Murder Road

Eddie comes outside and asks why April left the cabin—he could tell she was upset. She tells him that she identifies with the girls at Hunter Beach and feels a connection with Rhonda Jean. When she was 12, she and her mother left her father in the middle of the night. Her mother woke her up and they drove away with their headlights off. They changed their names and wandered the country, picking up jobs when they could. April got a fake ID and started working early. By the time she was 18, she was alone—she told Eddie that her mother had died.

April shows Eddie the photo Gretchen gave her, and they decide to continue investigating. So far, they are ahead of Quentin—he has been so focused on them that he hasn’t visited Hunter Beach, but he will soon.

April and Eddie go into Dollar Mart. Like so many places in the area, it just doesn’t feel right. April wonders again how exactly they ended up on Atticus Line. She apparently fell asleep and didn’t see Eddie get off the expressway, and Eddie himself doesn’t seem to know how they got there.

In Dollar Mart, the woman at the register recognizes Rhonda Jean, Gretchen, and Todd in the photo, and she specifically remembers Rhonda Jean being there a few days earlier. As they are talking, the doorbell keeps jangling, but no one comes inside. April looks through the glass door and sees, idling in the parking lot, the truck that was following them on Atticus Line.

She points it out to Eddie, who goes outside to confront the driver. As he walks towards the pickup, he and April both see a girl sit up in the pickup’s bed and stare at them. The driver throws the truck into reverse, but the girl doesn’t move. As the truck speeds toward the exit, April runs to their car and drives to where Eddie is standing. He gets in the car, and they follow the truck out of the parking lot.

April tells Eddie that she saw the girl too, which means he wasn’t hallucinating then or on the night of Rhonda Jean’s death. April reflects that she “had never seen anything as terrible as that girl, as her face, as her undead hands” (99). The furious anger emanating from the girl was unforgettable.

They follow the truck down Atticus Line to a driveway with a mailbox reading “Shandler.” At the end of the driveway, the truck sits in front of a farmhouse, its engine off. There is no sight of the girl or the driver, but in the pickup’s bed, they find a backpack. April turns towards the house and sees the girl again. The driver comes out of a nearby barn and runs straight at Eddie, tackling him. They fight, and Eddie overpowers the man. April runs into the farmhouse and calls the police.

Quentin and Beam question April and Eddie again. The police now know about the truck that April and Eddie kept secret. Beam questions April, and when he lights up a cigarette, she remembers her mother chain-smoking the night they ran. Although April is convinced that the truck’s owner, Max Shandler, is the killer, Beam offers an alternate theory—April and Eddie killed Rhonda and planted her backpack in Shandler’s truck.

Beam also insinuates that of the two of them, April is the one capable of such a crime, while Eddie would’ve just been an accomplice. This theory is supported by the fact that while they can find out everything about Eddie, April’s background is a mystery. This is because April has been living under the assumed name of April Delray since running away with her mother as a preteen. She obtained her first driver’s license under that name, but everything before then is a blank. April continues to insist that they are innocent, but before they can go any further, Quentin suddenly releases April and Eddie. Rose picks them up at the police station and admonishes the police for questioning April and Eddie and confiscating Robbie’s car.

As Rose drives them back to her house, Eddie wonders if Quentin released them so that he could watch them, but Rose says that’s not how he works. Quentin arrived in Coldlake Falls 10 years earlier out of the blue, and no one knows much about him. She admits that Robbie told her Quentin closes cases, so if he still suspected April and Eddie, he wouldn’t be holding back. April theorizes that the backpack turned Quentin’s attention to a new suspect. They ask Rose about Max Shandler, but she doesn’t know much about him. However, even if Shandler killed Rhonda Jean, he is far too young to have killed all the victims over the years.

That night, April and Eddie have sex for the first time since they left for their honeymoon. April reflects that sex with Eddie was completely different than with other men. The first time they had sex, she felt like she was leaving her old self behind and fully becoming April Delray.

Early the next morning, Syed taps on their bedroom window. He is out of uniform and tells them to call him Kal. He says that Max Shandler has been charged with Rhonda’s murder. Kal grew up in Coldlake Falls and wouldn’t have thought Shandler was capable of it, but Shandler admitted he didn’t remember the night of Rhonda’s death. In addition, they found blood on the backpack and inside his truck, and the jacket Rhonda was wearing was Shandler’s.

Kal tells them that the hitchhiker killings on Atticus Line have been happening for 20 years, but there is no pattern to the timing, the victims, or the weapon. The local police, and especially Quentin, desperately want to close the case, and April and Eddie are the first witnesses they’ve ever had. April tells Kal what the kids at Hunter Beach told them. He wants them to make an official statement, but Eddie refuses, saying that they are leaving town.

Eddie and April pack their bags—going home seems anticlimactic, but the idea of continuing with their honeymoon is ridiculous. April also wants to know what happened—she wants to understand the mystery but knows that sometimes you have to leave without all the answers.

