“My thinking is that I should hold off showing the property to locals,” she said, her voice crisp and impersonal. “I’d like to avoid any pointless showings to people who just want to satisfy their curiosity. And I’d rather not answer a lot of questions. So until people forget, I’ll limit showings to buyers coming in from out of the area.”
Until people forget. Some people never would, not even strangers to whom we were no more than names in the newspaper and on TV. People who’d never met us probably discussed our messed up lives, speculated about us. They would remember.
Ms. King tapped a nail on her legal pad. “As you’ve requested, I’ll arrange the repainting and so on, and handle all the contractual matters. You won’t have to be involved except to approve the final price once we’ve got an offer.” She ran the tip of her tongue along her brilliant red lower lip. “But before we can get started, we do need to have an empty house.”
Her eyes darted from me to Michelle and back again.
“What do you want us to do?” I asked Waterston.
He sat forward, adjusted his tie and cleared his throat. “The house is yours now, but the contents are part of the estate. If you like, we can schedule an estate sale as soon as we have permission from the probate judge. In the meantime, everything in the house has to be catalogued and removed to storage. But if you want to keep everything—”
“I don’t want any of it,” I said.
A short silence followed, and I realized how harsh and abrupt I’d sounded. I glanced at Michelle. Tears stood in her eyes. I leaned toward her over the chair that separated us. “Mish,” I said softly. “Keep whatever you want. I’m not interested in the money from the sale.”
She turned to look at me for the first time, and as she did a tear spilled down each cheek. She started to speak, but her breath caught on a sob.
“Oh, Mish.” I rose and went to her side, awkwardly leaning to embrace her with my free arm.
She pressed her face into my shoulder, and I felt the wetness of her tears on my blouse.
“We’ll get through this,” I said. “We’ll get all this done and behind us.”
The real estate agent gathered her papers, slapping them together briskly. “I’ll be in touch,” she said. “And you can call me anytime, of course, if you have questions.”
As she bustled out, Waterston also rose. “I’ll let you two have a few minutes to talk,” he said. He closed the door softly behind him.
I sat in the chair next to Michelle and reached for her hand. Her skin felt icy. “Mish,” I said, “how have you been?”
“I miss her so much. I can’t believe she’s dead.” With a low moan Michelle began to cry, rocking back and forth in her chair. Tears poured down her face and spotted the front of her blue dress. I waited silently.
When her sobs subsided, she turned beseeching eyes on me and said, “She was a good mother to us, wasn’t she? I mean—She gave us so much—”
“Yes, she did.” I took my sister’s hand again. Her fingers tightened around mine. “If I could turn back time, if I could make all this go away, believe me, I would.”
She looked down at our clasped hands. Her voice was a whisper. “She was trying to kill you. She would’ve killed you if I hadn’t stopped her. I didn’t imagine that, did I?”
“No, you didn’t imagine it.”
When she raised her eyes to mine again, I saw that she’d begun to accept the truth, or what she knew of it. But I also saw anguish on her face and in every tense line of her body. How much more could I ask her to accept?
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I said, “about what to do next. I want to try to find out who we really—”
“No!” She shot to her feet, rocking her chair backward. “You can’t, you have to let it drop.”
I stood and reached out to her. She stepped away from me.
“I just want to know,” I said. “I need to know.”
“Is this his idea? Is he pushing you to do this?”
“Who are you talking about, Mish?”
“Luke! He just wants to come between us, he’s determined to keep us apart—”
“Luke has nothing to do with this. He’s not coming between us.”
“Then why are you with him instead of me?” She wailed the words like a heartbroken child.
I held out my arm and this time she came to me, wrapping her own arms around me and burying her face in my shoulder.
“Nobody will ever come between us,” I said. “I have to stay with Luke, but anytime you need me, just call or come to me. I love you so much, Mish. I always will.”
***
When I sat once more in the periodicals room of the Library of Congress, looking at newspapers on microfilm, I began to doubt my memory again. I’d been so sure the abduction happened during warm weather, but I worked my way through June, July, August, scouring every page, examining even the smallest articles, and found nothing. I requested the April, May and September issues.
Nothing appeared in the April papers. I was near the end of May, pausing to rub my throbbing temples, when I spotted the one-paragraph item in a regional news roundup column. Two Young Sisters Disappear from St. Cloud Playground.
I held my breath while I read it. Catherine and Stephanie Dawson, ages five and three, vanished while their mother was in a nearby shop. In St. Cloud, not Minneapolis.
I sat back, covering my face with my hands, unable to stop the tears. Catherine and Stephanie. I fumbled a tissue from my purse and wiped my face, not caring what people at the surrounding desks thought. I read the little item over and over.
We were the daughters of John and Barbara Dawson. I could see them, still not sharply defined but clearer than they’d ever been. My real mother was slender and had shoulder-length hair that might be auburn, like mine. My father was tall and lanky. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was blond. That must be where Michelle got her coloring.
I rushed to the circulation desk and asked the clerk if the library had back issues of the St. Cloud papers. He flipped through a little box of cards. His casual, “Nope, sorry,” was like a punch in the stomach.
