The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (25 page)

He meant what he’d said. He thought our father killed us. But it was absurd, it was crazy. Caught up in these thoughts, I wasn’t braced for what he said next.

“John Dawson wasn’t the younger girl’s real father.”

I stared at him.

“That came out when I questioned them. We always start with the family, any time we get a crime like this, and no witnesses. Dawson just broke down and spit it out, said he wasn’t Stephanie’s father. He left Barbara for a while when he first found out. Then they got back together on condition they’d move to a new town and start fresh. They came to St. Cloud when Stephanie was a few months old. Dawson sold insurance, he got a transfer to the St. Cloud office.”

“Who—” My voice was so weak I barely heard it myself. I took a breath and started over. “Who was Stephanie’s real father?”

Steckling shrugged. “That, I never could get out of them. I really leaned on them, I even threatened to charge them for withholding evidence, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. Dawson swore he didn’t even know for sure who it was, and Barbara said it was somebody who was long gone.”

I gave my head a slight shake, trying to clear it. I had to be careful what I said, had to avoid questions that betrayed too much knowledge. “What made you think John Dawson was capable of murdering both girls?”

“Stranger things have happened, I’ll tell you. A man finds out his wife’s been carrying on an affair with another man, had a kid by him, he broods about it, starts thinking maybe the other one’s not his either. Hell, who knows? Maybe she wasn’t.”

A clutch of pain deep inside almost made me cry out a protest. Maintaining a calm, interested expression took all my self-control. “Did he tell you he thought neither girl was his?”

“No, but that’s no proof he didn’t think it. And even if he believed Cathy was his, he could’ve killed her too just to get back at his wife. People that do things like that, sometimes their motives are pretty twisted. Of course, he claimed he loved them both, and he swore he never treated Stephanie any different. But if you ask me, that’d be damned hard for a man to do under the circumstances, treat her like she was his.”

“You never found any evidence against him,” I said, and wished I’d made it sound like a question instead of a flat statement of fact.

“No. We watched him real close, but he was careful. He never led us anywhere.”

Because there was nowhere to lead you
. “How did they act after the disappearance? What was it like for them?”

“Well, Barbara, the mother, she blamed herself for leaving them on the playground.”

“They were so young,” I murmured. Did I really remember her walking away, leaving us behind, or had my imagination supplied the desolating picture? “To be left alone like that.”

Steckling sighed. “Well, she wouldn’t have won any mother of the year awards, that’s for sure. What I think—well, what I know—is Barbara Dawson was depressed, real bad depression, over a lot of things. Look what happened to her. An affair, a baby that wasn’t her husband’s, a breakup with the baby’s father, a separation from her husband, leaving a job she liked, moving from the Twin Cities up here where she didn’t know anybody. She was pretty low, she admitted it.”

“So depressed that she neglected her children.”

“I think she took pretty good care of them most of the time. But I guess she needed to get away from them for a few minutes now and then. So she left them where she thought they’d be okay and she went off by herself. Just careless, like I said.”

A careless moment that changed so many lives.

“How did John Dawson behave afterward?”

“Oh, he was really determined to punish his wife. Kept telling her it was her fault, she couldn’t be trusted. He said that right in front of me more than once. The more I heard, the more convinced I was that he did it himself, to hurt Barbara. It was brutal, some of the things he said to her.”

I recalled, with exquisite precision, the sensation of smothering when I pulled my pillow tight over my head to block out their quarreling voices in the next room.

Sour bile rose to burn my throat. I swallowed. “Couldn’t he account for himself, where he was when they disappeared?”

“He always claimed he was working in his office all afternoon, up to when his wife called him—she called him before she called us—but the only other person he worked with was a secretary, and she was on vacation. So, no alibi.”

What would this man say if I told him the truth?
My father didn’t kill anyone. Look at me. I’m right here in front of you, and my sister is sitting in a classroom in Washington.
He wouldn’t believe me. He might be very hard to convince.

I said, “How would you have identified the girls if you’d found them?”

“Decomposed bodies, you mean? Well, we had up-to-date dental records. General descriptions, hair color. Hair lasts a long time, even when there’s nothing else left but a skeleton. We lifted fingerprints from their room, but that wouldn’t do much good unless we’d found the bodies early enough—” He broke off with a shrug.

I looked down at my hands. Fingerprints. The never-changing stamp of identity. I could prove who I was whenever I was ready.

“What happened to Barbara after John Dawson’s death?”

“It took her a while to pull herself together,” Steckling said. “She was still in pretty rough shape when her husband died. It was tough on her. But she put her life back together.”

“How do you mean?”

“She sold the house here, moved back to Minneapolis and—”

“Minneapolis?” I said sharply.

“Yeah. She got a job at the same place she’d worked at before.”

