Page 123 of The Other Side
45
The campus was deserted.
It seemed everyone had left already, which would make my task much simpler.
I knew it was a risk to leave the relative safety of my room, but what other choice did I have? I could have called a taxi to come pick me up so I wasn’t alone, but where would I go? And I had no way of knowing if Chance would see the email I’d sent, let alone actually come to get me.
The sound of the snow crunching beneath my feet echoed across the courtyard, bouncing off the dormant trees of the surrounding woods. The otherwise palpable silence was unnerving, and I felt foolish for not having grabbed my coat, even for the short trek to the main building.
The door lurched open after I scanned my badge to release the lock. I tried to close it as quietly as possible, in case there was someone skulking around. However the old hinges made a high-pitched creaking noise that reverberated down the entire entrance hall.
Only the after-hours lighting was on, illuminating the entrance in a dirty yellow sheen. I took out my cell phone, turning on the flashlight and shining it down the stairs, into the dark maw that awaited me below.
It occurred to me that it had only been a few hours since Chance had left. His path out of the main building for the last time would have crossed where I then stood. I still felt like maybe I was in a dream, or rather, a nightmare.
I shook my head. I couldn’t let thoughts of Chance derail me. I needed to keep tabs on my surroundings, listening for signs of anyone approaching. I held my flashlight up, my hand trembling as I descended the stairs, making sure to use my free hand to trail along the stone walls to keep my balance.
The only other time I’d been in the admin offices this late at night had been with Chance. I didn’t remember it feeling quite so foreboding with him goofing around next to me. But it didn’t matter anymore. He was gone, and I was on this mission on my own.
Gulping as I made it to the bottom of the stairs, I tried not to think about the fact that nobody was around to help me. If something happened to me, down in that awful basement, nobody would hear me scream; nobody would even find my body until people started to return from break in a week.
“Geez, Violet,” I scolded myself.
Sneaking down into the admin offices, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I knew I was missing a final piece. I was having a hard time reconciling that my docile, cat-loving, sweater-making friend, Jolene, could have done anything so heinous.
Whether it was to find something that would disprove my theory, or a motive so strong that it would finally allow me to accept what I knew was likely true, I had to keep looking. And the records room was as good of a place to start as any.
What Lenny had said wasn’t sitting right with me. He had such conviction that she’d attended Montgomery. He had no reason to lie. But if I could verify his memory with something solid like a yearbook, then I could figure out how to move forward.
The door to the records room opened with an easy click, using Jolene’s hidden set of keys. I propped the regular stone against the door to stop it from shutting, praying I wouldn’t be locked inside. I decided to keep using my flashlight instead of turning on the overhead lights, too scared to make my presence that much more obvious than it already was.
The girls had gone missing in spring of 1992, so that was the first yearbook I pulled. I knew Jolene was in her forties, so the timeline roughly lined up. I found the headshots of the two girls, side by side in the section for the juniors. I’d seen the photos before, while Chance and I had investigated.
Leaning against a storage rack, I slowly made my way through the other student photos, until I found her.
I stared at the photo in shock. But there she was, on the second-to-last page of sophomores. Jolene Reynolds.
She was a natural brunette, so it took me a minute to reconcile what I was seeing without the bleach-blonde hair I had always associated with her, but despite the addition of a few wrinkles and a bit more makeup than her younger self, she hadn’t changed much.
Her hair was still frizzy, just darker, her cheeks still round and ruddy, and she even wore what looked like a hand-knit sweater, although it didn’t feature one of her elaborate designs.
Flipping between the pages, studying the photos of the three girls, I noticed something rather peculiar…the three of them bore an uncanny resemblance to one another. They had the same nose and mouth, and the same big eyes, albeit different colors, and the same hair color, but the twins’ had pin-straight texture.
Suddenly the lights in the room flipped on, temporarily blinding me.
“You just couldn’t leave well enough alone,” Jolene said from the door.
I dropped the yearbook and my phone in fright.
“Jolene!” I gave a nervous laugh that I hoped hadn’t given me away. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Looking at her then, the hard set of her mouth, and her eyes narrowed in on me, I knew it was her. I knew she’d hurt Daniel and I knew she’d hurt those girls. But I still didn’t know why. If I could play dumb long enough, perhaps I’d get the chance to find out before I could manage to get away, or before I became her next victim.
“I’m so embarrassed—I was trying to find that photo of Chance from high school,” I lied, angling my body so she couldn’t see the cover of the yearbook I’d been looking at. “I thought you were going to Florida for spring break, to visit your family.”
“I’ve never been to Florida,” she replied flatly.
“Isn’t that where your mom—”
