Twisted

by Laura K. Curtis

  Ethan pulled out the files on Julia Merriman—sixteen, brown hair, brown eyes, disappeared in September of 2004—and Kathy Axelrod—twenty-seven, blonde hair, green eyes, missing for two years—and handed them over.

  “Get to it. Check if their positions had changed at all in their communities, like Beverly’s had. Did the kid just make cheerleader? Stuff like that. And then see if they mentioned anyone watching them, even if they never reported it. If your friend can’t make it happen, find someone who can.

  “I’d go with you if I could, but Sarah Josephs, Renee’s mother, called. She wants to come in and talk to me.”

  “No problem, I’m on it.” Keith practically saluted as he left, which made Ethan, only a few years his senior, feel like a grandfather. Or maybe that was nothing more than the dull ache of his shoulder and knee, which begged for the relief of pain pills. Instead of taking one, Ethan levered himself out of his chair and began to limp around the office, rolling his shoulders back and forth, forcing the muscles, tendons and ligaments to cooperate.

  • • •

  TIM KEPT UP a steady stream of chatter all the way to Dallas, but once Lucy dropped him off, her mind returned to Ethan’s list of possible connections between herself and Renee’s murderer. He’d missed one, or deliberately left it off. It annoyed her that she couldn’t decide which. If Cecile’s murder had given her killer a thrill, a release beyond what he’d intended in killing her, Lucy’s resemblance to her mother could have triggered a craving to repeat the experience.

  Renee Josephs had been raped. The case file on Cecile didn’t mention sexual assault, and the medical examiner hadn’t put anything in the autopsy report, but that didn’t mean Cecile hadn’t been raped. Al Pike would have assumed any sexual contact—no matter how close to the time of death—had been consensual. DNA profiling hadn’t been easily accessible at the time, anyway; even paternity testing had only just become well accepted. Evidence of sexual assault might have been collected in Dallas or Houston in 1994, but not in Dobbs Hollow.

  When Lucy had opened the front door that day, she’d found Cecile face down, blood all around her. A few hairs caught in her fingers gave evidence of a vain attempt to fight off her attacker.

  Years later, experience studying crime scenes and spatter patterns had taught her to recognize the flat, irregularly shaped patch of red next to Cecile’s right elbow as a shoe print. The killer had braced himself with his right foot, forcing his left knee into her spine as he pulled her head up to cut her throat.

  By then, Cecile would have almost bled out. She would have been too weak to fight off her assailant even had he not tackled her from behind. She’d probably been heading for the knife block to defend herself, but the blood staining the olive carpet and matching easy chair told a tale of violence to which the pools and puddles in the kitchen were only the finale.

  Lucy shuddered, the picture in her mind almost obscuring the road in front of her. She could imagine Cecile’s struggle to survive so clearly. She’d dreamt it for the first two years of living in Dallas, waking every night screaming in terror as the faceless figure raised a bloody knife over her own body rather than her mother’s. Years of therapy and stability in Todd and Karen’s care had allowed her to live with the memories, but they never faded.

  A horn blared behind her, and Lucy realized she’d slowed almost to a crawl. She shoved the mental pictures away and returned her attention to the road, thankful Route 180 wasn’t more heavily trafficked.

  The motel in Mineral Wells, the largest town in Palo Pinto County, was a nationwide chain, with all the attendant amenities, including wireless Internet. Lucy logged on and sent an e-mail to Tim to let him know she’d arrived. He planned to spend a few days in Dallas before returning to Dobbs Hollow, but had been adamant that she keep in touch so he would know she was safe.

  As well as being far bigger than Palo Pinto Township, Mineral Wells was home to the local county newspaper. Lucy looked up the address and, finding it only a few blocks from her hotel, walked over to place her ad.

  Palo Pinto itself lay just over ten miles west, so once she’d paid for the classified ad to run for two weeks, she climbed back into her car. Palo Pinto was lovely, with meticulously maintained historic buildings, but it was tiny, smaller even than Dobbs Hollow. Her research the previous day had told her as much. The town didn’t even have its own high school. Palo Pinto students went to school in Mineral Wells. What would it have been like for Cecile, seventeen years old and pregnant in such a place? And yet she had stayed until she reached twenty-one. Or had she? Might she have left when she found out about the baby?