“Where was that?” I poised my pencil over my pad, realizing I had yet to write anything down.

“A law firm. One of those big ones with a dozen names. I don’t remember—Let me look here.” He turned to the front of the thick folder, where a sheet of paper was stapled to the inside of the cover. “Here it is. Jensen, Dubie, Goddard, and Brown. Well, I guess that’s not a dozen names, it just seems like it.”

My hand reached reflexively for my bag, where I carried the accident story that gave Michael Goddard’s place of employment. Jensen, Dubie, Goddard, and Brown.

I drew my hand back to my lap, anchored my fingers around the notepad. “She worked there.”

“Yeah, she was a legal secretary. Good one too, I guess, to work in a firm like that. She told me she was going back to work for one of the senior partners. He’d had three or four secretaries since she left and hadn’t been satisfied with any of them.”

“Is she still living in Minneapolis?”

He nodded. “Far as I know. She kept in touch for a long time, called regularly. She had this idea the girls might somehow find their way back home, and she wouldn’t be here for them. Well, I knew they were dead, I was always sure of that, but I’d talk to her, listen to her. She always wanted me to know what was going on with her.”

“What was going on?”

“She got married again after a few years. Had two more kids, one right after the other. She was getting close to forty, and she said she wanted to hurry before it was too late.”

In all my imaginings, I hadn’t considered the possibility that my sister and I had been replaced, that our mother had another family now. She hadn’t simply waited for us to return.

“How old are they?” I said. “The children.”

“Teenagers, fourteen, fifteen. A girl and a boy.”

My half-sister, half-brother. “Do you know their names?”

Steckling narrowed his eyes at me. “You ought to talk to Barbara about all that, see if she wants to get into it. Call her first, ask her if she’s willing to talk to you. I wouldn’t go knocking on her door without being invited.” He smiled, and suddenly looked a decade younger. “But you don’t strike me as somebody who’d do that anyway.”

My answering smile was automatic. “No, I wouldn’t.”

Then he said, “Caroline and Mark, that’s their names. The girl’s the older one. The boy’s named after his father. Mark Junior.”

“What’s their last name?”

“Olsson.” He spelled it, then laughed. “Easy to remember. A million of them in Minnesota.”

I produced another smile. 

“You’ll be careful how you approach Barbara, won’t you?” he said. “She’s always been pretty willing to talk about it, but this business about her husband not being Stephanie’s father—”

“I’ll be careful.” I added what I thought he wanted to hear. “I won’t let her know that you told me. If she doesn’t bring it up, I won’t either.”

“I’ll give you her home number.” He reached into his shirt pocket for a small notepad, consulted the sheet stapled inside the folder on the desk, jotted her name and number. He tore the page from the pad and held it out, with no idea of what he was giving me.

My fingers closed round it.

“You want copies of these newspaper stories?” he said.

“Yes, thank you.”

While a clerk did the copying, Steckling brought us coffee in Styrofoam cups, and we chatted about the weather differences between the Washington area and Minnesota. A couple of times I noticed him looking at my scar, but he never asked about it.

Chapter Twenty-six

For a long time I sat behind the wheel of the rental car in the lot next to police headquarters, watching the late afternoon sunlight slowly recede along the rows of vehicles. The folder full of newspaper articles peeked from underneath my bag on the passenger seat, both luring and repelling me. 

I wanted to devour every word, follow my parents through the days after my sister and I disappeared into Judith Goddard’s life. Yet I wondered how much more of their anguish I could bear to learn about and share. The things I’d heard from Steckling left me feeling battered and threatened. A few steps farther and the quicksand of the past would be sucking at my feet.

I could stop this now. Go home to Luke. To my sister.

I dismissed the thought as soon as it formed. I was here, so close. I had to go on. I reached into my bag and pulled out the St. Cloud map I’d bought at the Twin Cities airport.

The street we’d lived on at the time of the abduction was three or four miles from police headquarters. I drove toward it. Now and then some detail jumped out at me from the ordinary streets—a dry cleaner’s sign, a grocery store parking lot, an ancient gnarled oak tree—and I had the sensation that I was driving through the landscape of a half-remembered dream.

When I saw our house, I knew it. It was different, yet the same. A siding-covered house in a middle-class neighborhood, on a narrow lot of maybe a quarter acre. Smaller than my vague memory of it, but then I’d been seeing it through the distorted lens of a child’s perception.

The house was still white, the shutters still black, but now the door was bright red. Someone had cared enough to bring the small front lawn to perfection, a smooth unbroken green in contrast to the half-bald yard I remembered playing on. Low dahlias bloomed in beds along the walk leading to the door. The clear bright colors made me think of Mother’s gardens, and the blossoms I’d hacked to bits.

