident he’d respond.
The next person was easy enough to find as well. Loretta Hale, LPC (Licensed Professional Counselor), had a social media page. Romy aimlessly clicked around on her public photos.
Loretta appeared to be living the typical life of a city dweller who had an active social life, was apparently single, and made a good living. Dinners at various restaurants around town. Birthdays and holidays with friends and family. Vacations at locales both snowy and tropical.
Romy wasn’t certain what she was looking for—just a clue into Loretta’s psyche. Did she have a significant other? It didn’t appear so. Did she have children? Not that Romy could determine. Did she have pets? Yes, there was a small dog, a tan and white chihuahua mix named Butter.
Romy saw nothing that would confirm what she was half-heartedly hoping to find—that Loretta was romantically drawn to much younger men.
But she did see something that gave her pause. A long pause. And she’d almost missed it.
A couple of years ago, Loretta had been at a restaurant with what appeared to be extended family. Next to her was a little blonde girl, about eight or nine. In the picture, Loretta smiled from ear to ear and was leaning into the girl, who had on a big goofy grin. The pair obviously knew each other quite well. The untagged photo was captioned, “So happy to spend quality time with my beautiful niece!”
The girl in the photo was a harmless-looking pixie, not the maniacally grinning girl who haunted Romy’s window.
But slather white face paint on her, give her contacts to make her eyes strangely vibrant, and coach her to look and act fiendish—and it wasn’t out of the realm of imagination that Loretta’s niece could be the little girl in the window.
The things the girl was saying—bad lady, horrible woman, leave this place—all pointed to Loretta suspecting that Romy was responsible for Misty’s death. And wasn’t it rather clairvoyant how Loretta had instantly sensed that Romy’s past mistake may have led to a death?
Heath’s hypnotherapy sessions. If he talked in his sleep, he could be talking in those as well. And if he’d blotted out the memory of seeing Romy in the woods but the memory surged forth when he was under hypnosis, then Loretta would know what Heath didn’t yet know, at least on a conscious level.
Heath’s therapist, after hearing from him that he’d moved in with none other than the woman who’d killed Misty, might have decided to start playing games. But why? If Loretta knew or suspected what Romy had done, why not tell her client, tell Heath?
Did she not wish to traumatize him further, as perhaps what Romy had done that night was tied up with Heath trying to commit murder? Or was Loretta’s only goal to separate Romy and Heath so she could move in on him herself?
If coaching her niece to pretend to be the ghost of Heath and Misty’s unborn child was her way of coercing Romy into confessing to him, then this extremely unorthodox—not to mention unethical—method was also batshit crazy.
But not so batshit crazy if you consider that it almost worked.
The next day, Romy was working at her laptop when a blurry ring came out of it and a chat box popped up bearing the name Patrick Dugan and his profile photo.
She wasn’t ready for this but it had to be done, and who knew when she’d be able to get in touch with him again.
The puffy-faced man on the screen looked even more out-of-shape, ruddy-complexioned, and hairless than he had in his photos. Truly hard to believe that a little over a decade ago, this man was considered one of the hottest young lads Glass Town High had to offer.
Patrick had no idea who Romy was but he knew Gillian. Not only because Gillian had lived next door to Misty when the pair had dated but because neither Patrick nor Gillian had ever moved out of town. They also had children in the same pre-school, which Romy figured out from seeing mutual tagging on their children’s photos on Gillian’s social media wall.
They said their greetings and had about fifteen minutes of catch-up, during which Romy learned that Patrick owned a local car repair shop and had three young children. Romy decided she better get to the point before she lost all her nerve.
“Patrick, I hate to do this to you, because this might be traumatic for you but I’d like to ask you a little about Misty Glass.”
“Ohhhhhhh Mistyyyyyy…” he drawled, exhibiting a rather blank expression. From the response, Romy couldn’t tell if he even remembered dating her. “Ahhhhh, what is it you wanna know?”
“She was your girlfriend for a while, right?”
“Mmmmm hmmmmmm,” he drawled, again seeming as if the name Misty Glass was someone he was struggling to recall.
“I guess what I want to know is—if you’d be willing to tell me—why, ah, why you two broke up?” The last part of the sentence rose to a high-pitched crescendo and she made an exaggerated cringe-face, embarrassed for her own nosiness.
