Cole shifted in his seat. “We’ll take ’em back after lunch,” he promised. “I want to look through them and get a list of people to talk to.”
That brought up another uncomfortable topic. “How’re we going to get these people to talk to us, Cole? Won’t they think it’s a little weird that two teens are investigating Ben and Amber’s murder?”
“We can tell them that we’re researching a school project,” he said, quick enough for me to believe he’d already thought of this approach. “I’ll tell them that Ben was my uncle, and I’m doing a biography on him for my English class.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s not bad.”
Cole flashed me a Cheshire-cat smile and bounced his brows. “I’ve got mad skills, remember?”
That made me laugh, which helped stem the flow of all that adrenaline pumping through my veins. Then I realized that I hadn’t had a panic attack in a few days. Not even with the recent developments.
Cole drove us to a place called Jersey Mike’s for lunch and after we sat down, subs in hand, we each took up one of Ben’s yearbooks.
“Whoa,” I said, running my hand over the inside cover, where Amber had quoted a love poem to Ben.
“Find something?” Cole asked, setting aside his sandwich to lean forward and look at the yearbook.
I pointed to the smooth, almost elegant black cursive text in the upper left hand corner, which was very different from her suicide note and was even closer to mirroring my own handwriting. “This is a quote from a love poem written by a woman named Christina Rossetti called ‘I Loved You First,’” I said, stunned by what I was seeing. “I did a paper on her in my English Lit class last year and this is by far my favorite poem of hers. Rossetti was amazing, but she’s not super-well-known, so it’s a little freaky that Amber knew about her, too.”
Cole squinted at the text, and I swiveled the book so that he could read it. “One more connection for you to Amber,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, marveling at the newest coincidence. “So what’re we looking for again?”
Cole took a bite of his sub and chewed it before answering me. “See if you can find any photos of my uncle or Amber with other people, or maybe there’s something in the notes from their friends who signed the yearbook.”
I flipped to some of the signatures in the yearbook’s beginning page and frowned. “Nobody is signing here with their last name. Everybody’s just putting their first names in.”
Cole leaned over as I pointed to a few of the personal notes. “Damn,” he muttered. “Okay, we’ll see if you can cross-reference any of the first-name signatures to kids Spence or Amber were photographed with.”
“How is this going to help us again?” I asked, thumbing a little more through the pages.
“Some of their friends could still live in the area and we could interview them to see if they knew of anything weird going on with Ben and Amber.”
“Got it,” I said.
As I turned the pages of the yearbook, I quickly became fascinated. The kids were dressed so differently. Lots of upturned collars, huge earrings, rubber bracelets, and wild patterns. I couldn’t get over how pronounced the fashions seemed to be. Everything was flashy, big, and dramatic. And I didn’t see a single hoodie or pair of sweatpants. The guys all wore jeans. Almost nobody wore shorts or T-shirts. And the hair! I never saw so much frizz, feathering, or high bangs. And a few of the kids had Mohawks. Everybody seemed to be trying so hard to stand out, which was the complete opposite of how it was in school now. I kind of marveled at the boldness of those kids. They didn’t seem to be walking through the hallways with their chins down, hurrying to their next class. Instead they appeared to swagger down the corridors, brimming with confidence.
We studied the yearbooks in silence for a while, and then I thought of looking in the back to the index to find the pages that Ben and Amber would be on. I quickly discovered that Ben was the captain of the football and track teams. There were photos of him in uniform, on the field, and racing around the track.
Amber wasn’t a jock, though—she was a brain. She was recognized her junior year for having the highest GPA, and she also scored the highest for the entire class on her SATs. She was the junior class vice president, and led the debate team to regionals.
Still, most of the photos of her were on Spence’s arm, but I did find two shots of her with two other girls: Sara Radcliff and Britta Cummings. The caption under the photo read, Best friends forever. It dawned on me that these were the very girls that I’d mentioned to Dr. White when I was hypnotized and speaking as Amber.
“Here,” I said, swiveling the yearbook around so that Cole could see. “These two might know something.”
Cole made a note of the girls’ names on his iPhone. “We can look them up on the web after we get these back to Grams’s.”