CHAPTER 49.

She walked us to a small interview room. The walls were the green of dying plants; the chairs, the pink of red plastic rubbed too many times with bleach. The ceiling tiles were yellowed, from when smoking had been allowed. I might have confessed to something, too, if I were interrogated in that room.

She came back five minutes later and set a worn large brown tie-envelope down on the scarred wood table. “It won’t take you long to see there’s nothing in here,” she said.

“There were never any suspects, never any leads?”

“The gas station was kind of remote.”

“Or never any real investigation?”

“The sheriff did what he could.”

“You know this?”

“You’d do well to remember I’m being hospitable, Mr. Elstrom. I could make you file a Freedom of Information Act request for this material. Given your social skills, processing your request could take weeks, months, or perhaps years.” She left the room.

“You found a nerve,” Leo said.

I lowered myself onto a chair and undid the tie on the envelope.

Ellie Ball’s assessment of its contents had been right. There wasn’t much inside, just three thin manila file folders, a blue wire-bound notebook, and a plastic sandwich bag containing two spent bullets.

“Though the station is old, we should assume this room is bugged,” I said, reaching for the notebook.

Leo laughed, taking a file. “Nuts. I was hoping to say something of interest.”

The notebook contained Sheriff Roy Lishkin’s record of his investigation. The first page summarized the details, such as they were: Willie Dean, age twenty-four, had worked at the gas station, three miles east of Hadlow, for two years. According to the station’s owner, Willie was a reliable employee, a competent mechanic, and as honest as the day was long. The station’s owner could not imagine Willie having an enemy, certainly not one who would shoot him in the stomach.

Lishkin’s notes made it clear, based on the fact that the station’s cash drawer, beneath the counter, had been emptied, that Willie had been killed in the course of a robbery.

The next two pages recorded his interviews with eight individuals who lived out near the gas station. Five had not seen or heard anything. Each of the remaining three remembered seeing the Taylor girls breezing along with Georgie Korozakis in his convertible, the day of the robbery. All three had known the Taylor girls since they were little. None thought it remotely possible they could have had anything to do with the murder.

“You’ll find the files interesting,” Leo said when I looked up after reading Lishkin’s notes a second time. He pushed them across, and I gave him the notebook.

A name had been written on each of the three file folders: George Korozakis, Darlene Taylor, Rosemary Taylor. Inside each file was a single piece of paper, apparently torn from the wire-bound notebook. Lishkin had intended to maintain a light surveillance on each of the three teenagers in the weeks and months following the killing.

Georgie Korozakis’s sheet began with the date he left Hadlow, four days after the killing. According to Lishkin, he enrolled in a prep school in Connecticut. Georgie graduated two months later, remained in Connecticut for the summer to work as a clerk in a Woolworth’s, and left at the end of August for a college I’d never heard of in Vermont. No entries followed after that.

Darlene Taylor’s sheet had only one entry: “Remains in Hadlow.”

Rosemary’s lone entry was just a few words longer: “Left Hadlow, following graduation, June 12. Per SP, no DL. Whereabouts unknown.”

“‘Per SP, no DL,’” I read aloud, from Rosemary’s sheet. “Per state police, no driver’s license. He tried to track her, but couldn’t.”

“She must have started using aliases right away,” Leo said.

“Not only did Sheriff Lishkin not have other suspects, it looks like he gave up tracking Georgie, and trying to find Rosemary, by the end of August.”

“Certainly by September third?”

“The day Alta died.”

His twin caterpillar eyebrows rose up on his bald head. “Not very tenacious, the sheriff?”

“Or by then, he’d learned all he needed to know.”

I picked up the small bag containing the two spent bullets. They looked almost pristine, not at all damaged by their business of killing a young gas station attendant.

For a moment, I let my fingers linger on the wire tie that kept the little bag closed, wondering if anyone would notice whether one of the two was missing. I pushed the thought away; I had no gun to compare them to. I put the bag, its contents intact, back into the large envelope with the wire-bound notebook and the three thin manila file folders.

That the Taylor girls and Georgie Korozakis had been near the gas station quite naturally interested Sheriff Lishkin.

What interested me was all the blank pages in the wire-bound notebook … and why Sheriff Lishkin hadn’t used one of them to write down the one question that must have haunted him to his death.