Ominous

by Lisa Jackson

  He’d never seen Larimer Tate again.

  And he hadn’t regretted it.

  Still didn’t.

  Except for the terrible thought that Larimer might have hurt Shiloh while Beau had turned a cold shoulder to his father’s other family.

  *

  Shiloh took one step into Faye’s bedroom, then backed out and closed the door. No way could she stay in the room where her mother had slept, at least not yet. The ghosts were too nearby. A single glimpse of the bedroom, with its faded floral wallpaper, yellowed curtains, patchwork quilt, and a bureau of Faye’s things, including her wedding picture to Tate, was enough to convince Shiloh that she wouldn’t be comfortable occupying a space that was so intimately Faye’s. Maybe she’d change her mind. Someday. Then again, more likely not.

  So she turned and nearly jumped out of her skin when she spied Morgan standing in the doorway of the other bedroom.

  “That’s Mom’s room,” the girl said.

  “I know.”

  “You’re not gonna sleep in there, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  There was a heavy silence before Shiloh said, “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  Shiloh’s heart twisted.

  “Are you?” Morgan asked.

  “Not … really.”

  “Are you staying here?”

  “For now.”

  “Why?”

  “Well … because of you.”

  Another long pause, then Morgan said, “You don’t have to. Beau’s here …” Her eyebrows knotted. “Isn’t he?”

  “In the attic over the garage.”

  “He should be in here.”

  “His choice.” Shiloh took a step closer. “Can I get you something?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “No.”

  “Maybe a glass of water? Or … hot cocoa?”

  “I’m not a two-year-old!”

  “I know … I’m just trying to help.”

  “Then leave.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t belong here,” she charged. “You really want to know what would help? If you left.”

  Shiloh wanted to fight back, to mention the fact that Faye had been her mother as well, but she knew she would only be wading into deeper, darker emotional waters, and Morgan was only twelve and hurting.

  “You should have come back when she was alive. She wanted that.”

  Guilt jabbed at Shiloh, but she didn’t explain.

  “But … you … didn’t, did you?”

  “It was complicated.”

  Morgan crossed her arms over her chest, her chin tilted at an imperious angle. “What? You can’t explain? You don’t think I’ll understand?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Never mind. I can tell you’re going to lie.”

  “I’m not going to lie,” Shiloh shot back. “Okay, the truth. I left because I didn’t get along with my stepdad, your father.” That was sugarcoating it, but the little girl didn’t need to know what a perverted creep her father was, and Morgan was still very, very raw from Faye’s death only hours before.

  “Dad’s been dead a long time.” She pressed her lips together.

  “I know, but by that time I had my own life.”

  “That’s what Mom said, but you know, I think it’s all just a big excuse.” Her last words quavered, and she cleared her throat. She wasn’t nearly as tough as she wanted Shiloh to believe.

  “Okay, look. You’re right. I should have been closer to Mom while I had the chance. I get that. And I get that you’re mad at me because you think I didn’t treat her right, but, we have to go forward. So maybe you and I can start over.”

  The glare she received could have melted granite. Without a word, Morgan stalked past her and into Faye’s room. She shut the door so fiercely the timbers creaked. A second later, the lock clicked.

  Shiloh closed her eyes and slowly counted to ten. She’d tried. She’d failed.

  Frustration boiled inside, and she nearly started beating on the door, to try and engage her sister, but that wouldn’t work. Instead Shiloh reminded herself she just needed to give the kid some space. Everyone grieved differently. Morgan was hurting and transferring the source of that pain onto Shiloh.

  Made sense, but just the same it didn’t feel good.

  “Wonderful,” Shiloh hissed beneath her breath. “Just … fabulous.”

  Chapter 6

  “Shiloh Silva’s back in town?” Kat repeated, staring at her father in surprise. She was standing in his tiny office, a storefront, its only nod to décor a few fishing poles and nets tacked neatly onto the gray walls.

