Cold Heart Creek: A nail-biting and gripping mystery suspense thriller (Detective Josie Quinn Book 7)

by Lisa Regan

  “What was that woman’s name?” Noah asked.

  Haylie frowned. “Oh geez, I don’t remember. Theresa, maybe? It was years ago. She left the restaurant, moved away to be near her kids. I didn’t hear from her after that.”

  “She told you how to get there?” Gretchen asked. “Before she left town?”

  “Oh yeah, one night after our shift, she drove me past it. At first, I thought she was a little nuts, you know? But the more she talked about it, the more I thought maybe I should check it out. It didn’t help that I was having a lot of problems at the time. I was really struggling, like, with depression and anxiety. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. My parents wanted me to get into farming cause that’s what they did, but I didn’t want to do that. I had dreams of going to college, which they said we could never afford. We were fighting all the time. It didn’t help that I was a lesbian and in total denial. There was no way I was coming out to them. I told Josh, and he was cool about it, but I knew they would freak out.”

  “You were under a lot of pressure,” Gretchen said.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  Josie said, “The woman who runs the Sanctuary says that people come there to find peace. Is that what your friend Theresa told you? That you would find peace there?”

  Haylie sipped her coffee. She picked at the discarded sugar packet wrappers. “Not so much that I’d find peace, but that I could be myself there—whatever that meant to me. Like she could go there and be like ‘I’m an addict and I screwed up my life so bad, my kids got taken away from me’ and everyone there was fine with that. I think it was the idea of acceptance more than anything else that made me curious.”

  “So you decided to check it out,” Gretchen prompted.

  “Yeah, eventually I drove up there. At first, I just met with Charlotte. We talked. She walked me around the place. She told me to go home for a few days and see how I felt. If I still wanted to stay at the Sanctuary after that, I could come back. So I did that. Have you met Charlotte?”

  “Yes,” Josie answered. “We have.”

  Haylie smiled but tense little lines pulled at the corners of her eyes. “She’s very… well, she’s got this way about her. Like she knows what you’re thinking. It’s really weird at first but then it becomes kind of comforting. I was really mesmerized by her, I guess.”

  Gretchen asked, “What happened when you first joined the Sanctuary?”

  “Well, back then, I spent a week or two in the main house with Charlotte. It was like this intense therapy. I talked with her for hours on end. I did some stuff like cooking and helping in the garden or doing laundry, but mostly I talked with her and I meditated. They used to have a lady who taught a yoga class at the house for new people. It was all about relaxing and ‘shedding the trappings of the outside world.’ Like a retreat.”

  “Were there other people in the house with you?” Josie asked.

  “A few, yeah. People in various ‘stages of arrival.’” She used her fingers to make air quotes. “That’s what Charlotte called it.”

  “So she had a system of some kind?” Noah asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Haylie said with an eye-roll. “They have a very strict system there.”

  “Really?” Josie said. “She made it sound like there was no organization at all. She said she didn’t even keep track of who came and went or how long they stayed.”

  Haylie picked up her coffee but put it back down without taking a sip. “Well, that is true. She didn’t keep a list or anything. I mean, not that I know of, and you could come and go as you pleased. I could have left at any time.”

  Josie asked, “What were the stages?”

  “It had mostly to do with the work that needed to be done there and where you got to sleep. When you first arrived and stayed at the house it was great. I mean, it was like a vacation. You didn’t mind helping out with cooking or cleaning or whatever. I felt like someone saw me—really saw me—and accepted me for the first time in my life. I think I had been in the house about three weeks. Maybe a month. Then she said if I was going to stay, I’d have to really ‘immerse myself in the work’ which basically meant toiling all day. It wasn’t boring at first ’cause I was all into it, and I thought I was having some kind of awakening. But it got old quick.”

  “What was the work?” Gretchen asked.

  “Like, literal work. They live off the land, you know? So the work is never done. There’s gardening, laundry, cooking—they’re mostly vegetarians though so we didn’t have to worry about killing animals, although some would go fishing and cook that.”

  “Sounds like they kept you pretty busy,” Josie said. “What else did you do there?”

  “Not much. There’s no internet or television. No radio. No connection to the outside world at all. Oh, and the bathroom situation is gross. You can’t have that many people going in the house, so they put outhouses in certain places. The smell was horrific. Anyway, when you have to do everything from scratch, there’s really no downtime. Sometimes we’d get books when someone went on thrift runs.” At their puzzled faces, Haylie added, “That’s where you would take a drive with another member and visit a bunch of thrift stores to buy second-hand clothes for everyone who lived there.”

  Gretchen asked, “Where do they get their money?”

  “You give them whatever you can when you get there and they kind of live off that. They sell produce too. I don’t know much about that part of it. It never seemed like something that was discussed. That was one of the cool things about living there. Money was never a stressor. If it was for Charlotte, she never showed it.”

  That hardly seemed enough to house, clothe, and feed up to thirty people but just because Haylie didn’t know the Sanctuary’s full financial picture didn’t mean that there wasn’t more to it. It was possible that Charlotte’s husband had left her a good chunk of money. One hundred acres of land was quite a lot. Perhaps he had also left her other assets that she’d been able to live off all these decades. Or maybe he had had a sizeable life insurance policy.

