“Photos?”
“Yes, recent photos of him,” Pip said, looking between the two of them, the large kitchen clock counting the silence. But the ticks felt far too slow, as though she were somehow moving faster than time. A feeling she hadn’t had in a while, one she missed. “I’m guessing you don’t have any photos of Jamie from the memorial, what he was wearing?”
“No,” Joanna said, unlocking her phone and flicking through her photos.
“But I did take lots on Jamie’s birthday last Thursday.”
“One where his face shows clearly?”
“Here, have a look.” Joanna passed her phone across the table. “There’s several if you scroll left.”
Connor moved his chair closer to look over Pip’s shoulder at the screen.
The first photo showed Jamie on his own, on the other side of the kitchen table from where Pip now sat. His dark blond hair was pushed to the side and he was grinning, an overly wide grin that stretched into his rosy cheeks, as his chin glowed orange from the lit candles on the birthday cake below. In the next photo he was bent low over the cake, cheeks puffed out to blow and the flames stretching away to escape from him. Pip swiped. Now Jamie was looking down at the cake, a long gray knife in his hand with a red plastic band between handle and blade. He was sticking the point of the knife into the center of the cake, parting the creamy white frosting. Next photo and the
first slice was cut, Jamie looking up, smiling directly at the camera. Then the cake was gone, replaced by a present in Jamie’s hands, the silver-spotted wrapping paper half ripped off.
“Oh yeah,” Connor snorted, “Jamie’s face when he realized Dad bought him a Fitbit for his birthday.”
It was true; Jamie’s smile did seem tighter, more strained here. Pip swiped again, but next was a video that started to play as her thumb brushed against it. Connor was in the frame now, the two brothers together, Jamie’s arm draped across Connor’s shoulders. The frame was swaying slightly, rustling sounds of breathing behind it.
“Smile, boys,” Joanna was saying through the phone.
“We are,” Jamie mumbled, trying not to ruin his smile for the photo.
“What’s it doing?” Joanna’s voice asked.
“For God’s sake,” Connor said, “she’s accidentally taking a damn video
again. Aren’t you?”
“Oh, Mom.” Jamie laughed. “Again?”
“I’m not,” Joanna’s voice insisted. “I didn’t press that, it’s this stupid
phone.”
“Always the phone’s fault, isn’t it?”
Jamie and Connor looked at each other, their laughs spiking into high- pitched giggles as Joanna grew more insistent that she hadn’t pressed that.
Arthur’s voice saying, “Let me see, Jo.” Then Jamie tightened his arm around Connor’s neck, bringing his little brother’s head down to his chest, where he messed up his hair with his other hand, Connor protesting through giggles.
The frame dropped and the video ended.
“Sorry,” Pip said, noticing how Connor had tensed in his chair and Joanna’s eyes were so full she’d dropped her gaze to the floor. “Can you please email me all of these, Connor? And any other recent photos?”
He coughed. “Yep, will do.”
“All right.” Pip stood up, packing her laptop and microphones into her
bag.
“Are you going?” asked Connor.
“One last thing to do before I go,” she said. “I need to search Jamie’s room. Is that OK?”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Joanna said, also standing up. “Can we come too?”
“Sure,” Pip said, waiting for Connor to open the kitchen door and lead them upstairs. “Have you already looked through it?”
“Not really,” Joanna said, following them up the stairs, tensing when she heard Arthur coughing in the living room. “I went in there earlier when we first realized he was gone. I took a quick look to see if he’d slept here last night and left early in the morning. But no, the curtains were still open.
Jamie’s not the sort of person who opens his curtains in the morning or makes his bed.” They paused outside the door to Jamie’s darkened bedroom, which was ajar. “Jamie’s a little messy,” she said gently.
“That’s fine,” Pip said, nodding for Connor to go ahead. He pushed open the door, the room full of dark shapes until Connor flicked on the light, and the shapes became an unmade bed, a cluttered desk under the window, and an open closet spewing clothes onto the floor, piles like islands against the
sea-blue carpet.
Messy was one word for it.
“Can I, um…?”
“Yeah, do whatever you have to. Right, Mom?” said Connor.
“Right,” Joanna said quietly, staring around the place from which her son was most missing.
Pip made a beeline for the desk, stepping over and between the small mountains of T-shirts and boxers. She ran her finger over the lid of the closed laptop in the middle of the desk, over the Iron Man sticker peeling at the edges. Gently, she opened the lid and clicked the on button.
“Do either of you know Jamie’s password?” she asked as the computer purred into life, the blue Windows log-in screen jumping up.
