The Girl I Used to Be by April Henry
“But they’re talking about truckers who kill strangers.” Duncan doesn’t sound nearly as confident as he did last night “Not people they know. Not their best friends. So that would rule out Jason.”
“Maybe my parents were the start.” I drop my voice to a near-soundless whisper. “Maybe Jason killed them and then got a taste for killing.”
His mouth twists. “Thousands of people are truckers. Probably hundreds of thousands. Just because a few are serial killers doesn’t mean they all are. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.”
Duncan liked the idea of a serial killer when he thought that meant it couldn’t be anyone he knew. “All I’m saying is we need to look at Jason more closely.”
He finally nods. Reluctantly.
When I asked the librarian earlier, she told me the reference room had copies of all the high school annuals, one for each year. Now I find the section, then the annuals for North Medford and the year my parents graduated. I open it to the index. With Duncan leaning in, I run my finger down a column of tiny type. Badger, Barrett, Beckstrom.
Benson, Naomi. My mom’s name is followed by a series of page numbers: 132, 244, 248, 273. I have only one photo of my mom, but this annual has four.
I turn to page 132. And there’s my mom. It’s one of those first-day-of-school photos, the ones the photo vendor tries to sell you sets of. None of my foster families ever bought them, not even the cheapest package with eight wallet-size shots.
Duncan says, “She’s really pretty.”
My mom wears a black top with a scoop neck. Her wavy brown hair falls past her shoulders. Her large dark eyes are focused on something to her right. Her lips are pursed, making her look either dubious or uncertain. I wonder what she was thinking.
On page 244 is a photo of the choir, dozens of people dressed in identical red robes. If my mom wasn’t identified as being in the third row (N. Benson), I don’t think I would be able to pick out her tiny dot of a face.
Page 248 reveals she was also in the National Honor Society. So she was smart. About two dozen people pose in front of an oak tree. My mom sits cross-legged in the first row. She wears jeans and a cream-colored cardigan with a shawl collar. Her smile is so wide her eyes are nearly closed. I lightly run my thumb over her face. A bubble expands in my chest, crowding my lungs.
Page 273 has the annual’s only photo of my parents together. They’re part of a crowd at a cafeteria table, all of them raising their milk cartons and juice bottles as if toasting the photographer. It’s easy to pick out my parents. Not only are they in the middle of the photo, but they look exactly as I expect them to. They never had a chance to change.
Duncan points. “Hey, that’s gotta be Jason.” Even back then, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, but his face was fuller, his arms thicker.
“And check out who he’s looking at,” I point out. “My mom. Not the camera. Not Heather”—she’s sitting next to my mom—“even though that’s who he ended up marrying.”
The woman sitting on the other side of my dad looks familiar. Wide cheekbones, blond hair—it’s Sam, with longer hair. She’s half-turned toward my dad. He’s sitting between her and my mom, but he’s grinning at the camera.
“Who’s that?” Duncan taps on a guy sitting next to Sam.
If he wasn’t the only Asian-looking guy at the table, I wouldn’t recognize him. He wears a faded T-shirt, and his hair hangs raggedly in his eyes. “That’s Richard Lee. You know, the real estate guy.”
The only one I don’t recognize is a guy with close-cropped orange-red hair who is sitting at the end of the table. “‘Ben Gault,’” I read aloud from the caption. “Do you know him?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe he moved away.”
In the back of the annual, there are only two page numbers next to Terry Weeks: one for his yearbook portrait, the other for the photo in the cafeteria. I guess the kinds of things my dad liked—concerts and parties, hanging out at the river, driving a Trans Am too fast—aren’t the activities that make it into the annual. He wasn’t on a team; he wasn’t in a play; he didn’t sing in the choir.
I make photocopies of everything, and then Duncan puts the annual away. I go back to the librarian at the information desk. “Do you have old copies of the Medford Mail Tribune?”
“How far back do you want to go?” Her dark hair is cut in curly points that frame her face. “We have paper copies for the last year. Anything older than that is on microfiche.”
“About fourteen years ago.”
She presses her lips together and looks at us more closely. “First you wanted to look at annuals and now old newspapers. Is this about Terry Weeks and Naomi Benson?”
Duncan and I exchange glances, and then I nod. My cheeks are on fire.
“Everyone’s asking about them,” she says. “I was a couple of years behind them in high school. Terry Weeks was really cute. Not that he noticed me.”
Duncan asks, “Do you have any theories about what happened?”
“Maybe they picked up a hitchhiker, but he was crazy.”
I try to imagine it. A confrontation that turned ugly but stopped short of killing a kid.
She finds the right film and threads it through the reader. The machine looks like one of those old boxy computers you see in movies, as deep as they are tall.
I turn the knob, and time flickers by. Since my mom (and my dad, too, although no one knew it) died near the end of the year, there are a lot of pages to go through.
It still seems likely to me that they were killed by someone they knew.
But could Duncan and the librarian be right, that it was a stranger? A serial killer who didn’t know them? A deranged hitchhiker? Or someone who targeted them for a different reason?
