tonyhealey.com

The first bedroom has been turned into an art studio. There is a stool, an easel, a table. Painting materials everywhere. Sun pouring through the window, making the room light and airy. Walls covered with works-in-progress. Albie dabs a finger at the corner of the painting still clipped to the easel board.

“Still wet,” he says, rubbing the tips of his fingers together. “Must’ve been working on it last night.”

“Hence what she had on her nails.”

Some of Sally-Anne’s art is in frames on the floor, propped against the wall.

“Do you think she sells her artwork?” Albie asks. “These seem to have been prepared to go on display.”

“Looks that way,” Harper admits. “Could be a local art gallery stocks her work. Maybe it was a source of income for her.”

“Like people who sell stuff on eBay,” Albie says.

“Somehow I don’t think it’s the same thing,” Harper says. She slowly circles the room, hands clasped behind her back, studying what is up on the walls. Landscapes in watercolor, with architectural details and agricultural elements picked out in oil crayon. Studies of Hope’s Peak. Some of them with reference photographs of the scenes pinned next to them. All very clear and precise. Filled with bright splashes of color. The work of a sure and steady hand.

The town hall against a backdrop of pink sky.

Turner Street with the Hope and Ruin Coffee Bar in the background, cars parked up against the sidewalk.

A long field of corn under an unrelenting sun. Black crows cutting through a sky of unbelievable blue.

Seeing it brings back memories: Harper remembers the girl in that corn—coveted and crowned by a sick, deranged mind. She shakes the image—and the memories it stirs up—and looks at another picture, this one a pencil sketch of the Crenna Woodmill at the edge of town, sitting ominously on the horizon. Seen from a distance, the sign just about visible. At the bottom is written Blue Ruin in what must be Sally-Anne’s scrawled script.

Harper had been talented with a paintbrush herself back in high school. Often she found solace in drawing, in recreating Disney characters with pencils and felt tip pens. It took her away from her own childhood—providing some form of escape.

In her teens it was music: The Clash, Springsteen, Roxy Music, The Smiths, Led Zeppelin.

Later, it was boys and all the trouble that comes with them.

Then it was working the beat in San Francisco as a rookie cop, where she found her calling and no longer felt the need to escape, to fly free.

Over on Sally-Anne’s workspace she finds charcoal pencils, chalk, all manner of brushes, half-used tubes of oil paints, their flat ends rolled up. Pencil shavings. Blotter paper. A craft knife. “She was a talented girl,” Harper says, almost to herself.

Albie looks at her.

“She used different mediums. Watercolor and oil crayon. Pastels over there. Oils. Gauche. All these pictures are a mixture of different techniques,” Harper says, cocking her head to one side as she regards the pictures on the wall. “Wait, are you seeing what I see?”

Albie looks about, eyes searching for a long moment before widening with surprise. “I do.”

Along with the landscapes and studies of scenes around Hope’s Peak, Sally-Anne has painted the same scene over and over.

A dark wall. In some it is old brick, in others what looks like stone or rock.

Light spilling from an open doorway.

Silhouetted in the door, a man of shadows. No features, nothing but a hulking mass of torso, arms and legs.

Albie says, “I didn’t even notice when we walked in here.”

Harper shakes her head. “Because they’re scattered here and there. Some are concealed beneath other pictures. By the looks of things, I don’t think Sally-Anne was even aware she’d made several of the same pictures. She probably just did them and put ’em up.”

Albie scoffs. “I’m sorry, Harper, but I just don’t see how that’d be possible. I don’t buy it. How can you not know you’ve made the same picture over and over?”

“I’m telling you, it happens,” she says. “The same way you can dream the same dream, night after night, but never remember you had it. If it’s locked in the subconscious, it finds a way out. Especially if it means a lot to you personally. Look at all the novelists who end up channeling the same shit into book after book without realizing it.”

“You mean, facing your demons through art.”

“Something like that.”

Albie looks up at one menacing painting in particular. “I don’t know . . .” he says, unsure.

“Anyway, it’s a theory,” Harper says, moving on to another picture. “Gotta admit, they’re creepy.”

“I wonder who it is,” Albie says.

“Somebody who made an impression on her,” Harper says. She frowns at the shadowy figure in the pictures around her. The mystery man.

In the hall outside, the walls are bare save for a full-length mirror. The bathroom is white tile, white toilet, sink and shower unit. Black towels hanging from a rack on the wall. A wicker laundry basket in the corner.

Albie lifts the lid to peer inside. “Just a few undies,” he reports, putting the lid back on top.

They go to Sally-Anne’s bedroom. The bed is unmade. Top sheet thrown back––no doubt in her hurry to get out of the house. Apart from that, it is orderly. Doesn’t look as if it has been ransacked. Nothing that rings any alarm bells.

Albie inspects Sally-Anne’s wardrobe, pulls the clothes back on the rack. He opens the drawers at the bottom of the wardrobe. “I don’t even know what I should be looking for,” he says.

“Well, if I did, I wouldn’t keep it a secret from you, Albie,” Harper says sarcastically, rooting through the drawers of the bedside cabinets.

Albie feels around on the top shelf of the wardrobe, standing on tiptoe to do it. “Ah,” he says, finding something.

Harper watches as he pulls out folded clothes and jeans, drops them to the floor, then reaches in with both hands to remove a metal box.

Harper produces a pocketknife. Jimmies the lock.

Inside there are newspaper clippings. Loads of them. One clipping faces upward, folded over halfway. She uses the tip of the pocketknife to lift the flap back over.

The clipping is dated 2002. It’s faded, the paper yellowed with age.

‘HURT RIVER GIRLS’ RETURN

A victim of one of the most shocking kidnapping cases Virginia has ever known have been returned to their families, we have learned today. Rachel Jones, 13, from Hurt River, Virginia, was found walking the dark back roads outside of Shenandoah National Park, at 5:30 yesterday morning.

Dr. Piper Fisher, a local pediatrician, was passing through the area on her way to a medical conference when she spotted Rachel on the verge of the road. She pulled over and found her to be “dazed and confused.” In a statement to the press, Dr. Fisher said the girl was “almost catatonic. She didn’t seem to know where she was.”

The FBI was alerted by the local PD, and within hours Rachel’s family was notified.

The second kidnapping victim from the Hurt River area, Christine Faulk––believed to have been abducted at the same time as Rachel Jones––remains missing. Authorities are asking for anyone with information to come forward . . .

“What do you think this means?” Albie asks her.

She looks at him. A chill runs down the back of her neck, a trickle of ice water, her whole body prickling with goose bumps. “I don’t know. Close it up. Bag it as evidence.”

“Sure.”

“CSU need to go over this entire house with a fine-tooth comb,” she says, frowning. “Something’s amiss here.”

“You mean, apart from the fact she was murdered?”

“Nobody likes a smart ass. I’m being serious. This doesn’t feel right . . . this victim, the whole thing, it doesn’t feel right.”

“Okay. I’ll go talk to CSU,” Albie says, leaving the room.

Harper moves to the window. There is the yard. The woods beyond. White sun rising over the tops of the trees, burning hot.

Why did this woman die?

It’s the question that drives every homicide investigation, even more than How.

Why.

This person, over all others, met their maker before their time.

Why.

When a woman is found murdered by hunting arrows in a woodland clearing, Detective Jane Harper is left to determine who is responsible. But when revelations about the victim’s true identity surface, Harper soon realizes that all is not as it seems–and that the killer’s motivations are more complex than she could have imagined….