The Truth About Comfort Cove

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  As she stood outside the store, people passed her, going into the store. Coming out. Car tires swerved as they pulled into parking places.

  It had been a Saturday, just like this one. Almost the same time of day.

  How had Wakerby gotten her mother and a baby into his car without anyone in the busy parking lot noticing?

  What had Sandy been thinking about? And when Wakerby showed up, how had she felt? Had she known right away that she was in danger? Had she been stronger then?

  Reports said that there’d been debris under her fingernails, as though she’d fought back.

  The Sandy Lucy knew would have fallen apart, but had her mother always been that way?

  Would a woman with no ability to cope have been able to have a baby alone, and work and care for the child?

  Sandy had done so.

  And what about Allie?

  “Are you okay, dear?” A gray-haired woman, sixty-five or so, stopped with a basket full of bagged groceries on her way out of the store. Her brow was creased with concern as she looked at Lucy.

  “Oh, yes, I’m fine,” Lucy said, moving over a couple of feet with her basket, out of the way of the door. “I’m…waiting for someone,” she said with a smile.

  The woman didn’t look quite convinced. But she went on her way. Lucy watched her load her groceries into the back of a Cadillac sedan and then waved as the woman drove past.

  So how had Allie felt that awful day? Had the baby sensed danger? Had she had any idea that her life was about to change irrevocably?

  Talk to me, Allie. Tell me about that day. Take me to you.

  Closing her eyes, Lucy focused on the young woman Sandy would have been. On the baby in the cart. She focused so hard she could almost see them there. And she waited.

  No huge lightning bolt flashed inside her mind. No voices spoke. But Lucy knew when it was time to move on. Walking out to her car with the basket, she imagined herself unloading groceries. She opened the driver’s side door.

  Why? Why was that door open with a baby in the cart? Wouldn’t Sandy have gone to the passenger’s side door first, strapped Allie into her car seat and then proceeded to the driver’s side?

  They’d found the car with the car seat intact, bearing no fingerprints but her mother’s and Allie’s, and the driver’s door open. Did that mean that Allie was already in the car when Wakerby appeared? Had her mother left her door unlocked as she got into the car? Lucy could picture the man yanking open her mother’s door, hauling her mother out of the car, but what about Allie? How did he contain her mother, who would have been frantic to protect Allie if nothing else, and get a child out of a car seat all without attracting attention?

  Or had Sandy had Allie in her arms, planning to sit in the driver’s seat and from there lift Allie into her car seat?

  Had Wakerby come upon her while the door was still open and hauled her, holding her baby, out of the car?

  Once he had them both, Sandy would have done anything he said to keep him from hurting Allie. Standing at her car door, Lucy could picture the whole thing. Wakerby had probably pulled up right next to her mother.

  “Get in the car without making a sound or your baby dies.”

  If he’d had Sandy in his grasp, while she had Allie in hers, what would Sandy have done?

  She’d have gotten in the man’s car.

  Lucy got into her own car. Pulled out the map she’d marked that morning with different colors highlighting different routes.

  Amber Locken was interested in the numbers they’d found written down among Wakerby’s things, too. She was pursuing different theories regarding them and some of the other things in that box, too. Like Lucy, Amber thought the numbers might be coordinates, but she was looking at Sloan Wakerby as a rapist, looking for other rapes that he could have committed. Thinking that if the numbers were map coordinates, they might lead her to another crime. And another woman.

  As Lucy drove, she kept young Sandy and six-month-old Allie focused in her mind. Tried to imagine how they might have felt that day. What they might have suffered.

  And she watched every inch of the road—in front of her and both sides. She had no idea what she was looking for. Just knew she had to look.

  She’d followed Amber’s theory and mapped the numbers they’d found in Wakerby’s things on an Aurora map, leading from the grocery store. But she wasn’t looking for another rape victim.

  She was in hell. Feeling the blows to her mother’s skin as if they were her own. Feeling desperate. Afraid.

  When had Sandy’s eyes swollen? At the beginning of her hours-long ordeal? Had she been nearly unconscious, nearly blinded, before the man had raped her?

  Or had those blows to her eyes come later? How conscious had she been when her arm had been broken?

  Lucy took the shortest route first, between the grocery store and the place where the numbers came together on the area map. The site was less than twenty miles from the parking lot she’d left.

