"I'll be right back," she told everyone now. "I need to put the Closed sign on the door." She could have had one of her salesclerks come in today. But she hadn't wanted the distraction. She hadn't wanted chatter and laughter in the store. She hadn't wanted anyone else around after the detective left, no matter what he had to say. Composure was everything now, at least when others were around.
When she returned to her office, no one was speaking. Detective Grove sat with his hands clasped between his knees, staring at the floor. Max was watching Clare as she stared out the window. Clare and Lynnie had looked so much alike as children. If Lynnie was alive, would she and Clare look alike today? Probably not.
Amanda perched on her desk chair and waited.
Grove looked up, saw that she and Max were seated across the room from each other and didn't seem to know which one of them to address. Finally his gaze locked to Max's. "I know you want me to cut to the chase, so here it is. Luther Brown is on death row in Texas, awaiting execution for the murder of two little girls."
Amanda heard Clare's sharp intake of breath, saw her daughter wrap her arms around herself as if in protection for whatever came next.
"His sister," Grove went on, "was charged as a co-conspirator. But she made a deal, led the authorities to the bodies and got life without the possibility of parole. It turns out she was diagnosed with cancer about four months ago—pancreatic cancer. It's moving fast and she doesn't have long to live. Apparently she held something back during the deal-making. No way to tell why. No way to tell whether loyalty to her brother was still important to her. But what she held back was a journal Brown had kept."
Amanda's heart pounded now and her gaze met Max's. Over the years, they'd learned more than they'd wanted to know about child abductions, kidnappings, pedophiles and anything else that might help them find their daughter. When Lynnie had been taken, there had been a minimal knowledge of all of it. Some police departments had been more well-informed than others. There hadn't been a Missing Children's Act or Amber Alerts then. Everything had been different. Everything had been disorganized. Everything had been a guess and a hope with little or no strategy and no organization.
From the research, she knew not all pedophiles were killers. But she also knew that in some pedophiles, their propensity for violence increased with each child they abused.
Tearing his gaze from hers, Max asked Grove bluntly, "Are you telling us Lynnie is dead?"
"No. That's not what I'm telling you. Hear me out before you jump to conclusions."
"Hear you out? Like you heard me out when Lynnie was abducted?"
Amanda could still hear the old anger ringing resoundingly in her husband's voice.
Only a day or so into the investigation, Grove's suspicion had fallen on Max. But Max had passed a lie detector test. And once they had finally listened to Clare jabber about a blue car, everything had changed. Still, Grove had never apologized to Max for the hell he'd put him through.
Ignoring Max's question, Grove took a small notebook from his shirt pocket, flipped it open and studied his scribbles. "Brown's journal started in 1980. He's not an educated man but he is a smart one. He was trained as an electrician. My guess is he worked on your new house. He saw you when you came through with your family, checking it out from foundation to carpet laying. I suspect he was there the day the doorknobs were set. Either he stole a key or managed to rig the lock on that basement door that went outside."
"All the locks were the same," Amanda murmured, knowing one key unlocked them all.
"Convenient then and now. Some people still do that today who aren't security conscious. But in a little burg like Pine Hill, where no one even locked their doors back then, even just picking the lock wasn't a problem for somebody like him."
"Was Lynnie in his journal?" Clare's voice was small and she sounded more like a child than an adult.
"This is how it goes," Grove said with the lines around his mouth cutting a deep frown. "The journal had details, dates and places. When Brown first started doing this, the kids seemed to vary in age from three to seven. He snatched them, kept them somewhere for a while, then abandoned them."
Amanda knew there was a world of information the detective wasn't giving them. But she didn't care right now. She just wanted to know what that journal said about Lynnie.
"Abandoned them where?" Max asked sharply.
"He drove them three to four hours away, left them at a church, or a school or a shopping center."
"What did he do with Lynnie?" Amanda couldn't keep the question inside.
"That's the thing, Mrs. Thaddeus. There was no Lynnie from Pennsylvania in his journal. But there was a Winnie, though. And another little girl, Barbara. He listed both of them as abandoned near Pittsburgh."
"Lynnie has a lisp and couldn't say L's," Clare told the detective. "They always came out as W's. She couldn't even get out Thaddeus most of the time. It came out as 'Saddees'."
Everything Clare remembered about Lynnie was right and apparently she hadn't forgotten even the smallest detail about her sister. Amanda watched the former detective assimilate Clare's information which might have been in the original report. After all these years, Amanda wasn't sure what the police still had on file.
"There are a couple of things I want you to keep in mind," Grove counseled them. "When Brown's sister told the authorities about the journal and they obtained a warrant and confiscated it, she also told them that her brother changed the little girls' names. During the time they were with him, he gave them a new name—a name from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. So looking for Lynnie Thaddeus was a lost cause. What I did have were the Pittsburgh destinations and the possibility of four names—Beth, Meg, Amy and Jo. I checked dates of foster children coming into the system from Pittsburgh and surrounding locations. Although Brown's journal listed both drop-offs as June, I could only find one child who matched Lynnie's statistics—age, hair and eye color, height. Her name is Amy. No surname was recorded until after her adoption. She was placed with a foster family after she was abandoned at a shopping center. They eventually adopted her. The FBI is involved and I have legal roadblocks to deal with, sealed records, that kind of thing. But I'm making progress and I wanted you to know that. What I don't want to do is raise false hope. This might not be Lynnie. A DNA test will be the only way to find out. But it's something we've never had before. Something solid. And I thought you should know."