  Patrick Starr was seated behind his desk, a newspaper spread on the scarred top, coffee warming in a glass carafe on a hot plate situated on the credenza stretched behind him. Since retiring from the force, Patrick Starr had worked as a private detective, renting this hole-in-the-wall office space in a strip mall. His private detective business was wedged between a taxidermist, who doubled as an accountant when tax time rolled around, and a bakery that specialized in a wide array of cupcakes. The freshly made pastries were so special that most mornings a line of patrons snaked from the counter inside Betty Ann’s Bakery and out the front door, even in the middle of winter with the temperatures freezing. So far, Kat had resisted temptation and hadn’t sampled Betty Ann’s fare.

  “I saw Shiloh myself.” He folded the paper as she dropped into one of the side chairs. His hair, once as dark as hers, was now shot with silver, and his sharp eyes had dimmed a bit, forcing him to wear glasses that he vociferously hated.

  “I didn’t think she’d ever return.”

  “Her mother passed away a few days ago.”

  “I heard. But—” There hadn’t been a lot of love between Faye and her firstborn daughter. And once Shiloh took off, she’d never returned. Nearly vanished. Kat hadn’t heard from her. Not a word.

  “I know, I know. I didn’t expect her to ever set foot in this town again. She was vehement when I talked to her.” While on the force, Detective Patrick Starr had been working on the investigation of the teenagers who had gone missing fifteen years earlier. Erin Higgins and Rachel Byrd had never been located, and their missing persons cases had crushed Kat’s father. Sometime after their disappearances, a third girl, Courtney Pearson, never returned home. That was about a month before Ruthie’s rape, and she’d never been seen again, either.

  That was the one that really gnawed at Kat. Her worst fear was that Courtney had fallen victim to the same man who’d raped Ruthie—and that she and her friends could have prevented it if they’d only stepped forward.

  Kat had wanted to come clean about the night at the lake. It was hell keeping mum, but she’d made that promise to Ruthie. But what if the three girls’ silence had put Courtney Pearson at risk? Could they have prevented her disappearance? If they had just gone to the police, told what they knew, maybe talked to a police sketch artist and come up with some kind of composite picture of the attacker, would things have turned out differently? Would the son of a bitch be serving time?

  Worse yet, Kat had been forced to face her father every day, the very man who was leading the investigation, a man who had poured his heart and soul into his job rather than deal with the pain of a sickly wife. Those had been horrible years, when only Kat, it seemed, faced the fact that Marilyn Starr had been dying bit by bit, that the chemo hadn’t been working.

  Even now, seeing the lines on her father’s once-ruddy face, she felt a renewed sense of guilt. And still, to this day, when she was a detective with the department herself, she’d held her tongue. Though she’d never actually lied to her father, she knew now that there were lies of commission and lies of omission, and she was certainly guilty of the latter.

  “I think I’ll look Shiloh up,” she said. It was time to rectify her mistakes.

  “I always liked that kid, but I thought she got a raw deal with that stepfather of hers. A mean cuss. No one ever filed any charg
es, you know, but I had a gut feeling about him.” Patrick’s face tightened. “I should’ve asked some questions, y’know.”

  “It’s long over.”

  “I know, but there’s the right thing to do, and then there’s the wrong. Not a lot of gray area in between. I didn’t do the right thing.”

  “We’ve all made mistakes,” Katrina said, meaning every syllable. She desperately wanted to get the story on record, but first she had to talk to Ruthie, and with Shiloh back, maybe the two of them could convince her to come forward. Ruthie, or Ruth, as she apparently went by now, had recently returned to Prairie Creek after years away, though Katrina had yet to run into her.

  Ruth hadn’t made any concentrated effort to connect with her onetime friend, either. Since in a town the size of Prairie Creek that was nearly impossible, Kat guessed it was by design rather than happenstance.

  But with Shiloh back in town, there was no more waiting, as far as Kat was concerned. The three of them needed to come clean about the night of Ruth’s rape.

  “I was just too involved with my job at the time to take on much more,” Patrick was saying. “And then there was your mom, may she rest in peace.”

