by Lisa Jackson
She was just nervous, that was it. She’d been caught with Nell by Reva, who was carrying a big butcher knife and then had left her out here alone.
But there it was again.
A shifting of darkness and light. Movement.
Her heart ka-thumped.
Something was up there. Staring down at her.
Heart thudding, she backed up a step, and again the image was gone.
You’re a moron, she told herself, but couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being observed. She rubbed her arms, trying to convince herself that she was only imagining a dark shape shifting on the ridge, that what she was seeing was a tricky play of muted light, the result of clouds moving slowly across the moon. She started to turn toward the far end of the beach when she caught a glimpse of white. She looked upward again.
There, on the outermost point, was a woman, dressed in sheer white, the moonlight catching in her blond hair, her face as pale as death.
Elle!
Sosi’s heart nearly stopped. Her eyes rounded and terror slid through her veins as the waifish figure stared down at her and then, in a blink, disappeared.
CHAPTER 15
Averille, Oregon
Now
Lucas
“Hey, stop here!” Maggie said suddenly from the passenger seat of Lucas’s Jeep. She’d been reading the computer mounted on the dash, but must’ve seen that they were passing her favorite drive-through coffee kiosk located in the Safeway parking lot, just three blocks from the station.
He wheeled into the lane and saw that the car ahead of him was a grimy Toyota Camry, the back window obscured by helium balloons that shifted with the breeze allowed in through the driver’s open window.
“Thank you, thank you. I need a jolt this afternoon,” Maggie said as Lucas queued up behind the Camry whose driver got his coffee and drove away. Lucas slid down his window and the barista smiled at him as, along with a stiff breeze, the strains of some jazz tune filtered into his SUV. “Hey, Sheryl,” Lucas greeted her. “I’ll have a tall coffee. Black. And her—the usual.” He hitched his chin toward Maggie, who was still studying the computer screen.
She lifted her head long enough to look past him and through the window. “Make it a triple shot today, okay?” she said.
“Got it!” Sheryl, a tall, much-tattooed blonde, grinned from within the tiny space of the Coffee Shack. “That’s a tall, triple-shot mocha with light whipped cream?”
“Right,” Maggie said, nodding. “Perfect. Thanks.”
Lucas rarely frequented the coffee kiosk on his own, but when he and Maggie were out of the office, driving through the town, she insisted they stop so that she could indulge herself and opt for a “fancy caffeine kick” rather than wait until they got back to the office and the dark brew warming on a hot plate in the lunch room. So here they were.
Lucas handed Sheryl some cash. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks!” she said, smiling brightly, the blue butterfly inked onto her neck more visible as she turned her head. “Just a sec.”
While the sound of the espresso machine screaming and sputtering filled the air, Maggie asked, “What do you think happened at the camp twenty years ago?”
Lucas glanced at his partner and tried to keep the irritation from his voice. “How many times do I have to tell you? It’s all in the statement I made at the time.”
“Yeah, but now you’ve got insight, and it’s all being brought up again and the press, not just Kinley . . . whatever—”
“Marsh.”
“Right. Marsh was just first. Others are starting to call. It won’t take long for the reporters to connect the dots, that you were there, and when the case is ‘officially’ reopened, you, my friend, might be in the crosshairs of some of the media.”
“I know.”
“It makes you look guilty.”
He glared at her. “You think I had something to do with that body we found, of it getting there?”
“No, I think you might be . . . not fully transparent.”
He felt his jaw tighten. He didn’t expect this from Mags.
“Your girlfriend went missing, and Dusty Peters was never heard from again. All on your family’s property. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You think I’d cover up for my old man?” he said, biting out the words.
“No, but you’re not giving me anything, so I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s all in my statement,” he said.
“Okay, fine. I’m just asking you about your take on things now, as an adult, as a cop, that’s all. You’re not as close to the crime now.”
“If there was a crime.”
“We’ve got a body.”
“An unidentified body.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Luke. It’s not working with me, okay?” Her back was up and he really didn’t blame her as he stared through the windshield. The first few drops of rain began to drizzle down the glass.
“You were Eleanor Brady’s boyfriend, and you broke up with her just before she disappeared.”
He didn’t respond.
“And then you and Bernadette Alsace became a couple and she’s also part of the group that seem to have created this air-tight, but unbelievable alibi that they were all together when both women went missing. Not in their bunks, not tending to the campers who were assigned to them, but out partying together, even though they didn’t like each other.”
“Here ya go!” Sheryl handed the steaming paper cups through the window. “These are recyclable, y’know,” she said as she did each time they stopped by. “Same with the lids. Lots of people don’t know that and just throw ’em away.” She flashed a smile. “Gotta do what we can to save the planet, y’know.”
“Thanks.” Lucas handed Maggie the frothy drink, held his in one hand, rolled up the window, and pulled away from the kiosk as the rain started to pelt from the sky. “Okay,” he said, turning on the wipers and heading back to the station, through the town and past a gas station where a flatbed under the wide awning was gassing up. “You’re right. I’ve held back. Only because I want to do some investigating on my own. It was a long time ago, but yeah, sometimes it feels like yesterday and a lot of crap went on, not that I was in on all of it.
