“This is just part of it.” He sat down. “The whole case file’s about ten jackets this thick, mostly tips and dead ends and stuff that doesn’t mean anything.” He opened the folder. “Here’s the first story.”
He slid a large clipping across the desktop.
My childhood face, and my sister’s, smiled back at me. We leaned together, arms around each other, her hair light, mine dark. We wore pants and tee shirts. The caption read Catherine and Stephanie Dawson in a photo taken last week.
I didn’t realize how long I’d been staring at the picture until Steckling said, “A real tragedy, huh?”
“Yes.” My voice was a dry rasp. “It’s a tragedy.”
He placed more clippings in front of me. In another picture a couple clung to one another, their faces distorted by crying. Barbara and John Dawson plead for the return of their daughters.
The mother—it was so hard, even now, to think of her as my mother—had the dark hair I recalled, but John Dawson’s hair wasn’t the pale blond I’d expected, the hair my sister had inherited. It looked light brown, or sandy, like Luke’s.
I touched the faces with a fingertip. Vague images swam into my mind. I’d pushed open a door in my memory, just a crack. I watched him yank dresses from her hands, from a half-filled suitcase, and slap the hangers back over the closet rod. Clink, clink. Metal on metal.
“You said you wanted to know about the effect on the parents?”
Steckling’s voice brought me back to the present. The memory dissolved.
“Yes.” I pushed the clipping aside, out of my line of vision. “I thought I might like to talk to them.”
“Well, I’m afraid you can’t talk to him because he’s dead.”
The shock was swift, deep, and left me momentarily speechless.
Steckling went on, “He killed himself a couple years after the girls disappeared.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed.
The detective nodded. “It never was officially ruled a suicide, but I always thought it was. Shot himself in the head while he was cleaning his hunting rifle. This guy was a hunter since he was a kid, he knew guns, he knew gun safety. That wasn’t any accident. But the insurance company couldn’t prove suicide, so they had to pay for accidental death.”
I licked my dry lips. “But why did he do it? Was it grief?”
“More like a guilty conscience, if you ask me.”
“A guilty conscience? Over what?”
“My theory was, he took the girls and killed them.”
“You’re not serious.” The words came out on a burst of astonished laughter.
Steckling started to speak, changed his mind, then changed it again. He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “I’ll tell you something we never did make public. This is confidential, you understand? But if you’re going to talk to the mother, you probably ought to know about it.”
He meant what he’d said. He thought our father killed us. But it was absurd, it was crazy. Caught up in these thoughts, I wasn’t braced for what he said next.
“John Dawson wasn’t the younger girl’s real father.”
I stared at him.
“That came out when I questioned them. We always start with the family, any time we get a crime like this, and no witnesses. Dawson just broke down and spit it out, said he wasn’t Stephanie’s father. He left Barbara for a while when he first found out. Then they got back together on condition they’d move to a new town and start fresh. They came to St. Cloud when Stephanie was a few months old. Dawson sold insurance, he got a transfer to the St. Cloud office.”
“Who—” My voice was so weak I barely heard it myself. I took a breath and started over. “Who was Stephanie’s real father?”
Steckling shrugged. “That, I never could get out of them. I really leaned on them, I even threatened to charge them for withholding evidence, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. Dawson swore he didn’t even know for sure who it was, and Barbara said it was somebody who was long gone.”
I gave my head a slight shake, trying to clear it. I had to be careful what I said, had to avoid questions that betrayed too much knowledge. “What made you think John Dawson was capable of murdering both girls?”
“Stranger things have happened, I’ll tell you. A man finds out his wife’s been carrying on an affair with another man, had a kid by him, he broods about it, starts thinking maybe the other one’s not his either. Hell, who knows? Maybe she wasn’t.”
A clutch of pain deep inside almost made me cry out a protest. Maintaining a calm, interested expression took all my self-control. “Did he tell you he thought neither girl was his?”
“No, but that’s no proof he didn’t think it. And even if he believed Cathy was his, he could’ve killed her too just to get back at his wife. People that do things like that, sometimes their motives are pretty twisted. Of course, he claimed he loved them both, and he swore he never treated Stephanie any different. But if you ask me, that’d be damned hard for a man to do under the circumstances, treat her like she was his.”
“You never found any evidence against him,” I said, and wished I’d made it sound like a question instead of a flat statement of fact.
“No. We watched him real close, but he was careful. He never led us anywhere.”
Because there was nowhere to lead you. “How did they act after the disappearance? What was it like for them?”
“Well, Barbara, the mother, she blamed herself for leaving them on the playground.”
“They were so young,” I murmured. Did I really remember her walking away, leaving us behind, or had my imagination supplied the desolating picture? “To be left alone like that.”
Steckling sighed. “Well, she wouldn’t have won any mother of the year awards, that’s for sure. What I think—well, what I know—is Barbara Dawson was depressed, real bad depression, over a lot of things. Look what happened to her. An affair, a baby that wasn’t her husband’s, a breakup with the baby’s father, a separation from her husband, leaving a job she liked, moving from the Twin Cities up here where she didn’t know anybody. She was pretty low, she admitted it.”