  Kat watched as a particular sadness settled over him the way it always did when he spoke of his wife. Though Marilyn had been gone nearly fifteen years, he’d rarely dated, though he’d had many opportunities. He’d struggled to be around Marilyn while she was dying. He’d loved her fiercely, but he couldn’t watch her suffer. Kat understood that now, though at the time she’d been deeply angry with both her father and her brother for leaving her with the bulk of her mom’s care. She’d forgiven both of them over the years and had forged new, happier relationships, but it had been a long struggle.

  “You look like her, you know,” her father said wistfully.

  “Yes.” She’d heard the same thing all her life. While Ethan was tall and rangy like their father, she’d inherited her mother’s shorter height, if not her sunny disposition.

  “You may have gotten my temperament, but thank God, you got her looks. She was a beautiful woman, Kat. You’re lucky.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “I should have paid more attention those last years. Been there with her,” he said.

  “I know that too.” She sought to head him off from the maudlin track he was about to embark on.

  He nodded, just managed to stop himself from going there. A big, strapping man who thought nothing about staring down the barrel of a shotgun pointed in his direction, Patrick Starr had been leveled by the insidious disease silently killing his wife. Rather than sitting for hours at her bedside, he’d found excuses to be away. He’d turned his attention to finding the missing girls most people thought were runaways. That was his way of coping.

  Still, despite his efforts, every lead in the investigation had turned into a dead end.

  Patrick smiled sadly at the picture of his deceased wife, and Kat’s restless mind wandered back to the investigation that had become her father’s Waterloo. Rachel’s parents, Paul and Ann Byrd, had never given up hope that their daughter would someday be found. With their remaining daughters at their side and the news cameras rolling, they had let it be known they blamed the police as a whole for not finding Rachel—and Patrick Starr, in particular. Anytime there was an issue in the family that required involvement with the Sheriff’s Department—and there was a small one developing now—Paul Byrd used the opportunity to complain anew about the department’s failings.

  Erin Higgins’s parents, Alan and Dora, though divorced, were united in their belief that Erin was alive. They were less angry with the authorities than the Byrds, but they were steadfast in their belief that their daughter would come home someday. Their son, Bryce, had been one of the most loyal searchers for Erin and had never given up trying to find her.

  And Courtney Pearson’s mother, Jan, believed that the Lord would bring her daughter back to her. Courtney’s father wasn’t in the picture and was in fact, long gone; broken, he’d walked out soon after his only daughter disappeared.

  When Shiloh had first disappeared, Faye Silva-Tate had shrieked at the police to find her baby, too. Kat had been miserable and had been on the verge of telling her father about the attack at the lake, but again Ruthie had shut her down.

  “What good would it do?” she’d demanded. “Did you recognize him? No. None of us did.”

  “He’ll have wounds on his body that we inflicted. Scars now, maybe.”

  “It won’t help. It’s not enough. And my father will kill me, if it comes out. He’ll kill me!”

  They had been walking down a park path after school; Ruthie had chosen the venue because she didn’t even want to be seen talking to Kat. Their burgeoning friendship had been cut off by the events of the night at the pond, and they’d all stayed away from each other by unspoken rule, but now Shiloh was missing.

  “You really think Shiloh’s been taken?” Ruthie had queried, her face screwed up in misery.

  Kat shook her head. No. Shiloh had taken off a few times before for periods of time; Kat knew that from overhearing her father discussing Larimer Tate on the phone with someone else at the department. She really hadn’t believed Shiloh had been caught by the man who’d taken Ruthie, but what she said was, “All I know is we need to go to the police about your rape. Or at least my father. It wasn’t your fault. For God’s sake, you were attacked, Ruthie. Violated. You’re the victim here. Your father will understand that.”

  Ruthie shook her head so hard her hair started to fall from its knot at the top of her head. “He’ll … he’ll …” She swallowed. “He’ll make an example of me at church. I … will be like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. You know that one?”

  “Yeah, I know that one.”

  Ruthie had then swiped at her eyes and stopped, leaning on the trunk of a massive tree for support. “He’ll show no mercy. He’ll be mortified. He sets his family up as this … this godly example.”

