Quentin blinked at her.
“I mean it. I’m a fan.Kentucky Crimesis my favorite. I’ve listened to it three times.” She picked up the smartphone on the desk in front of her, headphones dangling out. “I think I’d go insane in this place if it weren’t for my podcasts.”
“You’re interested in true crime.” He said it not to Melanie, but to the smartphone, its case designed after the cover ofIn Cold Blood.
She smiled. “How did you guess?”
Quentin smiled back. It was always so much easier when they turned out to be listeners. You hardly had to explain anything.
“Are you doing a podcast on April Cooper?” Melanie said, proving the point.
“How didyouguess?”
She adjusted her glittering glasses. “You’re not going to do a hatchet job on her, are you? Treat her like she was whatsherface inNatural Born Killers?”
Quentin looked at her. “Any reason why I shouldn’t?”
Melanie gave him a long, appraising look. “Come with me.”
Quentin followed her down a hallway full of empty lockers, her heels clicking on the floorboards and echoing. A janitor nodded and grinned at her as she passed, clearly an object of interest to him in all her youth and red lipstick and costumey attire. “Hey, Bob,” she said, unfazed. Used to the attention.
Near the end of the hallway was the library, which Melanie opened by key. “Librarians get summer vacation.” She sighed, switching on the lights. “Unlike Bob and me.”
Quentin inhaled the smell of books and plastic and carpet cleaner, memories snaking through him.
When he was a kid, his mother would drop him off at the public library after school and pick him up at closing. It was cheaper than day care, and Quentin never complained. At that age, before he grew tall and came out and learned how to fight, he’d spend full days getting tortured by bullies, then full nights at home with his mother, neither one of them saying a word. But at the library, he could escape. He could sit on the floor between the stacks and read for hours without feeling hassled or ignored.
He used to daydream about staying there past closing, reading all night, the night turning into morning and that morning to weeks,months. He dreamed of living at the library, amongst the Harry Potters and the graphic novels and the grown-up books he was just starting to discover. Shirley Jackson. Edgar Allan Poe. Joyce Carol Oates.
Once, he’d hid out in the back of the adult section and nearly achieved his dream, managing to stay past closing time to 10:00P.M., when he was found by a security guard, thrown into a cop car, and reunited with his mother. Kate had been underwhelmed—at least that was the way Quentin recalled it—his mother’s expression changing as soon as the cops left their home. “What the hell is wrong with you?” A roll of the eyes when he tried to hug her. Then off to the bedroom, the latest boyfriend, without a glance back.
Was that true? Like most people, Quentin so often lied to himself—out of protection or self-justification—to make himself the hero of his own story or at least someone deserving of sympathy... There were plenty of reasons for it. But regardless, it was difficult for him to put his trust in anything he hadn’t bothered to get on tape.
“This was what I wanted to show you,” Melanie said. She was standing at a long table to the left of the librarian’s station, in front of a section markedOur School, which held bound editions of the SRHS newspaper, as well as shelves of yearbooks in chronological order. Melanie was holding one of the yearbooks, thumbing through the pages.
“I knew about April Cooper when I first started working here,” she said. “I mean... she was probably the most famous person ever to have gone to Santa Rosa, which says a lot about this crappy school...”
Quentin moved closer. The yearbook was dated 1975–76. “She’s obviously not in here very much,” Melanie said. “She was only a freshman, and not exactly an activity queen.”
“How many pictures are in there of her?”
“Just one.” She laid the yearbook out on the table before him. It was opened to a spread titled “Freshman Homerooms.” Quentin’s gaze moved between the six black-and-white photos, but he couldn’t differentiate April Cooper from the other ’70s-era teens until Melanie tapped on her image with a bright red fingernail: a girl with delicate features and lank, dirty blond hair. She was short, but she slouched anyway, a baggy shirt and jeans swallowing up her frame. In the TV movie, April had been played by a twenty-one-year-old actress, and since photographs of the real girl were so scarce, that was the image that had stuck in most people’s minds: that of an overdeveloped young seductress, worldly beyond her years.
The real April Cooper had turned fifteen less than three months before the murders. She did not look worldly in any way, but Quentin had already known that. He’d seen the posed picture of the two of them at the St. Xavier High School winter formal—Gabriel LeRoy looming over her at six one, the corsage a shackle on her bird-thin wrist. What surprised him about the yearbook photo wasn’t how young April Cooper looked. It was how happy. April’s attention was focused on the woman standing next to her—Mrs. Brixton, according to the caption, her homeroom teacher. And she was beaming. “Wow,” Quentin said.
“Right?”
Quentin turned to her. “Do you know Mrs. Brixton?”
“She retired before I started working here,” Melanie said. “But I’ve seen her.”
“Yeah?”
“At last year’s homecoming. I talked to her for a little while. Asked her about April. What she was like.”
“You did?”
“I figured it might be my only chance. She’s eighty-two years old, you know.”