“Barely. That was the year I discovered cocaine.” Judith laughed lightly, as if she hadn’t just confessed a crime to a Marshal. “What I remember was sadness. It’s so hard to be a teenager, but to have such loss …”
“You really captured it.” Andrea breathed deeply, trying to quell her emotions as she took in the minute details of Emily’s life. The frame of photos showed the young girl’s personality—whether she was running on the beach or reading a book or dressed in her band uniform playing the flute, her sweetness almost pierced the camera lens. She didn’t look fragile so much as vulnerable and very, very young.
A group photo was in the top-left corner. Emily was flanked by three boys and another girl. Ricky was easy to spot by her halo of curls, and also because she was the only other girl. Clay reminded Andrea of something Laura had said—that he’d been a breathtakingly beautiful boy. His piercing blue eyes sent a chill through Andrea even from forty years away. She assumed the guy standing beside Clay was Ricky’s twin brother, Eric Blakely, though their hair was different in texture and color. Which left Nardo as the snarky-looking, slightly plump blond with the hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips like Delaware’s own Billy Idol.
“Those were her friends.” Judith still seemed clearly anxious for more feedback. “Rather, the people she thought were her friends. Pregnant teenagers didn’t get their own reality shows back then.”
Andrea had found herself transfixed by Clay’s gaze again. She forced her attention onto a faded Polaroid. “Who’s this?”
“That’s my mom with my great-grandmother on my grandfather’s side. She died shortly after I was born.” Judith was pointing to a woman in a stern, Victorian-looking attire with a chubby, happy baby in her lap. “Granny was caught up in her career in those days. Gram practically raised my mother. That’s where the name Judith comes from. I’m the sum of their parts.”
There were more photos representing Judith’s motherless life. First day of school with no one at her side. First school play. First art show. First day at college. All linked together with text from the letter and found objects—a piece of a report card, a diploma, an advertisement for training bras. Though someone was clearly behind the camera, Judith was always alone.
Weirdly, the photographs made Andrea realize how relentlessly present Laura had always been in her own life. Gordon was always taking the photos. Laura was the one helping Andrea frost cupcakes for the school bake sale, showing her how to pin the pattern onto the pieces of material for the dress she wore to her Pride and Prejudice–themed birthday party, standing beside her at every art show and graduation and concert and waiting in line outside the bookstore wearing a wizard’s hat for the next Harry Potter release.
The revelation made Andrea feel oddly petty, as if she had scored a point against a rival.
“Obviously, that’s me.” Judith indicated a series of ultrasounds she’d fanned out in the center to represent the beginning of her life. “My mother had these taped to her bathroom mirror. I think she must’ve wanted to see them every morning and every night.”
“I’m sure she did,” Andrea agreed, but she found herself drawn to the liner notes from a cassette tape that anchored the bottom right-hand corner. Small, torn sections of colored photographs served as a constellation around the handwritten songs and artists.
Someone had made Emily a mixtape.
Judith said, “A lot of the music sucked in the eighties, but I have to admit these are pretty good.”
The ink had smeared. Andrea could only read a handful of the cramped words—
Hurts So Good-J. Cougar; Cat People-Bowie; I Know/Boys Like-Waitresses; You Should Hear/Talks-M. Manchester; Island/Lost Souls-Blondie; Nice Girls-Eye to Eye; Pretty Woman-Van Halen; Love’s/Hard on Me-Juice Newton; Only/Lonely-Motels
She tried to make sense of the tattered constellation around the words, but then she realized the pieces were not from several photographs, but from one. Two icy eyes at diagonal corners. Two ears. A nose. High cheekbones. A lush, full mouth. A slightly cleft chin.
Andrea felt a knot in her throat, but she forced herself to ask, “Who made the tape?”
“My father,” Judith said. “The man who murdered my mother.”