The Acadia Killer

Chapter 29

Climbing into Blake's passenger seat, I was anxious to get to his house to find that box with the yearbooks inside. It didn't take more than fifteen minutes to get to where he lived, and I was chomping at the bit to see what we could find out.

"Here we are," Blake said as he shut off the engine. "It's not much, but it's home."

It was a cute, cozy looking cabin in the woods. The house was an A frame with big glass windows in the front and glass doors. It made me think of some of the cabins I'd stayed in in Washington and Oregon. There was a small deck around the front half of the house with a large firepit and some rustic outdoor furniture surrounding it.

"Not much, huh?" I giggled. "It's a beautiful house."

Blake smiled and walked up the steps to the front door, unlocking it and holding the door open for me to walk inside first.

The inside of the house smelled like cedar. The furniture was a mix of leather and dark wood colors, and there was a moose head mounted on the wall above the fireplace.

"Did you shoot that?" I asked, pointing up at it.

Blake chuckled and shook his head. "No. It's not real. I just like the look of it."

I nodded, rolling my eyes in amusement. "Okay. Where is this infamous box of yours?"

He glanced around the house for a moment like he was trying to remember where he'd put it and then told me to follow him up the stairs.

There was a tight yet spacious landing at the top of the stairs, but you had to duck to avoid hitting your head on the angled ceiling in some places. I stood by the railing which gave a beautiful view down at the living room while I waited for Blake to find what he was looking for.

A few minutes into digging through his spare closet, he found the box labeled "memories."

"Here we go," he said, hoisting it up onto a small table and pulling out his pocketknife to cut the tape. "It should be in here."

I watched intently as Blake opened the box. I half expected moths to fly out with as crumpled and old as it looked. I noticed that dust covered the top of everything inside the box as he pulled items out one by one, setting them beside the box on the table.

"I think we're in luck," he finally said as he got down to the last of the items in the box.

He pulled out an old green book about the size of a dictionary, but not nearly as thick. The binding creaked when he opened it.

"This is one of them," he said, flipping through the crinkled pages of black and white photos. "Here's my dad."

I walked over to where Blake stood to look at where he was pointing to on the page. It was an old black and white picture of a teenage boy. It was his father's high school yearbook. Below the image was the name Michael Robert Henry.

"Let's see if there's a Regina Middleton in there," I said as Blake began to flip through the pages again.

"We don't know if she's married, right?" he asked.

I groaned, remembering that I hadn't found that out yet. "I have no idea. We probably have to go through every photo and see if anyone has the first name Regina and then go from there."

"What a fucking pain in the ass," Blake chuckled, though I could tell he was more annoyed with the task than he was letting on.

An hour passed by, and we'd looked through every single page of the yearbook and found nothing other than a couple shots of Blake's father playing baseball with the school team, which didn't tell us anything. There wasn't a single person in the book with the name Regina.