I parked at the curb across the street and sat there until a group of children in a nearby yard noticed me. When I glanced at them, I saw small bodies pulling closer together, suspicious eyes trained on me. They’d been taught to be wary of strangers.

I searched up and down the surrounding streets, first close in, then farther and farther away, my frustration growing. The playground was gone. Something had replaced it, but I couldn’t be sure if it was the small fire station that looked relatively new or the block of townhouses with scrawny trees lined up in front.

I told myself it didn’t matter. Seeing the playground again wasn’t necessary. Yet I felt as if I’d lost a vital piece of the puzzle that was my life. Strangers had obliterated the very spot where my universe altered in an instant.

Reluctantly abandoning the search, I stopped at a fast food restaurant and went in for a cup of coffee. The hot greasy smell of fried chicken made me realize I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, when Luke badgered me into finishing a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice.

Luke. How far away he seemed.

I ordered a chicken breast and a salad to go with my coffee and sat down to eat, marveling that appetite persisted in the face of calamity.

***

There was no point in rushing back to Minneapolis. I needed time to absorb what I’d discovered and decide what to do next. As dusk faded to night, I checked into a motel. I took a long steamy shower and pulled on my comfortingly familiar terry cloth robe.

I stood at the window for a while and watched the trucks and cars that rolled past on the highway, their long beams piercing the dark and just as quickly vanishing into it again. No one, not even Luke, knew where I was.

When I felt I was ready, I drew the curtains closed. I pulled the chair from the room’s small desk, sat next to the bed and opened the folder I’d placed there. I arranged the newspaper clippings in order of their dates, gradually covering the surface of the pale green bedspread.

I picked up the stories one by one and followed my parents on their odyssey through a landscape where all that was right and normal had taken on terrifying forms. Tearful pleas. Neighbors questioned. A man on the next block with a history of molesting girls, briefly under suspicion, cleared when his alibi was confirmed. Hints, then blunt statements that John Dawson was a suspect.

I lingered over the only story that was about my sister and me rather than the distress of the adults around us. Cathy and Stephanie Dawson had been inseparable. Cathy, so young herself, watched over her little sister. They were good girls, sweet and bright and lively children.

Two weeks before the abduction, Stephanie had turned three. She’d had a small party and received a bike with training wheels. Cathy’s fifth birthday came four days after the girls disappeared. Her gifts remained unopened on a closet shelf.

Mother had given my sister a second birthday celebration that first year we were with her, while my real birthday was ignored and the celebration put off for months. Some memory of that had stayed with me, causing ripples of vague resentment and a sense of loss.

When I’d read all the clippings, I dug into my bag for the photocopied story about the Goddards’ accident and the note on blue paper I’d taken from Mother’s study. I smoothed the three sheets of paper and laid them on the bed in their proper place, at the beginning, first the note, then the accident report.

I believed I knew most of the story now. I could put it together in a way Detective Steckling never could, because he would always be missing a vital piece.

Barbara Dawson had an affair with Michael Goddard when they worked at the same law firm, he a young partner, she a secretary. She became pregnant. Her husband found out about the affair and left her.

Why hadn’t she gone to Michael, why hadn’t they begun a life together? Because he was already married to Judith, who was also pregnant with his child. Perhaps he rejected Barbara’s claim on him, made it clear she and her child would never be part of his life.

Judith didn’t know about the affair and Michael’s other baby. Not yet.

John Dawson resumed his life with Barbara and the two girls, one his and one not, on condition that they move away from Minneapolis. Distraught over the hopelessness of her relationship with Michael, Barbara agreed. When she was alone with John and the girls in a new place, no work to occupy her, she became more depressed, less attentive to her children. And to her husband. The voices in my memory, the shouts, the sobbed pleas, were a legacy of their unhappiness.

I could only guess how Judith had learned about Barbara and the baby. Perhaps Barbara was unable to stay away from the man she still loved, perhaps she called him—or wrote to him.

Through all the following years, Judith had kept this single sheet of note paper, the message it bore disguised and made unintelligible to anyone who didn’t know the story behind it. 

I want you to know that I have no regrets. I could lie and say I’m sorry it happened because it turned my life upside down, but I’m not sorry. It was wonderful, and it gave me the one beautiful thing I’ve got left.

Mother’s own note was still paper-clipped to it:
Explore the motivations of a woman who is capable of such a thing
.

She might have found the letter in his belongings after his death, but I had a feeling she’d found it before.

I picked up the story about the accident that killed Michael and his daughter Michelle. Witnesses said the Goddard car was moving erratically and might have been speeding before it crossed into the oncoming traffic lane.

An argument in the car? Judith unable to contain her fury at his betrayal? Michael unable to keep control of the car as he tried to defend himself, explain himself?

