“What happened?” It was an intrusive knee-jerk inquiry, one that he didn’t expect to get an answer for, but he couldn’t keep himself from asking.
“January had issues with depression,” the woman said after a moment. “She, uh . . .” A stammer. A pause.
Oh God. She killed herself.
“I see,” Lucas said, hearing the emotion edge into the woman’s voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t. She’s in a better place.” She exhaled into the receiver. “Can I help you with anything, Mr. Graham?”
He wanted to ask her how January had ended it. January had left Jeffrey’s group in 1981, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have had a change of heart. If Jeffrey Halcomb had the power to captivate, January certainly couldn’t have shrugged him off like some mediocre one-night stand. Perhaps she regretted leaving Jeffrey behind, the way Sandy Gleason had, especially after seeing a handcuffed Halcomb all over the news. Had some of the envelopes in the stacks of mail hand-delivered to Halcomb’s cell been from her? In the aftermath of what had occurred in Pier Pointe, January and Jeffrey could have reconnected. Perhaps, to clear the checkmark in the column titled “ones that got away,” Jeff had pulled January back into the fold, then quietly convinced her to kill herself thirty years too late. Maybe he had done it just to see if he still could.
“Mr. Graham? Are you there?”
Lucas shuddered, shook off his momentary trance. “Yes, I’m here.”
“What is it that you’re writing about?” she asked.
“Jeffrey Halcomb,” he said. “The Pier Pointe, Washington, case. January knew a couple of the girls who took their lives back in 1983.”
More faltering. “I see.”
“Did January . . . leave a note? Some concrete reason?”
Another round of quiet. He doubted the woman expected him to ask that particular question. Hell, he didn’t know if she even had that kind of information. Whoever was on the other end of the phone could have been nothing but a store clerk hired as January’s replacement. But Lucas knew it would eat away at him if he didn’t ask. The worst she can do is hang up, he thought. Like that would be something new.
“Actually, she did,” the woman said after a moment. “Though I’m not sure I should . . .” Her voice tapered off. Her hesitancy was understandable. She had no idea who Lucas was, had no reason to help him, but goddammit he needed this.
“Please,” he said, surprised at the desperation that tinged that single-syllable. “I’ve lost nearly all of my leads. I’ve moved across the country with my daughter. I was supposed to be interviewing Halcomb myself, but he backed out on me at the last minute and . . .” A sigh, a pause. “I’m at the end of my rope.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman told him. She’s not going to bite, he thought. She doesn’t care. And why should she? He was just a random stranger in a shitty situation. That didn’t change the fact that January was dead.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t ask . . . what’s your name?”
“Maureen.” She hesitated, considering something. “But everyone calls me Maury.”
“Maury . . . were you and January close?”
“As close as two gals can be. We owned this place together. Now it’s just me.”
“Can you at least give me the date of January’s death? I’d like to pull her obituary, pay my respects to her in the book.”
“It was March fourteenth,” she said.
Lucas’s brain stalled out. That date, it was Jeff’s anniversary—the very day he’d been arrested, the day the police found the gruesome scene inside Congressman Snow’s summer home. Lucas stared at the wall of his study, his pen poised to write, his hand motionless.
“Mr. Graham?”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for your help, Maury. I appreciate it.”
He was ready to end the call when Maury stopped him a half second before. “Mr. Graham?”
“Yes?”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Twelve,” he said. “Going on twenty.”
A soft laugh on her end.
Another beat of oscillation.
“I . . . I really don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she said. “I was the one who found Jan’s body. She hadn’t showed up to work that morning, and when I tried to phone her, she didn’t answer her cell. It wasn’t like her, so I went by her house after closing up the shop. She was on the floor . . .” Maury stopped. Lucas waited for her to continue, hoping like hell that she wouldn’t change her mind and hang up. “She took a pill,” Maury said. “The coroner found it between her back teeth.”
“Do you know what it was?”
“Arsenic.”
Lucas’s mouth went dry.
“I still don’t understand. I don’t even know where she’d have gotten such a pill, or why she’d have had it at all. Unless she’d been planning on doing what she had done for a while. But . . .” She exhaled a sigh. “I don’t like to think that way. I don’t like to know that my best friend was so sad that she’d been planning on doing something like that and I was too blind to see it.”
“She didn’t show any signs at all?” Lucas asked.
“We had dinner together the night before,” Maury recalled. “Her treat for no reason. I suppose that could have been a sign, but we’d gone out before.”
“There was no clue in her letter?”
“No. I suppose her letter wasn’t much of one at all.”
“What did it say?”
“It said, See you soon, J. Just the letter J. She didn’t even sign her name.”
Lucas’s heart rattled in its cage. Nausea took hold.
“She always signed her name,” Maury said softly. “She was fond of her signature, always saying how it was too elegant for an old hippie like her. I still don’t understand why she didn’t sign it then.”
He scribbled January’s last words down across the top of the interview she’d given in 1984, that J burning itself into his brain.