The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1)

by Kathryn Casey

“Yes, Clara. It’s been a long, busy day, but I’m home and looking forward to supper,” he said. At that, he bent down, and I wrapped my arms around his neck. It was then that I glimpsed someone walking in behind him.

  A gray-haired man emerged from the shadows, and Father said, “Look who has come to visit you.”

  I woke with a shudder.

  For hours after we returned to the shelter the night before, Hannah and I talked, dissecting what Gerard Barstow had said about Delilah, trying to decipher if it was true. Hannah believed him. “I’ve never known Gerard to lie,” she said. “His brother Evan, yes, but not Gerard.”

  “I’m not buying it,” I said. “Why would Lily have been so upset if Delilah’s not in trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” Hannah said. “But isn’t it possible you’re reading too much into what you thought she might say?”

  Hannah had eventually gone to bed. Once alone, I’d plugged in my laptop. I logged on to the NCIC website and clicked on MISSING PERSONS. On the ADD A REPORT screen, I typed in DELILAH JEFFERIES. I’d had little to enter, just her age, a physical description, and the few details in the note: that she’d disappeared the prior Thursday evening and was believed abducted from the small town of Alber, Utah.

  For a contact number, I’d listed my cell phone.

  After a restless night in one of the shelter’s seven master bedrooms, I woke before dawn, my head filled with images from my dream and thoughts of Delilah. Still dark outside, I showered and dressed, put on khakis, loafers, and a pale blue button-down shirt. I ran a brush through my wet hair, thinking about the innocent young girl I once was. I recalled mornings in our house, children milling about, pushing past one another as we dressed for school. I could almost feel Mother Naomi working her fingers through my hair, pulling the tangles out, crooning in my ear about the blessings that awaited me when I became a mother. “You and your children will be jewels in your husband’s heavenly crown.”

  A last swipe of the brush, and I secured my shoulder-length hair into my usual tight bun.

  That done, I pulled my bag off the closet shelf and double-checked to make sure my gun was fully loaded. I clicked the magazine back in as a familiar sound, a screech, drew me to the window. I pushed back long beige drapes and discovered double doors. The sun had come up. I flipped a lock and stepped out onto a second-floor balcony.

  Below me spread an immense yard surrounded by cottages, the center taken up by a primitive playground and a vast vegetable garden. As early as it was, a dozen or so children played in a sandbox and spun each other around on a wooden merry-go-round. Three girls on swings pumped hard, their feet pointed toward the sky.

  Nearby, half a dozen women and the older children shuffled systematically through the garden, harvesting what appeared to be green beans. Others were on their knees digging out potatoes and pulling carrots. Near the back, a cluster of women ripped corn off stalks and piled the cobs still in their husks into their aprons. When full, they dumped the corn into barrel-size wooden baskets with rope handles.

  I remembered working with my mothers, brothers and sisters during the harvest, the sweet smell of the ripening corn, the insects buzzing my face, the hard ground beneath my feet, the way the corn stalks scratched through my clothes, the leaves sharp as I grabbed a cob and pulled down, snapping it off with a crack.

  From the balcony, I watched the work below for a few moments, until I heard it again—the same high-pitched shriek that had drawn me to the window.

  At first, I couldn’t find the source, but eventually I focused on a dark object sixty feet away on the limb of a massive oak. Perched on a twisted branch halfway up the tree, I saw the distinctive white head and tail, the curved golden beak. The eagle let loose another series of cries, and I breathed in the sweet mountain air. I pushed up my T-shirt’s sleeve, uncovering the three-inch tattoo I had inked on the inside of my right arm a year after arriving in Dallas. At the time, I told myself the tat was a symbol of strength, but looking at it while listening to the eagle’s cries, I acknowledged the truth.

  My eagle had always been a reminder of home.

  Before leaving the room, I put in a call to Chief Thompson in Dallas. It was Monday morning, and he had me on the schedule to start in three hours. “I’m taking some time off. Maybe a few days,” I said, bracing for an argument.

  After all, I should have called in sooner.

