She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,141

Dotts

Kaitlyn Gargery

Penelope Maudlin

Richard Nettleton

Keith Pickford

Emma Tackett

Edward Thatch

Lester Woolford

Elfrieda Leech

I drew arrows connecting my mother’s and father’s names, then did the same for Stella’s parents.

I stared at that list for nearly an hour.

The bottle of Jameson sat on the nightstand.

If I went back to the apartment, Willy would be waiting for me. Maybe Matteo too, at this point. He might have driven up. Maybe the police. Possibly all of them.

The people in white, too.

That’s where they’ll pick you back up, my mind whispered. If they lost you at all.

Cecile Dreher saw me at Leech’s door. She may have told the police. If the police knew I was in the room when Elfrieda Leech shot herself, they may be wondering if it was even suicide. I had no motive, no reason to want her dead, but they wanted me. They made that real clear the last time. Police planted evidence, they lied. They’d do what they needed to do to build a case, even a weak one.

At the very least, if I went back, Matteo would find some way to lock me down. Some facility, a thirty-day program. He’d find a jailer much worse than William Trudeau.

The bottle of Jameson sat on the nightstand.

A settled brain is a clear brain, they always say.

Who’s they? I had no idea.

I couldn’t drink. Not now.

I looked back down at the list and realized what I had to do.

I had to find them. All of them.

That’s why my father left the yearbook.

Why else?

I left just a little after two in the morning.

6

The Penn State Registrar’s office was located in a brick building off Curtin Road between the recreation center and the Pegula Ice Arena. Nancy Vass had worked there for twenty-three years and planned to retire to Boca Raton in two more. She’d miss the students, she wouldn’t miss the cold. On the morning of March 15, 1994, when she arrived to work, she found the registrar’s office suffered the first and only break-in since the college was founded in 1855. Someone had used a rock to shatter the glass in the door and gain entry. Although they would never determine what, if anything, had been taken, thirteen files were missing from the student records housed along the back wall in the beige file cabinets. One folder belonging to a former guidance counselor named Elfrieda Leech was gone too, this one from the employee records in the back room.

About the same time Nancy Vass was dialing the campus police to report the break-in, I was seventeen miles away at Otto’s Buy Here Pay Here lot in Hublesburg, trading my Honda Prelude (and one thousand dollars cash) for a 1989 Jeep Wrangler. For an extra fifty, he sold me a license plate he pulled from a clunker around back.

I wouldn’t speak to Willy or Matteo for the next four years.

I’d never set foot back on the Penn State campus.

I hadn’t reopened the bottle of Jameson but I would soon enough.

And I’d see Stella again, too—possibly the only certainty left in my life.

7

On the night of August 8, 1994, Detective Joy Fogel stood among the trees behind the bench at South Side Cemetery and waited for Jack Thatch to appear. Five other officers were positioned in various places throughout the cemetery, also waiting for Jack Thatch. She instructed them all to wear plain clothes and attempt to appear as mourners, but she knew they all stuck out, plain as day. Another officer had been positioned in the hallway outside his apartment. The operation hadn’t been sanctioned by Pittsburgh PD. She would have never gotten approval for something like this. She couldn’t charge him with anything—she had nothing but speculation and bits of circumstantial evidence, nothing that would hold up. Instead, she rolled out the Wall of Weird first thing that morning and simply asked, “Who wants to help today?” There were sneers, jeers, and six volunteers.

Jack Thatch did not appear.

He had not been seen for nearly five months. Not since leaving Penn State for God knew where.

At thirty-eight past one in the morning, she told everyone to go home. The operation was a bust.

She went back to Pittsburgh PD, brewed a pot of coffee, and waited for the inevitable phone call telling her another body had been found, appearing black and burnt, but not. That call did not come.

There was no body that year.

Nothing in 1995, 1996, or 1997 either.

Turns out, they were looking in the wrong place. Former Detective Terrance Stack, just Terry now, would figure that