Shattered (17 page)

“I know.” Carol raised her eyes from the cup to look at Laura, her expression bleak. “But if you're right, then I've got three people out there to worry about—four, if you count the woman who called me this afternoon—and that's at least three more than I can deal with.”

Laura nodded glumly. “God, honey,” she said, “what did you ever do to deserve this?”

Carol managed a dry grimace. “When I find out, I'll let you know, because I'm going to make sure I never do it again.” And then she groaned. “Damn, the police are going to want to interview Ken Carlton. I hate to involve a client in something like this. But he was with me when the call came in.”

“I don't suppose he made an offer on one of our beachfront lots before you distracted him, did he?”

Carol accepted her friend's attempt to cheer her up. “No. But he looked kind of interested in those three adjoining lots on Deer Trail. Then it started raining and...” She trailed off. Laura knew the rest of the story.

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the crackle of the fire and the rush of wind and rain against the windows. The clouds of the afternoon had gathered force for one last angry burst, and from the sound of it, a genuine coastal storm was on the way.

Carol realized she missed the sound of the surf. She wanted her house back, and she was angry, briefly and fiercely, at the intruder who had taken it from her—and who had taken, more importantly, the innocence of security she had always felt within its walls.

Then Laura said, “Whatever happened to you two anyway?”

Carol was confused. “Me and Ken Carlton?”

“You and the only man you've ever loved, fool,” Laura said with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation that made Carol smile.

“We broke up,” she said.

Laura looked at her steadily. “No, you didn't.”

Carol closed her eyes for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was low and strained. “God, I don't know. We always had more passion than sense. We were so different, we knew exactly how to get on each other's nerves, and after all those years it just got so hard, you know? Hard to keep fighting, hard to keep explaining, hard to keep overlooking things and forgiving things.” Her lips tightened with a brief sharp shake of her head, and her voice grew abruptly thick as she said, “Stupid things, all of them, the kinds of things every marriage goes through and none of them were worth losing our daughter over.”

It took a moment to collect herself and she didn't look at Laura. She tasted her coffee and finished in a calmer, more tired voice, “I don't know what happened. I never knew what happened. We just—let it get away from us, somehow, the anger and the stress and the stupidity. But the thing is—the really strange thing is—if it hadn't been for Kelly, and what happened, I don't think it would have been permanent. I think we would have gotten back together.” She shrugged and almost managed a wry smile. “Another thing we let get away from us.”

Rain slammed against the windows and sputtered down the chimney. Carol shivered. Laura put a comforting hand on Carol's knee, then sat back.

In a moment Laura said, “This woman, girl, whoever she was—she gave you her name?”

Carol nodded. “The police didn't seem nearly as impressed by that as you might think.”

“Well, maybe not, but it seems to me it's a place to start.”

Carol frowned again into her coffee cup. Small flames, reflected from the fireplace, danced within its black depths like eyes glittering in the jungle. She said, “I don't know, Laura. When I first got the call, when I listened to her, I was convinced she was just who she said she was and that she did know something about Kelly. But now ... I mean, this man was a child molester, a rapist. He was...” She had to catch her breath and then swallow hard, because she had not even had the courage to say the words to herself until now. “He was in Tallahassee when Kelly disappeared and it's possible he—knew her and now he wants to get back at Guy for putting him in prison and it's all just so crazy. I mean, the things this girl said—that Kelly couldn't get away, like she was being held prisoner, that she knew where Kelly was but she couldn't tell me any more than Kelly—the first caller—could. It's crazy. The kinds of things you would say if you wanted to torment someone. And the voice … the more I think about it, the more I think it might have been the same one—kind of hoarse and husky like.” She looked at Laura and drew a breath. “It might have been a man, disguising his voice.”

Laura nodded, understanding. “Maybe you're right. Maybe this has been just one long sick joke designed to torment you and Guy, and now they've got the fingerprints of the man who's behind it. He'll be back in jail in no time.”

Carol dropped her eyes. “Maybe.” And it was awful. Because she wanted to believe it, and she didn't. She wanted it to be that simple ... and she couldn't bear it if it were.

“On the one hand,” Carol said quietly, needing to voice her thoughts out loud. “Kelly never called me at all. She walked away all those years ago and never looked back, or—or she's dead. On the other hand”—and she had to draw another long and calming breath— “she's being held prisoner somewhere—and not just her, but this Tanya girl, God, maybe even more than that ... all this time, kidnapped, locked up, tortured by some maniac, and all within viewing distance of my house.”

She looked at her friend, her eyes haunted and torn. “Pick one,” she said simply.

Laura reached up and closed her fingers over Carol's hand, but she did not reply. There was nothing to say.

They both knew that.

~

Chapter Twenty-three

F
or two weeks every March and September, Chip Sanders and his wife rented a beach cottage on the channel end of St. T. He spent his days fishing while Margaret read on the beach, and at the end of the day, they met for a good dinner at Bay Breezes. Sometimes they went the entire day without hearing another human voice. In the real world Chip was a fifty-eight-year-old building contractor, and Margaret was a telephone operator. Those weeks at St. T. were the most peaceful of their lives.

Chip walked down early the morning after the rain, carrying his fishing tackle, a yellow bait bucket, and a cooler filled with ice for his catch. The beach was deserted in that cool purplish dawn, the shoreline slightly rearranged from the pounding it had taken during the night, and the surf dark and noisy. The fish would be jumping today.

He wore a pair of bright red hip waders and a straw hat. By the time Margaret came down with his lunch, the sun would be hot and he would have been standing thigh-high in the surf for four or five hours, if he was lucky. When they weren't biting, he fished from the sand. But if anything was swimming out there at all, the only way to go for it was to get right out there with them.

