Page 43 of Smoke and Roses

She kisses my scar, right at the top, where it ends, and goes to sleep with her hand under mine.

Chapter Fourteen

“Lindsey? It’s Carol Hayes.”

I almost drop the phone into a bucket of daisies.

It’s Tuesday afternoon, two weeks after the fire. I’m shocked, because I have not heard Carol Hayes’s voice on the phone since the week after Danielle disappeared, when she called me every night at ten to ask if I’d heard anything, and every night I said no. All the calls ended when she hung up without saying goodbye.

“Carol, hi.” I put the shears down. “Is everything okay?”

There’s a long pause on the other end. “I want to show you her room,” Carol says.

Travis drives me. He doesn’t ask a single thing. I appreciate it more than I can express.

Carol’s porch has the dead marigolds pulled now. Somebody planted pansies in the beds. The blooms are bright purple and yellow.

When she opens the door, she looks smaller than she did two weeks ago. Chewing the inside of her mouth, she looks at me, and then at Travis behind me on the porch steps.

“You’re the one who found her car,” she says to him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

With a grim nod, she steps back and holds the door open for both of us.

Danielle’s room is at the end of the hall. I could walk this hallway blind, I’ve been here so many times when I was young.

Carol stops in front of the closed door with her hand on the knob.

“I haven’t opened it in a long time,” she says quietly. “I used to come in and sit. Every night for the first year. That became every Sunday. Finally I stopped. It hurt too much to see it and too much not to.”

“Carol.” I put my hand over hers, my throat aching. “We don’t have to.”

“Yes, we do.” With a deep breath, she opens the door.

It’s exactly the same. The purple comforter. The posters on the wall, of Taylor Swift and a map of Oregon with a red pushpin stuck in Portland. The prom dress is hanging on the closet door in its dry-cleaner bag. The vanity mirror has pictures tucked in the frame, and half of them are of me.

I sit down on her bed before my legs decide for me.

Travis stays in the doorway, leaning on the frame with his arms crossed, keeping watch the way he does.

Carol opens the nightstand drawer and takes out a notebook. Purple cover, spiral bound, with Danielle written on the front in silver gel pen and a lot of hearts.

“Her diary,” Carol says. “I found it after she was gone. I read the first page and couldn’t read any more. It felt like stealing from her.”

She holds it out to me. “I want you to read it. You knew her better than I did. That’s the truth, and I hated you for it for seventeen years, and I’m sorry.”

With a lump in my throat, and my eyes watery, I take the diary. “I didn’t know where she went,” I say. “Carol, I swear to God. I never knew.”

“I know you didn’t.” She sits down on the bed next to me, stiff and careful. “It was just easier to be angry at you than at her.”

I open the diary.

The diary is definitely Danielle’s handwriting, loopy and fast, with circles over the i’s. It starts in the fall of junior year. Classes. Boys. Me. So much about me. Linds and I went to the lake. Linds made me a corsage out of dandelions. Linds says when we get to Portland she’s going to open the best flower shop in Oregon and I’m going to be a nurse and we’ll get a cat named Dolly.

I laugh out loud. A cat named Dolly. Carol puts her hand on my back.

Then, around Christmas of senior year, a name appears that I’d forgotten. Brett Kessler.