  Lucy parked in front of the pioneer museum, which, she noticed with amusement, occupied the former Palo Pinto jail, and wandered around until she found a small diner with a bright pink sign reading “Suzette’s Kitchen.” Cafés, diners, soda shops, pizza parlors—in every small town the best sources of information could be found wherever people congregated to eat. With a little luck, Palo Pinto wouldn’t prove the exception.

  The restaurant sparkled. Each booth and linoleum-topped table sported an individual jukebox and an old-fashioned, glass-and-chrome straw dispenser. The black and white floor tiles had been scrubbed within an inch of their lives, though no amount of detergent or elbow grease could remove the years of wear.

  Each of the four men in the booth in the back corner probably had as many years on him as the tiles did, Lucy thought. They’d also obviously missed the new prohibition against smoking in restaurants; a gray haze hung over their table and the smell of tobacco wafted toward her, circulated by the lazily turning ceiling fans. In other parts of the country, she’d peg them for farmers, their skin leather-tough and dark, but here they were more likely ranchers. They’d have turned their land over to their children by now, whether of their own volition or not, and probably spent a good many hours a day smoking in Suzette’s Kitchen.

  The woman who pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen didn’t look much like a Suzette, but she seemed friendly enough. She also had some of the biggest hair Lucy had ever seen.

  “Sit yourself anywhere,” she called, waving a many-ringed hand tipped with Pepto-Bismol-pink fingernails vaguely around the room. “There’re menus on the table. I’ll be over in a sec.” Picking up a big tub of dirty dishes, she backed through the door from which she’d emerged.

  Lucy dropped her purse on the table next to the four men and approached them.

  “Hi y’all,” she said with her friendliest smile. “Would you mind if I asked a question or two?”

  “Not at all,” said one from the back corner. “Harvey, pull up a chair for the pretty lady.”

  “Oh, I can do that.” Lucy retrieved her purse, then dragged a chair over and sat at the end of the table. The men introduced themselves as Gus—the leader, and oldest of the lot, who had ordered Harvey to get her a chair—Harvey, Bertram, and John.

  “What can we do for you?” asked Harvey.

  “Here’s the thing: my mother was from Palo Pinto, and I’m trying to find any family I might have left.”

  “Who’re your people?” asked Gus.

  “Her name was Cecile Sadler.” She looked from face to face, ready to defend against any censure she might find, but the men barely reacted at all.

  “Cece,” John said slowly, a frown further creasing his already wrinkled face. “I think Ronnie knew her.” He leaned out of the booth to shout toward the kitchen. “Ronnie!”

  “Hold your horses,” said the woman who’d greeted Lucy when she’d arrived. “I’m coming.”

  “You were friendly with Cece Sadler, weren’t you?”

  “Heavens, John, where’d you dig that name up? I haven’t thought about Cece in years.”

  “This here’s her daughter.”

  Lucy introduced herself, and Ronnie examined her closely.

  “You surely do have the look of her. I was
sorry to hear she’d gotten herself killed.”

  Lucy’s first impulse, which she quashed, was to correct the woman. Cecile hadn’t “gotten herself” anything. But this woman had been her mother’s friend. The first person who’d known Cecile as a child.

  Her stomach churning, she forced a smile. “Is any of her family left in the area? I’m trying to find them. And her friends. I would love to hear anything you remember about her. She never talked much about her childhood to us, so I’m pretty much starting out at square one.”

  “Her family . . . well, there’s no one left as you’d be able to talk to. Cece’s daddy—your granddaddy—was a preacher, you know.”

  Lucy shook her head.

  “No? Well, I guess if I had Hiram Sadler for a daddy, I wouldn’t be running around announcing it to the world, either. And Cece was a typical preacher’s kid. When you came along, your granddaddy wasn’t half furious. He like to have kicked Cece out, but she had nowhere to go, and sending her away would have reflected poorly on him.”

