Page 2 of 44.1644° North
It’s not like she was in the middle of nowhere. Not really. She could see a few scattered window lights, porch lights through the trees. She could ask for help at any of those homes. Better, though, to put some distance between herself and the crash site. Just in case the sheriff’s deputy returned.
She needed somewhere warm and quiet to spend the night. It had been a few years since she’d traveled this road, but she was pretty sure there would be lodges, motels down the highway a bit.
Tomorrow she’d retrieve her car and deal with whatever there was to deal with. Everything always looked brighter in the morning. She just needed a good night’s sleep—something she hadn’t had in…weeks?
Impossible to make important decisions, life-changing decisions when you were this exhausted.
Now that the initial heart-pounding surge of adrenaline had passed, she was starting to feel the aches and pains of the crash. And the cold… The cold really sucked the energy out of you.
Well, the best remedy for that was to keep moving. The white circle of her flashlight beam bounced playfully ahead of her.
She’d kill for a cup of hot coffee. The stop for lunch at that diner felt like a week ago.
The quiet was getting to her. Thecrackof every tree branch under snow sounded like a gunshot.
How far had she gone? It felt like miles, but the spot where she’d gone off the road was only just out of sight. Maybe she’d flag down the next car that came by. If she could get to a phone, that would simplify things.
After all, she’d been camping a million times. She loved the outdoors.
She began to sing one of those goofy old songs her dad loved, raising her voice in defiance of the ringing silence around her.
“When Irish eyes are smiling…” The air tasted of snow and pine. “Sure, it’s like a morn in spring…”
Overhead, the tufted stratocumulus layer of clouds drifted, pulled apart, and for a few encouraging seconds, the waning moon glowed warmly, brightly off the snow banks, gilded the tree tops.
“You can hear the angels sing…”
All too soon, the light faded and shadows fell once more. The trailing threads of clouds rewove themselves into a tapestry of darkness and silence.
Chapter One
“I don’t agree with your theory,” the drunk guy in the blue T-shirt said. “The idea that Deirdre would justhappento climb into the wrong car with the wrong guy is too far-fetched. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
I get this a lot, and I smiled politely. “If I told you that an anonymous woman hitchhiking at night in the White Mountains was found murdered, would you say that was too much of a coincidence? Would you even think twice about it?”
We were wedged into a table at the very crowded, very noisy Swiftwater Pub outside the village of Woodlark, NH (population 892—though this weekend that number would swell to something over one thousand). It was on a lonely stretch of mountain highway in this rural outpost off Route 112 that Deirdre O’Donnell, a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts teaching student, had vanished off the face of the earth almost two decades earlier.
The drunk guy—short sandy hair, florid face, a boyish fortyish hitting his flabby fifties—scowled. “Yeah, but Deedee wasn’t ananonymouswoman. I mean, what are the odds thatsheof all people, would get into the wrong car at the wrong time?”
“Have you ever seenDisappeared?” Kind of a rhetorical question. Most people crowded into the bar area were true-crime buffs and had seen episode six, “Road to Nowhere,” more than once. In fact, that 2010 showing had been Deirdre’s introduction to most of the country, which until then had been largely ignorant of the 2004 disappearance.
To be honest, most of the country wasstilllargely ignorant of Deirdre’s disappearance. In internet sleuthing circles, Deirdre was the grand dame of missing girls. In the real world? Just one of currently over five-hundred-thousand missing persons.
“What about it?” Blue T-shirt—had he introduced himself? Everybody was starting to blur together—demanded belligerently.
It always took me aback how personal this was for so many internet sleuths. How deeply,fiercelyinvested they were in their theories.
I said, “Most women who disappear—and these victims are usually, by far, women—got into the wrong car with the wrong man at the wrong time.”
Blue T-Shirt scoffed, “It’s too convenient. It’s tooeasy.”
“It seems that way to us: how couldshe, of all people? But that’s because we’ve been studying her, analyzing her case for so long. We feel like we know her. She seems like a personal acquaintance. Or even a celebrity. The idea that something like that, so tragically common, so mundane, could happen toheris hard to believe. It’s like hearing Rihanna was snatched off the road.”
Blue T-shirt’s face screwed up in disgust. “Bullshit. That’s not what I mean. That’s not how it is at all.”
I hung onto what I hoped was an expression of pleasant inquiry—or what my brother Kaj refers to as myteacher face. Says the guy with themarine biologistface. “Okay. How is it, then?”
“The boyfriend did it. Tommy Aldrich. Obviously.”
