The Truth About Comfort Cove

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  The little town Ramsey had grown up in had been thriving once, back when the tobacco industry had still supported much of rural Kentucky. Today it was mostly inhabited by people like his folks who just wouldn’t leave.

  “Who’s the developer?” Ramsey asked, hoping that his father hadn’t already told him.

  “Same guy who built the big-box store outside of town.”

  “So maybe he’s providing housing for all the people who got jobs when the store came to town.”

  “Maybe. It wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Earl continued. “Kind of exciting, watching the thing go up from scratch. They dig down first, then pour the foundation and…”

  Earl went on to give Ramsey a blow-by-blow of the beginning of an apartment construction project, and Ramsey listened. Because Earl was his father. And he deserved to be listened to.

  “Sounds like you’re getting to know these guys,” he said when his father finally paused.

  “I offered to help out,” Earl said. “You know, odd jobs, if they need anything. I know just about everything about everything around here… .”

  His father sure didn’t need any extra cash. The farmer had done well for himself and his family. Well enough to be able to retire in comfort when no one wanted to buy tobacco anymore.

  “Maybe it’s time you get to know someplace new,” Ramsey said, knowing he was wasting his breath.

  “This is our home, son, mine and your mom’s. It’s familiar to her.”

  “Is it still, Dad? Does she know where she is?”

  “Of course she knows. She gets a little lost sometimes. Especially when something reminds her of Diane… .”

  “Everything there reminds her of Diane.”

  His slightly older sister had been the life of Vienna when she’d been in high school. She’d loved their little town. Had planned to get married and have enough babies to fill up the school.

  Until she’d fallen in love with Ramsey’s friend from nearby Greer, Tom Cook. And Ramsey had broken a promise to his mother. And Diane had ended up dead.

  “Our life is here,” Earl said. Just as he had every other time they’d had this conversation.

  “I know. It’s been good talking to you, Dad.”

  “You hear anything from Marsha?”

  “Not since the divorce. Alimony was paid in full a couple of years ago so we have no connection at all anymore.”

  “Jimmy Downs says he saw her over in Greer a couple of months back. Says she’s married to some banker there and has a couple of kids. Twins.”

  Jimmy Downs, owner of the gas station in town—one of America’s last full-service stations—talked too much.

  “I’m not surprised she moved back home,” Ramsey said. He was a cop. He knew exactly where she lived. He knew she’d remarried, too. And didn’t care. “She wasn’t happy in Massachusetts. Too cold for her.”

  Comfort Cove’s frigid winters hadn’t bothered his ex nearly as much as the chilly atmosphere inside their home had. His fault, according to her.

  “Think about Thanksgiving, will you?”

  “Yeah.”

  But they both knew he wouldn’t be home. Not for Thanksgiving. Or Christmas.

  “Don’t let the next time you visit be for a funeral, Ramsey.”

  “I have to go, Dad.”

  “Take care, son. I love you.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  Ramsey dropped the phone on his desk, thinking about funerals. And Vienna. His father might be a simple man living a simple life, but he knew how to put the hook in his son.

  Ramsey didn’t blame Earl.

  He just wished things were different.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “You ready, Ms. Hayes?” Detective Amber Locken stood next to Sandy at the one-way glass. Watching from the back of the small room, about two feet behind her mother, Lucy bit her lip. Sandy was sober. And she was on the brink of a breakdown.

  “I’m ready.” The tremor in her mother’s voice tore at Lucy. Sandy had been traumatized enough—too much for any woman to endure and find a way back to normal.

  “Okay, as soon as I give the signal, the curtain is going to open and you’ll see five men standing on numbered spaces. I need you to tell me if you recognize any of them. Then I’m going to ask you which one or ones you recognize. You’ll give me the number of the space the man is standing on. And then I’ll ask you where you know him from. I need you to tell me, as precisely as you can, where you remember seeing him and what he was doing at the time, got it?” Amber Locken, the Aurora, Indiana, detective in charge of the Sloan Wakerby case, spoke gently.