  “But you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “He won’t see it that way.”

  “Other girls are missing—”

  “I know that! Don’t you think I know that? What would you do if it were you? Would you tell your father? And the police. Could you confide in some officer who looks at you as part of the job? And what about the people at the hospital or, worse yet, the local clinic? Sandi Thompson’s mom is a nurse there, and she goes to our church and … oh, can’t you see?”

  The truth was Kat did see. Much of what Ruthie feared was true. Gossip spread like wildfire through the streets and shops of Prairie Creek.

  “But—”

  “Just think about it, okay?” Ruthie said, clearing her throat, seeming to pull herself together a bit. “What possible good would it do? You can’t ID him, and neither can I. It would be a great big, horrible circus, and I’d be the main attraction. All of my family would be dragged into it.” She squeezed her eyes closed and balled her fists. “I don’t know what to do, Kat. I want to tell the police, but it won’t help. All that will happen is that I’ll be humiliated. My father will never forgive me, and my whole family will have to move. Again!” She shook her head. “I should have gone in right after it happened,” she whispered. “You know, when they could do those tests.”

  A rape kit, Kat had thought, but hadn’t said it.

  “But it’s too late now. I mean.” She blinked again, fought for control. “I must’ve showered a thousand times, trying to get him off me. And I’ve prayed. I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed and still … still …” Letting out her breath slowly, she grabbed Kat’s hand, letting the tears she’d been battling run down her cheeks. “I … I … just … I just can’t.”

  Kat had felt her own eyes burn, and she had never brought up the subject again.

  Some of Kat’s anxiety lessened when, shortly thereafter, Shiloh called her mother to tell her she was fine, that she just wasn’t coming back. Faye Silva hadn’t been convinced that she was, so she’d forced her da
ughter to speak on the phone to the lead detective on the case, Patrick Starr. Faye was afraid that a kidnapper was forcing Shiloh to make the call, even though Shiloh had assured her she was perfectly fine. Shiloh had then gone to a police station in Helena, Montana, where an officer had confirmed that she was well, and, having just turned eighteen, was not a runaway.

  Faye had been relieved. Yet over the years Shiloh’s name had become lumped in with those of the three missing girls. Her “miraculous” reappearance had given the parents of Rachel Byrd, Courtney Pearson, and Erin Higgins hope that their daughters were safe, a hope that had yet to come to fruition.

  Detective Patrick Starr hadn’t been sidetracked by Shiloh. He’d doggedly kept on working on finding Erin, Rachel, and Courtney, though the department had never officially listed them as missing persons. Even after his retirement, Patrick kept a list of names with pictures of his suspects, a list that Kat had caught glimpses of over the years and now knew by heart. Those suspects had been interviewed several times when the case was hot, but nothing had ever come of it, and now the missing girls were assumed to be runaways. No crime had been committed, as far as anyone could prove, and since Ruthie hadn’t come forward about her rape, the three missing teens—now women—were a cold case … actually, hardly a case at all.

  Skip Chandler.

  Calvin Haney.

  Rafe Dillinger.

  Those three were at the top of Patrick Starr’s list because they’d all left town about the time girls had stopped disappearing, though none of them had ever been charged with the crime. Coincidentally, they were all three now back in Prairie Creek. Back when the girls disappeared, Calvin Haney, a loudmouthed womanizing wildcatter, and Skip Chandler, a known thief and con man, had taken off without telling anyone, including their relatives, where they were headed. The third man was one of the Dillinger cousins, Rafe Dillinger, a dropout who had dated Courtney Pearson. When Kat was a teenager, Rafe had been a notorious bad boy, stealing cigarettes and beer from Menlo’s Market, driving girls around in his truck, giving alcohol to minors, even, supposedly, getting Darla Kingsley pregnant, though that was never confirmed. Unlike other petty criminals, Rafe had the Dillinger fortune as a safety net when he screwed up. He’d left town around the same time that Shiloh had done her own disappearing act; some said Ira Dillinger had had enough of the boy.