“Yep.”
She raised a foot to step in, but Thea’s hands curled around her upper arm, fingers biting into her flesh. Bryce sent a raised eyebrow over her shoulder to find her best friend cowering behind her back.
“What!? We weren’tallraised to be fearless criminals. I’m using you as my shield.”
“It wasyouridea to come here!” Bryce hissed back at her. She was anything but fearless, but her feet drove her forward; fragile, loose floorboards creaked beneath her feet as she took the plunge.
The place was as dingy and riddled with cobwebs as expected, even worse than the bookstore basement, in fact. Weeds crept through the cracked wood with the watery midday light, and shards of glass from a broken window lay scattered on the floor.
But it wasn’t empty or unused. Not at all. The walls were plastered with newspaper clippings and photographs. Bryce thought it was just insulation at first, until she saw an image of Officer Isaac Harmer staring back at her from the corner.
A beam of light shone from a flashlight app on Mikey’s phone as he skimmed over it all. There were photographs of George, too, and… Hannah, from their social media accounts.
She drifted to Harmer’s picture without hesitation, fingers subconsciously reaching out to trace across his warm, creased features. Seeing him, remembering, still left pain stabbing through her. Some of the articles, roughly cut out from theStone Grange Gazette, were new. Details of his disappearance and his murder; his obituary and his accomplishments. Some of them went back years, to the time he’d rescued a dog from an iced over Lake Tunwall and stopped a thief who had knocked over Miss Kelly on the way out of the grocery store.
The collection branched off to the wall adjacent. Bryce followed it, and Mikey’s torch followed her.
“Is that Roger Morris?” Thea squinted. The older newspapers sat right at the top, coffee-stained and faded; the same ones Thea had shown to Bryce just a few days ago, though a different print. Roger Morris’s harrowing mugshot glared down at them, but that wasn’t all. His cruel face sat beside a clipping of a familiar, gangly child sitting on a man’s shoulders.
The newspaper caption named her Sara Morris. And the man… the man was Roger Morris, his moustache-framed grin showing the famous gap between his teeth.
“But that’s Sara. Officer Shaw. Roger was her dad,” Bryce whispered.
“Then it’s her,” said Thea. “It must be. Maybe she’s finishing what her dad started all those years ago.”
Officer Shaw was a little stern sometimes, but Bryce had never imagined her a killer. “But why? What’s her motive?”
Both Mikey and Thea shook their heads, at a loss. Bryce could only chew on her cheek, deep in thought. Sarahadreacted strongly when she’d seen them scouring the newspapers the other day. Maybe because the previous killer had been her dad. Maybe because she didn’t want to be found out — or already had been by Isaac. But why the other deaths? What was the point?
“Bryce.” Mikey’s voice shook with urgency, and Bryce whipped around, heart pounding.
And then her stomach turned to water. The opposite wall didn’t display Isaac or George or Hannah. It was forher.Photographs of her she hadn’t known had been taken: strolling out of work with her sweater pushed up past her elbows, slurping on a milkshake at Dina’s with Thea, shopping with Liv on Maple Street. This person had followed her in plain sight. This person had documented her life around town.
Why?
If itwasShaw, it made no sense. Bryce had only talked to her a handful of times, usually down at the arcade. There was no reason she — or anyone, for that matter — should have a special interest in her.
“These photographs aren’t public pics like the others,” Thea said quietly. “They’re like… stalker pictures.”
“Psychopaths often fixate on one person. Maybe… maybe Shaw is obsessed with you,” Mikey suggested.
With the foul taste of ash in her mouth, Bryce turned away from the pictures before they burned themselves into her memory forever. “No. This is all just some sick prank or something. I don’t have time for it. I have to go to work. Are you coming?”
“Bryce.” Thea tried to catch her hand, but she snatched it away and pushed past them both, gulping down the rotten-smelling air as soon as she stepped outside. Bile rose in her throat, but she refused to let her fears take hold of her now. This was all just some misunderstanding. All of it.
“We have to figure this out,” Thea pleaded, following Bryce back through the bramble and onto the muddy path. Mikey trailed behind.
“Put the lock back on the door.” Bryce barked out the orders loudly enough that she swore the ground rattled beneath her feet. Maybe that was just the anxiety, though, still vying for her attention, her weakness. “Nobody can know we were here.”
She didn’t stick around long enough to see if either of them listened. She needed to get as far away from that shed, this lake, all of it, as possible.