Page 96 of The Secrets We Hide
“That’s what every asshole with internet access is saying.” Emmy’s frustration came roaring back. “But Allison had three hundred grand in her attic. Fake IDs for her and Mandy. Witness protection was the better solution, but she could’ve disappeared without the FBI.”
“That was her backup plan,” Jude said. “Look at the timeline. Tell me what Allison has been up to.”
Emmy huffed air between her lips. “Two months ago, she had a plan to reach out to the FBI. She wanted my help. I’d like to think she wanted me to figure out a way to keep Dad’s name out of it. Force him into retirement. Get him to cooperate with the FBI. It’d be like her to send the tip, then figure out later how to deal with the fallout. She was smart, but she wasn’t strategic. A lot of times she threw a bomb, then figured out how to run away after.”
“It’s possible,” Jude said. “What happened next?”
“She worked her ass off investigating Reggie and the squad. Valerie, Talia Wilkinson’s mom, told me Allison was never home. That’s probably what she was doing—working the case. Then she handed it to Foley on a silver platter.”
“Keep going.”
“Thursday rolls around, Foley tells Allison that the plan won’t work. That’s the same day she found out that Woody was harassing Mandy. If you believe Lee Rawley, it was over Bill’s gambling debts. Allison went to the Dew Drop Inn and threatened Woody. Friday night, she went to see Bill at the Lazy Eight motel. They got into a fight. According to motel security, she told Bill ‘you took the last good thing from me.’ Saturday around one, she was murdered. Mandy was shot.”
“You’re leaving something out.” Jude indicated the room. “Two months ago, she was spending hours locked in this room. She wasn’t talking to Reid Foley on the burner phone all that time. What was she looking for?”
“Something that happened in 2002.” Emmy went back to the drawer that had opened with Allison’s key. She thumbed through the sleeves of microfiche. “Atlanta Journal.Atlanta Constitution.Macon Register.Augusta Tribune.”
“Those are big publications. They have the money to digitize. We need something that would only be stored in this room.”
Emmy kept flipping through the sleeves. She stopped at one of the last sections. “TheNorth Falls Register. The paper comes out twice a week. I can’t remember when they started putting it on the internet.”
“Most publications were online by the late nineties.”
“When you’re talking about North Falls, add twenty years.”
Emmy picked up a stack of sleeves. “2002. Twice a week means one hundred and two issues. They don’t print over Christmas and New Year’s. They’re roughly thirty pages each. Looks like there’s three issues per piece of film.”
Jude turned on the microfiche reader. The whir of machinery and bright light took her straight back to every term paper she’d ever written. “We can narrow our search to crime stories, right?”
“Aunt Millie wrote the police blotter.” Emmy handed her the sleeves. “She used to come down to the station every morning to see who’d been arrested.”
Jude hefted the thirty-four pieces of film in her hand. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“That this would go a hell of a lot faster if we just asked Aunt Millie.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Emmy accelerated past an SUV filled with teenagers who dropped their phones when they spotted her cruiser. She felt like all she’d done for the last twelve hours was chauffeur her sister from one end of the county to the other. She glanced at Jude in the passenger seat. She’d turned quiet again, but there was yet another shade to her silence. Her sunglasses were back on. Her face was turned toward the sun as it flashed through the tree canopies like a disco ball. She was probably bracing herself for Aunt Millie, who had lately gotten into the habit of not answering the phone if she didn’t feel like talking to anybody.
Emmy was trying to think of something to say when a yawn racked her body.
Jude kept her face to the window. “You really should get some sleep. Even half an hour would help.”
Emmy only responded for the sake of distraction. “I don’t think I’ve really slept since Mom got her diagnosis.”
Jude turned to look at Emmy. She was clearly expecting more. “It might help if you talked about it.”
Emmy chewed her lip. She could feel the distant tremble of fault lines wanting to shift. “What’s the word when something stops being cathartic and starts being traumatizing?”
“Destabilization.”
Emmy nodded. That sounded right. “You told me you sang rock ’n’ roll. Why did you go to Memphis and not New York or Los Angeles?”
Jude was silent, but she must’ve known she owed Emmy achange in subject like the one Emmy had given her in the street. “Followed a bad man to a good city.”
Jude turned her face toward the window again.
Emmy stared at her a beat before taking a left onto the back roads.