  “What were the other people there like?” Gretchen asked.

  Haylie shrugged. “They were all nice. Most of them were either struggling with drug or alcohol addiction or running from bad relationships. Then there were one or two like me who had bad anxiety or just didn’t know what they wanted out of life.”

  Noah said, “Were they… did they…” He hesitated, and Josie knew he wanted to ask her about how tight-lipped everyone had been.

  Josie jumped in. “We met some people there the other day. They all seemed very reserved. Almost as if they had been coached not to speak to law enforcement. Was it like that when you were there? Was anything ever said about dealing with outsiders?”

  “I was never coached. I never heard anything like that, but a lot of them had had bad experiences with the law so they would have gotten real spooked if police came around asking questions. This was ten years ago though.”

  Josie asked, “Was there some kind of guiding principal at the Sanctuary?”

  “You want to know if they’re religious? Well, it wasn’t religion, I can tell you that. Charlotte isn’t like that. I mean, she wanted people to meditate all the time. She’s a big believer that meditation helps people overcome their problems and anxieties, but she doesn’t believe in organized religion or in God. She believes that we only get one life and this is it. There’s no afterlife, no heaven or hell. No purgatory. No paradise. There’s just this. This life. So while you’re there, you should be focused on becoming your ‘whole, authentic self’ is what she always said.”

  “What does that mean?” Josie asked.

  Haylie shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t know. I never really understood what she was going on about most of the time. I was so tired all the time, and I started not to care what she was talking about. Plus, I never got to the commitment stage.”

  “What’s that?” Gretchen asked.

  “Okay, so you can go to the Sanctuary and stay there
for a while, like you said: like a retreat from the world. But after you’re there for a while you have to make a commitment, or leave and go back into the world. You can return to the Sanctuary, but you can’t stay forever unless you make the commitment.”

  “Which is what, exactly?” Noah asked.

  Haylie’s brow furrowed. “Well, I’m not sure. I didn’t do it, so I don’t know what really happens to you. Except you get to live in some cabins or something.”

  “Those cabins are all unoccupied now,” Josie said. “People lived in them when you were there?”

  “Well, that’s what I heard, but I never actually saw them.”

  “Did making the commitment mean you had to stay forever?” Noah asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. She just said it meant I would always be loyal. I didn’t really understand the whole thing, to be honest. But it was the branding that really turned me off. Like, I’m not gonna let some strange person put a permanent mark on me for something I don’t really understand.”

  “Branding,” Josie said. “What kind of branding?”

  “I guess like with a piece of metal and some fire or something. I don’t know. I never saw it done. I just heard about it. I saw some people’s brands, but I never asked about it.”

  Josie felt an uptick in her heartbeat. She thought back to all the people she’d seen and spoken with at the Sanctuary. Besides their demure demeanors, she hadn’t noticed any strange markings. Then again, she hadn’t been looking for them. She hadn’t seen any markings on Renee Kelly’s body nor had Dr. Feist noted any, although perhaps Renee hadn’t made the commitment. “What does the brand look like?”

  “Like two Cs facing one another, except that the top of one C goes into the opening of the other C. Do you have a piece of paper?”

  Gretchen tore a blank page from her notebook and handed it to Haylie along with her pen. The three of them watched as she drew the letter C. Then she drew a backward C, the top of which started inside the opening of the first C. “Almost like a broken infinity sign,” Haylie murmured as she finished.

  “What’s it supposed to mean?” Noah asked.

  “Charlotte said it’s supposed to represent dark and light being connected or some weird shit like that. She was always talking about how we all have dark and light inside of us, but that we shouldn’t have to choose just one or the other.”

  “Did she ever give you any examples?” Gretchen asked.

  Haylie shook her head. “No, and I didn’t ask. Honestly, the longer I was there, the weirder the whole thing was. It really started to feel like a cult.”

  “Where did they brand people?” Josie asked. “Which part of their body?”

  “Charlotte said I could have it done wherever I wanted, although they didn’t like for it to be visible. So it couldn’t be on your wrist or ankle or whatever. I saw some on the backs of people’s necks, like under their hair, or on their hips or lower backs.”

  “Why didn’t she want it to be visible?” Gretchen asked.

  “Because the Sanctuary is a kind of private place. If people go back out into the world and are asked about the brand, it might gain notoriety. Charlotte didn’t want that.”

  “Aside from the branding,” Josie said. “Did you witness or hear of any other kinds of violence at the Sanctuary?”

  Haylie shook her head. “No. Everyone there was really nice. It was just super boring. When I turned down the commitment and left, Charlotte was great about it. She said I’d always be welcome.”

  There was a knock at the door, and their desk sergeant, Dan Lamay, poked his head into the room. “Boss,” he said to Josie. “Can I talk to you for a minute? Lieutenant Fraley, too?”

  Josie and Noah excused themselves and walked out into the hallway. When Josie pulled the door closed behind them, Lamay said, “We just got a call from the hospital. Maya Bestler is missing.”

