No One Will Miss Her(9)
Maybe I don’t want to tell this part after all.
And I don’t want you to think my life was all bad. It wasn’t. My father did love me, which is more than some people can say. He gave me what he could, and the mistakes he made were out of ignorance, not meanness. Even when he was drunk, and he was drunk plenty, he never raised a hand or said a cruel word. Plenty of people hurt me in my life—hell, I married a man who did almost nothing else—but Pop wasn’t one of them. That house on the lake, the one where I died? He bought it cheap from Teddy Reardon the year after my mother’s accident. He bought it for me, to fix up and rent out for the college education he thought I might want someday. He actually thought that was possible. That I’d amount to something, never mind what everyone said about us.
And when it all went sideways and I ended up with Dwayne, Pop handed me the key to the place and called it a wedding present, and you’d never have known he was disappointed except for the way he couldn’t quite meet my eyes.
Chapter 5
The Lake
Bird’s first thought, as he scrolled through the history on Lizzie Ouellette’s Facebook page, was that she didn’t like having her picture taken. Some girls were downright obsessed with their own faces—his last girlfriend had been one of these, her social media feeds an endless scroll of self-portraits, overlaid with those weird glowy filters that made her look like some kind of cartoon doll. Whatever you called that kind of girl, Lizzie was exactly the opposite. Her profile photo had last been updated three years ago, a grainy picture taken from a distance as she faced into the sun. One hand was lifted to shield her eyes, a can of Coors Light clutched in the other, and her face was a featureless squint—it was impossible to tell what she looked like beyond the basics: pale, thin, red-haired. Bird kept swiping. The next several photos didn’t have Lizzie in them at all; one was a picture of a sunset over the lake, another a blurry shot of something brown and furry—a rabbit? a cat?—nestled in a patch of grass. At some point, she’d tried to take a close-up photo with the camera on her computer, her features so blown out that all you could see were her eyes, her nostrils, and the thin line of her mouth. But finally, he found her. Ten years back, right up close, glancing over her shoulder and into the camera with wide eyes and parted lips, like she’d been caught off guard. She was wearing a strapless yellow dress and a wreath of flowers on her head, her hair twisted up beneath it in a series of elaborate coils, and her cheeks were full and pink. Ten years ago . . . Bird did the math. She would have been eighteen here. Just a kid, off to her senior prom.
He gazed at the picture for several seconds longer before it clicked: the flowers, the makeup, the outfit. The prom, he’d thought, but it wasn’t.
It was her wedding day.
The last time Lizzie Ouellette had willingly let herself be photographed—or the last time that someone else cared enough to point a camera in her direction, and the more Bird scrolled back and forth through her feed, the more sure he was that it was the latter. Facebook profiles only told you so much about a person, but there was something incredibly lonely about this one. Some people didn’t post much online because they valued their privacy. But for Lizzie, it seemed more like she simply hadn’t bothered, because no one would care.
They cared now, of course. In the past few hours, Lizzie Ouellette’s timeline had come alive with comments. They read like macabre yearbook entries: I can’t believe it. RIP Lizzie. Lizzie we were never close but I know your having fun in heaven, stay sweet girl. Bird dutifully wrote down their names, but he was already certain none of them would be any help. These people didn’t know the girl, didn’t spend time with her. With one exception, a Jennifer Wellstood, they had never liked a single one of her photos or even wished her a happy birthday. Certainly, they would have no idea what she’d been up to in the last few days of her life, which was Bird’s job to piece together and proving near impossible. That moment at the house, just a few hours before—the barely suppressed snickering over that mole on the woman’s breast—had been the tip of a town-wide phenomenon. Somehow, everyone in Copper Falls knew about Lizzie Ouellette, but nobody kept company with her.
Even her own father wasn’t sure where she’d been that past weekend, what she’d been up to, why she would have ended up at the lake instead of the place she and Dwayne owned in town. Earl Ouellette had been Bird’s first interview, conducted in a corner of the police station, where the EMTs had left him just after dawn on account of the fire. Earl’s stubbled face and gnarled hands were smudged with grease and soot; as he talked, he kept scrubbing absentmindedly at one blackened knuckle with his thumb. Bird wondered if he might be in shock. By any reasonable measure, he should be. It was a hell of a thing for a man to bear, his livelihood and his family both gone in a single morning. Lizzie had been his only child. Earl Ouellette was now alone in the world. And yet . . .
“I don’t know what help I can be. We didn’t keep in contact much,” Earl said. He gazed straight ahead, his eyes bloodshot and glassy from the smoke, or grief, or both.
“Even with her living so close?” Bird asked.
Earl had shrugged. “Everything’s close here. The whole town ain’t but a mile end to end. Lizzie kept herself to herself. She always did, even when we was under the same roof.”
“At the junkyard?” Bird had passed by on his way here, just to see the charred remains of the single-wide that had been his victim’s childhood home. “That must have been hard. Close quarters. Even just for two.”