The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel by Peter Swanson

Author:Peter Swanson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harpercollins
Published: 2014-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Sporadic bursts of rain came in the night as George lay awake, his face still aching, on his broken mattress. The joints of the weathered motel clicked and whistled. Cars on the highway cast shadows that wheeled through the room, long to short to long again. George filled the ashtray with butts and turned the television on and off several times. At dawn, when the wind had died and the rising sun bathed everything in the same thin light, he fell asleep, lips stinging, mouth thick with the taste of cigarettes.

He called Chalfant in the morning, told the detective that he thought the girl they were looking for might come from a neighboring town; maybe he could look at more yearbooks. George told Chalfant he thought Chinkapin was a possibility. Chalfant told him to come by the station after lunch.

Dan Thompson lent George the car again. “You speak Mexican?”

“Sorry, no.”

“That’s okay, but it would help. I do need one favor from you. There’s a Mexican joint—Abelito’s—you know it?” He wore the same light tan suit again, but with a different matching set of tie and handkerchief. Today they were a shiny neon blue.

“No, but I can find it.”

Thompson gave him the avenue and the cross street, and the paperwork that needed signatures.

George timed his errand to coincide with lunch and ate at the busy Mexican place. The food was good, but he barely had an appetite. He knew with what felt like certainty that in a few hours he would find out the true identity of the girl he’d known as Audrey. How soon after that would he be able to see her again? He paid for his meal and drove to the police station.

Chalfant was out, but Denise had left a stack of yearbooks, including Chinkapin High’s, in his office. Left alone with the books, George started with the most recent. Instead of looking at the individual photographs first, he flipped toward the back, where there were group shots of clubs and teams. He found “Speech and Debate,” a half page with a black-and-white shot of about seven students in two rows, and nervously scanned the faces.

There she was. Her hair was not the same in the photo—it was longer and feathered and somehow looked blonder—but the rest was the same, the face, the posture, the half smile.

He read the names printed along the bottom. She was in the second row, third from left: L. Decter. He flipped the pages back to the early section of the senior portraits and found her: Liana Decter. She wore a black, scoop-necked dress and a string of pearls. He stared at the picture for a long time, her eyes staring back at him. They told him nothing new.

He closed the book but kept it on his lap. Ever since Denise had ushered him into the office, he hadn’t heard any activity at all in the hallway. He made his mind up. Leaving the yearbook behind and casually walking out of Chalfant’s office,

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