by RJ Scott
My heart hurt for what I could have had with Lucas.
“What if you ran because you don’t love Chris?” I suggested in a freaky devil’s advocate kind of way.
“What? No, of course I love him. He’s everything to me.”
“Then maybe at the back of your mind you think you could find someone better?” I saw Chris deflate, but I had to get Sawyer to answer.
“No. Jesus, Josh.”
“So, you love him?”
“So much that my heart aches, and I start writing sonnets in my freaking head. I’ve never thought up so many ways to tell him how much I love him.”
“So, you ran because…?”
“I’m a small-town cop in the middle of multiple murder investigations with little hope of resolution. He’s an international bestselling author. He does red carpets. He has this whole golden life. I can’t match that.”
“See?” Drew said to me with a wild hand gesture. “He’s saying all this shit, and I can’t get through to him.”
I held up a hand to stop Drew from talking and tried another tack. “Sawyer, do you remember the first time you met Chris?”
“Of course, yeah, I went up to the old Dwyer cabin to officially check him out for Sandoval.”
“Do you remember the first kiss?”
“Yes, all that. And the first time we slept together and all the other stuff that means I can’t imagine life without him, but can I really trap him here in Lancaster Falls? Expect him to be with me with everything that is going on? I get home, and it’s time for bed. I’m up before he wakes up. Why would he want that?”
“Why wouldn’t I want it?” Chris asked, and Sawyer whirled so fast to face him that he dropped his beer. Only Drew catching it meant the glass didn’t crash onto the stones of the patio.
“Shit, Chris, I didn’t mean to leave. I’m sorry,” Sawyer apologized.
“You’re an idiot,” Chris muttered. “Even Kota thinks so.”
“I know.”
“But you’re my idiot, and I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Then I’m asking you again. Will you marry me?”
Sawyer didn’t hesitate. “Yes!” he snapped out, and they met in the middle, kissing fiercely.
I exchanged glances with Drew, and we sidled past them, catching sight of Chris slipping the ring onto Sawyer’s finger as we went inside.
“Well played,” Drew said and slapped me on the back so hard I nearly fell over. We fist-bumped, bro-hugged, and then he left.
I wished my love life was that easy to work out when the man I was falling in love with now saw me as a criminal who’d completely messed up.
Oh well, it was good while it lasted.
Twenty
Lucas
The new owner of Belmont Pines, fresh-faced and flush with Daddy’s money, had bought the nearly derelict building five years ago. He’d turned it around and was running it as a wellness clinic. He didn’t have any memories of what it used to be or any records of the place from before he’d taken over aside from the usual deeds. But he did at least point us in the direction of Bridget Stawley, the current president of the Claydon Creek Historical Society.
After we showed our badges, she showed us into a brightly lit house, showcasing older times in the beautiful town, and took us directly through to the kitchen. She offered coffee, and then we all sat at a large oak table, with cookies on a plate, and it looked to me as if she was settling in to tell us everything about the town she loved.
“This is a lovely place,” Avery said.
Bridget beamed. “My late husband, Bert, loved that we lived in a town that has so much history. When he passed, I just knew I needed to take over from him as curator of the small museum. I’m proud of what we’ve done, so what is it I can help you with?”
“We’re here about a specific time frame, ma’am, and a particular place.”
She leaned forward in her chair, her eyes bright with interest. “Do tell.”
“We’re interested in any information you might have on the Belmont Pines Clinic, through the seventies and into the early eighties.”
She frowned, then shook her head sadly. “Oh dear me. I wondered if that place would ever come back to haunt the town.”
“Ma’am?”
“It was a sad place because it used to be a home for unwed mothers, advertised as somewhere that a young woman may go to get support in her journey toward being a mother.” Her eyes narrowed, and there was anger in her expression. “I recall that slogan on leaflets that landed on our doormats just after it opened. Why would a family throw their child out for being unwed?” She drew back her shoulders. “It may have been a long time ago now, but even then, I was convinced that any young woman, if able, should be pulled into their families and shown unconditional love.”
She paused and seemed to be waiting for a reaction.
“Agreed,” I said, and it appeared to reassure her.
“The young women who came here, they’d been rejected by their families, and some of them went on to lose their children, their purpose.”
Was that the connection? Had the women whose remains we’d found attended the clinic because they were pregnant? Avoiding the shame to their moneyed families who wouldn’t support them in their time of need?
“So the young women would come here, get the support they needed, have their babies, and then what?”
Bridget sighed and cradled her mug. “Some of it wasn’t pretty. One young girl was found distraught on the sidewalk. I remember it clearly as though it was yesterday. Maude her name was, a pretty young thing. She was bleeding, losing the baby, and my Bert carried her back inside. When he went back the next day to check on her, she’d passed away, complications of what they’d told him was a home-based abortion she’d tried that had gone wrong. When they took the body from the house, Bert and I placed flowers there, and he never really forgot.”