In March, whiting and flounder were beginning their spawning behavior, redfish were abundant, and so were speckled trout. And he could always look forward to the thrill—sometimes once or twice a week—of hooking a baby shark, particularly after a good storm like they had had last night.

Chip set up his camp chair and cooler on the sand far enough away from the tide line so that he wouldn't have to worry about moving it when the tide came in—which he had been known to forget to do on more than one occasion—and started to bait his hook. He scanned the surf, speculating on what might be biting, and decided to start out with the shrimp he had bought fresh from the bait shop last night.

Then something in the surf caught his eyes and he swore. A dolphin. He hated it when they fed this close to shore. They were always breaking his lines, not to mention driving the fish away. On the other hand, dolphins only went where the fish were, which could mean good news.

But it wasn't a dolphin. Chip's eyes narrowed and he took a couple of steps forward, searching the tide. He saw it again, and his throat went dry. Slowly, still not quite believing what he saw, he put his fishing pole down and moved closer to the surf.

There was no mistaking it this time. Long dark hair swirling around like seaweed, a white hand flip-flopping back and forth with the surge and crash of the tide. Chip took a few purely instinctive running steps into the surf, then stopped.

He shouted, “Hey!” for no reason at all. He looked frantically over his shoulder, calling again, “Hey!” But the beach was deserted, and Margaret, still asleep in their cottage across the dunes, was too far away to hear.

Lacking no other options, Chip splashed forward grimly to retrieve what the sea offered up.

~

Chapter Twenty-four

D
errick Long was thirty-two-years old, married, no children. Patsy, his wife of nine years, had M.S., dormant now and perhaps for years to come, but never far from their minds, never out of their lives.

Maybe because of Patsy's illness, maybe because of Patsy herself, every day was precious to him. He was grateful when he woke up beside her. He was grateful when he sat down across the table from her. He was grateful when he walked into a room and she was there and it didn't matter what he had been through during the day, it was all worth it because she was there. He would have felt like a sentimental idiot saying these things, of course. And perhaps the best thing about Patsy was that he didn't have to.

She was a nurse at Mid County Hospital, a job she loved even though Derrick worried it was too stressful for her. Still, with their combined incomes, they could barely afford the split-level house on three acres off County Line Road. Patsy wanted to live in the country, which was one of the reasons that when the job with the St. Theresa County Sheriff's Department opened up, he had jumped at it. He had never regretted the decision.

A lot of officers made it a policy never to discuss their cases with their family. Derrick made it a policy always to discuss his cases with Patsy. She had been so proud of him when he made investigator; he knew he wouldn't have made it without her. Sometimes he called her Mrs. Colombo and she laughed, but there was more truth to that than she knew. Things didn't really make sense to Derrick until he talked them over with Patsy.

But they had been discussing the Dennison case for days now, and it still didn't make much sense.

“I told you,” said Patsy, thoughtfully munching on a piece of toast, “that it wasn't the husband trying to get back at the wife. Not after all these years.”

Derrick shrugged uncomfortably. “That was never a serious theory.”

Patsy was working three to eleven this week, so she had been in the emergency room when Guy Dennison was brought in. She now felt she had a special involvement in the case, which was evident as she informed Derrick a trifle smugly, “And there's no way that tiny Mrs. Dennison did that kind of damage to her husband with a fireplace poker—not even if he was sound asleep at the time and she had been working out for six months.”

He gave her a dry look. “You're pushing it, baby.”

“Well, at least now you have a real criminal to track down—and a pretty good idea of who he is.”

Derrick nodded. “That was always the thing that bothered me,” he admitted, glancing at the clock on the wall over her head before he refilled his coffee cup. “That was the thing that never made sense. Why would the Dennison girl call now, after all these years, with those crazy messages? She was doing just fine living on the streets, but almost three years later, she comes home and gets into so much trouble she has to call her mother for help. But she can't tell her mother where she is or what kind of trouble she's in or how anybody can help her. Well, I mean, nothing about the whole thing made sense, but it's a relief to know we don't have a lost girl out there to track down.”

Patsy lifted her coffee cup to her lips with both hands, fingers delicately curved around the mug, “You don't?”

Derrick frowned a little. That was one of the things he still hadn't quite worked out. “Well, no. I mean obviously it had to be Saddler, disguising his voice somehow or using an accomplice to make the calls. He just got out of prison, that’s when this whole thing started. He blamed Dennison for his arrest. He's probably been brooding on it all these years, planning how he was going to get his revenge.”

Patsy said, “And one way to get that revenge couldn't be to seduce Dennison's daughter? To drag her into his scheme for revenge?”

Derrick's frown deepened. “Do you mean Kelly Dennison herself might be his accomplice?”

“Why not?”

“Kind of a coincidence, don't you think?”

“It's only a coincidence until you find out the real explanation.”

“Did somebody say that?”

She smiled. “Me.” Then, “Anyway, what about that other girl—that Tanya whoever? Why would he make up another name—one that means nothing to the Dennisons? Wouldn't he just stick with Kelly if he wanted to scare them?”

“So you're saying there really are two girls out there for us to worry about?”

She shook her head. “Not necessarily. One is all you need.”

'Tanya Little,” Derrick said thoughtfully. “Saddler's accomplice. But why would she give her real name?”

“Well, she wouldn't,” Patsy pointed out equitably, “if she were Saddler's accomplice—or at least his willing accomplice.”

“You're not being very helpful.”

“Sure, I am. Now you have two leads on Saddler—Tanya Little and Kelly Dennison. Find either one of them and you'll have Saddler.”