The cops said my parents didn’t have anything to steal, but I realize that someone could still have killed them for the pickup. Once pictures of the truck were shown on America’s Most Wanted, the killer might have figured it was too hot and dumped it. After all, just because the pickup was found at the airport’s long-term lot weeks after the murders doesn’t mean it was there the whole time.
The newspaper images are still spooling by when I grunt as if someone just hit me in the stomach. My gut knew what I saw faster than my thumb and fingers did.
“What is it?” Duncan leans in.
I scroll back. It’s a photo I haven’t seen before, captioned “Family Missing.” My dad wears a baseball cap and a light-colored T-shirt. He grips a can of beer in his right hand. His left arm is around my mom’s slender waist. She’s wearing a dark short-sleeved shirt with contrasting trim. Her hand is on her hip, a stack of bracelets on her wrist. It must be summer, because I’m standing in front of them wearing a sleeveless top, my blond hair falling past my shoulders. My head isn’t even as high as their waists.
The story starts out as front-page news. Each succeeding day, it gets smaller and moves further inside the paper. None of the information is new to me.
And then I read a paragraph that makes my stomach cram itself into the back of my throat.
Several times, police have been called to the house Naomi Benson and her daughter shared with Benson’s mother, to deal with fights between Benson and Weeks. Medford Police Department files show that Weeks was under a Nov. 26 temporary restraining order forbidding him from coming within 100 yards of Benson after a domestic-violence complaint was filed. However, police have also said Benson willingly went with Weeks to look for a Christmas tree.
Duncan looks at me wide-eyed. I feel as if I’m being wrenched back and forth. My dad was guilty, my dad was innocent. Now he sounds guilty again.
I grab Duncan’s arm as a new idea takes root. “What if my dad really did it?”
CHAPTER 24
THE TRUTH
An old woman sitting at a nearby computer furrows her brow and puts her finger to her lips.
I drop my voice to a whisper. “What if my dad really did kill my mom? And then killed himself?” In
“What if there was another person there that day, like the librarian said?” I ask Duncan. “Maybe a hitchhiker or even a friend?”
I imagine my dad having yet another fight with my mom. Only this time it turned deadly. Meanwhile, the third adult stood by, too horrified or too afraid to act. Or maybe they ran into the woods. I picture them creeping back to find my mom dead, my dad dying from a self-inflicted wound, me the only survivor.
“Maybe they couldn’t stop what was happening, and afterward they were too afraid to deal with cops,” I go on. What if they had an arrest record or had simply been too anxious to face the questions? “They could have figured the Walmart was a safe place to drop me, and then left the car at the airport, wiped it down, and went on their way.”
I squeeze Duncan’s arm so tight he grimaces. I’ve been feeling sorry for my dad, for misjudging him all these years. But maybe I was wrong.
“No.” Duncan shakes himself free. “Wait a minute. That was a pickup your family was in. I don’t think there would be room for another person.”
Duncan’s right. Or at least probably right. There’s nothing to say that I didn’t end up on someone’s lap. But it’s a less likely scenario.
“Chief Spaulding said they were reopening the case,” he continues. “There still could be evidence that they never got around to testing back when they figured they didn’t need to, because they thought your dad did it. There must have been footprints or even tire tracks.”
Now he’s the one who’s imagining things that probably aren’t true.
“Yeah, but it was three weeks before those grouse hunters found my mom’s body,” I point out. “There would have been a lot more snow in between.” I see that little flash of memory again, the blanket of white lying untouched underneath the trees. I’ve always loved how snow makes everything new, but in this case it helped hide the truth.
“There still could be other clues,” Duncan insists. “Fingerprints on that tarp or maybe on the clothes your mother was wearing. DNA where the killer touched. Maybe blood, if the killer got cut swinging around that knife. Fibers from the killer’s clothing.”
A surge of hope pulses through me. The police must be testing things right now. Running them under special lights, picking up pieces of hair with tweezers. The truth of what happened that day might be answered in a lab.
CHAPTER 25
RAINING BLOOD
I don’t know where I expected a hypnotist to have an office, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t right next to a Paradise Tans in a strip mall. Duncan wanted to go with me, but he was scheduled to work at the same time as the first open appointment time she had. Besides, I’m not nearly as certain as he is that this plan will work. I take a deep breath and open the door.
The woman sitting behind the desk unfolds herself and gets to her feet. Tall and slender, she has bright blue eyes and close-cropped hair bleached white-blond. She’s nothing like I was expecting.
“Are you Quinn Columbo?” I ask.
She nods. “You must be Olivia.”
“That’s right.” We shake hands. Like the rest of her, her fingers are long and thin.
She half sits on the edge of her desk. “On the phone you said you’re interested in being hypnotized?”
“Maybe.” I resist the sudden urge to leave. “First, I want to know more about how it works.”
“Of course. People sometimes think hypnosis is something unfamiliar and scary. But you’ve actually been in hypnotic states before. We all have. Like when you get so lost in a book or a movie that you don’t notice anything else around you. That’s a hypnotic state. Or when you’re driving and suddenly you’re at your exit, only you don’t remember how you got there.”
