Shattered Secrets

by Karen Harper - Cold Creek 01 - Shattered Secrets

  “Sure. I understand your protective instincts—being a preschool teacher and all. So, can you help me with the dowsing while you’re here? The site is that knoll over there above the creek,” he said, pointing. “We can use my willow wand.”

  That was her perfect excuse to stay right now or come back, and he’d set it up, she thought. “I have to leave, but I can come back later today,” she said. “Besides, I want to try one of my father’s old wands—and maybe yours too.”

  “Great. Appreciate it, Tess, and so will everyone.”

  Maybe not everyone, she thought as she waved and walked away, past Silas, through the gate to her car, hoping she hadn’t seemed to agree too easily. Too bad that knoll was not in the compound itself, but maybe she could convince Lee to let her dowse the grounds inside too.

  Tess knew Gabe would have a fit if she tried to check out this place without telling him first. Besides, she wanted to go uptown to see how they were coming with Sandy’s case and whether she could learn the circumstances of Amanda Bell’s abduction. She had to find the key to unlock her memories, even if those might make things worse than not remembering at all.

  10

  Tess ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for an early lunch, then did something she knew she shouldn’t. While pacing from the kitchen to the living room as she had while she’d eaten, she poured herself a glass of wine and downed it fast. Then she realized Gabe would smell it on her breath, or if she drove erratically and he or his deputy picked her up—but no, they must be busy with the Kenton case.

  She drove carefully, wondering whether to try the gift shop or the police station first. She should have called Gabe and let him come to her, but she didn’t want him to think she’d remembered something big. Maybe the books Miss Etta had left would trigger something.

  About ten media people more or less camped out near the gazebo on the town square with two satellite trucks parked nearby. It was enough to make her turn back, but she only ducked her head and hurried into the station—unnoticed, she hoped.

  She saw Ann on the front desk again. Three strapping men in jeans and flannel shirts waited nearby, talking among themselves. Had Gabe found a suspect, or arranged some sort of lineup? Not for her to view, she hoped, but then they were all too young to have had anything to do with her abduction.

  Ann got off the phone and spoke to the men. “You’ll have to go without me, bros. Too much going on here. Hi, Tess. The sheriff’s in the conference room if you need to see him again. How was the waterfall? It’s one of Gabe’s and my favorite places.”

  Tess could have fallen through the floor. Ann and Gabe—together—that way? She’d had no idea, but she could tell the three men did. Ann’s brothers might be triplets since they looked like clones of each other. She overheard a few teasing remarks about Ann and Gabe, including something about “the sheriff of Hot Creek.”

  “I suppose,” Tess said, suddenly having trouble forming her thoughts. “Did the sheriff tell you about the graffiti we went to see? If you would tell him I’m here, I’d appreciate it.”

  Ann nodded but narrowed her eyes. “These are my brothers, triple trouble. They work at the lumber mill just outside town, and they can’t get it through their wooden heads I’m totally tied up with this case right now and have to miss our weekly pub lunch. Just ignore them.”

  Ann’s brothers resembled Paul Bunyan–type lumberjacks. They hardly seemed the type for the English pub, but then appearances were often deceiving.

  Tess nodded, but she could hardly ignore what she’d just learned. Gabe and Ann were seeing each other. Yet he’d kissed her, held her. Some sort of magnetic force pulled them together. But—had that just been her imagination? Or had Gabe been cleverly coercing information from her?

  Frowning, Ann punched a button and spoke into the phone. “Tess Lockwood’s here. Want me to send her back or have her wait? I figured. He’s coming out to get you,” Ann said even as Gabe appeared in the hall and gestured for her to come back. He met her partway and took her elbow.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I just wondered what you’d uncovered so far—if that might spark something in my molasses-thick thoughts. And Marian Bell’s friend Erika Petersen stopped by with a cash offer for my house—if I meet with Marian to help her find her daughter.”

