Page 42 of To the Grave

Otis and I congregated around him, all of us staring at the Blackwell High yearbooks arranged in chronological order going all the way back to the 1950s.

Wolf bent to the shelf. When he straightened, he was holding six yearbooks in his hands. “Let’s take all of these, just to be safe.”

We sat on the floor and Wolf handed Otis and I two yearbooks each.

“Start with the class photos,” Otis said. “Once we know Jace’s dad is there, we can look through the other pictures.”

I flipped past team photos — football, basketball, baseball — and past pictures of a production ofLittle Shop of HorrorsandJesus Christ Superstar. I passed pictures of student government meetings and bake sales, pep rallies and school dances.

Finally I reached the freshmen. I flipped to the K’s and looked for Jace’s last name, then continued to the sophomores when I didn’t find it.

Not there either, and not in with the juniors and seniors.

I set the yearbook aside and started on the second one. I found what I was looking for in the junior class, the nameArlo Kanejumping out at me from under a picture of Jace’s face.

Well, not exactly Jace’s face, but definitely close.

“Found him.”

Chapter 30

Daisy

Ididn’t know why I was speaking so softly, like I expected someone to overhear us when the vacuum cleaner made it clear Dylan was still cleaning in another part of the building.

“Seriously?” Wolf leaned in to look.

“There,” I said, pointing to the picture of Jace’s dad.

He wore a leather jacket over a T-shirt, his jaw sharp under a stylized haircut, long in front, shaved on the sides. There was a challenge in his eyes, the same challenge I saw in Jace’s eyes.

Fuck with me. I dare you.

Try to get close to me. I dare you.

“He looks like Jace,” Otis said.

I looked over at him. “You’ve never seen a picture of him?”

“Jace doesn’t have any up in his room,” Wolf said. “It wasn’t something he liked talking about.”

If it had been anyone else, it might have seemed strange not to talk about a dead parent, but I knew Jace now, understood the way he tried not to think about the things that were hard to think about.

I used my finger to save my place in the yearbook, then looked at the cover to check the year. “He was a junior in this one.”

“Now we know he was here during this four-year period,” Wolf said, returning to the yearbooks he’d been going through. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

I wanted to start at the beginning of the yearbook in my hands, see if I could find other pictures of Jace’s dad, but first I flipped the page to the M's, looking for my mom. I didn’t find her in the juniors or the sophomores, but when I turned to the freshmen, there she was, a younger version of my mom staring back at me from a black-and-white picture with the nameEleanor Mercerunder it.

Her dark hair was stick straight, a contrast to the way I remembered her, with soft curls from an expert blowout. Her face was a little softer too, and I thought of Ruth, the way her face had morphed from soft and babyish to more angular, more refined, just in the last year.

I saw both of us in my mom. Ruth had gotten her nose, but it was obvious I’d gotten her eyes even though you couldn’t see their unusual color in the black-and-white photo.

Long earrings dangled from her ears and she wore a top that looked like it was made of crushed velvet. Even from the pictures it was obvious she was a counterpoint to Arlo Kane: good girl meets bad boy.

I touched her picture. She’d been so young, just a kid.

I took a deep breath and flipped to the front of the yearbook, but I only got a couple pages in before Wolf spoke next to me.

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