They sat. The little girl dragged a stuffed animal across the floor and climbed onto a chair close enough to keep Hailey within reach. To stare at Miranda. Miranda smiled at her and waved.
“I just want to clarify a few things. Nothing new. Just tightening up the timeline.”
Hailey nodded and waited.
Hailey followed the timeline without hesitation.
“Terra didn’t like sitting around,” she said when Miranda asked about afternoons. “If she was quiet, that’s when we noticed.”
Miranda wrote it down.
“She was always moving,” Hailey continued. “Friends, activities, noise. She’d spent a lot of time at the park just up the road when she was younger. That kind of stopped when she hit middle school. She liked middle school sports and things. She was our social butterfly.”
Miranda asked about the night Terra disappeared. Hailey answered with the same details she had given before. The child slid off the chair and pressed her face against Hailey’s knee.
After a moment, Hailey stood and went to the entertainment center. She opened one cabinet and came out with a photo album.
“I still have pictures,” she said. “From when we were kids. If that helps. It was…Aimee’s.”
The albums were worn at the corners, the lid slightly bowed. Hailey lifted it and began sorting through the photos without commentary.
“That’s Terra,” she said. “Seventh grade. A few months…before.”
Miranda studied it. Terra stood in front of a middle school sign, one foot lifted as if she hadn’t meant to stop moving. Her smile was wide, unguarded, aimed past the camera toward someone else.
Another followed. Terra sitting on grass with a group of girls, her arm looped around someone beside her. Another at a softball field, jersey loose, face flushed, blond hair wild and frizzed from the heat.
“She never stood still,” Hailey said.
Miranda continued looking.
Terra appeared again and again. And Cruz. And…their family. The album was a mix of all three Gibson kids, Aimee and Derek, and Hannah. And friends. It told of a life of…love. Damn it. It hurt to look at those photos.
“Thirteen,” Hailey said, sliding another forward.
The cake was crooked, candles crowded together. Terra leaned in too close, cheeks puffed, mid-motion.
Miranda set it down carefully.
“These are earlier,” Hailey said, turning another page. “Before middle school. Aimee liked to go backwards in her albums for some reason. I never understood.”
In one image, two older girls stood behind Terra. Miranda recognized Hailey immediately. The other girl stood a half-step back, posture more contained.
“That’s Kora,” Hailey said. “She was my best friend. She died…when we were kids. A few months after that one was taken. We did everything together, until…Kora was killed in an accident about two years before…my family.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just…I am not sure I can keep going forever not knowing what happened to my baby sister. I just want to know where she is now. Put the ghosts to rest once and for all.”
Miranda didn’t have the heart to tell her that some ghosts never fully went away.
That was a lesson she thought Hailey Gibson had learned long ago, anyway.
Chapter 25
It had been a long, damned cold day where everything that could have gone wrong had. And he was running much later than he’d wanted to. Bryan's truck pulled in behind Cass's sedan, and she was already at the front door when he got out, purse on her shoulder and keys in hand. He'd spent the last four hours patching drywall at one of the Elm Street units where the previous tenant had put a fist through the bedroom wall, and he still had grout under his fingernails from the bathroom tile job at the duplex on Third.
"You're cutting it close," he said. She had five minutes to get to work. She’d texted him she’d been called in for second shift. He’d been trying to get home before she left. At least he’d caught her now.
