The first thing was a photo strip. One of those booths, four pictures in a column, black and white, curling a little at the edges from being kept somewhere warm. The booth at the arcade on Broadway in Seaside, by the turnaround. I knew it because I'd taken Jodie and Petey in it a dozen times, and it always made everybody look like they'd just been startled awake. The first picture was two young people with their heads together, laughing. In the second one he was kissing her cheek and she was squeezing her eyes shut. In the third they were making faces. In the fourth one the girl was looking at the camera and the young man was looking at her.
The girl was Jodie. She had on the yellow windbreaker I'd bought her at the Bon Marché in Portland for her birthday in August, and her hair was pulled back in the barrette with the little enamel bluebird Petey had given her, and she was laughing, really laughing, with her nose wrinkled up the way it had wrinkled since she was a baby. The young man was Darrell.
It was the fourth picture I looked at longest. I want to be honest about that. I couldn't have told you why, then. There was nothing in it, really. A young man looking at a girl. But the way he was looking at her was not the way a boy looks at a girl he's crazy about. I've watched that look go across my counter a thousand times, high school kids in booth seven splitting a milkshake. This was different. It was patient. It was the look Toivo gave a side of beef when it came in off the truck, figuring where to cut.
"Where did you get this?" I said. My voice came out wrong.
"Please," she said. "Keep going."
Under the photo strip there was a sheet of paper folded in thirds. It was a photocopy, gray and a little blurred, of a typed form. At the top it said COWLITZ COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE, KELSO, WASHINGTON, and under that INCIDENT REPORT, and there was a case number and a date: 11/17/79. In the box that said COMPLAINANT/VICTIM, somebody had typed SHAW, LORI ANN, W/F, DOB 3/2/62, and an address in Longview. In the box that said SUSPECT, somebody had typed TOLAN, DARRELL WAYNE, W/M, DOB 6/9/60, and an address in Longview, and under that, in pencil on the original, so that it came through faint on the copy, somebody had written: also Brownsmead OR, grandmother's.
I read it. I'm not going to put down everything it said, because it isn't mine to put down. Lori Shaw was seventeen. She had been found at two in the morning walking along the shoulder of Ocean Beach Highway west of Longview in November, in the rain, with no shoes. Her jaw was broken in two places. One of her eyes was swollen shut. There were marks on her upper arms that the deputy had described, in the plain, dead language deputies use, as consistent with being gripped. She had told the deputy that her boyfriend, Darrell Tolan, had done it in his car, after she'd told him she wanted to go to a party without him. She'd told the deputy he'd said, if she ever tried to leave him, nobody would ever find all of her. That was in quotation marks on the form. Nobody would ever find all of her.
At the bottom of the sheet somebody had stamped a word in capital letters, crooked, and it came through on the copy very black. The word was CLOSED. Next to it, handwritten: Victim declines to proceed. Suspect alibi verified.
I set it down. My hands weren't working right. I set it face down so I wouldn't have to look at it, and that's when I saw there was more.