“So depressed that she neglected her children.”
“I think she took pretty good care of them most of the time. But I guess she needed to get away from them for a few minutes now and then. So she left them where she thought they’d be okay and she went off by herself. Just careless, like I said.”
A careless moment that changed so many lives.
“How did John Dawson behave afterward?”
“Oh, he was really determined to punish his wife. Kept telling her it was her fault, she couldn’t be trusted. He said that right in front of me more than once. The more I heard, the more convinced I was that he did it himself, to hurt Barbara. It was brutal, some of the things he said to her.”
I recalled, with exquisite precision, the sensation of smothering when I pulled my pillow tight over my head to block out their quarreling voices in the next room.
Sour bile rose to burn my throat. I swallowed. “Couldn’t he account for himself, where he was when they disappeared?”
“He always claimed he was working in his office all afternoon, up to when his wife called him—she called him before she called us—but the only other person he worked with was a secretary, and she was on vacation. So, no alibi.”
What would this man say if I told him the truth? My father didn’t kill anyone. Look at me. I’m right here in front of you, and my sister is sitting in a classroom in Washington. He wouldn’t believe me. He might be very hard to convince.
I said, “How would you have identified the girls if you’d found them?”
“Decomposed bodies, you mean? Well, we had up-to-date dental records. General descriptions, hair color. Hair lasts a long time, even when there’s nothing else left but a skeleton. We lifted fingerprints from their room, but that wouldn’t do much good unless we’d found the bodies early enough—” He broke off with a shrug.
I looked d
own at my hands. Fingerprints. The never-changing stamp of identity. I could prove who I was whenever I was ready.
“What happened to Barbara after John Dawson’s death?”
“It took her a while to pull herself together,” Steckling said. “She was still in pretty rough shape when her husband died. It was tough on her. But she put her life back together.”
“How do you mean?”
“She sold the house here, moved back to Minneapolis and—”
“Minneapolis?” I said sharply.
“Yeah. She got a job at the same place she’d worked at before.”
“Where was that?” I poised my pencil over my pad, realizing I had yet to write anything down.
“A law firm. One of those big ones with a dozen names. I don’t remember—Let me look here.” He turned to the front of the thick folder, where a sheet of paper was stapled to the inside of the cover. “Here it is. Jensen, Dubie, Goddard, and Brown. Well, I guess that’s not a dozen names, it just seems like it.”
My hand reached reflexively for my bag, where I carried the accident story that gave Michael Goddard’s place of employment. Jensen, Dubie, Goddard, and Brown.
I drew my hand back to my lap, anchored my fingers around the notepad. “She worked there.”
“Yeah, she was a legal secretary. Good one too, I guess, to work in a firm like that. She told me she was going back to work for one of the senior partners. He’d had three or four secretaries since she left and hadn’t been satisfied with any of them.”
“Is she still living in Minneapolis?”
He nodded. “Far as I know. She kept in touch for a long time, called regularly. She had this idea the girls might somehow find their way back home, and she wouldn’t be here for them. Well, I knew they were dead, I was always sure of that, but I’d talk to her, listen to her. She always wanted me to know what was going on with her.”
“What was going on?”
“She got married again after a few years. Had two more kids, one right after the other. She was getting close to forty, and she said she wanted to hurry before it was too late.”
In all my imaginings, I hadn’t considered the possibility that my sister and I had been replaced, that our mother had another family now. She hadn’t simply waited for us to return.
“How old are they?” I said. “The children.”
“Teenagers, fourteen, fifteen. A girl and a boy.”
My half-sister, half-brother. “Do you know their names?”
Steckling narrowed his eyes at me. “You ought to talk to Barbara about all that, see if she wants to get into it. Call her first, ask her if she’s willing to talk to you. I wouldn’t go knocking on her door without being invited.” He smiled, and suddenly looked a decade younger. “But you don’t strike me as somebody who’d do that anyway.”
My answering smile was automatic. “No, I wouldn’t.”
Then he said, “Caroline and Mark, that’s their names. The girl’s the older one. The boy’s named after his father. Mark Junior.”
“What’s their last name?”
“Olsson.” He spelled it, then laughed. “Easy to remember. A million of them in Minnesota.”
I produced another smile.
“You’ll be careful how you approach Barbara, won’t you?” he said. “She’s always been pretty willing to talk about it, but this business about her husband not being Stephanie’s father—”
“I’ll be careful.” I added what I thought he wanted to hear. “I won’t let her know that you told me. If she doesn’t bring it up, I won’t either.”
“I’ll give you her home number.” He reached into his shirt pocket for a small notepad, consulted the sheet stapled inside the folder on the desk, jotted her name and number. He tore the page from the pad and held it out, with no idea of what he was giving me.
My fingers closed round it.
“You want copies of these newspaper stories?” he said.
“Yes, thank you.”
While a clerk did the copying, Steckling brought us coffee in Styrofoam cups, and we chatted about the weather differences between the Washington area and Minnesota. A couple of times I noticed him looking at my scar, but he never asked about it.