  With her hands clutched together, Lucy sank back against the far wall. She was an observer, not a participant. She couldn’t save Sandy this time. She needed to. She wanted to. But she couldn’t.

  She’d be here, though, ready to pick up the pieces. Get through this, Mama. I’m right here.

  Sandy’s trembling was visible from several feet away as

  Locken tapped on the window and the curtain slowly slid away, exposing five men, all around six feet tall, sixty years of age, white and muscled.

  Sandy bowed her head.

  Lucy knew that Sloan Wakerby was number four. When he’d first been brought in, she and a visiting missing-child cold-case detective, Ramsey Miller, had done their best to break the man. And just because a good lawyer could maybe prove that the fluid recovered by the hospital after Sandy’s rape was not up to court standards, could maybe get it thrown out of court, did not, in any way, prove that the man was not guilty of raping her mother and abducting her sister.

  Lucy wanted him dead.

  As soon as the piece of shit told them what he’d done with baby Allie. She prayed to God he sold the baby as opposed to… Black-market babies brought a hefty price—she knew that all too well since breaking the Buckley case eight years before.

  Sandy’s head was bowed, her eyes pointed at her feet.

  “Ms. Hayes? We need you to look through the window,” Detective Locken said.

  The good thing about black-market babies was that, once they made it to their homes, they were generally loved and adored and spoiled by the desperate couples who were willing to pay huge sums of money for children they couldn’t have on their own. Allie could be happy and healthy and just unaware that she had a family out there. A family whose lives had been irrevocably torn apart by her absence.

  “Ms. Hayes? Are you okay?” Amber sent Lucy another long glance.

  “Look up, Mama.” Lucy had agreed not to speak. If she influenced the ID in any way…

  But if there was no ID…

  Lucy watched, as her mother slowly raised her head.

  “Ms. Hayes. Do you recognize anyone there?”

  Sandy’s head jerked forward. And back. Her dyed blond ringlets moved up her neck and back down to the top of her lumbar.

  “I need you to speak, Ms. Hayes. Do you understand? We’re recording this session.”

  “Yes!” Sandy’s voice was loud. Too loud. “Yes,” Lucy’s mother said more calmly. “I do understand that you are recording this. My daughter told me what to expect. And no, she did not tell me what to say.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if she did, Ms. Hayes. Lucy had no way of knowing who would be in this particular lineup or on what space. You indicated, by a nod, that you recognized someone through the window, Ms. Hayes. Can you verify that?”

  “Yes. I… Yes.”

  Sandy’s voice lost any strength it had had.

  Get through this quickly, Locken. You don’t have much longer....

  “What number do you recognize?”

  Lucy held her breath. What if her mother’s memory played tricks on her? Sandy had tried so hard to forget. To survive.

  “Number four. I know him.”

  Lucy’s muscles gave way, weakening so much she had to sit down.

  “Who is he?”

  “The man who… He…”

  “It’s okay, Ms. Hayes. We’re here with you now. Tell us
where you know this man from.”

  “He…raped…me… .”

  Lucy was directly behind her mother, holding Sandy’s weight with her own. Locken would need more. The prosecutor would need more.

  But the ID had been made.

  Sandy needed Lucy now.

  R amsey had last night’s files on the nightstand and his laptop computer open and booted up on his chest when the phone rang Saturday night.

  “Lucy?” He pushed the call button the second he saw the

  long-distance number. “I expected your call hours ago.” As a favor to Lucy, a fellow missing-child cold-case detective, he’d flown from Massachusetts to Indiana to sit in on the interview when Wakerby had first been apprehended.

  “She ID’d him, but collapsed. I had to bring her straight home.”

  “That bad, huh?” Where was Lucy now? At home alone? Like he was?

  “Worse.”

  “Did seeing him spark any new memories?”

  “Not that she’s saying.”

