Alma sipped her coffee. She seemed to be getting into it now. “It’s a theory, sure. But so far you aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know, or anything I can’t look up at work.”
“Victoria Lee,” Viv said, ignoring her and flipping to yet another page, pulling out another hand-drawn map. “She was eighteen. The article said she’d had ‘numerous boyfriends.’ That means everyone thought she was a slut, right?”
Alma pressed her lips together and said nothing.
“It does,” Viv said. “Victoria had an on-again, off-again boyfriend. They fought all the time. She fought with her parents, her teachers. She had a brother who ran away from home and never came back.” That was almost all she knew about Victoria. There had been considerably less coverage of her in the newspapers next to pretty, upstanding young mother Cathy. After all, Victoria’s killer had been arrested. And next to Cathy, Victoria was a girl who deserved it.
“August of 1981,” Alma said, breaking into Viv’s thoughts. “I remember that day well.”
Viv looked up at her and nodded. “Victoria liked to go jogging. She left home here”—an X on the map—“and went to the jogging trail here.” Another X. “She didn’t come home. Her parents didn’t report it until late the next afternoon. They said that Victoria went out a lot without telling them. They figured she found some of her friends.”
“We spun our wheels for a while,” Alma admitted. “The parents were so certain she’d been out partying the night before. So we started there, questioning all her friends, trying to figure out what party she was at. It was a full day before we realized the parents just assumed, and Victoria wasn’t at a party at all. We had to backtrack to the last time anyone had seen her, which was heading to the jogging trail.”
Viv leaned forward. None of this was in the newspapers, none. “The article said they used tracking dogs.”
“We did. We gave them a shirt of hers, and we found her. She was twenty feet off the jogging trail, in the bushes.” Alma blinked and looked away, her hands squeezing her coffee cup. “The coroner said she’d been dead almost the whole time. She got to that jogging trail and he just killed her right away and dumped her. And she just lay there while everyone screwed around.”
They were silent for a minute.
“Was it really her boyfriend?” Viv asked.
“Sure,” Alma said. “They’d had a big fight. She nagged him a lot, and he called her a bitch. There were a dozen witnesses. Then Victoria went home and fought with her parents, too. The boyfriend, Charlie, had no alibi. He said he went home after their fight, but his mother said he came home an hour later than he claimed he did. Plenty of time to kill Victoria. He couldn’t say where he was. He eventually tried to claim he’d spent that hour with another girl, but he couldn’t produce the actual girl or give her name. The whole thing stunk, and he was convicted.” She frowned. “Why are you interested in Victoria? It isn’t like Cathy. It’s solved.”
Viv tapped her fingers on her notebook. She couldn’t say, really. The papers had portrayed it as an open-and-shut case. But it was those words Jenny had said: Don’t go on the jogging trail. Words of wisdom from one girl to another. Like it could happen again.
“They were so close together,” she said to Alma. “Cathy in December of 1980, Victoria in August of 1981. Two girls murdered in Fell in under a year. Maybe it wasn’t the boyfriend.”
This earned her a smile—kind, but still condescending. “Honey, the police and the courts decide that. They did their job already.”
The court. Was there a transcript of the trial? Viv wondered. How could she get one? “It doesn’t feel finished,” she said, though she knew it sounded lame said out loud. “Why the jogging trail? Why there of all places? He knew her. He could have killed her anywhere. He could have phoned her and lured her somewhere private, say he wanted to apologize or something. And she’d go. Instead he killed her where anyone could walk by.”
“Who knows why?” Alma said. “It was a frequented spot, but it was raining that day. He was angry and irrational. He killed her quickly, dumped her in the bushes, and went home. You’re young, Vivian, but it’s an old story. Trust me.” Alma set her empty coffee cup on the table and gentled her voice. “You’re a nice girl, but you aren’t trained for this kind of thing. I don’t know why you think it’s connected to Cathy. Is that what you’re getting at?”
She couldn’t have said. Because they were both cautionary tales, maybe. Don’t be like her. Don’t end up like her. It was a gut feeling. Which was stupid, because she was just a clueless girl, not a cop or a judge. She had no area of expertise.
Except being a potential victim. That was her area of expertise.
“There weren’t two murders,” Viv said. “There were three.”
She pulled a newspaper clipping from her file and put it in front of Alma. Local family still search for their daughter’s killer, the headline read.
“Betty Graham was murdered, too,” Viv said.
Alma looked at the article, and for the first time her expression went hard. “I’m not going to talk about Betty Graham,” she said. “I shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”
This was why she had done all this research. This was what mattered. To Viv, it was all about the woman in the flowered dress. Who, she now knew, was Betty Graham.
“Betty was unsolved,” Viv said, pushing