  Forty

  Twenty minutes later, Josie and Noah followed a guard into Denton Memorial’s CCTV viewing room. It was dark with a bank of screens, each one split into four different views, showing various locations in and around the hospital. A laptop sat open on a nearby table. The guard sat down and manipulated the software program to bring up the nurses’ station on the fourth floor.

  “Her baby’s fine,” the guard said. “He was down in the nursery with the grandmother. Ms. Bestler’s father was in the room with her. She got up and said she was going to take a walk around the unit. This was about an hour ago. She didn’t come back, so the dad reported it.”

  On the laptop in front of him, the guard rewound the footage from the fourth floor until they saw Maya Bestler, in her pajamas and a pair of slippers, walk past the nurses’ station. She stopped for a moment and chatted with one of the nurses before slowly moving on.

  “No IV,” Noah noted.

  Josie squinted at the screen. “She still has the port in her hand.”

  The guard said, “We talked with the nurses. They said she came around and asked them about the lunch menu, so that’s probably what they were talking about here. She didn’t get into any of the elevators. We checked all the fourth-floor rooms and didn’t find her.”

  “What about the stairwell?” Josie said.

  “Well, that’s what’s strange,” he said. “Watch this.” He switched to another view of a door. “This leads to the stairwell.”

  They watched for several minutes before Maya ambled onscreen. She walked right through the door without hesitation. She didn’t look around to see if anyone noticed or if there was even a camera. She didn’t open the door tentatively as if she didn’t know what was behind it. She knew exactly where she was going. But where was that, Josie wondered?

  “We need to see the cameras over the entrances to the stairwells on every floor,” Josie told him.

  “Already did that,” the guard said. “No sign of her.”

  “What about cameras inside that stairwell?” Josie asked.

  The guard shook his head. “Don’t have any.”

  Noah said, “How can you not have security cameras inside the stairwells?”

  The guard sighed. “The Joint Commission’s Life Safety Code—”

  Noah cut him off. “Wait, what?”

  Josie said, “The Joint Commission. It’s an organization that accredits healthcare facilities.”

  “Right,” the guard said. “In their rules, it says that stairwells are only there to provide egress. We can’t put anything into stairwells unless it ‘serves the stairwell.’ That includes cameras. Apparently you can put cameras in the stairwells if you make a special application for them, but we’re not a big hospital. We haven’t had any incidents of escaped patients or violence in the stairwells for at least fifteen years, maybe longer. So upper management decided not to apply for cameras in the stairwells. Like I said, egress only.”

  Josie said, “Okay, if you wanted to exit the building from this stairwell, where would you do that?”

  “Basement,” the guard said. “And yeah, we have an exterior camera over that door. I checked it. Maya Bestler didn’t exit there.”

  Josie thanked the guard, then asked him, “You mind if we have a look around? Maybe check out the stairwell ourselves?”

  “Be my guest,” he said. “You know where to find me if you need anything else.”

  They made their way down to the basement stairwell exit, where they checked the staff parking lot, and then back up, headed for the fourth floor.

  Noah said, “Where do you think she went?”

  “My first best guess would be that she went to see the abusive ex-boyfriend,” Josie offered. “Maybe she feels like they have unfinished business and wanted to go see him. She probably doesn’t feel like she can really talk to him with her parents hovering the way they are—especially her dad.”

  “But why take off without a word?” Noah asked. “She must know that would devastate her folks.”

  Josie said, “She’s a grown woman. She can do whatever she wants, really.”


  “But she left her baby behind.”

  Josie stopped walking, her right foot on one step and her left foot below it on another. Her hand held tightly to the metal railing that lined the stairwell. “Noah, has it ever occurred to you that she might not want that baby?”

  “How could she not want her own baby?” he blurted.

  “Noah,” Josie said. “She didn’t exactly have a choice in making that baby. Sure, he’s innocent and beautiful, but even if she loves him with all her heart, she’ll always associate him with trauma. Two years of trauma. Maybe she got scared. She’s a single mother now with no resources. She just lost two years of her life and everything she knew. Maybe she feels like she can’t handle raising a child.”

  “But her parents clearly love that baby,” Noah pointed out. “They haven’t left her side—or the baby’s. She has help.”

  “Help, yes, but ultimately she is the mother of that child. He’s her responsibility. At the end of the day, no amount of help will change that.”

  “But why just… leave? Without a word?”

  Josie thought about what Sandy had said about her daughter: Maya was never very good at getting herself out of things. “Maybe Maya didn’t think there was any other way to get out of raising the baby.”

  They began climbing the stairs once more. When they opened the fourth-floor door, they could hear Sandy Bestler yelling at her husband all the way down the hall. “I told you, Gus. She was up to something! She held that little baby how many times, Gus? How many? Once? She left.”

  “She didn’t leave,” Gus Bestler shouted back, his voice thick with tears.

  “Get a grip, Gus, would you? Your daughter isn’t the perfect angel you think she is—she just abandoned her own son. She’s not missing. She left.”

  Josie pulled the door shut, muffling the shouting.