The Motif

Chapter 5

Ever since Jennifer had returned home, she'd been haunted by the presence of her sister's ghost. Everywhere she looked, she saw remnants that reminded her of the life that was no more. From the empty bed to the boy band posters on her wall. From the kitchen table (she always had to have the center seat on the right side of the table) to her toothbrush, resting forlornly on the bathroom sink. From the school to her favorite shops in town. Everything, everything reminded Jennifer of Kimmi.

But nothing reminded her more of Kimmi than Rachel. Not so much in appearance, for Rachel had dark auburn hair, green eyes, and freckles in contrast to Kimmi's blonde hair, brown eyes, and spotless skin. It was more the memories of watching the two girls who had been inseparable since childhood.

As they silently walked across the school parking lot, Jennifer thought back to her first night back home. Her father had picked her up at the airport – her mother had been too distraught to even leave the house. Jennifer and her parents spent the rest of that dreadful Sunday holding each other together (barely) in a cocoon of grief.

The thought that something extraordinary had occurred, aside from a teenage boy losing his mind out of unrequited infatuation, never even crossed Jennifer's mind until the next morning, when Rachel had told her about the other attack from earlier in the same week.

From that moment, Jennifer's reporter instincts kicked in and smelled a rat. She immediately got in touch with two of her old friends from high school: Christine who had majored in journalism with Jennifer at Connecticut State, and was currently working for the local town newspaper, and John, who was a deputy at the town sheriff's department.

Christine easily shared everything she had learned about the two cases, which wasn't much. John was a little harder to coerce, being a deputy and all, but Jennifer did manage to wheedle him into letting her see the high school pool.

Police tape and markers littered the area, marking off significant areas; where Ben's phone had been found, where the razor that had taken three teenage lives had been discarded, where Kimmi and Derek's bodies had been found by Rachel.

Jennifer knelt at the spot where her sister had died, and though she had promised herself she wouldn't, she broke down crying.

The pool itself had naturally been drained, but they had not yet been able to completely remove the stain of red which blasphemed the smooth concrete walls of the gaping depression in the ground. She had learned from her father, on the ride home from the airport, that this was where Ben's body had been found. The police said it appeared that Ben had been killed first, not at the school but also not too far away, and then dragged and dumped into the pool. Texts on Ben and Kimmi's phones indicated that Derek had lured Kimmi out of the dance and into the pool room by using Ben's phone, and then killed her before killing himself, kissing her with his last breaths.

Not entirely surprising, visiting the scene of the crime did not yield any clues to Jennifer's curiosity, since any pertinent evidence had been cleared away. However, it did offer a very small measure of closure. Jennifer also visited the park where Brian Robertson had killed Carley Benson – which yielded about the same level of evidence as the pool, but without the closure.

Disappointed, but not about to give up, Jennifer returned to John the deputy, and wheedled him into giving her some more information. It wasn't easy, but eventually he was able to pull some necessary strings and got permission to let her see the case files (or so he claimed – Jennifer suspected that, more likely, he had gone against protocol and shared the case files with her out of pity).

The case files, however, did not offer any possible answers to the riddle before her. To the contrary, it raised a thousand more questions.

"Rachel, we need to talk," Jennifer said, as they stepped onto the main street in front of the school.