by Cameron Dane
“All?” The woman’s eyebrows went up. “I likely think not. Most people have a few things in their life they never tell a soul.”
Abby glanced around at all the country-looking plaques in this kitchen with various Bible verses painted on them. “Not even to God?”
Lorene nodded as she stirred the heating milk. “God will know whether you tell him or not, but yes, I believe every person has at least one thing they don’t want to confess to their priest or even confide to God during private prayer.” She pulled her attention away from Abby and put it on breaking up pieces of chocolate for their drinks. Her voice lowered when she went on. “We all have done something that shames us; we refuse to talk about it and don’t even want to think about it when we’re alone. I don’t think any of us, Christian or otherwise, are exempt.”
“Fair enough.” The woman couldn’t mean the choice she’d made to give up Abby, as everyone in their church community had known about it. Impossible to keep secret a child there one day and gone the next. “What about my mom? Did she unburden any secrets on you?”
“A few.” Lorene glanced Abby’s way before going about gathering mugs and a few other items from around the kitchen. “None that I think would be appropriate for her daughter to hear, particularly when Elaine isn’t here to explain them.”
Abby had anticipated resistance. “Were there any that could have made an enemy out of someone?” She didn’t have to wait more than a second for Lorene to whip her head Abby’s way, her eyes wide. “Anything that had to do with slighting someone or secrets at another person’s expense?” Abby pressed. “Something that someone might have killed over?”
“What? My dear, what are you asking?” Lorene moved the saucepan to a different burner and joined Abby at the table. “What are you even trying to say?” Her pitch rose in the breathless manner of one who couldn’t bear to speak the words coming out of her mouth. “Your mother had nothing to do with what happened to them. The police know who killed your parents. It’s terrible that the man was not convicted, but he is most definitely guilty. We have to content ourselves with believing he will receive justice at the hands of his Maker when the time comes.”
“I’d prefer justice of the human kind, and I’d like the right person to get the life sentence when it happens.” Abby snapped those words out. “I’ve done some research regarding my parents’ murders lately, and I’m starting to recall pieces from that day I don’t ever remember dreaming about before.” She kept her focus locked on Lorene, searching for subconscious responses to Abby’s revelations. “Things that make me very confused and bits that make me believe Rusty Cormack did not kill Mom and Dad.”
Lorene’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“The man said my name.” Abby dropped her first bomb. “The goddamn bastard who killed my mother and father spoke my name when he was looking for me afterward. He only did it once, and then he said ‘little girl’ or things to that effect, but one time, when he was looking for me, he called me Abby.”
“What?” For a handful of seconds, the blood fled from Lorene’s face. “This person knew about you? Wanted to kill you too?”
“I believe so.” Abby had never been able to speak of her time in the attic and then later in that bedroom with her dead parents. “I don’t think he wanted to take me out for ice cream, which was what he said while trying to get me out of hiding.”
Pale did not even begin to describe Lorene’s visage. “Oh my dear Lord in heaven. I cannot believe it.”
“It was obviously someone who knew my family.” Abby laid her hands flat on the table and kept her gaze on Lorene. “Who knew me.”
“No.” Lorene shook her head with vehement conviction. Abby watched her struggle to reach another path to the truth. “You were probably at the church on one of the occasions Mr. Cormack came looking for a meal and counseling. Yes. Yes. That must be it.” Her frantic searching in the thin air around her for an explanation came to a stop. “Your mother spoke of you so often, Abby. Many of us remember Elaine offering this young man kindness on multiple occasions. In speaking to him, I’m certain her wonderful daughter came up. That is how Mr. Cormack knew your name. It has to be.”
Abby felt her mouth tighten and her fingers curl into fists. “She called him baby. Before this person killed my mother, she called him baby. It was familiar, like how Daddy would call me his little orange blossom. There was…knowledge of the other person in the tone of her voice.”
Lorene pressed her fingers to her lips, and their fragile paleness trembled. “Oh, my dear. You’re certain?”