As Amanda glanced at Max, she saw the stunned look on his face. This was something he'd never expected. They'd never expected. Not in a million years. Clare looked...as if she were going to cry and Amanda could feel her daughter's emotion in her own throat.
Unable to stay in her seat, Amanda went to her daughter and knelt down beside her. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know. What if we go through all this and this girl, this woman, isn't Lynnie? What if she's so damaged—"
Max leaned forward in his chair. "Don't! Don't do this until we know more. You could ask yourself a thousand questions and not have any of the answers."
"How am I supposed to not ask the questions, Dad?" Clare's voice rose. "You didn't want me asking questions back then, either."
"Because I couldn't answer them," he said evenly, "just as I can't answer them now." Max focused on Grove. "Is the FBI helping you or getting in your way?"
"Helping. That journal opened everything up again. And police departments aren't isolated like they once were. But there's a lot of dust that's collected in twenty-seven years and we've got to get that all brushed away before we can find the truth."
"Is there anything I can do legally to help push this along?" Max wanted to know.
"No. Nothing. I want you to stay out of it."
"This is my daughter we're talking about."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Light brown hair, brown eyes, height and weight that seem to match isn't a whole lot to go on. But put it together with the dates and circumstantially everything seems to fit. Bottom line is you know as well as
I do that those puzzle pieces might not match."
Grove stood. "I'll let you know more when I know more."
Max's color was high. He speared his fingers through his hair and Amanda saw his frustration. She felt his frustration. But there was nothing she could do about it. Divorce changed everything. It had taken her too long to understand that. But she did now. She accepted it. It had taken her years to realize she could only change what was in her power to control.
"I'll see myself out," the detective said, obviously understanding their state of upheaval.
When Grove left her office, Max swore.
A tear ran down Clare's cheek.
As Amanda stood by Clare's chair and put her hand on her daughter's shoulder, she was filled with hope. She'd never believed Lynnie was dead, although reason, and Max and the world had told her over and over again to be realistic. Her reality had been different than everyone else's. Hope would be her life raft until they knew the truth.
Once they knew the truth, she wouldn't need a life raft...because she'd have Lynnie back home.
****
Chapter Two
"This is unusual. Since when do you sit in your backyard, alone at night, studying the stars?"
Startled, Clare's hand went to her chest until she recognized Joe Lansing's voice. She hadn't paid any attention to him for the first year he'd lived next to her in the west York neighborhood. Then she'd been forced to. One night he'd come to her door, his hazel eyes serious as he'd told her he was a member of the Army Reserve and he was being deployed again. His dad would be looking after his house on a regular basis, but Joe wondered if she'd keep an eye on it, too. A house standing alone for over a year at a time could use more than one watcher. He'd said it so easily and had been so laid back that she hadn't thought of refusing.
When Joe had returned from his stint in Afghanistan over six months ago, they'd discussed changes in the neighborhood. He'd told her he owed her for being his sentry and if she needed help with something, as simple as putting out the garbage, she should call him. She hadn't, of course. Clare and men simply didn't mix. Well, maybe they mixed, but the result of the experiment was usually damaging. So she hadn't called him until Shara's makeup swatches had clogged up the toilet. That had been last summer. Since then, they discussed the weather whenever they saw each other, or Joe's dad's health. He'd had a hip replacement after Joe had returned from Afghanistan.
They weren't friends, yet they were friendly. She knew much more about him than he knew about her, although she sometimes saw questions in his eyes.
"Did you ever feel claustrophobic inside your own skin?" she asked him now as he loomed over her in the darkness. She didn't usually like men to loom over her. It brought back memories of uniformed officers the night Lynnie had been taken. But Joe— His looming seemed more...protective.
"Did you ever feel so restless that if you sat, you couldn't stay sitting? That if you walked, you couldn't walk far enough? If you breathed, you couldn't feel the bottom of your lungs?" Now where had all that come from? He'd think she was a nutcase.
He sank down beside her on the redwood bench that accompanied the picnic table on the patio. He was a good six inches taller than she was, lean and fit. So lean and fit she usually took a second look if he wasn't watching. He was a landscape architect and a partner with his dad in a nursery. She knew any muscles he had didn't come from a gym. They came from hefting trees, rotating bushes, pushing carts loaded with supplies.
"I felt that way after I came back from Afghanistan."
She remembered seeing the lights on in his house very late, night after night. They'd never talked about the time he'd been away.
But right now she was glad for any subject that would distract her from what was really on her mind. "Were you in Afghanistan the whole time?"
He rested his hands on the bench and looked up at the sky. "I was."
"Were you hurt at all?"