But I had the names. It was a beginning. I made a copy of the little story that would lead me back to my real parents. Then I made another copy of the story about Michael Goddard’s accident. It was a part of the puzzle. Someday soon I might have all the pieces, and the complete picture would come clear. I didn’t know yet whether I would go any farther than that.
***
“Are you sure you want to do this by yourself?” Luke said.
I was packing a suitcase. The cast had been taken off my arm that day and the muscles protested at being put to use again, so I folded blouses and slacks mostly with one hand. The doctor wanted me to start physical therapy at once, but I’d told him it would have to wait. I had something to take care of first.
“Let me go with you,” Luke said. “I’ll cancel my appointments for a week—”
“No,” I said firmly. “I’ll be fine.”
I didn’t feel fine. Dread of the unknown threatened to paralyze me every time I stopped to think about what I was doing.
Luke came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me, kissing my cheek. “Just come back to me.”
I felt a wash of tenderness for him, and gratitude for his steadying presence in my life. I turned and embraced him. “Oh, I’ll be back. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
Chapter Twenty-five
I had a plan. I had a script written in my head, and I rehearsed it all the way to Minneapolis on the plane. Driving north to St. Cloud in a rental car, I spoke my lines aloud again and again, until I began to worry that they’d sound phony and stiff because they were over-rehearsed.
I walked into police headquarters with a notebook and a tape recorder in the big canvas bag slung over my shoulder. The recorder had been a last-minute thought, tucked into my bag just before I left Luke’s apartment that morning. It would make me more believable, and it would ca
tch any bits of information that emotion prevented me from absorbing.
The receptionist at the front desk, a middle-aged woman with ruddy cheeks and flyaway blond hair, was eager to help. She made a couple of phone calls, telling invisible strangers about my interest in a twenty-one-year-old case. When she replaced the receiver she was beaming with accomplishment.
“Guess what?” she said. “The detective that headed up that case, he’s still in the department. You can get the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth. Soon as he gets in. He’s out on an interview, but it won’t be long. Want some coffee while you wait?”
The man who investigated our disappearance. Fear and doubt seized me. I couldn’t pull this off. I would give myself away the moment I met him.
I turned abruptly.
The startled receptionist said, “Is something wrong?”
I faced her again, shook my head, smiled. “No, no,” I said. “I’ll pass on the coffee, but I’d love a cup of water.”
Almost an hour went by. I sat on a hard wooden bench inside the front door, next to a metal container of sand bristling with cigarette butts. The place reeked of stale smoke. No one else came in, and between occasional phone calls the receptionist chattered about Princess Diana, the subject of a book she was reading in idle moments.
“I blame that husband of hers for everything,” the woman said, shaking her head. “If he hadn’t been carrying on with that old girlfriend of his, I bet him and Diana would still be married to this day, and she’d be alive and those two boys would have the kind of home they deserve.”
Now and then, even as she seemed consumed by details of the royals’ lives, the woman’s gaze slipped down to the raw scar on the back of my left hand. But she didn’t ask about it. Her glances made me acutely conscious of the far worse scar that was hidden by the sleeve of my blouse. The silk fabric felt like sandpaper scraping across it.
At last a tall gray-haired man walked through the front door. “Detective Steckling!” the woman exclaimed. “This young lady’s been waiting for you. She wants to talk to you about the Dawson sisters.”
I stood and shook his hand, aware that my palm was moist. “I’m Rachel Campbell.” The name tasted strange on my tongue but came out smoothly.
“Jack Steckling.” He narrowed his blue eyes, looking down at me. He was ruggedly handsome, square-jawed, with broad shoulders that gave an impression of strength. “You got some information about the Dawson girls?”
“Oh, no,” I said. Telling myself to stay calm, I went into my spiel. “I’m looking for information. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Maryland, and I’m writing my dissertation on the families of abducted children. This is one of the few cases I’ve heard of where two children in the same family disappeared. I’m visiting some relatives in St. Paul, so I thought I’d drive up here and see what I could find out.”
He nodded. “Yeah, sure. I remember that case like it was yesterday. Come on back, let me see if I can help you out.”
Walking with him down a narrow fluorescent lit corridor, I had a peculiar sensation, as if I were floating on water, moving without touching down. I could barely take in the knowledge that the man beside me, although I’d never seen him before, had once been part of my life and I’d been part of his. He’d looked for my sister and me and never found us. He remembered us as if it had happened yesterday. But he didn’t see Catherine Dawson in my face. The thought left me feeling obscurely bereft, yet simultaneously relieved.
We entered a room that must have been twenty feet long but seemed small, crowded, crammed full, with most of the perimeter taken up by filing cabinets, a newspaper-laden table, and six desks spaced out at right angles to the side walls. On a table by the windows a coffee maker poured a stream of fresh coffee into a glass pot. The rich aroma made my mouth water.