  “Clever move since I told Marian to steer clear of you. I didn’t take out a restraining order but threatened to. But I still can’t blame—”

  “Me either. Blame her. I guess I’d move heaven and earth to get my girl back.”

  Tess thought again of Lee and Gracie in that religious group. They wanted to help their kids, but as far as she was concerned, they were actually endangering them.

  “I kind of got the idea just now that Ann considers you her very close friend,” Tess blurted out.

  “We’ve dated, but I’m not as close to any next steps as she—and her band of brothers—like to think.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding stupid to herself. This was not only the wrong time and place for that talk, but truly none of her business. Except for that kiss.

  “Want to see Victor Reingold after all this time?” Gabe asked. “We were just going over things, so maybe you can help—and if not, fine. Anything else new?”

  “I’ll see him. Like I said before, though his hard work didn’t locate me, I’ve always been grateful to him, and Mom was too. But nothing else is new.”

  She almost told Gabe about the screams at the Hear Ye compound. It was like lying to him not to, but she’d tell him later, if she was sure he and Agent Reingold wouldn’t go in there like gangbusters. Or maybe they’d tell her something so that she could explain her suspicions to them. Maybe it would be better if she went back in there without law enforcement.

  Gabe walked her down the hall, past his deputy’s office and his own to the last room before the door that said Detention. It had a big lock and a grated window high on the door, so it must be the jail cell.

  “Vic, you remember Tess Lockwood,” Gabe said as they entered a big conference room.

  “Sure do, but not looking like that,” Vic said as he got up to come around the table.

  It was what Tess could only call a war room. Kate had taken her to London for a week a few years ago, and they’d seen Winston Churchill’s World War II war rooms deep underground. This was similar to what they’d seen there—wall maps with lines of yarn stuck in with pins on bulletin boards, piles of papers, strewn photos. But here, two laptops sat on the table.

  Agent Reingold walked closer, limping. Had he always limped?

  “Hey, my favorite survivor,” he said, his voice gruff. The man had tears in his eyes. He held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders and studied her. “You look great, Ter—Tess.”

  “You too, Agent Reingold.”

  “Hey, no little white lies now,” he said, making her feel guilty again as he pulled out a chair for her and Gabe sat beside her. Agent Reingold made his way back around the table. “We appreciate your trying with Gabe—to remember anything,” he added hastily. “And you can call me Vic, since we go way back, okay?”

  “Okay, sure. I don’t mean to intrude, but I thought if I knew about Sandy Kenton’s clues—disappearance—it might make me remember something, if, that is, it’s not privileged information.”

  “What is privileged, we’ll keep quiet,” Gabe said, “but we’ve scheduled a news conference in about half an hour in the town square. You might want to keep a low profile until the media scatter—if that even gets rid of them. Then we could walk down the alley if you want to see the storage room the girl disappeared from, but it’s a far cry from a cornfield.”

  A far cry, echoed in Tess’s head. She heard again that girl’s screams from that Hear Ye building, even heard her own scream years ago before the monster came and darkness descended.
<
br />   “That would be fine,” she said.

  “You can just wait here,” Gabe said. “It does appear Sandy might have known her abductor, because she evidently walked a ways outside with him—or her—before getting in a vehicle. We figured that out from using a tracker and his dog. I’m not sure you ever knew this, Tess, but when you were taken, Sam Jeffers and one of his tracking dogs followed your scent through the cornfield. When the hound lost the trail, we tried to go by where the corn looked pushed aside or disturbed.”

  Disturbed. Why hadn’t Gabe, her mother—someone—ever told her they’d tried to track her before? They’d tried to protect her when facing memories might have been better. She was desperate to face—and recall—them now.

  “Also,” Vic said, “when the dog lost your scent—probably because you were then being carried—we tried to lift the hound to see if he could catch your scent off cornstalks or hanging ears you might have brushed against. No go.”

  “A minute ago you referred to my abductor as him or her. Do you think it could have been a woman?”