  He wished he was there. And then wondered what in the hell he was doing. This was about the job. His life was about the job. Period.

  “I couldn’t get her to rest. Or to talk,” Lucy said. “She cried most of the afternoon and evening. And clung to me. I finally sedated her, Ramsey. I feel bad for doing it, but she was making herself sick.”

  “Her doctor gave you the pills for that reason, Lucy. No need to feel ashamed for using them.”

  “Maybe not.”

  But it was clear she did. And there wasn’t a damned thing that was going to change that.

  Ramsey knew all about the guilt that parents managed to instill in their offspring.

  “Give me another rundown of the case again.” He offered the one thing he had to give—the one thing she’d accept— professional expertise. “Start at the beginning.”

  They’d been through it all before. Ramsey had read the police report shortly after he’d “met” Lucy by phone when evidence he’d found in Peter Walters’s basement had had a possible link to her sister’s case.

  But they were cold-case detectives. They didn’t stop when they reached a dead end. Their job was to keep looking for the missing child. Until they found a link, a clue, an answer.

  “My mother was nineteen. A single mom living alone in Aurora with a six-month-old baby girl.”

  “Where was the father?”

  “Gone. Out of state. She didn’t know where. He’d split right after she had the baby. She got checks in the mail, though, randomly, with no return address. Various postmarks. She can’t remember where from.”

  “Seeing Wakerby today didn’t spark any of the memories she’d lost?”

  Lucy’s sigh was heavy. And deep. “No. Not consciously, at any rate.”

  He could picture her in the precinct room at the station, at her desk along the far wall—he’d only been to Aurora once and had never seen her home—in slacks and a blouse and blazer. As far as Ramsey could tell she wore the same kind of plainclothes “uniform” every day. Just like he did.

  “The memory lapse is understandable.” Something in her voice pulled the words out of him. “She suffered a horrendous trauma that night. Her mind is protecting her from what she can’t handle.”

  “I know. It’s just…so frustrating. I look at her and I know the answers are in there. And sometimes I think it’s not just the trauma blocking the memories. It’s the alcohol. If I could just keep her sober for enough days in a row to clear her head—”

  “She still might not remember.” Cold hard facts. Victims, especially emotionally sensitive ones, couldn’t survive without deleting particularly damaging images from their psyche. “And she’s been sober for a couple of months, at least,” he reminded her.

  Lucy had told him that her mother had been in rehab. When, or how many times, he had no idea. But she’d completed the inpatient program at least once fairly recently.

  “Okay, so, she leaves her job as a department-store cashier near a mall in Cincinnati on a Saturday afternoon in August, picks up Allie from the mall day care, drives to the bank to deposit her paycheck at the after-hours depository, drives back toward Aurora, stopping at a grocery store in Lawrenceburg.

  “She remembers getting Allie out of the car seat. She remembers standing in the baby-food aisle at the store. She remembers that the cashier was pregnant and she remembers that it was almost dusk when she pushed her cart, with Allie in the seat, out of the store. And then…nothing…” Lucy’s voice broke slightly.

  “The police report said that she was taken from the parking lot.” Ramsey jumped in with what he knew to keep her on track. “They think she made it to her car, because it was found with the door open.”

  “Right. It was a ’74 Ford Pinto. Lemon colored. With a dent in the left back fender, and the driver’s side front wheel well was rusted out. It had close to a hundred thousand miles on it and a half a tank of gas. Her mother, who’d gotten pregnant with her in high school and never married, had given it to her just before she found out my mom was pregnant and kicked her out of the house.”

  “Her mom lived in Aurora, too, right?”

  “Yeah. But she was in prison by the time Allie was born. She was drunk, ran her car off the road and into a yard, hit a six-year-old girl and then left the scene of the accident. The little girl later died. My grandmother got six to ten.”

  “Was she back in the picture when she got out? Did you ever know her?”

