Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

3

Andrea stood at the sink in the bathroom at RJ’s Eats and splashed cold water onto her face. She studied her reflection, thinking she didn’t look nearly as freaked out as she felt. She had finally met Emily’s daughter. Her possible half-sister. That it had happened due to sheer coincidence rather than Andrea’s crack detective skills was something she was going to take as a gift rather than an omen of failure.

Judith.

Andrea fumbled for her phone in her pocket. She googled Judith Vaughn, but nothing came up but a pair of obituaries for some really old women and a Linked-In account that Andrea was not going to sign up for. Instagram, Twitter and TikTok were dead ends. She checked Facebook and found more older women and what she assumed were photos of older women’s grandchildren. The name was from another century, so that made sense. Even when Andrea narrowed it down to Maryland and Delaware, she still couldn’t find a Judith Vaughn matching the one she’d just gawked at in the street.

She held the phone to her chest. Her alternate investigation into Nick Harp wasn’t going to fall apart because of some dead-end internet searches. Judith didn’t seem like the marrying type, but she did have a daughter so maybe she also had a man’s last name. Or a woman’s, because that kind of thing happened too.

Andrea closed her eyes, took a breath and tried to focus on what, if anything, this new information meant. She had assumed that Bernard Fontaine, Eric Blakely and Erica Jo Blakely hadn’t embraced social media for generational reasons, but that didn’t make complete sense. Her mother was just a few years younger than Emily’s former friend group and she had a Facebook account. Granted, Laura spent most of her time on Nextdoor but that was because people who lived year-round in beach towns were either busybodies, lunatics and/or possible serial killers.

The bathroom door opened.

A woman with a halo of salt-and-pepper curls raised her eyebrows at Andrea. She was wearing a red apron and white T-shirt. Madonna bangles looped around both wrists—black and silver bracelets stacked at least an inch up her arm. She stopped chewing her gum mid-smack to ask, “You okay, hon?”

“Uh—” Andrea’s mouth suddenly didn’t want to make words again. The woman was late fifties, five-six, around 140 pounds, with white roots showing under her dark hair dye. Andrea recognized the striped apron from the waitstaff, but the RJ on her nametag made a tiny bell start to trill inside of Andrea’s head.

“Sweetheart?” The woman had a warm maternal air about her, like she always kept a bag full of emergency supplies and cookies in case anyone needed them.

“Uh,” Andrea repeated. “Yeah, sorry. I’m fine, thank you.”

“No problem.” The woman resumed her gum-smacking as she walked into one of the two stalls.

Andrea resisted the urge to stare at her through the crack in the door. She had grown up in a small town, and the one thing she knew was that people tended to stay put.

She waited for the sound of peeing, then returned to Google, pulling up the diner’s website. After bypassing a large HELP WANTED banner, she clicked on a page detailing the history of the diner, which started back in the 1930s when great-grandpa Big Al Blakely had started as a soda jerk. Then he’d bought the place, then passed it down to his son, Big Al, Jr, then there had been a fire that almost destroyed the business, then twenty years ago, the name had changed to RJ’s when the woman currently occupying one of the stalls in the ladies’ room had given up her job as editor of the Longbill Beacon to take over the joint. Andrea found her photo with her name underneath.

RJ “Ricky” Fontaine.

I, Erica Jo Blakely, wasn’t at the prom last night. I stayed at home by myself until around six when my brother got back early from the prom because it was boring. We watched Blazing Saddles, Airplane and part of Alien on the VCR then went to bed. I know nothing about Emily Vaughn’s baby. Yes I was her best friend since kindergarten, but the last time I talked to her was five months ago and that was to say don’t talk to me anymore. We did not have a falling out or argument. My grandfather said stay away because Emily used drugs, which I knew to be true. I don’t know what happened to her but that wasn’t our scene. She turned out to be a really angry and bitter person. Everybody feels bad for her and her family because she is probably going to die, but that does not change the truth or the facts. I swear the contents of this statement are true under penalty of law.

Andrea stared at herself in the mirror again, wondering how she had failed to put together such an easy piece of the puzzle. Of course Ricky Blakely had married Nardo Fontaine. That was why all the searches for Ricky Blakely hadn’t returned results. Ricky had taken her husband’s last name. They were probably high school sweethearts. That’s what happened in small towns.

Her reflection smiled back at her. She should’ve been kicking herself for not figuring it out sooner, but she was suddenly filled with elation. She had figured something out! She had actually located someone closely connected to Emily. No matter the snarky tone of Ricky’s witness statement, they had been best friends for the majority of Emily’s life. Adult Ricky would be over their little spat by now. She would know everything.

The elation sputtered out as quickly as it had come.

How would Andrea get Ricky to talk? She couldn’t just knock on the stall door and ask Ricky to provide every single detail about a violent murder that had happened to her best friend forty years ago and hey, can you tell me if your other childhood best friend is the killer?

If Ricky wanted to spill dirt on Clayton Morrow, she would’ve done so decades ago when Nick Harp’s terrible deeds had garnered national media attention. All of the stories Andrea had read outed him as Clayton Morrow of Longbill Beach. Ricky’s own bio said she used to be in journalism, but Andrea had never come across a first-hand account from someone who’d actually grown up with her father. As far as she knew, no one in Longbill Beach had ever talked to the press. Clay/Nick’s long-lost siblings had never been located or come forward on their own. His adoptive parents had refused to speak to reporters. They had both died over thirty years ago—one of breast cancer, the other of a heart attack—so any details they had about their son had died along with them.

Which left Andrea exactly back where she’d started.

She felt the familiar pull of Old-Andy-psyching-herself-up-for-failure. If Andrea had learned one thing at the academy, it was to break up tasks into manageable pieces. Right now, she was still in the information-gathering stage. She would come up with step two when the time presented itself. For now, one thing that might help was to stop thinking about her father as Nick Harp. Clayton Morrow was the person of interest in the Emily Vaughn murder. If Andrea could find a way to pin the charge on Clay, then Nick would be taken care of.

The distinctive sound of toilet paper coming off a roll put Andrea on alert. She knew that as weird as it had been to stand there the entire time Ricky was relieving herself, it would be extra weird to still be hanging around when the woman came out of the stall. Andrea made sure she was out the door before the toilet flushed.

She purposefully took a left out of the bathroom instead of a right toward the dining area. The kitchen was empty despite the rush. Andrea walked farther down the long hallway. The door was propped open. She could see the boardwalk beyond. The roar of the sea tunneled into her ears. A man in a fry cook’s uniform appeared. He gave Andrea a curious look. He was about her age, and black, so definitely not Eric Blakely. Maybe a nephew or son?

She had her phone in her hands again. She put RJ Blakely through the searches and came back with a Twitter account: @RJEMSMF

RJ Eats Milkshakes Motherfucker.

Points for specificity. A quick scroll through the responses brought up tourists posting nice reviews alongside the usual number of assholes that were always on Twitter. Copious photos of milkshakes displayed on the counter in the diner. Most of them contained alcohol. Andrea would never get used to seeing liquor on a diner menu. She had grown up in the south, where you could score meth or a handgun on most any street corner, but alcohol sales were strictly controlled.

Behind Andrea, the bathroom door started to open. She hot-stepped it back up the hallway, but not before she heard Ricky on her cell phone anger-whispering like she was about to ask to speak to the manager.

“Certainly not,” she hissed. “That’s unacceptable.”