I almost don’t want to hold the two pictures when Will offers them side by side. The paper they’re printed on is light as a feather and impossibly heavy. The girls could have been sisters, they look so much alike. Brown eyes. Button noses. Dark straight hair parted in the middle and falling over slender shoulders. Their eyes pull me in and in. “When did you start working on this?” I finally ask him.

He shrugs. “Since Jenny died.”

Shit. “What have you learned?”

“That it’ll fuck you up good to obsess over anything for twenty years.”

“Oh, Will.” My heart flutters. How well I knew. “I’m sorry.”

“It ruined my marriage.”

“Tell me about it. Tell me about Beth.”

He looks away, smoothing his hand over a glassine sleeve filled with old news clippings.

“Please?”

“She’s a saint.”

“No one’s a saint.”

“She’s close enough for me, then. We met just after college, up near Mount Shasta. I was there with some buddies, camping. She and some friends were in the next campsite. That was pretty much it.”

I have to smile then. “Love and s’mores?”

“And a few cases of Coors Light. Yeah.” He reaches into the box again and pulls out more photos, notebooks, and index cards wrapped in crackling dry rubber bands.

“Besides Jenny, these girls hit me hardest. There were seven victims over eighteen months, including Jenny. But these two were the youngest. The only ones taken together. One watched the other die first. Can you imagine? They were best friends.”

“Twenty years is a long time for one murder to go unsolved, let alone seven of them, Will.” I let the words float. “Does Beth really not understand why you need to keep pursuing this? She knows your history, right? How close you were to Jenny? How could she just give up on you?”

“She didn’t. She never did. I gave up on me.”

I don’t know what to say.

“I haven’t opened these boxes in a while. A year maybe?” He scratches his head and sniffs, trying to hold back tears the way that men do, by pretending to have a cold. Sinus trouble. It’s something I’ve always found endearing and maddening, but in Will’s case mostly endearing. I feel for him.

“Why now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s Cameron and the other girls, all within a hundred miles. Maybe it’s the Internet. We’ve never had a tool like this before, not anything like it. Millions and millions of people are out there, reachable with a few clicks of a button, and at least one of them knows something.”

He’s right. A whole new day is dawning. A chance to take another crack at this case and so many others, thousands and thousands of searches that had grown cold, enough to fill a yawning morass.