The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (24 page)

“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 catch 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.

“This is just part of it.” He sat down. “The whole case file’s about ten jackets this thick, mostly tips and dead ends and stuff that doesn’t mean anything.” He opened the folder. “Here’s the first story.”

He slid a large clipping across the desktop.

My childhood face, and my sister’s, smiled back at me. We leaned together, arms around each other, her hair light, mine dark. We wore pants and tee shirts. The caption read
Catherine and Stephanie Dawson in a photo taken last week
.

I didn’t realize how long I’d been staring at the picture until Steckling said, “A real tragedy, huh?”

“Yes.” My voice was a dry rasp. “It’s a tragedy.”

He placed more clippings in front of me. In another picture a couple clung to one another, their faces distorted by crying.
Barbara and John Dawson plead for the return of their daughters.

The mother—it was so hard, even now, to think of her as
my
mother—had the dark hair I recalled, but John Dawson’s hair wasn’t the pale blond I’d expected, the hair my sister had inherited. It looked light brown, or sandy, like Luke’s.

I touched the faces with a fingertip. Vague images swam into my mind. I’d pushed open a door in my memory, just a crack. I watched him yank dresses from her hands, from a half-filled suitcase, and slap the hangers back over the closet rod. Clink, clink. Metal on metal.

“You said you wanted to know about the effect on the parents?”

Steckling’s voice brought me back to the present. The memory dissolved.

“Yes.” I pushed the clipping aside, out of my line of vision. “I thought I might like to talk to them.”

“Well, I’m afraid you can’t talk to him because he’s dead.”

The shock was swift, deep, and left me momentarily speechless.

Steckling went on, “He killed himself a couple years after the girls disappeared.”

“Oh my God,” I breathed.

The detective nodded. “It never was officially ruled a suicide, but I always thought it was. Shot himself in the head while he was cleaning his hunting rifle. This guy was a hunter since he was a kid, he knew guns, he knew gun safety. That wasn’t any accident. But the insurance company couldn’t prove suicide, so they had to pay for accidental death.”

I licked my dry lips. “But why did he do it? Was it grief?”

“More like a guilty conscience, if you ask me.”

“A guilty conscience? Over what?”

“My theory was, he took the girls and killed them.”

“You’re not serious.” The words came out on a burst of astonished laughter.

Steckling started to speak, changed his mind, then changed it again. He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “I’ll tell you something we never did make public. This is confidential, you understand? But if you’re going to talk to the mother, you probably ought to know about it.”