  “What about my grandmother?”

  “She was frail, sickly, always up in her bedroom with some kind of nervous disorder. You know the type. She wasn’t about to stand up to her husband.” Ronnie’s snort left no question about her opinion of such a woman.

  “Are they still here in town?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. Your granddaddy, he died of heart failure, and Evelyn went to live with her sister in Kansas. That was when Cece left Palo Pinto.” The waitress pulled over another chair and sank into it with a sigh.

  “Did you know my father?” She hadn’t even realized she was going to ask until the words were out.

  “Honey, no one knew who your daddy was,” Ronnie said kindly. “And believe me, we all wanted to, not the least your granddaddy. Cece was crazy popular. A cheerleader, the whole nine yards. He could have been anyone, but Cece always said she wouldn’t be stuck here, so she wasn’t likely to hook up with a man who’d tie her to this place. She’d have seen him, whoever he was, as a ticket out.”

  “But he didn’t marry her when she got pregnant.”

  “No, he didn’t. If you want my opinion, he was already married. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so.”

  “Which would have made him an even better ticket out. She wouldn’t have had to worry about a husband; she could just have taken his money and gotten a new start.” Lucy had never had any illusions about her mother, but the more she discovered about Cecile, the harder it was to remember the mother who’d loved her. Maybe it was time to give up, to keep the memories of Cecile singing Timmy to sleep or hugging them both before school, and try to forget the rest.

  “That’s the way most of us thought at the time.” Despite her words, Ronnie didn’t seem to disapprove of Cecile’s behavior. Perhaps Hiram had been such a tyrant, no one blamed Cecile for getting pregnant? Or maybe Ronnie just wished she’d had a way out of Palo Pinto herself.

  “But then why wait until her father died to cash in?”

  “She needed a place to stay until she was old enough to go out on her own. Palo Pinto might not have been her favorite place in the world, but it was safe. And she had friends here, people she could leave you with when she needed. But your granddaddy, he left everything, even his house, to the church, so once he passed she had no place to stay. Evelyn could have homesteaded the place, lived there till she died, but she had no income. She’d have taken your momma to Kansas with her, I’m sure, but Cece, she took off in the middle of the night, and none of us heard word one about her until we saw the news about her murder.”

  “You don’t have any idea why she would have chosen Dobbs Hollow to move to, do you?”

  Ronnie raised her manicured eyebrows at the four men, but they all shook their heads. “Not a clue, honey. But I wasn’t so close to her, either. You want details, you need to talk to Gina Woodward. Back then she was Gina Malloy, and she was Cece’s best friend.”

  “She still lives here? In Palo Pinto?” Lucy’s heart thudded. She was so close to her mother now.

  “Well, not here in town, but near enough. She and her husband, Mark, live in Mineral Wells. He owns a movie-rental place there. I don’t have her number, but they’ll be in the book.”

  “Wow, thanks, that’s great!”

  “Any time. Now, you want anything to eat?”

  Lucy grinned and ordered a burger, fries, and a Coke. This was another familiar dance for her. She would eat, leave a good tip, and hope word got around town that she was free with her cash and looking for information. The habitual behavior felt cleaner than it often did. Leaving cash for Ronnie would be no hardship; the woman obviously had a difficult life, and she’d taken the time to be kind to a stranger.

  Chapter Eight

  Sociologists will tell you that children believe their home lives to be normal, that an abused child assumes all other children are also abused, and perhaps at some level they are right. But on another level, children feel difference far more acutely than do adults. And they are far quicker to point out any deviation from the norm.

  from A Bad Day to Die by Lucy Sadler Caldwell [DRAFT]

  GINA MALLOY WOODWARD had been thrilled to hear from Cecile’s daughter, and at nine the next morning, she met Lucy in the hotel lobby. Petite, with pixie-cut auburn hair, she radiated so much energy she exhausted Lucy almost before the first hello.

