“So do you remember anything about that day?” Duncan asks as I drive us back to my house.
“If you had asked me last week, I would have said I didn’t remember anything.” I sigh. “Not about what happened that day or anything before it. I didn’t even really remember my parents. But ever since I came back to Medford, I’ve been having these little flashes.”
“Of what?” Duncan looks half-curious, half-horrified.
“Once it was of being in a snowy forest. I think that must have been when we had just started looking for the Christmas tree. And I can remember my mom reading to me. I even remembered where she hid a box of keepsakes.” Did I do the same thing, tuck away my memories, even from myself? “And after the memorial, I dreamed about seeing a bloody knife lying on the floor of a car.” My scalp prickles just thinking about it.
“Oh my God.” Duncan turns in his seat to me, his gray eyes wide. He echoes my thoughts. “Maybe everything that happened that day is still all there, inside your head.”
“If it is, I wish I could figure out how to get it out. I don’t want to just wait around for a dream or some random phrase to make me remember. I want to know now.”
Duncan doesn’t respond, just takes his phone out of his pocket. He starts tapping on it. The car is quiet for the remaining few minutes it takes me to drive home. What am I doing, spilling my deepest secrets to a stranger who isn’t really even paying attention?
“Hypnosis,” he says as I pull into my driveway.
“What?” I turn off the car.
“Maybe hypnosis could help.” He hands over his phone.
He’s pulled up an old news story from 1976. In Chowchilla, California, twenty-six children and their bus driver were kidnapped and locked in a moving van that had been buried in a gravel quarry. After they managed to escape, a hypnotist put the bus driver under, and he remembered the license plate number of one kidnapper’s car.
But when I think of hypnotists, I think of country fairs or weight-loss ads. Not crime solving. I hand his phone back. “But that was a fresh memory. Mine’s nearly fourteen years old. And I was only three when it happened.”
Duncan looks hurt. “It might be worth a try.”
When we go inside, I point at the couch. “Wait here. I’m going to get something.” I walk down the hall and come back with my mom’s cigar box. I hand it to him.
“What is this?” he asks before he opens it.
“It belonged to my mom. It’s got all her keepsakes. She used to hide it under the floorboards of her closet.”
His eyebrows go up. “You mean—here? In this house?”
“Yeah. It’s been here all along. I think I was the only one who knew about it, besides my mom. My grandma didn’t know.”
When he flips back the lid, right on top is the Halloween photo, the one I took from the bulletin board at the service. I had put it in the box along with my dad’s program, never thinking anyone else would look at these things.
He picks it up. “Hey, I remember seeing this picture at the memorial. You have a copy, too, huh?”
“Um, I took it.”
He jerks his head back. “What?”
“I don’t have any photos of just my dad or even of my family. I think my grandma threw away any photo with my dad in it after my mom’s body was found. And she never talked about him.”
His eyebrows pull together. “But—that was someone’s photo.”
Guilt pinches me. I ignore it. “Yeah, it was. But whoever put it up probably has lots of photos of my dad. I’ve got nothing.”
Duncan doesn’t say anything more, though the way he twists his mouth, he doesn’t have to.
I set the photo and the program aside and show him the begging note. “Have you ever seen that handwriting before?”
He purses his lips. “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think it’s Jason’s, unless it really changed.” I unearth the old valentine and watch Duncan smile as he reads the childish insults. “But I do wonder about Jason. Look at this invitation to his wedding to Heather.” I pull it out. “Why would my mom crumple it up unless she still had feelings for him?”
“Wait.” He holds up a hand. “So you’re thinking Jason might have killed your parents?”
“The cops told me that the first person they would have looked at would have been a lover. And I’m pretty sure there was something between them at some point.”
“Look, you’re talking about Jason. That guy’s just a blowhard. Not a killer.”
“Then what about Sam? It’s clear she was in love with my dad. You saw how she cried over him at the funeral. Maybe those were really tears of guilt.”
“Sam?” Duncan makes a face. “She’s as thin as a straw. I mean, she seems pretty tightly wound, but I can’t see her hurting someone.”
“In Portland, the detective told me it could have been a woman, if she was motivated by some strong emotion, like hatred or even panic.”
Duncan shakes his head. “Hey, look, I’ve known Jason and Sam since I was a kid. And they’re not killers. Do you really think one of them snapped fourteen years ago and then just went back to being normal?”
Why did I ever say yes to him? He may be cute, but he’s so nice that he can’t believe other people could be not so nice. “Then what do you think happened?”
“I think your mom and dad must have crossed paths with a serial killer. Some crazy guy in the woods.”
“Serial killer implies a series of murders. If it was a serial killer, then why weren’t there more victims?”
“Maybe there were.” Duncan picks up his backpack. “Last night I was trying to figure out what happened. It turns out there are websites that keep track of unsolved murders. You can sort them by year or geographic area. So look at this.” He hands me a printout showing a girl with long dark hair parted down the middle. “This is Angie Paginini. She lived in Grants Pass.” Grants Pass is about a half hour away. “A year after your parents died, she left her high school play rehearsal, but she never made it home. Two days later, her body was found in a park—a wooded park. She had been stabbed to death. She even looks like your mom.”
I regard the photo critically. Maybe. Or maybe they only look alike because they’re both girls from the same time period with the same hair color. All I say is, “But it wasn’t just my mom who died. It was both my parents.”
“That’s happened before, too.” He slips another piece of paper into my hands. “Six months before your parents died, another couple in their twenties was killed in Northern California. Shot to death in their sleeping bags. Right on the beach. No sexual assault, no robbery, no known motive, and no suspects. Just like your parents.”
Medford’s only thirty minutes from the California border. But it’s a much longer drive to the coast. And—“That was a gun, though. Not a knife.”
“Nobody knows how your dad was killed,” Duncan points out. “And I was reading that serial killers will sometimes just use whatever’s available.”
“It’s hard to believe that my parents were killed by some random stranger. I mean, why would a serial killer murder them and then let me live? But if it was someone my family knew, they might have felt a connection to me.”
“Serial killers don’t murder every single person they come across.” Duncan’s eyes look stormy. “They pick their targets. Maybe your parents fit and you didn’t.”
Or maybe Duncan just doesn’t want to believe it could be someone he knows.
I think of foster homes where I lived in fear but smiled for the caseworker. Or where the house was a pigsty unless a visit was scheduled. If I’ve learned anything in the past ten years, it’s that a lot of people have one face in public and another in private.