Connor shrugged and Joanna shook her head.
Pip bent down to type password1 into the box.
Incorrect Password
12345678 Incorrect Password
“What was your first cat called?” asked Pip. “That ginger one?”
“Peter Pan,” said Connor.
Pip tried it. Incorrect.
She’d entered it wrong three times and now the password hint popped up beneath. In it, Jamie had written: Get off my computer, Con.
Connor sniffed, reading it.
“It’s really important we get in,” Pip said. “Right now this is our strongest link to Jamie and what he’s been up to.”
“My maiden name?” Joanna said. “Try Murphy.”
Incorrect Password
“Football team?” asked Pip.
“Patriots.”
Incorrect. Even with numbers replacing some vowels and trying 1 and 2 at the end.
“Can you keep trying?” Joanna asked. “It won’t lock you out?”
“No, there’s no limit on Windows. But guessing the exact password with the correct placement of numbers and capitals is going to be tricky.”
“Can’t we get around it some way?” said Connor. “Like reset the computer?”
“If we reboot the system, we lose all the files,” Pip explained. “And, most important, the cookies and saved passwords on his browser, for his email and social media accounts. Those are what we really need to get into. Any chance you know the password to the email account Jamie’s Windows is linked to?”
“No, I’m sorry.” Joanna’s voice cracked. “I should know these things about him. Why don’t I know these things? He needs me and I’m no help to him.”
“It’s OK.” Pip turned to her. “His password could be anything. We’ll keep trying until we get in. Or I could try to contact a computer expert who might be able to brute-force it.”
Joanna seemed to shrink again, hugging her own shoulders.
“Joanna,” said Pip, standing up, “why don’t you try some passwords while I keep searching? Try to think of Jamie’s favorite places, favorite foods,
vacations you’ve been on, anything like that. And try variations of each one, lowercase, capitals, replacing letters with numbers, a one or two at the end.”
“OK.” Her face seemed to brighten, just a little, at having something to do.
Pip moved on, checking the two desk drawers on either side. One held pens and a very old, dried-up glue stick. The other, a pad of A4 paper and a faded folder labeled College Semester 1.
“Anything?” Connor asked.
Pip shook her head, dropping to her knees to lean across Joanna’s legs so she could reach the trash can beneath the desk. She pulled it out. “Help me with this,” she said to Connor, fishing out the contents one by one. An empty can of deodorant. A crumpled receipt. Pip unfolded it: it was for a chicken mayo sandwich on Tuesday the twenty-first at 2:23 p.m. from the Stop & Shop on Main Street. Beneath that was a Cheetos bag: flamin’ hot flavor.
Sticking to the grease on the outside of the bag was a small slip of lined paper. Pip unpeeled it and spread it open. Written on the paper in blue ballpoint pen were the words Hillary F Weiseman left 11 She held the paper up to Connor. “Is this Jamie’s handwriting?” Connor nodded. “Hillary Weiseman,” Pip said. “Do you know her?”
“No,” Connor and Joanna said at the same time. “Never heard that name,”
Joanna added.
“Well, Jamie must know her. Looks like this note was recent.”
“Yes,” Joanna said, “we have a cleaner, comes every two weeks. She’s coming on Wednesday, so everything in that wastepaper basket is from the last ten, eleven days.”
“Let’s look up this Hillary, she might know something about Jamie.” Pip pulled out her phone. On the screen was a text from Cara: Ready for stranger things soon?? Shit. Pip quickly fired back: I’m so sorry, I can’t tonight, I’m at Connor’s house. Jamie’s gone missing. I’ll explain tomorrow. Sorry! Pip pressed send and tried to ignore the guilt, clicking on the browser and bringing up whitepages.com. She typed in Hillary F Weiseman and Connecticut and searched.
“Bingo,” she said when it came up. “We have a Hillary F. Weiseman who lives in Fairview, Connecticut. But wait, it’s saying her age is eighty-plus and
she has no current address. Hold on….” Pip opened another tab and Googled the name along with Fairview and obituary. The first result from the Fairview Mail gave her the answer she was looking for. “No, that can’t be the right Hillary. She died in 2008, age eighty-four. Must be someone else with that name. I’ll look into it later.”
Pip spread the scrap of paper between her fingers and took a photo of it
with her phone.
“You think it’s a clue?” Connor asked.
“Everything’s a clue until we discount it,” she replied.
There was just one last thing left in the trash: an empty brown paper bag, scrunched up into a ball.
“Connor, without disturbing anything too much, can you search the
pockets of all of Jamie’s clothes?”
