The Hudson cut a dark ribbon through the landscape. Her face, reflected in the window, was pale, and faint lines were etched around her eyes. Perhaps she should contact Tim’s old school friend, Jeremiah. If nothing else, he would know if Tim had been a victim of Graham’s bullying. Foolish to get sucked in, and yet impossible to turn away.
*
In the quiet hour after lunch, Erin closed her office door and plugged in her electric kettle. As she waited for the water to boil, she grabbed the file for her newest patient and settled into the window seat. Out on the grounds, the lacework of fresh green leaves shimmered in the sunlight.
Reading between the lines of the case summary, it was clear that the girl had a long history of troubled behaviour. But Erin’s concentration was fading, and her thoughts kept drifting to the yearbook she’d returned to Ray, the one from his – and Tim’s – junior year of high school. She wished she’d asked him for the one from his senior year, though she might be able to find it online. Everything was online these days. She typed a couple of search terms into the browser on her computer, and in less than three minutes she’d found it. Belle River High School, 1978.
Like a diver poised to jump, she held her breath and scrolled to the M’s. There it was: the scowling mug and stone-cold eyes that had haunted her dreams for years. Graham Marston. When the doctor arrived in the dead of night to take her to Danfield, her brother had held her down as she cried out in terror, grinning like a jackal as he pinned her to the floor.
Under his name was the usual string of nonsense. VmanKingxxxAngeltwjsbr#rip. The arcane codes of high-school students everywhere. Concocted during a time when he was, what, the king of the world, the Viking conqueror? She read the text aloud, halting at the ‘tw’. Tim’s first two initials. A coincidence? Surely, they’d known each other. That pencilled scrawl of Tim’s had clearly mentioned the Viking.
She massaged her temples, trying to ward off a headache. Graham. The Viking. She had no interest in knowing where he might be now. Since her arrival at Lansford, she’d taken great pains to keep her previous incarnation under lock and key.
Out of curiosity, she scrolled back a year to the photo of Ray as a junior. Long, scruffy hair, sideburns, a druggy look about the eyes. Under his name was the Orwell quote, followed by a string of letters: eldu#QUEpasa?777party#docks@ Alcapolco+doree. Impossible to imagine the Ray she knew as this rebellious, drug-addled teenage boy. She scanned the pages of the 1978 yearbook, looking for the picture of Ray as a senior, and almost missed him. Jacket and tie. Short hair, neatly combed. Nothing but a quote by T.S. Eliot under the picture, something about having to accept the terms life offers you if you don’t have the courage to impose your own.
In the space of a year, he seemed to become a completely different person. Had he grown out of his rebellious pose, or was it something else?
30
The Meadows
Lansford, New York
May, Present Day
Janine swept into the staff lounge, clutching a cardboard envelope. ‘Here’s the FedEx package you were waiting for.’
Erin thanked her and tucked the envelope into a stack of files. As she gathered up her things, she spotted Greta Kozani checking her post. She was in no mood to listen to one of Greta’s harangues, so she ducked behind the bookshelf until certain she was gone.
With the staffroom to herself, it was tempting to linger with a cup of tea. But the photos in the envelope had her on tenterhooks and she couldn’t wait. She slipped into her office without encountering anyone and locked the door. On her desk, she sorted Lydia’s photos, placing the exterior shots in one pile and the inside ones in another.
Under the light of the desk lamp, she studied the living room and kitchen for anything she might have missed during her visit to the Stern farm. It was just as she remembered. No photos or anything else of a personal nature. Not even a shopping list tacked to the refrigerator. And the large front room, with its curated colour scheme and designer gloss, could have come straight from a magazine. No knick-knacks on the shelves by the fireplace, nothing but the boxed set of leather-bound classics.
It was the two shots of Stern’s study that started her pulse jumping. The first was too dark, but the second looked promising, with the photos tacked to the corkboard clearly in view. The flash had reflected on the photo at the far left, obscuring its subject. But the one she was interested in, of the two couples on the beach at sunset, was fairly clear. If she had it blown up, she might be able to identify the dark-haired man, and the blonde woman with the sunburst medallion. The second woman was not fully in the picture, with only one shoulder and a triangle of her blue dress visible. Behind the foursome, a shirtless boy with brown hair crouched on the rocks by the water.
That sunburst medallion. The mere sight of it made her uneasy, and she tossed the photo in a drawer. How could she focus on her patients with these niggling details from the Stern case pulling her away? Just when she thought she’d put it all behind her, a string of nonsense syllables in a high-school yearbook, and a snapshot of a random couple on a beach, had the power to haul her back.
*
The following day, the enlarged snapshots from the photo lab in Albany arrived by courier. Erin shut herself up in her office and spread them on her desk. Both were grainy, and the resolution poor. One was too dark to see much of anything but shadowy figures against a paler