“Unless my mind has been conjuring up fantasies these last two weeks every time I close my eyes,” Abby said a little impatiently, “then yes, I’m certain.”
“What do the police say?”
“I haven’t gone to them. I don’t know what any of it means. What can they do, anyway?” Abby wished Lorene would give her a helpful possibility she hadn’t considered herself. “Are the police going to question members of the church and Daddy’s work again? The cops interviewed so many people eighteen years ago, and they apparently didn’t see any other avenue worth pursuing than Rusty Cormack. Let’s say they talk to all those people again. What is one of them likely to remember all these years later that they didn’t think to say eighteen years ago?”
“I don’t know, but this is new information, dear. You have to tell them.” With a glance toward the stove, Lorene rose and moved to it, chatting as she checked on her saucepan. “One of those people questioned must have been lying, if it truly was someone Elaine knew. Oh my.” Her hands still shook as she poured hot chocolate into two mugs. “I cannot imagine someone in our church would do such a horrific thing. I cannot believe it.”
“Would it have to be someone from the church?” Abby wondered. This was at the heart of her decision to face Lorene Jones again. “All my memories are of activities connected to the church in some way, but maybe that’s just because Mom didn’t take me to the other places she frequented. Did she have a life away from her home and church?” The thought choked her, but Abby didn’t let the sickness drown out her voice. “Something away from my dad?”
Lorene paused at the sink, empty saucepan in her hand. She leaned her hip against the counter, and her mouth pulled downward in thought. “Not much that I can recall. She liked your nearest neighbors quite a lot, the ones who owned the orange orchard. I think the wife’s name was Martha, but her family does not go to our church, so I didn’t know her well.”
A smile took Abby over, and the tension left her limbs. “I remember Martha and her family,” she murmured. “I was actually at their house the morning of the murders. They were a raucous bunch and always going in ten directions at once, but fun to be around.” Abby made a mental note to visit with Martha Bruno soon. “Do you remember anyone or anything else?”
“Elaine belonged to a book club,” Lorene shared as she slid a mug in front of Abby. “Some of the material was controversial and risqué. It was not for me, so I only attended with her once, but she went for a few years I believe. The club wasn’t affiliated with the church, but I think some of its other members were from our congregation.”
“Is it still a club today?”
“I don’t know.” With her hands curled around her cup, Lorene blew steam from the liquid’s surface. “I’d be happy to ask around for you, if you’d like.”
“That would be helpful. Thank you.”
“The only other outside activity that comes to my mind is some extra charity work Elaine did at a local secondhand clothing store. It’s called Good as New.”
“Oh.” Abby perked up, and a silly giddiness shot through her. “I know that place. My mom worked there?”
Lorene nodded. “Your entire life before she passed. Before you were in school, she would drop you off at my house, and I’d take care of you while she put in her hours.”
“Right.” Abby often donated clothing to Good as New. It would be so bizarre to walk in there nex
t time and know her mother used to occupy the same space.
I’ll add it to the growing list of new things I’m uncovering about Elaine Gaines through my dreams.
The bond, the whisper of connection to her mother, dissipated with the return of one word from her mom that had haunted Abby since having the dream.
Abby put her mug down, the chocolate she’d already swallowed suddenly souring in her stomach. “What about the baby I heard my mom say that afternoon? Could it have been someone she grew close to through the church or one of these other outlets?” Here was the big one. The one no kid should ever know about a parent. Yet Abby didn’t have a choice if she wanted to get to the truth. “Do you know if my mother was having an affair?”
“Of course not.” Lorene averted her eyes from Abby—just enough to raise the hairs on Abby’s arms. “I don’t know.”
Abby’s jaw clicked as she clamped her teeth together hard enough to jar. “What aren’t you saying?”
“It’s not right to tell a daughter these things about her mother.” Lorene’s voice was hushed, and she appeared near to tears.
