I found her in her room. She lay on her back, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The older she got, the more she reminded me of Trina. It wasn’t just how she looked. With the benefit of time, I could see some of my old friend’s flaws in her, too. Trina had always been emotionally distant, someone who was willing to cut off the highs in order to never face the lows. Karl had confided in me a while back that Trina suffered from severe depression her whole life. I never knew about it. I didn’t know if that could be passed down from mother to daughter, but Anna had clearly followed Trina’s path. If you don’t want to feel bad, then the safe thing is to feel nothing. Unlike me, who felt everything way too much.
“Hey,” I said to her.
Anna didn’t look at me. The one lamp in the room was dim and cast shadows. Her face was dark as she stared at the ceiling. “What do you want, Shelby? I’m tired.”
“I have something I thought we could look at together. I think you’ll want to see it.”
“What is it?”
I held up a plastic bag with a thumb drive inside. “The FBI finally sent me what they recovered from Jeremiah’s phone. I thought we could check it out on my computer.”
“No, thanks.”
“Look, I know it’ll be sad, but if there are pictures, don’t you want to see them? It’s the last little bit of Jeremiah we have. I thought it might make you feel close to him again.”
“I don’t want to see any pictures.”
“All right. Maybe later.”
“No. Not later. I don’t want to see them ever.”
I shoved the thumb drive back in my pocket. I sat down next to Anna on the bed and stroked my fingers through her blond hair. She didn’t react at all. All I could feel from her was numbness.
“Is it really so hard to think about him?”
“I don’t think about him at all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You can believe what you want. When people go, they’re gone. Dwelling on it doesn’t bring them back.”
“No, it doesn’t. But forgetting them isn’t any better.”
Anna closed her eyes. “I’m tired, Shelby.”
“All right. Good night. Try to get some sleep.”
I left her bedroom and closed the door softly behind me. I went to my own room and kept the lights off. I opened the window, letting in crisp spring air. Outside, the forest and the cemetery were lit up in a gray glow by the moon shining through misty clouds. I stood there for a while, watching the world. Spring was my favorite time of year, but my heart was heavy.
I took the thumb drive from my pocket again. I felt as if I were holding Jeremiah’s soul in my hand. I didn’t want to wait until morning to see what he’d left for us. I booted up my computer and pushed the device into the USB slot. According to the note from Agent Reed, the FBI had recovered nearly five hundred photos and a similar number of text messages from the boy’s phone. This was like his last will and testament. His last chance to speak to us.
I checked the texts first, which took me into the past. Jeremiah was alive again, and we were all more than ten years younger. We’d lived the “after” of this case for so long that it was strange to be reminded of the “before.” I smiled as I read the texts. He’d messaged back and forth with his brother during the long summer days. He’d sent Adrian silly jokes, the kind little boys tell.
What did the dog say to the tree?
Bark.
He’d exchanged texts with his mother, too. Ordinary things. What’s for dinner. When do I have to be home. Yes, I took a shower. One of the messages broke my heart. It had been sent to Ellen two days after her father’s funeral.
Where did Grampa go?
Ellen texted back: Heaven. We talked about this, honey. He and Grammy are in Heaven, and they’re happy, but they miss us just like we miss them.
Jeremiah texted back: Okay.
But I remembered that he was still wearing his Sunday suit when he disappeared.
There were messages to his friends in the archive, but I was surprised to find only one message to Anna. The recovered texts went back for over a year prior to his disappearance. The boy hadn’t deleted anything else on his phone, as far as I could tell, but at some point, he’d erased his texts with Anna. They’d been best friends the previous summer, and I was sure they’d sent hundreds of messages back and forth to each other. But the texts were all gone.
The only message that was left was a text that Jeremiah had sent to Anna in the early spring.
It said: Are you still scared of the Ursulina?
There was no reply.
I closed out the messages, and I loaded the photographs.
What I saw was the world through Jeremiah’s ten-year-old eyes. He took photographs of everything. A rabbit in the middle of the yard. A june bug on a soccer ball. Cheerios spilled on the floor. Adrian playing a video game. His father napping in a hammock. A leaf. A doorknob. Most of the pictures were blurry because he never stood still long enough to focus.
The photographs began that summer, but then they went backward in time to when Jeremiah was in school. I recognized dozens of students from different grades. Teachers I knew. Classes, desks, and blackboards inside the school building in Everywhere and the sprawling athletic fields outside. Click click click. I smiled at everything I saw.
What stopped me was seeing a photograph of Keith Whalen.
It was nothing unusual. It was simply a photo of Keith taking a drink of water from a hallway fountain. Jeremiah took plenty of pictures of random things, but I wondered why he’d taken that photograph.
And then, as I scrolled through more pictures, I saw Keith again, getting out of his car in the school parking lot.
And again in the cafeteria.
And again grading papers at his desk in an empty classroom. All in all, I found almost twenty different pictures of Keith Whalen taken around the school grounds.
That wasn’t a coincidence. Jeremiah had been spying on him.
When I located the earliest photograph of Keith in the picture gallery, I checked the date stamp, and it looked familiar to me. Jeremiah had taken the photo on the same day he’d sent his one remaining text message to Anna.
Are you still scared of the Ursulina?
I felt an odd sense of foreboding. A sense that something was very wrong.
Around that same time in the roster of Jeremiah’s photos, I began to see pictures of the cairns, too. Whenever he built a tower of rocks near Black Lake on Keith’s land, he took a picture of the stones. I found eight different photographs, taken over a span of several weeks. As soon as the winter snow had melted, he’d begun sneaking off to visit the lake and assemble his memorials.
I began to scroll through the pictures more quickly.
I knew something was waiting for me.
There were only a handful of photographs taken during the winter. Mostly indoors, mostly in the boy’s bedroom. His Lego creations. His boots. Crosses made with Popsicle sticks. Christmas presents. The family Christmas tree lit up with lights. Picture by picture, I went back through each month.
I found my finger hesitating with each click, as if I knew I would regret what I was about to see.
And then there it was.
One single photograph date-stamped November 14. Just one. There were pictures in the days before and after, but only one photograph was left on his phone from that day. I wondered if he’d deleted the others.