  “Standard procedure,” Vic said. “We assume it’s a man, but we don’t know for sure. A young girl’s taken, then people jump to conclusions. But you came back physically intact, Tess, and that’s hardly ever the case if a man takes a young girl.”

  Not raped, he meant. Yet she’d been drugged and beaten. But how that happened or by whom was long gone.

  Leaning closer to her, Gabe said, “You’ve got to realize if you sit in with us—which we both want you to—the talk gets tough at times.”

  “I understand. And you handled that very carefully—I was returned intact.” But I still feel like I’m in a million pieces sometimes, she told herself. Then she recalled the reason she came.

  “Gabe, about dealing with Marian Bell. Was there anything in her daughter’s disappearance that could be a tie-in to me or the others who went missing?”

  “Only that she was taken from her backyard, which Marian says is a big enough link,” Gabe explained. Vic looked up from writing something down, longhand, when a laptop was right beside him.

  Gabe went on, “She was out there with her pet cat, which was left behind. Not a peep, not a sound. Did take her jacket though, which she’d earlier discarded. It was as if the abductor cared that she stayed warm and was not in a total rush to grab and go. No drag marks, tire marks, no trace, no witnesses, so basically that’s the same.”

  “So why aren’t you convinced Amanda could have been taken by the same person?”

  “Her father took flights from Columbus to Miami to Rio the next day. No child was with him, but there was one who matched Amanda’s description with a woman on an earlier flight to Rio. The child had a passport, of course, but not with Amanda’s name. And then, even though her father had done business in Rio and had contacts there, the trail—Amanda’s father, Peter Bell, the woman’s and the child’s—grows completely cold.”

  “Poor Marian.”

  “First we worked with the police in Rio. Now Marian’s hired a private detective. I’d bet my house Amanda’s father is down there under an assumed name with his daughter and the woman he loves. He and Marian were going through a bitter divorce and they both wanted custody of their only child.”

  A bitter divorce, like my parents, Tess thought, though that similarity obviously ended there. The order of her being taken and Dad’s leaving was the reverse of what had happened to Marian and her daughter. But, because Tess was a tomboy when she was small and her older sisters were more like Mom, Tess had always felt—Kate and Char had too—Dad favored Tess. But there was no way her own father would have taken her, even if Amanda’s did.

  “Jill Stillwell, the second girl who was taken, and then Sandy—no problems between the parents, right?” she asked.

  “Not a factor,” Gabe and Vic said, almost in unison.

  “Good head on your shoulders though, Tess,” Vic said. He looked back to what she assumed were his notes for the news conference.

  Gabe, elbows on the cluttered table, said, “Let me go over with you what we do know and can share about Sandy’s disappearance.”

  He talked about the child’s play area in the back room of the store. He mentioned a well-timed phone call her mother took from a customer, which might have been part of a setup—a call they were trying to trace. The fact that the girl had never strayed on her own was noted. The chaos of the crime scene. The Barbie doll and the soiled, tattered scarecrow they couldn’t account for.

  Tess gasped. “A scarecrow?” Now, why, she thought, did that mere word make her stomach cramp? Had she seen one in the cornfield the day she was taken?

  “Yeah,” Gabe said as Vic looked up again. “One Sandy’s mother said had never been in the shop anywhere, though she had ordered some small ones that had not arrived.”

  “A scarecrow?” Tess repeated, frowning.

  “So?” Gabe prompted.

  “Nothing. It just seems weird. Maybe it’s just the word scare I’m reacting to. Even though all this happened to me years ago, and I know I’m safe now, the whole thing still scares me.”

  “Let’s get the scarecrow from the forensics lab in the truck and unbag it, get Mike to drive back here,” Vic said. “He’s only been on the road to headquarters about fifteen minutes. I agree the scarecrow’s weird, but so is all of this.”

  “I’ll have Ann call Mike,” Gabe said. “He ought to make it back right after the news conference. Tess, you want to wait here for us? There’s a smaller conference room, empty, that might be better next door.”

