Simone St James

Plus j'écoutais M. Gellis, plus il me semblait que la plupart des histoires de fantômes n'évoquaient pas seulement la mort, mais aussi un désespoir et un malheur insondable. Les gens heureux ne laissaient pas de fantômes derrière eux ; ou alors des fantômes calmes, qui restaient dans leur coin ou erraient sur les rives de leurs ruisseaux favoris sans jamais déranger les vivants.

The night it all ended, Vivian was alone.
That was fine with her. She preferred it. It was something she'd discovered, working the night shift at this place in the middle of nowhere: Being with people was easy, but being alone was hard. Especially being alone in the dark. The person who could be truly alone, in the company of no one but oneself and one's own thoughts - that person was stronger than anyone else. More ready. More prepared.

Since losing Mom, staying in college for my business degree seemed pointless. When I’d started college, I’d thought I had all the time in the world to figure out what I wanted to do. But Mom’s death showed me that life wasn’t as long as you thought it was. And I had questions I wanted answers to. It was time to find them.

Night people were not the same as day people. The good people of Fell, whoever they were, were sound asleep at three a.m. Those people never saw the people Viv saw: the cheating couples having affairs, the truckers strung out on whatever they took to stay awake, the women with blackened eyes who checked out at five a.m. to futilely go home again. These weren't people suburban Viv Delaney would ever have seen in a hundred years. They weren't people she would ever have talked to. There was an edge to them, a hard collision with life, that she hadn't known was possible in her soft cocoon. It wasn't romantic, but something about it drew her. It fascinated her. She didn't want to look away/

She puts on a navy blue sweater and her nylon jacket. she picked up her purse and her car keys. She knew what the eleven o'clock news would say: There was a killer on the loose. People should lock their doors/ Women should look over their shoulders, try not to be alone at night. Parents should look out for their daughters and always know where they are. Women should carry a whistle or a flashlight. Because if you were a woman, the world was a dangerous place.

The first email was from my family’s lawyer. The remainder of funds has been deposited into your account. Please see breakdown attached.
I flipped past it without reading the rest, without opening the attachment. I didn’t need to see it: I already knew I’d inherited some of Mom’s money, split with my brother, Graham. I knew it wasn’t riches, but it was enough to keep me in food and shelter for a little while. I didn’t want numbers, and I couldn’t look at them. Losing your mother to cancer – she was only fifty-one – made things like money look petty and stupid.
In fact, it made you rethink everything in your life. Which in my crazy way, after fourteen month in a fog of grief, I was doing. And I couldn’t stop.

"The newspapers didn't say that Victoria was an athlete," she said. They'd only said that Victoria got in a lot of trouble in school, as if that might be a reason her boyfriend had grabbed her and strangled her. As if somehow she deserved it. They didnt say it outright, but Viv could read in between the lines - any girl could. If you're bad, if you're slutty, this could hapen to you. Even the articles about saintly, married Cathy Caldwell speculated wheter her killer could be a secret boyfriend. Sneak around behind your husband's back, and this could happen to you.

On the radio, they talked about a body. A girl found in a ditch off Melborn Road, ten miles from here. Not that here was anywhere – just a motel on the side of a two-lane highway leading out of Fell and into the nothingness of upstate New York and eventually Canada. But if you took the two-lane for a mile and made a right at the single light dangling from an overhead wire, and followed that road to another and another, you’d be where the girl’s body was found. A girl named Tracy Waters, last seen leaving a friend’s house in a neighboring town. Eighteen years old, stripped naked and dumped in a ditch. They’d found her body two days after her parents reported her missing.
As she sat in her car, twenty-year-old Viv Delaney’s hands shook as she listened to the story. She thought about what it must be like to lie naked as the half-frozen rain pelted your helpless skin. How horribly cold that would be. How it was always girls who ended up stripped and dead like roadkill. How it didn’t matter how afraid or how careful you were – it could always be you.
Especially here. It could always be you.

Librairies were my places. I was that girl who maxed out her library card every week, starting with The Hobbit and The Witch of Blackbird Pond and moving up from there. I could kill an hour by wandering into an unfamiliar part of Dewey Decimal System and checking it out. Computers, card catalogs, microfiches - I could navigate them all.
So the Fell Central Library was immediately familiar.