Chapter Twenty-six
For a long time I sat behind the wheel of the rental car in the lot next to police headquarters, watching the late afternoon sunlight slowly recede along the rows of vehicles. The folder full of newspaper articles peeked from underneath my bag on the passenger seat, both luring and repelling me.
I wanted to devour every word, follow my parents through the days after my sister and I disappeared into Judith Goddard’s life. Yet I wondered how much more of their anguish I could bear to learn about and share. The things I’d heard from Steckling left me feeling battered and threatened. A few steps farther and the quicksand of the past would be sucking at my feet.
I could stop this now. Go home to Luke. To my sister.
I dismissed the thought as soon as it formed. I was here, so close. I had to go on. I reached into my bag and pulled out the St. Cloud map I’d bought at the Twin Cities airport.
The street we’d lived on at the time of the abduction was three or four miles from police headquarters. I drove toward it. Now and then some detail jumped out at me from the ordinary streets—a dry cleaner’s sign, a grocery store parking lot, an ancient gnarled oak tree—and I had the sensation that I was driving through the landscape of a half-remembered dream.
When I saw our house, I knew it. It was different, yet the same. A siding-covered house in a middle-class neighborhood, on a narrow lot of maybe a quarter acre. Smaller than my vague memory of it, but then I’d been seeing it through the distorted lens of a child’s perception.
The house was still white, the shutters still black, but now the door was bright red. Someone had cared enough to bring the small front lawn to perfection, a smooth unbroken green in contrast to the half-bald yard I remembered playing on. Low dahlias bloomed in beds along the walk leading to the door. The clear bright colors made me think of Mother’s gardens, and the blossoms I’d hacked to bits.
I parked at the curb across the street and sat there until a group of children in a nearby yard noticed me. When I glanced at them, I saw small bodies pulling closer together, suspicious eyes trained on me. They’d been taught to be wary of strangers.
I searched up and down the surrounding streets, first close in, then farther and farther away, my frustration growing. The playground was gone. Something had replaced it, but I couldn’t be sure if it was the small fire station that looked relatively new or the block of townhouses with scrawny trees lined up in front.
I told myself it didn’t matter. Seeing the playground again wasn’t necessary. Yet I felt as if I’d lost a vital piece of the puzzle that was my life. Strangers had obliterated the very spot where my universe altered in an instant.
Reluctantly abandoning the search, I stopped at a fast food restaurant and went in for a cup of coffee. The hot greasy smell of fried chicken made me realize I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, when Luke badgered me into finishing a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice.
Luke. How far away he seemed.
I ordered a chicken breast and a salad to go with my coffee and sat down to eat, marveling that appetite persisted in the face of calamity.
***
There was no point in rushing back to Minneapolis. I needed time to absorb what I’d discovered and decide what to do next. As dusk faded to night, I checked into a motel. I took a long steamy shower and pulled on my comfortingly familiar terry cloth robe.
I stood at the window for a while and watched the trucks and cars that rolled past on the highway, their long beams piercing the dark and just as quickly vanishing into it again. No one, not even Luke, knew where I was.
When I felt I was ready, I drew the curtains closed. I pulled the chair from the room’s small desk, sat next to the bed and opened the folder I’d placed there. I arranged the newspaper clippings in order o
f their dates, gradually covering the surface of the pale green bedspread.
I picked up the stories one by one and followed my parents on their odyssey through a landscape where all that was right and normal had taken on terrifying forms. Tearful pleas. Neighbors questioned. A man on the next block with a history of molesting girls, briefly under suspicion, cleared when his alibi was confirmed. Hints, then blunt statements that John Dawson was a suspect.
I lingered over the only story that was about my sister and me rather than the distress of the adults around us. Cathy and Stephanie Dawson had been inseparable. Cathy, so young herself, watched over her little sister. They were good girls, sweet and bright and lively children.
Two weeks before the abduction, Stephanie had turned three. She’d had a small party and received a bike with training wheels. Cathy’s fifth birthday came four days after the girls disappeared. Her gifts remained unopened on a closet shelf.
Mother had given my sister a second birthday celebration that first year we were with her, while my real birthday was ignored and the celebration put off for months. Some memory of that had stayed with me, causing ripples of vague resentment and a sense of loss.
When I’d read all the clippings, I dug into my bag for the photocopied story about the Goddards’ accident and the note on blue paper I’d taken from Mother’s study. I smoothed the three sheets of paper and laid them on the bed in their proper place, at the beginning, first the note, then the accident report.
I believed I knew most of the story now. I could put it together in a way Detective Steckling never could, because he would always be missing a vital piece.
Barbara Dawson had an affair with Michael Goddard when they worked at the same law firm, he a young partner, she a secretary. She became pregnant. Her husband found out about the affair and left her.
Why hadn’t she gone to Michael, why hadn’t they begun a life together? Because he was already married to Judith, who was also pregnant with his child. Perhaps he rejected Barbara’s claim on him, made it clear she and her child would never be part of his life.
The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 25