Only two desks were occupied, by a young man talking on a phone and an older man reading a newspaper. Steckling sank into a padded rolling chair and motioned for me to take the straight-backed wooden chair next to his desk. With movements polished smooth by long habit, he reached inside his jacket, withdrew a large and heavy-looking pistol, and slid it into a desk drawer. A pungent odor of oil rose from the gun and hung in the air, competing with the coffee, even after the drawer was closed.
“So,” he said, “what kind of information are you after?”
In spite of my careful rehearsal, I wasn’t ready for this. My heart hammering in my chest, I reached down to my bag, which I’d set on the floor, and pulled out the pad, a pen and the recorder. “Do you mind if I tape this?”
“No problem. Go ahead.” After he made room by pushing aside his phone, I laid the recorder on the desktop and switched it on. He was looking at my hands, studying the scar, but he didn’t say anything. Would a detective’s first reaction to the sight be a suspicion of violence?
I asked, “Did you work on the Dawson sisters case from the beginning?”
He leaned back, fingers knitted together over his stomach. The gold wedding band on his left hand was old, badly scratched. “Yeah. First call came to me.” His eyes lost focus as he looked into the past. “I’ll never forget it. She was screaming in the phone.”
“She?” Keep it cool, impersonal.
“The mother. Barbara. Screaming her girls were gone. I had trouble calming her down enough to tell me where it happened.”
The grip of panic tightened around my chest. I didn’t know if I could go through with this.
Screaming her girls were gone.
“The way she told it,” Steckling said, “she left the girls on the playground and just went up the street to a shop for a minute. When she got back they were gone.”
“She left them alone on the playground?” I heard Mother’s voice: She didn’t take care of you. Anything could have happened.
“Yeah. Seems crazy, doesn’t it? But she was in the habit, never gave it a second thought. She said they’d always been okay, and she claimed she never was gone more than a few minutes. Used to go in the shops up on the next block, then come back for the girls.”
“Are you saying—” I stopped to clear my throat. “Was she a bad mother?”
“I wouldn’t say bad. Just careless.” He paused. “But all it took was a little carelessness.”
I fussed with the recorder, moving it a few inches closer to him, to give myself an excuse not to look him in the face. Across the room one of the other policemen rose and walked to the door.
“Did anybody see what happened?” I said.
Steckling shook his head. “We had witnesses that saw them in the playground that day, but nobody saw them leave. You see, there was a thunderstorm, and everybody on the playground, the mothers and their kids, they ran for cover when it started.”
Everybody went away and left us alone. “Didn’t anybody try to get Catherine and Stephanie out of the rain?”
“A couple women said they worried about them, but they figured the mother would come get them pretty quick.”
“Why didn’t she? Did she say?”
“Oh, she came after them. But it was too late. As best we could figure it, there was about a five-minute window between the time the other mothers and their kids left, and the time Barbara Dawson got back to the playground. Somebody snatched them in those five minutes.”
“What did she do then? The mother.”
“She figured they’d gone looking for her. So she went back up the block, ran around in the rain, looked in all the stores and the diner. Then she thought maybe they’d headed home—they only lived about four blocks from the playground. So she went home. They weren’t there, so she started going around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking if anybody’d seen them.”
“Wasting time,” I murmured.
“Wasting a lot of time.” He grunted in disgust. “She didn’t call us for three solid hours.”
And by then we were in Minneapolis in Mother’s packed-up house.
“Did you search outside the St.
Cloud area?” I asked.
“We put out a statewide bulletin. Got press coverage. Kept looking, checking out leads. That’s about all we can do in cases like this.”
Cases like this. He had no idea. “Did anybody ever call and say they’d seen—” I stopped, horrified that I’d been on the verge of saying seen us. I finished, “—the girls?”
He barked a humorless laugh. “Oh, yeah. This kind of thing, you end up wading through a blue million dead-end tips, looking for one that means something. Everybody was seeing them everywhere. Once the story got picked up by out-of-state papers, we started hearing from people in Wisconsin, Michigan, even Canada.”
The wrong direction. “How long did you look for them?”
“Hell, I guess I’m still looking for them.”
My pen slipped from my hand and landed on the carpet without a sound. I leaned to retrieve it. “Why? After all these years?”
“It just eats away at me, that I never could find them, couldn’t close the case. Most of the time, a kid disappears, you find him, one way or another. He runs away, he comes back. The father grabs him to get back at the wife after a divorce, and you catch up with them. Or you find the kid dead somewhere. You get some closure. This case, though, we never had a clue. They just vanished into thin air, like the saying goes. I know they’re dead, but I’d like to prove it.”
His breath came out in a long sigh as he sat forward. “You want to see some of the newspaper stories?”
“Yes, please, thank you.”
He was already on his feet. “That stuff’s in another room. Sit tight, I’ll be back in a minute.”
It was much longer than a minute, long enough for me to start feeling disconnected again, to start wondering if any of this was really happening and whether I wanted to go on with it. The other policeman—it was the younger one, a tall blond—left the room and I was alone.
Steckling came back with a bulging file folder. When he plopped it onto his desk a musty odor rose from it.
The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 24