"I was lucky to come home with just a little bit of shrapnel under my skin. Some buddies weren't so fortunate."
She thought about a man risking the life he'd made for his country. "Can you be called up again?"
"Possibly. But I might be out of the Reserve in six months. I have to decide if I want to re-up."
"It has to be hard to have your life interrupted."
He shrugged. "Usually life is a series of interruptions."
As he studied her, tendrils of the porch light's yellow beams reached for them in the yard, but didn't quite touch them. They sat in shadows. She was glad about that right now. If he could see her face, too much would show. She wouldn't be able to talk to him as a neighbor on a fall night if she thought he'd guess what was going on inside of her. She shifted, wiped her palms on her jeans, tried to think about something other than the information Grove had given her.
"Is something wrong, Clare?" Joe's voice was quiet, interested if she wanted to talk, but nonchalant if she didn't.
She was ready to give her usual answer, the one that would tell Joe nothing and keep a wall up between their lives. I'm fine. I'm just tired. I have something on my mind, but I'll work it out.
She made the mistake of turning toward him. There was concern on his face. Actual concern. She hadn't confided in anyone for longer than she could remember.
"Have you lived in York all of your life?" She thought he had, but she didn't know for sure.
"Except when I went to college."
"How old are you, Joe?"
His mouth twitched up at the corners. "I'm sure your questions are leading somewhere—" When she didn't come back with a jibe as she usually did, he replied, "I'm thirty-six."
He would have been nine when she was five. Too young, maybe...no way to know unless she asked. "Do you remember a child disappearing from Pine Hill a long time ago?" Pine Hill, a rural community, was located about five miles outside of York.
Joe looked blank for a moment. Then, as if old movies were playing in his mind, he murmured, "I remember conversation at dinner about a search for a little girl. My parents sat me down and gave me the lecture about not talking to strangers." His gaze searched her face. "Did that have something to do with you?"
"Lynnie was my sister. Someone took her from our house in the middle of the night. We brushed our teeth together. We said our prayers together. She gave me hugs and—" Clare rarely let emotion get the best of her. She'd already cried once today. She was not going to cry again.
"Clare."
He said her name so gently, so compassionately she had no choice but to stand up and head for the house.
But Joe was quick on his feet and clasped her arm.
She shook him off. "I'm fine."
"Like hell."
She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to figure out how to end this conversation and make her exit.
"You've been dealing with this a long time and never gave a hint of it. What happened to bring it up now?"
He was perceptive. Too perceptive. Maybe that's why she hadn't revealed much of herself to him before. Joe wasn't like the guys she'd dated...avoided...rejected. She couldn't even put her finger on why. She just knew distance was better than closeness, simple neighborliness better than any type of familiarity.
Still, she'd started this and she had to end it. "It really doesn't matter."
"Yes, it does. Why can't you talk to me? It's not as if we're strangers."
"Aren't we?" Her question wasn't argumentative, just realistic. "What do you really know about me? What do I really know about you? We're neighbors. We're not friends."
His expression transformed from concerned to blankly neutral. His eyes, so gentle moments before, became unfathomable. His broad shoulders stiff now, he gave a slight shrug. "You know a lot more about me than I know about you. Ever since I moved in, I wondered why you kept to yourself. Why the weather report was our only conversation. Now I know. Apparently, you shut people out when your sister was abducted, and you still do."
"Don't make assumptions about
me, Joe." The walls she'd constructed brick by brick shook a little. Her neighbor had that effect on her, and that's why she'd stayed away from him since his return.
Doing quick math he calculated, "You were eighteen when you had Shara."
"I was looking for love in all the wrong places," Clare quipped, wondering why he was bringing up her daughter.
"So her father wasn't your soulmate?"
If this was his way of fishing, she was going to cut the line. "There is no such thing."
The phone in her kitchen rang. Relieved and so grateful, no matter who was calling, she said, "I have to get that."
Joe made no comment as she hurried away from him. When she stepped inside her back door, her neighbor still stood by the bench.
Would he wait for her to come back outside?
He'd be waiting all night. She wouldn't return to their conversation again.
Yes, she shut people out...with really good reason.
She did not intend to get hurt.
No risk, no pain.
It was her motto to live by.
****
What was Brad Hansen's mo-ped doing leaning against the side of her house at one o'clock on a Monday afternoon? Clare asked herself as she parked in her carport.
She rarely missed work. Rarely took a sick day. Rarely asked for days off. But she'd arranged for someone to cover for her this afternoon because—
Because the impact of what Detective Grove had told them on Saturday was hitting her hard. Yesterday she'd been in a kind of shocked haze. Although she'd told Shara about the meeting, she couldn't talk to her daughter about Lynnie. It just hurt too much.
She'd hardly been at the hospital an hour this morning when the urge to delve into the old boxes in her closet with photos of Lynnie had been so strong that she'd decided just to take this afternoon to try and put the detective's news in perspective, maybe even brush off her bike and go riding until she was clearheaded again. Until she could push away the fear and anxiety of what they might find out about her sister.
Her Sister (Search For Love series) Page 2