“For what?”
“Anything.” Pip crossed to the other side of the room. She stopped and looked at the bed with its blue-patterned duvet, and her foot nudged something on the floor. It was a mug, the sugar-encrusted remains of coffee coating the bottom. But the remains weren’t moldy yet. The handle had broken off and was lying a few inches away. Pip picked them up to show Joanna.
“Not just a little messy,” Joanna said, quiet affection in her voice. “Very messy.”
Pip placed the mug, handle inside, on the bedside table, where it had probably been knocked from in the first place.
“Just tissues and spare change,” Connor reported back to her.
“No luck here,” Joanna said, typing away at the keyboard, the clack of the enter key louder and more desperate each time she tried.
On the bedside table, now in addition to the broken mug, was a lamp, a battered copy of Stephen King’s The Stand, and the cord of an iPhone charger. There was one drawer below, before the table split into four rickety legs, and Pip knew that that drawer would probably be where Jamie kept his more private items. She turned her back to block Connor and Joanna from seeing what she was doing, just in case, and pulled the drawer open. She was surprised to find there were no condoms or anything like that. There was
Jamie’s passport, a set of tangled white earphones, a bottle of multivitamins “with added iron,” a bookmark shaped like a giraffe, and a watch. Pip’s attention was immediately drawn to the last item, for one reason only: it couldn’t have belonged to Jamie.
The delicate leather straps were a blush-pink color and the case was shiny rose gold, with a cuff of metallic flowers climbing up the left side of the face.
Pip ran one finger over them, the petals spiking into it.
“What’s that?” asked Connor.
“A ladies’ watch.” She spun around. “Is this yours, Joanna? Or Zoe’s?”
Joanna came over to inspect the watch. “No, neither of ours. I’ve never seen it before. Do you think Jamie bought it for someone?”
Pip could tell Joanna was thinking of Nat, but if ever there was a watch less suited to Nat da Silva, it was this one. “No,” Pip said. “It’s not new, look —there are scratches along the case.”
“Well, whose watch is it, then? That Hillary’s?” said Connor.
“Don’t know,” Pip said, placing the watch carefully back in the drawer. “It could be significant; it could mean nothing. We just have to see. I think we’re done, for now.” She straightened up.
“OK, what next?” Connor said, eyes falling restlessly on hers.
“That’s all we can do here for tonight,” Pip said, looking away from the disappointment creasing Connor’s face. Had he really thought she was going to solve this in just a few hours? “I want you two to keep trying to crack that password. Write down all the possibilities you try. Try Jamie’s nicknames, favorite books, films, where he was born, anything you can think of. I’ll research a list of typical password elements and combinations and give that to
you tomorrow to help narrow it down.”
“I will,” Joanna said. “I won’t stop.”
“And keep checking your phone,” Pip said. “If that message ever delivers to him, I want to know right away.”
“What are you going to do?” Connor asked.
“I’m going to write down all the info I have so far, do some editing and recording, and draft the announcement for the website. Tomorrow morning, everyone is going to know that Jamie Reynolds is missing.”
They both gave her quick, awkward hugs at the front door, and then Pip stepped out into the night. She looked over her shoulder as she walked away.
Joanna had already gone inside, heading back to Jamie’s computer, no doubt.
But Connor was still there, watching her leave, looking like the scared little boy Pip once knew.
File Name:
Scrap of paper found in Jamie’s trash can.jpg
File Name:
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder SEASON 2, EPISODE 1: Intro.wav
PIP: I made a promise. To myself. To everyone. I said I would never do this again, never play the detective, never again lose myself to the world of small-town secrets. It wasn’t me, not anymore. I would have stuck to it too; I know I would’ve. But something’s happened and now I have to break that promise. Someone has gone missing.
Someone I know. Jamie Reynolds from Fairview. He’s the older brother of one of my closest friends, Connor. As I record these words, on Saturday, April 25, at 11:27 p.m., Jamie has been missing for twenty-seven hours. And no one is doing anything about it. The police have classified Jamie as a low-risk missing person and can’t spare the resources to look for him. They think he’s simply absent, not missing. And truthfully, I hope they’re right. I hope this is nothing, that there is no case here. That Jamie has just left home to stay with a friend, neglecting to message his family or return their calls. I hope he’s fine….I hope he returns home in a couple of days, wondering what all the fuss is about. But there’s no place for hope, not here, and if no one else will look for him, then I have to. So here it is: welcome to season 2 of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder: The Disappearance of Jamie Reynolds.