“We’re talking about something that might lead to her killer,” Abby said with a hissing tone, losing patience. “I think that’s more important than preserving the mother-daughter bond.”
Lorene looked like someone had shot her and had left her to bleed out onto her kitchen floor. She covered her mouth and spoke through the gaps in her fingers. “Your mother once told me she suspected your father was having an affair.” Regret filled the pale blue gaze peeking out from above Lorene’s hand. “But I think Elaine was the one having the affair and was trying to talk to me about it without confessing to her sin.”
Oh God.
Abby covered her mouth too. It didn’t matter that she’d been thinking this very thing since hearing that word baby in her nightmare. The blow still punched her right in the gut and made her feel like she was going to throw up.
Suck it up, girl. Abby blinked away wetness before it could form. Focus on getting answers.
She forced her hand to her side and swallowed down the betrayal trying to push its way out of her. “Why do you think she was lying?” Good. Good. Your voice hardly sounded strained at all. “Can you give me some examples of what made you suspicious?”
It took Lorene a good minute of putting her hand against the top of her mug, to curling it around the side, to biting her lips inward, as if to stifle herself, before she spoke. “It’s difficult to describe, but when two people have been best friends since they were five years old, one can tell when something is wrong with the other. It’s something indefinable but detectable.”
Another moment of silence passed, wherein Lorene’s brows pulled together as she ticked her fingers against the table surface. “Elaine mentioned this concern about your father three or four months before their deaths,” she finally went on, “but I’d seen subtle changes in your mother during that entire last year of her life. Every once in a while she would cancel plans we’d made, when she’d really never done that before without a legitimate reason. These new excuses were not solid reasons, such as your being sick, that I could check. I found Elaine less able to hold eye contact when we had conversations about your father. When I had occasion to sit next to her in church, she would sometimes fidget in a way that made me think the message was hitting home to her in a particular way.
“I didn’t even want to let my mind go to such a place”—Lorene made a tittering, nervous-laugh sound—“but I have to confess, I’d already begun to suspect Elaine might be having an extramarital affair. Or if she wasn’t having one, she was doing something inappropriate that was troubling her enough to alter her behavior in small ways. When she brought up your father out of the blue, and her suspicions of him, I saw it as her attempt to reach out for help. I suspected she wanted to confess her own transgressions but couldn’t bring herself to do it.”
Abby struggled to take everything in. Nothing in Lorene’s mannerisms or voice led Abby to believe the woman was trying to deceive her. Still… “With eighteen years to think about your suspicions, do you still believe your first assessment to be true?”
“Yes,” Lorene answered, no hesitation at all. “I knew your mother so well. Better than a sister. I know something very important was going on in her life that final year. I know it troubled her and that she hid it from me. I can’t speak as confidently about your father. I wasn’t around him nearly as much, but I was around him enough, and I didn’t see behavioral changes in him the way I did with her.”
“Right.” Well, there it was. Abby found herself staring down, watching her hands twiddle her mug in a slow circle and feeling like they didn’t belong to her. “Okay.”
Lorene reached across the table to pat Abby’s hand. “I’m so sorry.”
Abby withdrew her hand; she didn’t think she could handle attempts at comfort right now. Particularly from this woman. “It’s all right.” She grabbed for a smile to lighten the moment. “When I remembered she called this person baby, I came to the same conclusion myself.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier to face.”
“I’ll be fine,” Abby insisted. “Thank you for your help.” Uncomfortable with Lorene’s scrutiny, Abby grabbed her coat and got to her feet. “I have to go now, but you’ve given me a new angle to consider when I have one of my nightmares. Maybe it will help some of the confusing images make sense.”
Lorene rose too, following Abby out of the kitchen. “If it helps bring the right murderer to justice, then I will do whatever I can.” She put a gentle hold on Abby’s shoulder; just the slight force of her fingers guided Abby around to face her. “I still think you should take this new insight to the police,” she said, sounding like a parent nudging a kid to do the right thing on his or her own.