“Do these names mean anything to you?” I slid the paper toward her, the four names we had, then a space, then Olivia Matthews’ name because we still hadn’t ruled out that she might be one of the remaining set of bones. Bridget put her glasses on and picked up the paper, frowning at it, then with a shake of her head, she put it back down.
“I’m sorry, no. Are these names connected to the house, mothers looking for their children?” She had such hope in her eyes, and I glanced at Avery, who gave a subtle shake of her head.
“Is that what happened there? The children were found new homes?” What happened to the moms?
“I always hoped that is what happened.”
“Is there anything else you can tell us? Or direct us to anyone else in town who could help?”
“Maybe we have something in the archives. Let me have a look.” She left the kitchen, and when she came back, it was to bring us three dusty ledgers that had seen better days. “We haven’t gotten around to putting the information on here into the computer. I know the seventies seem like only yesterday, but it was fifty years ago now. This first one is ’72 to ‘75, is this where you’d like me to start?”
“How about I take that one?” Avery asked and held out a hand for the first ledger. This would cover the time when Jessica and Amelia had vanished, although neither of their families had ever mentioned a pregnancy or them leaving home to attend this clinic outside Attica. In fact, none of the families we tracked down had said anything about either of those things.
“And this one? ’76 to ’80?” She looked at me expectantly.
I took the ledger. This time frame covered Angela and the possibility of Olivia, but of course it wouldn’t go up to the year Carmen Kreuger had vanished, and that was the name I hoped to find.
“I’ll scan this, and then we can swap,” I suggested.
“Good call,” Avery murmured, already scanning pages of names, article details, and photos.
“And I’m looking for?” Bridget prompted.
“Anything about Belmont Pines, unmarried mothers, fostering, a
doption, untimely deaths, and those names on the list.” She stared at me bewildered and eyes wide.
“How serious is this, Agent?”
What did I tell her without freaking her out?
“Serious,” I offered, and she went straight to checking her own ledger. We could probably have taken the whole lot back to Lancaster Falls, but my instinct said that Bridget Stawley was an asset we needed to utilize. Also, the last thing I wanted to do right now was go back to the town where Josh was.
I tracked him down to your position. He accessed the dark web. User name is Gilded7783820, real name, Joshua Baker… He has a presence on the dark web. So far, there’s no link to terrorism or drugs or child pornography, but he’s implicated in two attempts to… the words passed me in a blur. You want to tell me what to do next, sir?
I couldn’t wash away the feeling that I’d bought into a complicated web of lies, where Josh was this cute, hardworking, sexy father, with a kid I was learning to love and was part of a future I saw myself belonging to. Nowhere had I signed up for someone who was adept at traversing the dark web.
“Are you okay?” Avery faux-whispered, and I realized I’d been staring at the same page for far too long. Maybe it was the detailed news of a fresh produce-growing competition that had me faltering and let in thoughts about Josh. Or maybe it was because I had decisions to make.
“Yeah, sorry, just thinking.” I went back to the journal, stopped at interesting pages and took photos, taking special care to find out all I could with respect to the old building and anything else that seemed at odds in Claydon Creek. Next would be visiting the PD here, asking questions about old cases, but I knew if this place was anything like Lancaster Falls, then answers would be in short supply.
Avery seemed to want to ask me something else, but thank god she found something else to talk about. “Look at this.” She turned the journal around, loose paper cuttings, along with a list of articles in a local newspaper printed December 7th, 1973. The main headline was all about the previous day’s vote to make Gerald Ford Vice-President, but in the sidebar, there was a secondary headline about a pro-life protest at the Belmont Pines Clinic.
“Ahh, the protests,” Bridget murmured. “I stayed away from them.”
“I thought the clinic was for unwed mothers, helping them until they gave birth? Was it actually an abortion clinic?” Avery asked the same question I was going to.
There was a distinct sadness in Bridget’s expression. “All they wanted to do there was help. It was a delicate situation, a place that a young girl might go if she wanted help either way. You have to remember it was very different back in those days. That was the year of the Roe v. Wade decision, and I recall it was tense here when church and state were at war needlessly over what a woman could do to her own body.” She shook her head.
“Nothing has changed,” Avery murmured.
That put a new angle on what had been happening here.
I took photos. A tiny article continued on page three about a disturbance at the clinic, along with pictures of protestors that were blurry and not at all helpful. We found a few more mentions, articles about protests, a feel-good story about a garden planted in the memory of the women who had passed there, or the babies that were stillborn or died young. By the time we’d finished, both Avery and I were likely on the same page. Things had happened in Belmont Pines that were hidden way below the surface. But how had the women ended up in Lancaster Falls, in the sinkhole? Well, a solution to that wasn’t obvious.
The journey back from Claydon Creek was a long one. Not in miles. It was less than two hours in the car, but because there was a silence between us that wasn’t filled with music or inane chatter. Both of us would’ve been running through scenarios, but it wasn’t just that playing in my head.