  “Yes, fine. You know, I was afraid I’d be spotted coming in.”

  “I’ll have Ann tell Mike not to bring the scarecrow in until you and I are back,” Gabe told Vic as he escorted Tess out.

  He walked Tess next door to a much smaller room with a regular door, a narrow table and two chairs facing each other. There was no evidence of the investigation in here.

  “An interview room?” she asked.

  “Multipurpose, but yes.”

  “With all those reporters out there, I feel like it’s my safe room.”

  “I don’t want you to feel that way—as if you’re under attack, or we’re grilling you.” He put his arm around her waist as he pulled out a straight-backed chair for her and she sat down. One hand on the table, he bent closer to her. She could tell he’d had pizza or something Italian for lunch, but on his breath, it was enticing. She leaned slightly toward him.

  “You really reacted to the mere mention of a scarecrow, Tess. Anything else that comes to mind then?”

  “Fear. Something flapping in my face. Maybe being hit—smackings.”

  “Smackings? Is that a word your parents used with you?”

  “I don’t think so. I can ask my sisters.”

  “If not, your using that term would not relate to anything in your own family, like a punishment or spanking paddle.”

  “Right. I really don’t think my parents had anything like that.”

  “So that could be a memory of your time away that popped out. And once there’s a trickle of memory, there could be a gush of it. Well, I read that in a book somewhere.”

  “Oh, Miss Etta gave me some books on childhood trauma I’m going to read.”

  “Let me know if something stands out.”

  She did think then of hearing that a Hear Ye girl was being spanked for stealing. Should she tell Gabe right now that she was determined to learn all she could about that girl, maybe to help her if she was imprisoned at the compound?

  “Gabe, let’s go!” Vic’s voice came from down the hall.

  Gabe squeezed her shoulder. When he moved away, his hand brushed through her hair, almost like a caress. But this was no time to imagine things, not about the past or the present. Especially since it seemed Gabe and Ann had something going on. And
what did it matter to her? She wanted to sell her house and get out of here just as fast as she could, but if she could help herself or others in the short time she was here, then—

  A voice interrupted her agonizing. Ann.

  “Gabe said to bring you coffee and a donut,” she said as she put the mug and a powdered sugar donut in front of her. “I’m going out to watch the news conference. My brothers are gone, but Peggy, our night dispatcher’s, out front if you need anything.”

  “Thanks, Ann.”

  “Think nothing of it. But think about this,” she said, her tone hardening. “Gabe’s obsessed with this case—yours and the others, of course. But if you can’t help him, you should clear out so having you around doesn’t keep reminding him of his father’s failures. You know what I mean. Maybe you should talk to Aaron Kurtz, who owns all those fields around your place. Maybe he’d want to buy your property, demolish the house and garage for more arable land. He’s always trying to expand his holdings. You know, think outside the box to sell your house fast.”

  And get away from Gabe fast, was the rest of the message.

  “Thanks for the suggestion,” Tess said, gripping the hot mug between her hands.

  “Yeah. Sure,” Ann said. She almost ran from the room.

  Think outside the box. Someone was still taking little girls, someone local, maybe right under their noses. So she was definitely going to take a closer look at the goings-on at Hear Ye. And maybe she should go talk to Aaron Kurtz, although, obviously, Gabe and Vic had crossed him off their list long ago. Both of those decisions scared her.

  But what really churned up long-buried terror was the mere mention of a scarecrow.

  11

  Time crawled for Tess. One of those big, round schoolroom-type clocks glared down from the opposite wall of the tiny office. Not only did the minutes seem too slow, but the clock hands jerked with a strange sound not quite a ticktock.

  Half an hour passed. Wasn’t the press conference in the town square over yet?

  She heard footsteps in the hall. Good! Gabe was back, but did he have the scarecrow? Surely it wasn’t just that she’d seen a scarecrow the day she was abducted. No, it was something more than that.