“But you’re right. Elle was my girlfriend and I broke it off because I got involved with Bernadette. Once I make sure everyone who knows anything about what went down twenty years ago is either going to show up or talk to us on the phone, then I’ll reread my statement, and each of theirs, and you can grill me from here to kingdom come.”
“Grill?”
“Whatever. I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said, though he knew he was lying and the truth would come out with or without his help. He just needed a little more time to find out for himself what really happened on those dark days. He wanted to read over the others’ statements, including Bernadette’s. She was married now, so he assumed any passion they’d shared was long over, any pain of their breakup was water under the bridge. Besides, married or not, they were both adults, for the most part, over twice the age they’d been as counselors at the camp.
Hopefully he would be able to go over the statements, then talk to each of the counselors involved, with Maggie, of course, for impartiality purposes. Like it or not, it was time for the truth to be uncovered. All of it.
“Okay. Let’s move on to Waldo Grimes then. He’s a loose piece and I’m wondering how he fits in to all of this.”
“Yeah, the escaped prisoner.” He shook his head. “Convenient, wasn’t it? Another one who just disappeared into thin air. At the time the police thought he had an accomplice who helped plan the accident of the transport carrying Grimes and a couple of other prisoners. The other two were caught, almost immediately, but not Grimes. It literally became a real-life Where’s Waldo? search and he was never found.”
Maggie picked up the narrative. “He was from around the area, a hunter, knew all the back roads and creeks. The best that anyone could come
up with was that he met someone with a car who drove him to Astoria, and he got on a fishing boat or pleasure craft, either as a stowaway or through someone he knew, and he floated out to sea. Never heard from again.”
“At the same time that Monica and Elle disappeared, so there was a lot of talk that he could have kidnapped them or worse. No one ever knew, or if they do, they’ve never said.”
“Weird,” she said.
He nodded. “A lot of weird stuff going on back then.”
She took another swallow of her coffee, thinking hard. “Not just then. I know this is kind of out there, but you know that people have said they’ve seen Eleanor Brady over the years . . . or her ghost.”
“Oh, sure. If you believe in all of that.”
“She—or someone else—has been spotted on the beach, or on the point at the south end of the park, and on Cape Horseshoe itself.”
“By a couple of teenagers who shouldn’t have been up there in the first place. By the way, they admitted to being stoned.”
“Oh, I know. It’s just that it keeps happening.”
“Averille’s rendition of the old ghost story where every year on the anniversary of a deadly car crash at Dead Man’s Curve, the ghost of the girl who was killed there appears.” He glanced at her. “Oldest one in the book.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s usually . . . well, at least an ember.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been watching the horror channel on cable.”
“I don’t think there is even such a thing and no, but I keep my ear to the ground and I’m just sayin’ that there’s talk.”
“What we need are facts.”
“Exactly,” she said as her cell phone chirped. “That’s what I was hoping you could help give me.”
“And I keep telling you everything’s in the case file.”
“And I keep telling you that I want your take on it all now, as a cop.” The phone rang again and Maggie finally answered as Lucas wheeled into the station parking lot. She listened for a few beats and then said, “Okay, well, let me know.” She clicked off and said, “They’re still searching dental records on the skull. At this point, we can’t assume any of the bones we found on the beach belong to the skull, not until DNA. We know it’s a female, and that’s where it stands.”
Luke nodded, his chest tight.
“Anything else you want to tell me?” Maggie asked, eyeing him.
“When I know something, you’ll know something.”
She nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off him.
CHAPTER 16
Averille, Oregon
Now
Sosi
The Hotel Averille was the most historic buildings in town and certainly one of the tallest. Three stories high, the hotel towered over buildings that housed the post office, two taverns, a secondhand store, and a gun shop. On the other side of the main street was an “antique mall,” which had once been, as Sosi remembered, a bowling alley. Surrounding the mall were a couple of cafés, a dress shop, and a bakery. This, where the inn was located, was the heart of the town that had, over the last two decades, spread toward Highway 101 in one direction and the ocean in the other. From Averille there was no direct access to the Pacific, but the town was home to a couple of lumber mills, a construction company, and several office buildings that housed insurance companies, architects, an engineering firm, and, a few streets over, two cafés and a gas station, its overhang illuminated by bright lights.
Sosi pulled into the rain-washed parking lot to the rear of the hotel and parked her Ford Escape, its engine smelling hot, the temperature needle having slipped over to the red zone on the gauge the last few miles of her drive north from Roseburg.
So here she was.
Pregnant, two hours early, her room not yet available, the parking lot empty except for a minivan and a Dodge Charger.
Biting her lip, she stared at the clapboard hotel, painted a creamy yellow with white trim around watery windows that were a hundred years old. A broad porch flanked the entire first floor, and an American flag was flying from a mast mounted on a corner post, visible from the main street running through town as well as the side street leading to this parking lot. Raindrops drizzled down the windshield, and she wished she were back home with Joshua and the children, her precious babies.
