Hippie House by Katherine Holubitsky

Author:Katherine Holubitsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV000000
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2004-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

9

AT THE END OF MARCH there seemed to be no happy news in the world. On March 29, Charles Manson and three of his “family” were sentenced to death for the murders of actress Sharon Tate and several others. On the same day, Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of the massacre of twenty Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. The pictures of children starving in Biafra broke our hearts, and Bangladeshi civilians, under attack by Pakistani troops, streamed by the thousands toward the Indian border.

And three weeks after she disappeared, Fiona Young’s body was found.

She was found in a drainpipe by Boy Scouts on a scavenger hunt. It was a large drainpipe with room enough for a child to stand up. It connected the road ditches at the end of a lane leading to a rural community hall about two miles from where Fiona’s purse had been found. A chill spread through me when I read about it. What a horrible place to be left until somebody found you. Especially at that time of year with the snow melting and the water running through it, with all the muck and animal waste and winter debris winding its way to the sewer. I only hoped she wasn’t lying face down in it, in which case her eyes and mouth would be filled with mud—a suffocating and almost unbearable image for me to entertain.

I wondered how the twelve-year-old boys who discovered Fiona’s body were coping. Boy Scouts, like Eric had once been. In a race against other members of their scout pack they’d set out to search the park, fields and ditches for perhaps a duck feather or a rusty nail. Maybe it was a pine cone they were after, or a stone of a specific diameter, when they stumbled into the drainpipe. Did they trip over her? Or did they stop and stare, unable to speak as Eric had been unable to speak after discovering Katie, wondering if they could believe their eyes?

Fiona had been strangled in much the same way as Katie, although the newspaper article didn’t say what with. Her hands had been bound behind her back before she was killed—the work of a wimpy, spineless coward, Megan and I agreed. Her murder caused a sudden influx of detectives into Pike Creek once again. My father said they were likely looking for similarities. It could not have been their hair color; Katie’s hair was dark and straight, and Fiona’s was curly and blond. It also could not have been their size because Katie was petite and Fiona was big boned. They must have been looking for something less apparent, perhaps something cryptic that connected the two girls. It could have been the friends they had, but more likely, Eric told me, it was something taken or left behind.

On a Sunday afternoon, Detective Mather showed up at Ruddy Duck Farm. He took another walk around the area of the Hippie House, through the woods and up and down the ditches on both sides of the road.

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