“Hmmmmmm….” He rubbed his ruddy cheeks. “That’s a strange thing to ask.”
“I know. It’s… I’m fictionalizing the tragic case of Misty and doing research…” She trailed off, certain her explanation didn’t sound convincing.
“Fictulizing?”
“Making a fiction story out of the Misty tragedy. A novel.”
“Oh!” he said, unexpectedly interested. “That’s cool. I don’t read much, but I like movies.” He grinned at her, and for a moment she saw the echo of hunky, athletic Patrick. “Let’s see, Misty and I dated, what? A year? Something like that.” He slowly shook his head as he traveled back in his memories. “She sure was beautiful. I thought she looked exactly like Megan Fox.”
To make her story stick, Romy picked up a nearby pen and began jotting notes. “You two were the king and queen of the school,” she said, the ego stroking a calculated attempt to get him to open up. She was betting on the idea that Patrick wouldn’t mind reminiscing about his “glory days.”
He chuckled softly, casting his grayish eyes down at his lower half. “Hard to believe. Look at me now.”
“You look great,” she said, smiling stiffly.
“Misty… yeah, yeah. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Still is, don’t tell my wife. Lucky boy I was.” He began making mm-mm noises, practically smacking his lips, self-satisfied with his youthful ensnaring of a Megan Fox doppelgänger.
“But something happened?” Romy prodded. “I remember you two broke up. The whole school was shocked.” In reality, Romy had only surmised the pair had split when Misty began appearing at the pool without him but he didn’t need to know that.
“Yep, yep… well, you know…” His eyes glazed over as he delved further back into his memory. “At the time, I thought we might get married someday. She wasn’t Catholic but we’d work it out. Then one day she…” He snapped his fingers. “Told me it was over. Told me while we were sitting in my Jeep, in the school parking lot, right before school ended for the summer. Oh boy. I definitely didn’t expect it.”
“Did she give you a reason why?”
“Nothing major. Something about wanting to be free. The next thing I knew, she was dating another guy, that lifeguard down at the country club. So I assumed that was the real reason why.”
“Did you two talk after? Did she tell you anything about her new boyfriend?”
“Uhhh… no.”
Romy heard dramatic wailing in the background, what sounded like a little girl having a temper tantrum. Patrick craned his neck around the computer, apparently looking towards the door. When the sound faded, he returned his attention to her.
“Oh yeah,” he said, his sleepy eyes flickering with a retrieved memory. “There was that one day, the last time I saw her. She came to my house. This was the summer. I was outside playing basketball with my brother and there was Misty on her bike. We went upstairs and, uh….” He trailed off awkwardly.
“You had sex?” Romy grinned.
Patrick looked like he’d been slapped.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a good Catholic. None of that until marriage. Misty and I never got conjugal like that.”
Romy sat in a state of disbelief. Hadn’t Heath said that Misty had taunted him about Patrick being better in bed than he was, being “bigger” than he was?
“So you never… nothing? All that time?”
“No, ma’am.” He rocked back and forth, then his face lit up. “Ah, now I remember. Yep. She came over and told me she wanted to get frisky. Wanted to do the deed.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, now I think on it, she was a little insistent. Kind of, well, she got down there and…”
A guilty grin spread across his face, and again Romy could see a trace of the former studly quarterback, could envision him as she’d spied him in the hallways—standing a foot above most of the boys, broad-shouldered, floppy-haired, oozing athleticism and testosterone.
She wondered what had gotten him to his current washed-out looks and had the melancholy suspicion alcohol was behind it. Had Misty’s death started him drinking? Romy felt a stab of guilt that she shoved away before she could spiral into more guilt than she already had.
“Was this while Misty was with her next boyfriend? The lifeguard?” Romy probed.
She hoped Gillian and Patrick weren’t so close that her childhood friend would have mentioned that Heath was back in town—and living with Romy. She doubted it, especially as the pandemic meant schools were closed so they wouldn’t be coming into casual contact.
“Not sure, to be honest,” he said. “But like I say, J.C. wouldn’t have approved. J.C. comes first, even before Misty. Not an easy decision, I admit.”
He touched a silver cross pendant hanging down his white shirt, which Romy hadn’t noticed until he’d started the Catholic talk.
“So, she left. And that was it. Never saw her again. I heard that when she died, she was pregnant.” He smiled mournfully. “I guess the lifeguard gave her what I wouldn’t.”