  To my surprise – or perhaps I should have expected it – he sounded pleased. “Well, Clara, it’s about time. You’ve got enough vacation and sick days accrued to take a few months.” Then he sounded as if he had second thoughts. “This isn’t like you. Is everything all right?”

  “I went home for a little while.”

  “Where’s that? I don’t think you’ve ever talked about home.”

  I hesitated, reluctant to open that door. “Utah. I’m helping a deputy friend with a case.”

  “I should have known this was a working vacation,” he said, disappointment in his voice. I didn’t respond, and he offered, “If you need more time, just give me a heads-up.”

  “Great.”

  “And Clara, while you’re there…”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Try to relax some,” he said. “At least one day of real R and R.”

  I found Hannah downstairs, seated at the kitchen table, a half-empty mug of coffee in front of her. “About time you got up, sleepyhead.”

  I glanced at my watch. “It’s barely six.”

  “You’ve forgotten what it’s like in Alber,” Hannah chastised. “Our days begin before sunrise.”

  Heaven’s Mercy had been busy when I arrived the evening before, but this morning it bustled. Like the garden and playground, the house hummed with activity.

  The mansion had been built to serve a family of more than a hundred, so the kitchen had three refrigerators and a ten-burner stove. Five women gathered in front of a bank of four restaurant-size stainless steel sinks washing vegetables then handing them off to a second group of women, eight of them, congregated at one end of a long banquet-type table. Wielding a hodgepodge of knives, they cut cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, and carrots. They cracked peas out of pods. With the exception of Hannah in her jeans and a T-shirt, all the women wore their traditional garb, the long dresses and sandals over white socks.

  “Our crop is coming in from the garden,” Hannah said.

  “I saw the action from my balcony.” I made an educated guess: “Today’s the first day of canning?”

  “Come take a look,” she offered.

  I followed her down the back stairs. In the massive cellar, white shelves lined the walls and others, free-standing, filled a ten- by twenty-foot section. All the shelves held rows of gallon-size jars, those in the front filled with vegetables, but the ones to the back empty and waiting for this year’s crop. “We’ll have to bring these up and sterilize them soon,” Hannah said. “Many mouths to feed.”

  “How do you do it?” I asked. She gave me a puzzled look. “How do you keep the doors open?”

  “Donations, fundraising—most of our money comes from mainstream Mormon groups across the country. They’ve been wonderful. Such good people. Very supportive,” she said. “Really, we take whatever we’re offered to keep the utilities on, everyone clothed and fed. A lot of these women and children arrive like you once did, Clara, with nothing more than the clothes they’re wearing.”

  “Are they all here because their husbands fled?”

  “Not all,” she explained. “Some women come because it isn’t safe at home.”

  “I can identify with that,” I said.

  “Yes, I’m sure you can.” Hannah put her hand on my back and gave me a soft pat. “So what are we doing today? Are you done here? Have you decided to accept what your mother told Gerard, that Delilah is safe?”

  “I don’t know why Mother lied to Gerard but I’m convinced Delilah is in danger,” I said. “I’m going to find out what happened to the two girls you mentioned, El
iza Heaton and Jayme Coombs. I want to finish what we started last night, to talk to their families.”

  Hannah appeared relieved that I wanted to investigate the other girls, but asked, “What will that tell you about Delilah?”

  “What I’m worried about is that all three girls are pieces of the same puzzle.”

  Hannah sighed and shook her head. “I think that was what worried me from the beginning.”

  “Why you suspected there was something evil in Alber?”

  Hannah nodded in agreement.

  “You’ll come with me?” I asked. “To introduce me to the families? It would help.”

  “Of course,” she answered.

  But plans changed when my cell phone rang.

  “Detective Jefferies, this is Gerard Barstow.”

  “Good morning, Chief,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can explain why I got an NCIC report on my town this morning, one I didn’t file.” I heard the irritation in his voice. I suspected he wasn’t grinning like the evening before at the trailer park gate. “We need to talk.”