Josh.
What kind of man was he? I thought I’d known him. The hardworking father who put his kid first and cared for friends and family. But the dark web? That was the worst of humanity, sharing resources to bring down governments, trade human lives, terrorism, sex crimes. Where did Josh fit into that?
“I do have one idea,” Avery interrupted my thoughts, “but it’s kind of out there.”
“I’m listening.”
“These women, and this is assuming that all the remains in the sinkhole are women and that they had all given birth, or not, as the case may be. We could be looking at a killer motivated by revenge on a mother who abandoned him or from the knowledge a potential sibling was aborted. That could be a stressor and cause our murderer to take action.”
We passed theories back and forth, but nothing really jumped out at us. When Bryan checked in with us as we grew closer to Lancaster Falls, we had nothing concrete to tell him, or at least nothing that made sense.
“Jessica, Angela, and Amelia were all at Belmont Pines. That’s our connection,” Avery summarized. “But we found nothing on Melissa, nor do we have any idea of what happened to Jessica’s friend Olivia, or even if Olivia is part of this.”
“I do have something here that might connect. Hang on,” Bryan said, and I could hear him leaving the table he was sitting at and then coming back. “We have payment histories in Melissa’s paperwork, linking her to the same place, Belmont Pines, three payments each for three thousand dollars. Her younger brother sent us bank accounts from their father’s account, on the condition that he remained anonymous. Her parents stalled at letting us anywhere near her effects and her father, a Baptist minister, had disowned daughter a long time ago.”
“Was she at the clinic for an abortion?”
“No one would say. I did go back to the brother, but he couldn’t add anything else. So, unless you can find Belmont Pine records going back to 1981, then we might never know why she was there.”
“No chance. It’s a straight-up health clinic now, you know, buffed-up pool attendants, massages given by a sturdy Swede called Sven, seaweed wraps, and they shredded loads of old paperwork in boxes. Not that there was much they found. I shouldn’t think the clinic kept complete records if they were performing abortions alongside adoptions.”
By the time we hit the outskirts of town, my issues with Josh had subsided and had been replaced by piecing together everything we had. Did Adam Gray have something to do with the women in the sinkhole? Was that why he was killed and left for the dogs? Or was it Gerald Stokes, with his stash of child pornography? Or Joe Dwyer with his creative covering up of what looked like a murder? Who had killed each one? When I thought back to what Sawyer had said, how the mayor, the bank owner, and the captain were the three men who ran the town, then was it Sandoval who’d killed them?
He was the last person standing. He had money going in and out of his account from the PD into the church to the mayor. Hell, he’d grown so used to power in the town that he’d abused it.
“We need to talk to Peter Sandoval.” I summarized my thoughts in that single sentence.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Twenty-One
Lucas
We parked outside the hotel, and I wasn’t sure I could face Josh because I had no idea what I was going to say to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said as I stepped into the hotel, as if he’d been waiting for me.
“Josh, I can’t do this right now—”
He straightened his back. “I only ever did good.”
Funny thing was, I knew that. It didn’t take the cyber unit to tell me he’d been telling the truth about what he did for a living and that his visits to the dark web forums had been to specific information-sharing places. He hacked secure information systems, and he was good at his job. He wasn’t anything other than a good man with questionable work ethics.
And I’m a federal agent.
Avery passed by me, high-fiving Josh and looking back at us with a confused expression. I hadn’t told her that the intel on Belmont Pines hadn’t only come from our own sources. All she’d seen is me getting the news, then disappearing into Josh’s office.
“We can’t talk about it here,” I said in warning.
“Follow me,” he instructed and assumed I would follow.
“What’s up?” Avery asked in a faux whisper. “Are you having a lovers’ tiff?”
“First, when did you channel the forties, also, what the hell?”
“I’m a trained observer. I notice the little things, the touches, the smiles, also the fact that I walked in on you in the kitchen and backtracked at speed.”
“Were we…?” Shit, in the kitchen? “When exactly?”
She winked at me. “Just kissing. Now, seriously, go talk to the man, and I’ll start working on Peter Sandoval. Then get your ass back here. We have actual work to do.”
I headed out to the garden, found Josh pacing, and noticed the stress fall from him as he saw me arrive.
“I don’t care what happens,” he said, but I didn’t really believe him. “I understand that you have a job to do and that I lied to you, so we’re over, and I’m so fucking sorry—”
“Would you have told me anyway?” I needed to hear that from him.
“It’s difficult. You’re the law, black and white, and I’m breaking into the gray areas—”
“Were you planning on telling me?”
“A hundred times. The first time we kissed, the first morning we woke up together, the first moment I realized I was falling for you. I shut everything down, cut off contacts, told my handler I wasn’t doing any more security work.”
“But then you went on the dark web and made contact with people on our watch list.”
“I didn’t know they were on a watch list!” He slumped to the wall.
“Are you that naïve?”
