“Did you tell any of this to the police?” I ask.
“We did,” Bill confirms. “But you have to remember at the time we didn’t have her day planner. We didn’t see her notes and didn’t know Jeremy had surfaced again. Since there was no indication anything happened to her, we thought she might be running from him. It would have been an extremely hard decision. After having to leave Larsonville because of the rumors being spread about her, we worried she would never find her place again. Then she was invited to the study-abroad program and brought into Alexandria, and she seemed almost herself again. She was working so hard. I can only imagine how afraid she must have been to have left her entire life the way she did.”
Chapter Fifty-One
“That’s great news, isn’t it?” Sam asks. “I know you were looking for Jeremy. Now you know who both Jeremy and Corey are.”
“Yeah, it’s great in that I don’t have to look for them anymore. But neither of them had anything to do with Julia’s disappearance,” I say. “Corey was wrapped up in the mess at the other school for reasons I still don’t understand. But he had no reason to do anything to her. He hadn’t even seen her since she left Larsonville. And while Jeremy admits he did follow her around and probably scared the hell out of her the last time he saw her, he couldn’t have caused Julia to disappear.”
The conversation with Jeremy had been illuminating. Both in that he was able to explain the role he played in her life, but also in giving me the feeling I was looking through a piece of glass into the type of brain usually kept tightly concealed.
“Why not?” Sam asks.
“Because he was in jail,” I tell him. “When Julia wouldn’t stop to talk with him the last time he saw her and ran off to the bus stop, it made him so upset he ended up going to a bar and getting in a fight. It landed him in jail for three weeks. He couldn’t have had anything to do with her disappearance.”
“Why was he even around the city for her to run into him?” Sam asks.
“Well, that’s the fun part. It seems Julia might have actually had reason to be afraid of him. He moved to the area specifically to be close to her and had been following her for months leading up to her disappearance,” I tell him.
“So, disappearing might have actually saved her life,” he notes.
“Possibly,” I say.
“Why did he just tell you all this? Doesn’t it seem fairly incriminating?”
“He’s been in and out of jail since high school, including a fairly long stint a few years ago. He’s decided he wants to do something better with his life and is undergoing therapy. That includes having to come to terms with the wrongs he’s committed and try to make amends. Obviously, he can’t make amends for what he did to Julia. But admitting to everything so he can be cleared, and we can focus on others, is an important step.
“But that isn’t the only thing my fact-finding mission of the morning uncovered. When I talked to Julia’s father, he mentioned the study-abroad program again. It was something her mother had serious reservations about and didn’t want to send her on. But she had excelled in high school and had big aspirations. After what she went through at Laronsville, they wanted to do something to get her excited about coming to Alexandria. So, they allowed her to go,” I say.
“That sounds like a lovely story,” Sam says. “Things are always bad when you tell lovely stories. What’s wrong with this program?”
“It doesn’t exist,” I say.
”At all?”
“Not as far as the University can tell. I gave them all the information that Julia’s parents gave to me, including the name of the supervising professor, supplemental professors who were traveling along with them, the itinerary they were supposedly following. Everything. They said they had never heard a program like that existed at the University, and the supervising professor I named isn’t someone who has ever worked there. I did a search and can’t find anybody by that name at all who teaches. Same for the supporting professors. All of the information she gave her parents about this program was faked.”
“So, where was she for the fall and spring semesters?” Sam asks.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing now?” he asks.
“I’m going to the mall,” I say.
“Christmas shopping?” he asks. “Because you have so much time on your hands?”
I chuckle. “Not exactly. I know the mall’s probably a lot different than it was thirteen years ago, but I need to see it. I want to see where Carla Viceroy’s car was parked, and what the mall looks like at this time of year.”
“Why?” he asks.
“I was looking at Julia’s day planner again. The same day that Carla was murdered, Julia has one of her mysterious ‘visit’ notes, but it’s not the same time as all the other ones. Every other mention of visiting occurs at either noon or 3 PM. But this one is later. So, I had her father check if they still had access to her credit card records from that time. I know she had a credit card, but it was paid for by her father within a certain limit. When he checked, it showed
