Before She Was Found - Heather Gudenkauf Page 0,54
and told her what we were working on. The librarian said we should look at old newspaper articles and took us back to the microfiche machine and asked us what dates we needed.
She went into a back room and came back with a box of microfiche film from 1944 and ’45. The spinning microfiche pages made me dizzy but we did find an article that talked about the Wither house burning down. In the story the sheriff said that he thought that Joseph probably started the fire and then ran away.
Then we found another news story that came out a few weeks later that talked about a fourteen-year-old girl named Loretta and her twelve-year-old sister named Helen. Loretta, who was found dead by the railroad tracks, was strangled with some kind of rope and Helen was missing.
So Kendall and Emery weren’t lying to me. They were right, at least about this part of the story. The sheriff said they wanted to talk to Joseph Wither about the murder and the kidnapping.
The really scary part is that the Wither family lived on the same street as Violet. Obviously, the house isn’t there anymore, but still, it’s pretty creepy. After that we couldn’t find any more articles that mentioned Joseph Wither and Jordyn got all mad and said that we can’t do a report with only one dead body, that it wasn’t really a legend, then.
Violet said that of course we could do the report; we just had to look harder for more information. I brought up the idea of looking at the school yearbooks and Jordyn laughed. That’s stupid, she said. There isn’t going to be anything about the missing girls in them. But Violet said there might be pictures.
She was right. We went to the reference section where there were pictures of Joseph, Loretta and Helen in the yearbooks. Jordyn said Wither was cute. I thought he was, too, but I didn’t say that. Wither had sad eyes, which kind of makes sense since he and Lucy weren’t allowed to see each other. Violet drew a picture of him in her sketchbook based on the photograph. It was really good. I told you she was a good artist.
While Violet and Jordyn went to make copies of the yearbook at the copy machine, I found the Pitch High School yearbook from 1991 and pulled it down from the shelf. I flipped through the pages, not sure what I was looking for. JW44 said the girl’s name was Rachel so I started with that.
I found a picture of a girl named Rachel Daly, who was a senior in 1991. She was pretty even though she had the really big hair that Kendall said was popular during that time. I looked at the picture carefully, but I couldn’t see anything that would tell me that JW44 would know who she was.
I turned back to the index and started going through the long list of student names and came across another Rachel. Rachel Farmer. She only had one page number next to her name. I turned to page thirty-six and found her picture right away. My stomach did a flip-flop. Someone had drawn a heart around her face and had written next to it in tiny letters JW+RF.
Jordyn came up behind me and asked me what I was doing. I slammed the yearbook shut and said nothing. She gave me a weird look and said she had to go home and would see me tomorrow.
So JW44 must be real. The yearbook proved it.
I thought about Rachel Farmer and JW44 all night. I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. I keep hearing scratching at my window so I get up and check, thinking it might be Joseph wanting me to let him inside. Sometimes I think I see him hiding in the shadows.
During the daytime, it doesn’t seem so scary, but at night it’s different. After I go to bed I hear sounds coming from the vent above my desk. I think it might be Joseph Wither whispering my name over and over through the vent in my bedroom.
But that’s impossible, right?
The first few nights, I went into my mom and dad’s room and told them I was having a bad dream. My mom would walk me back to my room and lie with me in bed until I fell asleep. But after the third night, my dad said enough was enough and I needed to get to sleep on my own.