They are still waiting for the police to return their car, so after lunch, Eddie helps Rose with yardwork and April reads Flowers in the Attic until she falls asleep. She wakes up thinking she heard a voice and felt a hand on her shoulder. The room is cold, and there is no one there. She is startled by a knock at the front door.

The police officer who said that Rose killed her husband is at the front door. Eddie’s car is parked in the driveway, but the officer dangles the keys out of April’s reach. April is rude and makes him angry, enjoying the sight of him losing his temper. Finally, he gives her the keys and leaves. The car smells awful, as Rhonda Jean’s blood has soaked into the upholstery. The police have nearly destroyed the interior, cutting fabric out of the seats and leaving fingerprint powder. April goes to tell Eddie that they can leave.

As Eddie and April drive out of Coldlake Falls, a rainstorm begins. April wants to avoid Atticus Line, but when they get to the turn, Eddie is distant and unfocused and doesn’t respond to her. Without a word, he makes the turn onto Atticus Line.

As they drive, the storm increases, and April has a bad feeling. The sky is completely black, and it is raining so hard that Eddie can barely see to drive. They debate turning around but decide to go through the storm. April sees a light through the trees, as she did the first night, then directly ahead of them a white light appears and grows.

They drive into the light and suddenly see a woman ahead, running down the middle of the road. Eddie swerves to avoid her and the car spins before stopping on the side of the road. The incident sets off his PTSD. April holds him and confirms that she saw the girl too. They realize that it must be the Lost Girl. Just then, they see the girl again, this time running straight toward their car. She reaches through April’s open window and begs them for help.

Close up, April can see bruises around the girl’s neck and blood dripping from her ear. Eddie leans over to roll up April’s window, and the girl grabs him and drags him across the car. April slides into the driver’s seat and steps on the gas. The girl disappears and April drives as fast as she dares through the storm. The storm lets up and as they drive, Eddie points to a sign: They realize they are going back to Coldlake Falls.

April and Eddie return to Rose’s house. That night as Eddie sleeps, April wonders why they saw the Lost Girl—they may have been the first to do so. She hasn’t heard any reports of anyone seeing the girl or the bright light. It makes her think that she and Eddie were chosen for a reason. April is practical by nature, and although she’s never believed in ghosts before, her first-hand experience cannot be denied. She believes that the Lost Girl must want something from them. She is surprised Eddie is sleeping so soundly, as he rarely does. She now knows that they have to stay in town—one way or another they aren’t leaving until they find out what the Lost Girl wants.

The next day, April and Eddie shop for groceries and then go to a diner to discuss their next move. However, they don’t know how to begin their investigation. Eddie notices a teenage girl staring at them. She approaches their table and asks if they were the couple who brought Rhonda Jean to the hospital—the newspaper covered the incident, and even though they aren’t mentioned by name, she saw them with Rose and put the clues together. She sits down and introduces herself as Beatrice Snell. Beatrice tells them that she and her sister have collected extensive information on the Atticus Line killings. She offers an exchange of information and invites them to her house.

April and Eddie park down the street from Beatrice’s house, as she instructs. Inside, she goes upstairs to get her files. As they wait in the kitchen, they look out the window to the backyard pool, where another teenage girl is lying on a towel.

Beatrice returns with her files, one on each of the six murders, beginning with the first one in 1976. They realize that the 1976 victim is the Lost Girl—April reads the description of her injuries and realizes that they match the ghost they saw the previous night.

The girl by the pool comes inside and introduces herself as Beatrice’s sister, Gracie. Once she realizes who April and Eddie are, she joins the conversation. Gracie thinks that the police are covering for the Atticus Line killer and that Max Shandler is being framed. April tells them that Rhonda was wearing Shandler’s coat, guessing correctly that the detail wasn’t in the newspaper. Gracie, however, points out that Max is only 28 and too young to have committed all the murders.

Besides newspaper articles, the Snell sisters also have police reports—Gracie organized the police station’s files as community service for a speeding citation, and she made copies of all the Atticus Line files. In the report for the first killing, Eddie sees that a month after the girl’s body was discovered, a high school letter jacket from Midland, Michigan was found in the woods nearby. However, when the police contacted the Midland force, they were told there were no missing persons reports.

Gracie and Beatrice both feel a connection to the murdered girls and are upset that the police aren’t doing more to identify even the oldest cases. Gracie points out that although it made sense to withhold details like the letter jacket from the public, the crime is now so old that they could release the details and ask for new information. They are convinced that the police don’t do so because Coldlake Falls is a tourist destination, and they don’t want to scare business away.

April can tell that Gracie is holding something back, and she doesn’t buy into the girl’s conspiracy theory. Even though she doesn’t trust Quentin, he seems too determined to find a murderer to be simultaneously covering up the crime. As they go through the files, they notice that there is no pattern—every crime is different. In the first one, for example, they notice that the tag was ripped out of the girl’s shirt. When April asks the girls about the Lost Girl ghost story, neither of them believes it. However, they also never go out to Atticus Line at night.