I nod, thinking of my drive to Medford, how I lost track of long stretches of freeway while thinking about my parents.
“Hypnosis is a state of hyperfocus.” She bunches her fingers and taps them together. “It’s not sleeping and it’s not unconsciousness. You’re fully awake. But because your attention is so focused, you have less peripheral awareness.” She pulls her fingers apart, wiggling them in all directions.
What she’s saying makes sense, but I’m still hesitant. “Once at the county fair I saw a hypnotist tell a guy he was a dog. He got on all fours and started barking.” He scurried around the small wooden stage, his tongue hanging out, while his friends in the audience fell over with laughter. “You won’t make me do anything like that, will you?”
Quinn frowns. “People who volunteer want to be in the spotlight. They already know they’ll be asked to do silly things, so they accept the hypnotist’s suggestions.”
But what about not-so-silly things? “Could you hypnotize a person to do something bad? Like commit a murder or something?”
“What! No. Not if it was something they would never do.” She leans forward. “So what is it you want to work on today?”
“There’s something else I have to ask you first.”
“Okay.” She tilts her head and waits.
“If I tell you something, does it stay here in this room? Just between us?”
“I’m bound by our code of ethics to respect confidentiality. So, yes, what you tell me stays here. The only exception would be if you were a danger to yourself, or if you were threatening to harm someone. Or if I were subpoenaed by a judge.”
This last exception gives me pause. Right now, who I am is a secret. And I want it to stay that way.
Quinn must see my expression. “Let me just say that in my twenty years in the business, that’s never happened.” She takes a slow breath. Everything about her is unhurried. “Hypnotherapy is a tool. It can help you lose weight, or stop smoking, or realize something about yourself.” Her gaze is direct. “What are you hoping to do?”
“I want”—I have to swallow before I can say anything more—“I want to remember something that happened when I was a little girl.”
“A specific event?”
I nod, my throat tight. “Someone murdered my parents.” My voice cracks. “And I was there. But I don’t remember it.”
Her breathing catches then, just for a second. “And how old were you?”
“Almost three and a half.”
Quinn sucks in her lips. She knows who I am, or guesses. But she doesn’t ask anything more. “It may be there. It may not be. Memory isn’t like a video camera. It doesn’t record everything and let you replay it later. Sometimes if a memory seems to be gone, it really is. Or sometimes it’s there, but it’s been pushed down, out of conscious thought.”
“Do you think you can help me get anything back?”
“I don’t know.” Lifting her head, she locks eyes with me. “But I can try.”
She tells me to sit in one of two facing chairs upholstered in soft apricot. She moves around the room, dimming the lights and closing the blinds. “I’m going to turn on some music.” Her voice is low and soothing. “It’s not really necessary for the hypnosis, but it gives your ears a neutral background.” She presses a button, and instrumental music begins to play.
Then she sits across from me. I realize that all this—the music, the closed blinds, her low and unhurried voice—is the beginning of the process. It’s not like in the movies. There’s not going to be a watch swinging on a chain. Already I feel different, like I’m separating from myself, observing instead of participating. There’s no I, no me, just the girl sinking into the chair. It’s like I’ve gone from first person to third.
In the darkened room, her voice is nearly a whisper. “I’ll count to ten. It will be like you’re going down a staircase, taking one step with each number. Each step will take you deeper, and when I say ten, you’ll be in a place where you’re fully relaxed.”
“Should I close my eyes?”
“You can keep them open and just focus on my face. Your subconscious will tell y
As instructed, I keep my gaze on her while she begins to count to ten. After each number, she says I’m doing great or that the tension is leaving my body. I keep looking at her face. I feel anxious, wondering if I should cheat and just close my eyes. But I keep focused on her. A long stare in a darkened room, but there is no intimacy in it at all. Quinn is only a place to rest my gaze. Slowly her face grows hazy.
When she says, “Five,” I blink, and her face changes. Her eyes appear to be covered by a sparkly red mask, but it doesn’t seem strange. I blink again, and her face is a man’s, complete with a goatee. Another blink, and her features morph into a butterfly.
And then I blink and don’t open my eyes again. It takes me a few seconds to realize they’re closed.
“Ten,” she says. “Good. That’s right. You are completely relaxed.”
I feel like I do just before I go to sleep, when the horizons of my mind widen.
“Now one of your hands will begin to feel heavy and one light.” Both my hands feel heavy and warm upon the arms of the chair. “The hand that feels light might begin to lift itself off the chair, maybe a finger or the whole hand.”
I monitor my hands. They’re anchored to the chair. I’m failing at this.
“And the arm that is heavy, it’s very weighty and stiff, as if it were made of granite. And your arm that is light, it’s like a feather—it just wants to float up in the air.”
My right hand twitches into life and then rises, higher and higher, until it’s over my head. There’s no sense of effort, no strain. It doesn’t even seem like I’m moving it. The breeze of the air conditioner eddies around it.
I begin to feel as if I am spinning in my chair, even though it doesn’t have wheels, even though it’s absolutely still. Around and around. It’s like being drunk, only I’m not dizzy.