Aw…shoot.
A footprint.
I know I’m cheating, because I remember now a victim from a different time, laying in a hospital bed…“It happened so fast. I was coming out of work at Pillsbury’s and I heard someone behind me. I started running, and he tackled me. He put his foot on my back and held me down…
I’m scrabbling for her name, but it’s buried under layers of other memories.
“I wonder how she got here.” Zeke says.
“He surprised her after work, as she was coming out into the parking lot.” It’s not a hunch—I’m remembering my bedside conversation with the victim. Her name…her name. It’s lodged in the back of my brain.
But deep inside, I’m hoping that I’m wrong. That this woman is not the blonde I met in the hospital, the youngest daughter of a couple from the suburbs. “She probably ran, and he caught up to her.” I gesture to the footprint. “He held her down.”
“We’ll get this tread into the database and see what we can find.” Zeke says. He bags the evidence.
I walk over to the edge of the yellow tape, duck under it and hike down to the crime scene. Eve is looking at the body, the strangulation marks at her neck, the evidence of assault. She picks up her hands. “She chews her nails. Nothing to grab skin,” she says. “And the DNA might be washed away. It looks like her body might have been pushed into the water, then pulled out.”
Her hair is wet and muddy, her lower lip gray, split. My memory flashes, but it’s too brief to capture.
“I found her purse!” Zeke shouts. He’s standing near a park bench. Eve follows me as we hike up the hill. We wait for the photographer, then I glove up as Eve picks up the purse. It’s small, the kind that a woman wears over her shoulder, to her hip. What does Eve call that—a clutch?
“It’s a cross-body bag,” Eve says as she opens it. “So it’s funny that it would have fallen off. Unless she was surprised, and it fell off her shoulder as she ran.” She pulls out a small wallet.
I hold my breath. Because I remember now. Hollie Larue. Age twenty-three. Pretty, despite the black eye, the split lip. Two younger siblings. Her voice is soft, shaky in my head. He told me not to scream…
Eve opens the wallet. Tucked inside is her driver’s license.
I look away, to the river flowing downstream, past the stone bridge, into the horizon where time is beginning a new day.
And, as she reads the name, I brace myself.
“Her name is Hollie Larue.”
Yep.
This death is on me.