Pictures of Braden popped into Abby’s head, as clear as the ones of other people hanging on these hallway walls. Finally, a real smile, a small one she didn’t have to command herself to create, lifted the edges of Abby’s lips. “I have a friend who works in law enforcement. When I get some stuff figured out in my head, I’ll approach him with my suspicions.”
“Good.” Lorene reached out again, this time touching Abby’s jaw. “You’ve become such a beautiful young woman, Abby. Your parents would be very proud of you.”
Abby’s smile, of its own volition, grew bigger. “I hope so. Thank you.”
Lorene grinned for a moment too, but then it stiffened and the blue in her eyes deepened like an oncoming rainstorm. “My deepest shame and regret is that I couldn’t make a home for you.” The confession spilled from Lorene in a rush. “I tried, Abby. I tried so hard. We tried so hard. But at a certain point Bill and I had to accept that we didn’t have the skills to take care of you and that any more would destroy our own family.”
Abby pulled away, anxious to leave. “It’s all right. You don’t need to apologize.”
Lorene grabbed Abby’s hand, this time gripping it with an unbreakable hold. “It’s not all right. It had to happen, but that doesn’t make it all right. After your parents died, nobody could get a single word out of you while you were awake. You wouldn’t talk, even to me. You were withdrawn to the point that you had to take special classes half the day at school, remember?”
She squeezed Abby’s fingers, keeping them connected. “Perhaps we could have handled your prolonged silence although we feared you needed special help we were not skilled to give. But it was more than that. It was the nightmares that became too much for us. When you went to bed at night or when you took a nap, the memories of what you witnessed came back to you, and you screamed and screamed and screamed until someone shook you awake. Then it would take hours to calm this frantic racing we could feel in your chest, only to repeat the routine when you fell asleep again.” She let go of Abby and steepled her hands under her chin. “Do you remember Stephen?” As Lorene asked, she looked to her left, at a picture of a blond boy hanging on the wall.
Abby couldn’t help
following Lorene’s gaze to the photo and remembering the boy in the picture. Shame filled Abby, much as it had all those years ago. She’d pushed down the memories and her guilt after going into foster care, but seeing Stephen’s picture as the boy he’d been back then rushed it all back hard enough to clog her throat. “Yes.”
“It was already difficult creating an environment for Stephen where he could have more good days than bad. The addition of another child threw him off enough, but add to that his reactions to your nightmares. Every time we had to calm you, we also had to calm Stephen, and it came to a point where Bill and I never slept and could no longer handle our children in addition to you.” Lorene affirmed the very suspicions she had tried to assure Abby weren’t happening all that time ago. Abby’s nightmares—her very presence a lot of the time—had exacerbated Stephen’s autism.
Abby felt the burn behind her eyes and couldn’t keep the wobble out of her voice. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset him.”
Lorene tsk-tsked and drew Abby into her embrace. The woman rubbed Abby’s back, and Abby leaned into her as if Lorene were the one towering over Abby instead of the other way around. “It’s okay. I know you couldn’t help being scared either, sweetheart.”
“Tell me.” This was not what Abby had come to this house for, but the plea—the need—poured out of her without going through a censor first. “Tell me the rest.”
Lorene pulled back but kept Abby close with hands cupped on Abby’s face. “We tried keeping you for as long as we could. I do promise you that. We hoped the counseling you were receiving from the state would eventually help you get better, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. They suggested medicating you, but we didn’t believe in that.” Her focus strayed to the photo of her son as she continued, her voice dropping some. “Stephen continued to get worse, and his doctors said the only way to bring him back to the relative calm we’d helped him achieve before was to take the stress out of his environment. We couldn’t give up our own child.” She spoke as if she felt she needed to convince Abby of the rightness of her choice. “I agonized and cried for months, but at a certain point we had to let you go. It was the only way to keep the rest of the family from fracturing more than it already had.”