The Man Trapped by Shadows by Pete Zacharias

Author:Pete Zacharias [Zacharias, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-10T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

September 25, 2019

The two of them decided not to stay the night anywhere. While they drove back, Rooker flipped through the dusty pages of Amy Berglund’s high school yearbook.

“Her yearbook? Why?”

“I just wanted to take a look. She died shortly after graduation. Maybe there’s a connection somewhere in here. Maybe someone else who was going off to Princeton. Maybe there’s something in here about Amy that will make sense to me. Maybe there’s someone who wrote something odd in it.” The entire way, Rooker thought about the last gaze he took at the crooked house and the shape of the woman who watched him from behind the screen door.

He didn’t quite know what he was looking for. He started with the senior class of ’89 and looked through every page. Stared at face after face. Flipped through the damp smell to find Amy’s photo. She was there again, in the back, seated with the rest of the Debate Club. Again, he stared at each face and the name of each person below the photograph. He scanned the front and back where people typically wrote something like, “Have a great summer.” Promises to keep in touch that almost never were kept. At least in his experience.

After scouring the yearbook, he found only one note that stood out to him. Swirling letters and neatly written—a girl. It read:

Secrets, secrets . . . sure are FUN. If only the trees could talk, am I right?

Have an amazing summer.

V.R.

He flipped through the senior class to the R section of last names, but there was no one who matched those initials. Strange. He did the same thing with the junior class but found nothing. It wasn’t until he started with the sophomores that he found Victoria Reynolds, with dark straight hair, a look of menace, and a shiny hoop piercing in the right nostril of her pug nose.

He shimmied in the seat and plucked a pen from his pocket and wrote on his hand.

Victoria Reynolds.

“Listen to this,” he said to Millie without turning to her. He recited the yearbook message for her. “She was only a sophomore when Amy was a senior. What do you think?”

“An inside joke?”

“I wonder if that’s all it is, though.”

“You can’t be serious, Rooker?”

“Why not? When you were a senior in high school, how many sophomores wrote in your yearbook? Amy Berglund, the girl everyone knew, had an inside joke with this girl?” He flashed her image in front of Millie’s face.

Aside from shoving the yearbook out of her view, Millie didn’t answer.

“Look, I’m not saying she killed Amy. But maybe she knows something. It’s worth checking out.”

When the two of them got back to the cottage, Millie did a search on Victoria Reynolds and found hit after hit, but only one when she refined the search to Itasca County. There was no home address listed. Only an article published online that listed Victoria Reynolds as a server at a café called Betsy’s Diner. World-Famous Blueberry Pie!

Rooker called the

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