  “Ohmigod, I can’t believe it’s really you! I looked for you, you know, after Cece died. I even went down to Dobbs Hollow, but you weren’t there. You surely do take after her. It’s amazing.”

  “You didn’t keep in touch after she left Palo Pinto?”

  “No, I didn’t have any idea where she went. She didn’t tell anyone. She liked to keep secrets. It made her feel powerful, gave her a little control, which, believe you me, she needed.”

  “Ronnie over at Suzette’s mentioned that Cecile was popular with everyone.”

  “Oh, she was. She could be a little flip, a little hard, a little out for herself, but no one held it against her. It came from having to live with her daddy, and everyone understood that. She never meant to hurt anyone.”

  Tough, but never mean. Yes, that was Momma. The only difference was that Lucy didn’t remember her mother ever having friends in Dobbs Hollow. It must have been terribly lonely for her, especially with a past filled with people like Gina.

  “And boys? Did she date?” Lucy practically held her breath.

  “Your father, you mean? Not that I knew of. Cece was a bit of a wild child; it was one of the things that made her so appealing. She flirted with all the boys, but no one took it seriously, and Hiram never would have let her date.” She rolled her eyes, and Lucy thought thirty years hadn’t made much of a change in the teenager who’d been her mother’s closest friend.

  “But you were her best friend. Surely, she would have told you about him.” Frustration bled through despite her attempts to hide it.

  “Probably so, if he’d been someone she’d hoped to have a future with. Since she didn’t . . .” The woman shrugged.

  “A one-night stand?”

  “I can’t say. Cece liked to party. She worked for the school paper so she could get out of town when a story came up. No matter whether it was a cattlemen’s association meeting or a local political shindig she knew nothing about, Cece Sadler was first to request the story just so she’d have an excuse to get out of her house. I should know—I took up photography so I could go with her. And any place she wanted to go, she managed to wrangle an invitation on her own if the paper couldn’t get her one.”

  “You must have been quite the pair.” Lucy tried to imagine her mother as bright and vivacious as Gina, and failed. Still, having a happier picture of Cecile lightened her heart some after the previous day’s darkness.

  “Oh, we thought we were going to take the world by storm.” Her vibrant green eyes dimmed. “Poor Cece.
She never had a chance, really. But she sure did love you, even if your daddy didn’t carry her off on a white horse. I looked after you occasionally before she took you away, you know. She’d tell Hiram she was spending the night with me; it was how she got a couple nights of freedom every month.”

  “You didn’t mind? Being left behind while she ran out?”

  “Not really. By the time you came along, I had met Mark; he was in the photography club, which I only joined so I could run off with Cece to what counted for gala events in those days, so in a way she brought us together. You were sort of our practice child. I got to test what it would be like to have my own daughter without having full responsibility for your care, because at the end of the day—or the night—Cece would be back.”

  “Where did she go when she left me with you?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest idea. When I read about her murder, I wondered whether she’d gone to Dobbs Hollow those nights. She wouldn’t have stayed in Palo Pinto, or even Mineral Wells, because she wouldn’t have wanted word getting to Hiram, but Dobbs Hollow’s a long ways off and she was always home by dawn. Of course, if your daddy lived there, it might have been worth the drive.”

  Once, finding out her father lived in Dobbs Hollow would have thrilled her, but in those days, Lucy hadn’t realized what lay behind the civilized veneers of so many of the Hollow’s citizens.

  “Did she even say good-bye?”

  “No, but that was Cece. Hiram died at the end of the summer, and I got a Christmas card from her that year saying you were both doing great. No return address. It was postmarked Dallas, but even then I didn’t put much faith in that; Cece would have asked a complete stranger to mail letters from the city for her in a heartbeat. Not because she was trying to hide out, but to give us the impression she’d found success out of town.”

  “I don’t suppose you knew my grandmother’s maiden name? Ronnie from Suzette’s Kitchen told me she had moved to Kansas, and I thought I’d try to track her down.”

  “Cece didn’t talk about family. I have a mess of cousins, and she was jealous of that, I remember, so I always assumed she didn’t have any.”