What had those last moments been like for the little girl, Michelle? Had she heard her parents screaming at each other, her mother raking the air with bitter accusations?

I held the paper under the bedside lamp and studied the child’s smiling face, so like my sister’s, and considered our entangled lives. This girl and my sister shared a father, a young man who’d been too attractive and charming for anyone’s good. The girl and I shared a sister. But the lost child had no blood kinship with me.

What followed the accident? Judith knew Barbara had a living child fathered by Michael. That knowledge ignited a smoldering desire for revenge.

For the first time I willingly remembered the night Mother died. I closed my eyes, saw her tormented face, heard the ragged voice, the words tumbling out, words that made sense to me now.
That woman had no right to her! She had no right to have her child when mine was dead.

After recovering from her injuries, Judith had driven to St. Cloud, found the Dawsons without revealing herself. Perhaps she watched us many times, always focusing on my sister. How it must have wounded her to see a little girl so much like her own, with the same glowing blond hair, the blue eyes of Michael Goddard. Alive. All her years stretching out ahead. For an instant all I felt was pity for Judith Goddard in her grief.

I remembered that last day on the playground. Thunder rumbled across the sky. Mothers hustled their children away. A woman with a long dark ponytail who had a little boy by the hand said she was sure our mom would be back in a minute.

And I, being strong and brave for my little sister, said yes, we’d be all right, Mommy would be here to get us.

Then we were alone and the storm broke, sudden and ferocious. My sister clung to me and screamed.
Mommy! Where’s Mommy?
I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, while we stood in the deserted playground with the rain streaming over us and the trees thrashing above.

A woman with an umbrella appeared out of nowhere. “Your mother sent me, come on, get out of the rain!”

To my child’s mind, the word
mother
was all that mattered. I didn’t know who this woman was, but our mother had sent her, and she sheltered us with her big umbrella, protected us from the terrifying storm.

The inside of her car smelled of new leather.

When had I started to feel afraid? The woman told us she’d promised to take care of us for a while because our mother had something important to do. She stopped somewhere and bought chocolate milkshakes for us, and we drank silently, greedily. Our parents never let us have anything sugary.

Sitting in the motel outside St. Cloud, I could taste the rich sweetness of my milkshake and feel the cold liquid spilling from the straw onto my tongue. I didn’t know how much time had passed before I’d awakened in a house where stacks of big brown boxes lined the walls.

I remembered my own confusion and alarm and my sister’s happy acceptance of the stranger’s attention. I couldn’t recall the trip east, the first weeks or months in our new home. Vivid, coherent memories didn’t begin until well after that, in the second or third year of school. I was Rachel Goddard then. My sister’s name was Michelle. Judith Goddard was my mother.

She must have sedated me in the beginning, and she must have hypnotized me repeatedly to muddy my memories. I was a child, and my world had vanished. I believed what I could see and touch. I answered to the name I was called.

Yet somehow I’d clung to scraps of my other life. My memories were amorphous, and I doubted my own mind, telling myself I had an overactive imagination. But I held onto my real self by inventing Kathy. My imaginary friend was me, Cathy, Catherine, kept alive in the only way I could do it.

My sister hungered for the kind of attention Judith gave her. She’d needed little persuasion to become Mother’s adored child. Her memories of our real parents probably faded rapidly, with some assistance from hypnosis.

I was the troublesome one, haunted all my life by faces and voices and images that made no sense to me, and always feeling left out of the love between Mother and my sister. Stephanie Dawson was the one Mother wanted, the one she could make into another Michelle Goddard. I was an innocent bystander, caught up in it all.

How could she have believed she’d never be found out? Had there come a time, after grief’s sharp edges dulled and she was rational again, when she’d looked at what she’d done and known she would be discovered someday? Everything depended on her control of my memories and curiosity. For twenty-one years it had worked. I could only imagine her desperation when she realized I was breaking free of her.

I rubbed the back of my neck, stiff and painful with tension, and rose to pace between the bed and desk. Under my bare feet the short green carpet felt rough and unyielding. The room smelled of lemon polish, as our house always had after Rosario’s energetic attacks on the furniture.

Mother had given us a good life, in so many ways. We’d been cared for, catered to, encouraged, supported. We were the center of her existence. No professional duty was more important than our piano recitals, class plays, parent-teacher conferences. She took us everywhere from art galleries to amusement parks. She had no private life that didn’t include us.

But she wasn’t our mother. She abducted us from a playground and took us halfway across the country and twisted our minds and lied to us and cut us off from our family. Her actions had led directly to my real father’s suicide. She might have played a part in the deaths of her own husband and child, months before the abduction. In the end her crime had driven her to turn a knife on me, and then herself.