  Fourteen

  Gerard Barstow offered directions, but I didn’t need them. Everyone in town knew that Alber PD headquartered in the modest one-story, stand-alone building off Main Street. Growing up, I feared ever entering the place. Along with their official duties, the local police carried out the agendas of the church elders. Keeping the young ones in check, squad cars pulled up beside unchaperoned girls talking to boys on the street. Townsfolk saw, and whispers surrounded the offending children’s parents at the next social gathering.

  As an adolescent, my brother Fred caught the eye of the local PD.

  From a young age, his twin, Aaron, had earned the reputation of an obedient son, but although identical in appearance, Fred shared none of those attributes. Instead, Fred’s bicycle tires perpetually burst from popping curbs. He once smuggled a horned lizard he pulled from under a bush into school and released it in the girls’ lavatory, which resulted in high-pitched screams.

  I admired Fred’s spirit, but my parents worried. They reprimanded him, tried to rein him in, all with little effect. By the time Fred became a teen, police monitored where he went and who he befriended. Twice that I know of, they complained to our father about Fred’s attitude. At seventeen, he disappeared from our home. We children heard no explanation, other than that Fred had moved away. For months, our family grieved, especially Aaron, who’d always considered his twin his other half. I told myself that Fred would one day return. He never did.

  As I grew older and saw other boys forced out of Alber, I came to the conclusion that Fred must have been one of them. After I fled, I searched for him. I failed to find him, but I never gave up. When I had time, I still combed marriage, birth, death, arrest and property tax records, hoping to find Fred. So far, without luck.

  I wondered how many of my father’s children, my dozens of siblings and half-siblings, had been driven off in the years since I’d left. Did any others flee as I had? And I wondered yet again where Delilah was. What was happening to her, while I was about to be tied up with a command performance at the local cop shop? I had a sister to find, and Gerard Barstow was wasting my time.

  I parked the car around the corner from the station. The slots out front were taken by a line of squads, one of which looked like Max’s Smith County Sheriff’s car. A black-and-white from Hitchins PD parked near the front door also caught my eye – that was Evan Barstow’s department.

  The sun had been up for barely an hour, but it promised to be another stifling day. I opened the door and walked into a dreary wood-paneled waiting room. Someone, perhaps one of the Barstows’ wives, had tried to cheer the place up by hanging curtains with yellow daisies on the only window. It didn’t help. The worn linoleum floor, the smell of institutional cleaners, the dark paneling and rickety pine furniture was beyond hope.

  Behind a glassed-in reception area, a woman in her early twenties watched me enter. Her skin was a deep golden brown. The first three inches of her chin-length black hair were cornrowed, at which point it splayed out in all directions. She had dark almond-shaped eyes with thick silky lashes. She didn’t look like she belonged in Alber any more than I did; I’d grown up never seeing a black or Hispanic person. She pressed a button and talked into a chrome microphone. “Can I help you?”

  “Detective Clara Jefferies to see Chief Barstow.”

  The waiting room door buzzed, I grabbed the handle and walked through into the station proper. On the desk, a plaque read: STEPHANIE JONAS, DISPATCHER.

  The open area around her housed a clutter of unattended desks. “Quiet around here,” I said.

  “The day shift hasn’t started yet. Another hour and this place will be jumping. But there’s already a welcoming committee waiting for you down there,” she said, motioning toward a hallway. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a look that telegraphed: be careful. “The conference room is the third door on the right.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and I started off toward the door. I heard voices, one a low, gravelly rumble, as soon as I turned the corner into the hall. I paused to listen.

  “Damn it, Chief,” a man yelled. “What’s going on here, all these people moving in on us like this? Are we gonna let some cop from Dallas come in here and file false reports? This ain’t her department. She’s got no rights here.”

  “Mullins, I’ve got this,” Gerard said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. But Max, you’ve gotta control that woman, she’s—”

  “I didn’t bring Clara in to take over, just to talk to the family for us.” Max sounded weary, like he’d answered this attack before. “I didn’t think Clara would go off on her own and—”

  “Well, she’s a problem now,” the first man, Mullins, said. “The family says the girl’s fine, and here’s this cop who thinks she has a role because Delilah is her half-sister, so she logs on to NCIC anyway? Files a report? There’s no common sense here.”

