Never Knowing Read Online Free PDF

giggles. Now I crave this little window into her life outside our home, want to know how she felt in each moment: “Did it make you laugh?” “Did you like learning about that?” But that night Tom’s words kept flashing in my mind: The dates match up . It didn’t feel real, couldn’t be real.
    After Ally drifted off, I kissed her warm forehead and left Moose with her. In my office I turned my computer on and Googled the Campsite Killer. The first link was a Web site dedicated to his victims. While the site played haunting music, I scrolled through photos of all his victims, with their names and dates of death below each picture. Most of the attacks were staggered every few years from the early seventies on, but sometimes he’d hit two summers in a row, then go years without surfacing again.
    I clicked on a link that took me to a PDF map that had a little cross marking every location where he murdered someone. He’d moved all over the Interior and northern BC, never killing in the same park twice. If the girls were camping with their parents or a boyfriend, he murdered them first. But it was clear the women were his real target. I counted fifteen women—healthy, smiling young women. All told, they believe he’s responsible for at least thirty murders—one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history.
    The Web site also mentioned the only woman who ever got away: his third victim, Karen Christianson. The photo was grainy, her head turned away from the camera. I went back to the Google home page and typed in “Karen Christianson.” This time numerous articles popped up. Karen and her parents were camping at Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in the West-Central region of BC one summer thirty-five years ago. The parents were shot in the head while they slept in their tent, but he hunted Karen in the park for hours until he caught and raped her. Before he was able to kill her she managed to hit him in the head with a rock and escape. She’d been lost in the woods for two days when she stumbled out of the mountain and flagged down a passing motor home.
    In most of the photos she was hiding her face, but some industrious journalist found her senior year picture from the high school yearbook, taken just months before that fateful summer. I studied the photo of the pretty dark-haired girl with the brown eyes. She did look a lot like Julia.
    The phone rang, making me jump. It was Evan.
    “Hi, baby. Is Ally already in bed?”
    “Yeah, she was tired tonight.”
    “How did your day go, any word from the PI?”
    Normally I tell Evan everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly—the second he walks in the door or answers the phone, but this time the words caught in my throat. I needed some time to think, to sort through it all.
    “Hello?”
    “He’s still looking into it.”
    That night I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to get the horror out of my mind, trying not to think about Julia’s face turned away from the cameras, turned away from me. Hours later I woke from a dream, the back of my neck soaked with sweat. I felt hungover, my mouth dry. Snippets of the dream came to me—a girl running through dark woods in bare feet, a bloody tent, black body bags.
    Then I remembered.
    I turned and looked at the clock. Five-thirty a.m. No chance of falling back to sleep after that nightmare. Like metal to magnet I was sitting at my computer again. I studied the photos of the victims, every article I could find on the Campsite Killer, my body filled with fear and disgust. I read every newspaper article on Julia, every scrap of information in every magazine, examined every photo. The reporters had hunted her for weeks, staked out her house, and followed her everywhere. The media frenzy was mostly in Canada, but some American papers had picked up the story, comparing her to one of Ted Bundy’s victims who had also escaped. When Karen disappeared the articles changed to speculation about where she was, then gradually