I clicked, immediately recognizing the article’s author, Adrianna Montgomery: class president, town know-it-all, and senior columnist of the Austin Gazette.
She’d been standing in the dark amongst the others last night, her eyes judging me as they had for years…
Once upon a time, we had been best of friends. But that all changed after Jenny. Adrianna’s parents had fallen into the category of people who tried to avoid our family and our house as much as possible. Adrianna was no longer allowed to come over, and at school, she avoided me there too. Even now, when I saw her in town, there was this wall between us … something dark and hard. Impenetrable. I hated her for turning her back on me, for standing back while the others at school teased me about the farm and what happened there. And now, seeing her flourishing as a journalist made me cringe with jealousy.
I read the first few lines of her article:
It’s been thirty years since the beloved Jenny Juliott was brutally sacrificed on the Breyas Farm. It feels like only yesterday to those who loved her. So, imagine the shock and outrage we all felt when we heard the news: Chrissy Cornwall is getting out of prison. What sort of failing system lets a monster like her out after only thirty years? Townspeople should take to the streets, petition the mayor—
I minimized the screen, rubbing my eyes in annoyance. The article was bullshit. Adrianna Montgomery had been my age when the murder happened. She didn’t know the beloved Jenny any more than I did. And calling her murder a ‘sacrifice’ made it sound like something from the occult. The murder didn’t even happen on our property … she was dumped here.
Any minute now, the field will be crawling with reporters … hunting witches in Austin. Thanks a lot, Adrianna.
I clicked on another article, this one national news from Crime Times. I waited for the grainy image to load, tapping the desk impatiently.
When it did, I gasped.
It was a split shot—on the left, a mugshot of Chrissy with her jet-black hair and hypnotic blue eyes. I’d seen this photo a million times over the years—she had grinned in her arrest photo, exposing gapped front teeth and her feral demeanor. Little shocks of white in her hair gave her an ethereal quality.
She looked like a maniac.
But the photo on the right was something else entirely … it showed a middle-aged woman, with stringy salt-and-pepper hair and sad gunmetal-gray eyes being escorted out of prison. This time, when Chrissy’s eyes met the camera, she hadn’t smiled.
She looked downright sad and ashamed. Defeated.
I maximized the image, studying the woman that I hadn’t seen in years—there had been a few photos from prison, but nothing in more than a decade. Supposedly, she had denied all interviews with the press after her trial.
There were no traces of the girl in the woman. Where did she go?
Her jowls were thicker, her chin whiskery … and she’d put on nearly fifty pounds. It was hard to correlate the wild teen in the mug shot with this sad old woman beside her.
Skipping over the article itself, I typed in the search bar: Where is Chrissy Cornwall moving to in Austin.
I didn’t expect to find an answer—surely, she’d try to keep her address private. And I knew she wasn’t moving back to her childhood home by the creek because it had been abandoned for years now, her deadbeat parents skipping town for good and local teens trashing the place during midnight drunk dares to visit the murderer’s house…
But my search provided an immediate hit. Not only was her address online, but also the addresses for every living relative of hers in the country.
Someone had discovered her location, essentially doxing her.
4840 Willow Run Road.
Stunned, I settled back in my chair, reading the address over and over again. Not only was Chrissy coming home, but she was moving less than a mile from here. It made sense why she’d picked it; Austin was a small farming community, but most people lived in the center business district of town. She was moving to the outskirts near me—the place where outcasts reside.
Is she already there? Already moved in? I wondered. The thought of her being so close, breathing the same recycled air as me, made my stomach twist with unease.
I did another search, trying to figure out when she had been released exactly. I got an instant hit—they let her out two days ago.
Willow Run Road was a long road, but I guessed she was moving into one of the trailers people sold or rented out there. Who is paying for her place? I wondered. Somebody must be.
With a sideways glance out the window, I looked on as reporters grazed through my field like wide-eyed cows.
I didn’t even hear them pull in.
A flash of cold white skin, those bulgy gray eyes…
I stood up and went to the window, lowering the blinds.
The monster is back.
But is she a monster … or simply misunderstood? What truly motivated her crime that day? My thoughts were stuck on those two words: child killer.
Even now, a small part of me was filled with doubt. The violence of it … it didn’t seem like something a kid would do. It had never made sense to me.
Most of the conspiracy theories I’d read online were bogus—there were people who believed she was framed, some blaming her parents, Jenny’s brother … even a few who mentioned my brother or parents.
But her guilt was never in question. After all, she confessed to the crime.
And yet, I’d always felt like there was something more … a missing link to the story. Something more than a silly crush on a boy had to have motivated such violence…
The media had lost interest in the case over the years, but I had a feeling with her recent release, the cycle would begin again.
If I’m going to write