  “Mullins,” Gerard said, “calm down. I had the report removed, and—”

  “You had the report removed?” I walked into the room. All of the men looked up, startled to see me – including a fourth man who I hadn’t heard speak. “Why did you do that?”

  “And good morning to you,” Gerard said, friendlier than I might have been in his situation. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Actually, it sounds like you started without me.” I turned to Mullins, the one railing about my intrusion, and held out my hand. “I’m Detective Clara Jefferies, and you are?”

  “Mullins. Jeff Mullins. Chief detective here, Miss Jefferies.” He hung onto the “Miss” a bit long, emphasizing it. The guy was squat with rheumy hazel eyes and receding salt-and-pepper hair. He had a long scar that feathered at the ends and trailed down his right cheek.

  “Good to meet you, Detective Mullins.” I nodded at Max, and then turned to the fourth man in the room, someone I dimly recognized. I thought of the squad car from Hitchins out front. This man was massive, and he had Gerard’s jaw, one that jutted forward and came to a point. Must have been a decade or so older. “You’re Evan Barstow, aren’t you? The former chief here? Police chief in Hitchins now?”

  “Guilty as charged,” he said, followed by a gruff snicker. “I just drove to Alber today to see the family and stopped to tell Gerard howdy, when all hell broke loose. Thought I’d stay for the fireworks.”

  “Always looking for good entertainment, I gather,” I said.

  “Why not? These are small towns. Nothing much happens. Gotta have a little excitement when I can,” Evan said, more of a sneer than a smile on his wide face. “But this is my town, too. I was chief here a long time, and our family lives here. I’m interested.”

  “So am I,” I said, turning to Gerard. “And what I’m interested in is why you removed my listing from NCIC.”

  “Because your sister’s not missing,” Gerard said. “I explained last night that—”

  “You explained that you
didn’t see Delilah. She wasn’t at the house,” I countered. “All you know is what my mother told you: that she sent a twelve-year-old all the way to Salt Lake on a mission, alone.”

  “Not alone, with a family,” Gerard said.

  “Yes, that’s right. Thank you for correcting me,” I said. “Did you get the family’s name? A phone number? Anything we can use to verify?”

  Gerard looked over at Max, as if questioning if he was somehow involved with my rant. Max shrugged, but then agreed with me. “I don’t think the detective is wrong here, Chief. Like I said, we should ask Ardeth or Sariah—”

  “Max, this isn’t any of your business. The sheriff handed this case over to my brother,” snapped Evan. He had been relaxed up till now, apparently enjoying the show, but Max’s support for my suggestion had changed his mood. I had the distinct impression that Evan didn’t support any further investigation into Delilah’s whereabouts.

  To my relief, Max didn’t back off. “But Clara has a point. Another short meeting with Ardeth or Sariah, and we can put this to rest.”

  Evan ignored Max and turned to his brother. “Gerard, you gonna let this woman tell you how to run a case?”

  “Detective Jefferies is just worried about her sister. I understand that—” Gerard started.

  “Don’t call her Detective. In Alber, she’s nothing more than a private citizen.” Evan’s sarcasm seeped into each word. “I must be wrong, Gerard—I thought you were the chief in this town.”

  Gerard looked over at his brother with eyes as big as a raccoon caught in a trap, before he turned to me and said, “Clara, Evan’s right. You have no jurisdiction in Alber. You shouldn’t be meddling in police matters. As I said before, I need you to stand down on this.”

  “And if I don’t?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Gerard looked at me blankly, as if he truly didn’t understand.

  “Are you going to look for my sister? Will you make sure Delilah is safe?”

  Mullins piped up this time. “The chief’s in charge here, not you, Miss Jefferies. You need to head back to Dallas. We’ll let you know if there’s anything in Alber that needs your attention.”