She’d had to lie, of course, to come here. Joshua didn’t know about what had happened at the camp that summer and he never could. She had to make certain of that, so she’d lied that her cousin needed her, was having an existential/faith crisis and thinking of leaving the church. She’d insisted that she’d be home soon, and thankfully Joshua’s mother had taken over the household duties, and her cousin—bless her heart—had covered for her. What a nightmare!
She’d always been religious but had really found Jesus a little earlier. When she had been at her lowest point, finding out that she was pregnant and she was ready to face God and Judgment Day, Jesus had intervened. On that cold February morning, with rain sheeting down from the heavens—God’s tears, she’d thought—she’d sat behind the wheel of her mother’s classic Mercedes in the single-car garage of her mother’s townhouse, the engine running. With the windows down, the carbon monoxide making her woozy, her eyelids heavy, she’d thought she’d heard something, a voice, and had opened a bleary eye to spy the statue of Jesus her mom had hung from the Mercedes’s rearview mirror. The little idol had been swinging to and fro, even spinning, and she heard his voice, clear as a darned bell, telling her it wasn’t her time, that she had work to do. His work. She had a baby to birth—a boy—and she could not snuff out that tiny, fragile life, no more than she could take her own. All of her multitude of sins would be forgiven, the voice had said, comforting her. She just couldn’t give up. So she’d managed to hit the garage door opener before passing out.
And when she’d come to, she’d seen that the little statue was no longer spinning and rocking, but was quiet again, and a man was opening the door to her mother’s car, a repairman who had come to fix the leaking roof: Joshua Gaffney, her personal savior.
She’d practically fallen into his arms as he’d opened the car door and had begun praying over her.
“Dear Father, please have mercy on this beautiful soul.”
And in those first few moments, hearing his words of faith and feeling his strong arms surround her, she’d fallen in love.
She hadn’t been quite twenty years old, the whole incident at Camp Horseshoe having occurred over two years earlier. And he? He’d been twenty-seven, having served with the army, including two tours in Afghanistan.
As it turned out, Joshua was a traditional man whose father owned his own tire franchise where Joshua worked full time. An industrious soul, Joshua also had a side business and on Saturdays and evenings, he was a handyman, the man her mother had hired.
Had their meeting been divine intervention?
Sosi believed fervently that it had.
Theirs had been a whirlwind romance; their first date his friend’s wedding the very next weekend. Though he’d been surprised when she’d admitted that she was pregnant, he’d told her it didn’t matter. He’d known she was the one for him the second he’d found her collapsed in the car. When he’d asked her to marry him less than three weeks after that first meeting, she hadn’t thought twice about it. He’d claimed her child, born only seven months into their marriage, was his, and no one ever questioned it, at least to her face.
Joshua put his faith in God, loved his country and his family, and expected Sosi to do the same. And she did, though she was a bit more liberal than he and sometimes, deep down, resented the fact that Joshua thought she should take care of the kids, keep the house, work part-time as a waitress, and never want a full-fledged career. That, she thought, was a little backward thinking and it bothered her.
Sometimes she had to remind herself how much she loved him, how he’d literally saved her and her son, if not from death that day in the garage, then from her being a struggling sing
le mother. Because of Joshua she’d never had to scrabble paycheck to paycheck. She did resent the fact that he could spend his free time working out or watching football, or go meet his buddies at the rifle range for target practice, whereas he didn’t like it when she met some of her friends for a glass of wine or even coffee, unless they, too, were young mothers within the church.
But Joshua was loving and a good father to Isaac, as well as the two girls they’d had together. Sosi had lied about Isaac’s biological father, saying that he was a boyfriend she’d met while working in Portland and who had dumped her upon learning she was pregnant. In fact, Isaac was conceived on New Year’s Eve at a party where she hooked up with a good-looking guy and ended up spending the night in his hotel room.
He’d taken off for Chicago the next morning and never called.
Nor had she ever phoned or texted the number he’d left on the bedside table. He didn’t know he was a father and he never would. But it was as if God had heard her prayers when Joshua Gaffney walked into her life and took her for his bride.
Joshua loved her with his whole heart, not only accepting Isaac as his own, but fathering their two daughters, Faith and Grace. He’d said he would like another child, a boy, his own biological son even though he treated Isaac so well. Would that change if he actually fathered a son? she wondered. But Joshua was so, so good, she reminded herself. However, if he ever got wind of the truth—all of the truth about Isaac’s father, Sosi’s partying, and especially her involvement with an underage girl and the scandal at Camp Horseshoe—he would never forgive her and, she was certain, he would take her children from her, including the one who was yet to be born.
All because of the sins of her youth. Memories washed over her, memories of first love, sexual titillation, and the resulting shame, whether deserved or not. She knew what her church said about a woman loving a woman, but deep in her heart, in the most private recesses of her soul, she disagreed and wondered about Nell. What had happened to her? Jo-Beth hadn’t mentioned her, but was there a chance that Nell, as one of the counselors, might show up?