  “On and off. Prison roughed her up a bit. And she hung with some unsavory folks. Mama didn’t want her around me. Last I heard she was living in Florida with some guy. We don’t even get Christmas cards from her anymore.”

  Ramsey had been spoiled by all four of his grandparents growing up. And watched all four of them die, too. One at a time. As cancer and old age and too many years of hard work took their toll.

  “So the night of the rape…your mother was found, unconscious, on the bank of the Ohio River between Aurora and Rising Sun.”

  “Right. She couldn’t remember how she got there. But she kept describing a face. And hands. She remembered him touching her, but details of the attack were lost. She remembers him slapping her but has no idea how her arm got broken.”

  “And she has enough of a memory of the actual rape to convict him of it in case the judge throws out the DNA evidence.”

  “Yes.” Her voice broke again and silence hung on the line. Ramsey pushed aside his laptop, sat up and pulled on a pair of shorts.

  “But she has no memory of Allie at all. The baby was in the grocery cart, and then nothing.” Lucy’s exhaustion pulled at him.

  “I remember reading that Allie’s car seat was in the Pinto when they found the car abandoned in the grocery-store parking lot.”

  “Yes. But by the time Mama was found, the car had already been moved to a back lot at the police station. The store manager had called it in half an hour after Mama left the store because of it being unattended with the door wide-open.”

  “Police were on alert for her then, almost as soon as she’d been taken.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And when they found her, there was no sign of your sister.”

  “Right. Nothing. Not a diaper, or a shoe. Nothing. It was like she’d never been there.”

  “But then, they don’t think the rape took place where they found your mom.”

  “Right.”

  “We need Wakerby to tell us where he initially took your mother. We need to know where he raped her.”

  “I know. If we had a crime scene…”

  “We need to know what vehicle he put her in when he took her from the parking lot. Even the type of vehicle would be good.”

  If the rape had happened recently, they’d have surveillance tape to refer to.

  “I need my mother to remember something besides a slap and a face. I need to know what the walls looked like, if there were walls. And if not, I need to know that. What did the ground feel like beneath her? Was she in a
bed? On a floor? In a car? I need to know if there was more than one person and whether or not she heard Allie crying—”

  “All we need is a place to start,” Ramsey interrupted softly. Calmly. He couldn’t work the case officially. But there was nothing to stop him from using his professional skills to help if he could. “One piece of information inevitably leads to another.”

  “I know.”

  “So…how are you?”

  “Fine.”

  He stared out his bedroom window toward the fenced and very dark backyard that held nothing but a gas grill and lawn that was more dead than alive. “Rough day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m glad you called.”

  “Me, too.” Her tone told him what she would not. She needed a friend tonight.

  He couldn’t afford the temptation. And felt like a heel.

  His life in a nutshell.

  CHAPTER THREE

  M onday’s mail brought an invitation from Emma Sanderson and Chris Talbot. The pair were having a wedding and reception on a friend’s boat in Comfort Cove, Massachusetts, on Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend.

  The invitation bore a handwritten note from Emma, telling Lucy she’d really like her to be there.

  And while Lucy had only met the other woman a couple of times, sitting in on a case of Ramsey’s, this was one wedding she would not miss.

  Filling in the RSVP while sitting in her car, Lucy sealed her acceptance and tucked the envelope in the front pocket of her purse to be dropped into the outgoing mailbox at the station.

  The wedding wasn’t until the Saturday, so she’d be home to have the traditional holiday dinner with her mother on Thursday—hopefully Sandy would be coherent enough to do the cooking herself. Her mother’s cooking skills were much better than Lucy’s.

  And then she’d escape the rest of the painful weekend— Sandy hadn’t had a sober holiday yet—leaving her mother in the care of Marie Kolhouse, Sandy’s caregiver and best friend, whose salary was provided by Sandy’s emotional disability social security.

  Marie was a godsend. She got Sandy to her doctors’ appointments when Lucy couldn’t. She helped keep the house clean. Made sure Sandy had groceries.