  “In point four miles, turn right.” Bonnie’s voice sounded foreign in the car.

  And Lucy didn’t see any road upon which to turn.

  She slowed, ready to take up one of her regular pastimes and argue with Bonnie, but at the last second, she saw the dirt road to her right. It was hard to believe the strip of tire marks would be on a GPS system, or even on a map.

  Lucy inched her way around the corner, watching intently. Right. Left. For a ditch. A mark on a tree. Anything that might give her indication of life, twenty-five years earlier in time.

  “Drive point six miles and arrive at destination, on right.”

  Keeping her car at less than five miles per hour, Lucy approached the unknown. Bare, gnarly branches entangled so tightly she couldn’t see where one tree began and another ended, forming a canopy above her. Dried-out remnants of the glorious oranges and reds and yellows of the fallen leaves covered the ground and most of the track upon which she drove. Clearly no other car had been on the road in a while.

  She rounded a corner, about three-tenths of a mile from her destination. The road grew darker. She imagined Sandy there, knowing what had to be coming in her near future. Fearing for her baby’s life.

  Had Allie been crying then?

  Had she still been with them?

  Had she ever been with them?

  In her mind’s eye Lucy saw her favorite picture of the sister she’d never known, taken just a week before the abduction. The baby had been dressed in a red dress with white stars and underneath had been white pantaloons. Her cheeks were chubby and so were her arms. They were reaching out toward someone—Lucy knew that someone was Sandy. And the look of pure joy on that baby’s face, the smile, had been with Lucy all of her life.

  Picturing that baby here, picturing her mother here, knowing what had happened to Sandy, being unable to prevent it, hurt so badly she wasn’t sure she could bear the pain. Wasn’t sure she could continue.

  She couldn’t make it better. Not for any of them.

  Tears filled her eyes and she ignored them as they spilled over and ran slowly down her cheeks. She couldn’t help them, either.

  “Arriving at destination.”

  Oh, Bonnie, do you have any idea where you’ve brought me? And what happened here?

  What might have happened there. She had no idea at all if those numbers were coordinates. And if they were, what map they were coordinates for.

  But the numbers meant something. Something more than another rape. Wakerby had been adamant about not “doing babies.” Had something happened with Allie? Something important enough that Wakerby had written down map coordinates so he could make it back to this spot?

  Was there something of Allie’s here?

  Was this just a memory for him? Maybe one of the few good memories in his life?

  Or were the numbers significant in some other way entirely?

  Getting out of the car, Lucy wiped her eyes, but couldn’t stop the moisture from filling them right back up.

&nbs
p; It wasn’t completely night yet, but it was dark enough that she had her flashlight out and was shining it in an arc in front of her. She turned, and arced again. And again. Standing completely still, she surveyed the area, afraid that if she moved, she might somehow destroy evidence. She realized that the thought was ludicrous. She’d just driven on the land she was standing on.

  And twenty-five years of weather, rain and snow included, would have long ago washed away any evidence that might have been present. She took a few steps. And a few more, her eyes dry now as she concentrated.

  She knew what to look for. Anything out of the ordinary. Anything that didn’t seem right. Anything disturbed from its natural state.

  Darkness was falling rapidly and she was out in the middle of nowhere, presumably on private land, though she’d seen no fences or signs marking it so. Someone had trenched a road out here. Someone had seen that the road made it on a map. Maybe there was a house down at the end of the road. Maybe an address that would have been recorded for postal delivery.

  She felt like Sandy and Allie were right there with her, but knew that feeling was more a consequence of the afternoon she’d put herself through than any kind of intuition.

  She also knew that the best way to solve a crime was to get inside of it. To be able to figure out what happened, she had to understand what people were thinking. Feeling. She had to know what drove them to do what they did.

  Leaves crunched beneath her feet. And something rustled off to her right. She wasn’t all that far from Aurora. It wasn’t as though there were bears in the area.

  There were deer. And skunks and porcupines and…

  Had someone seen her drive in? A female all alone? Had they followed her?

  Hand on her gun, Lucy continued to look around. Maybe she could have waited to make this trek, but waited how long? Wakerby was talking to his lawyer on Monday. She had no faith that the D.A. would deny a deal. And if a deal was made, Wakerby could be out on bail by Monday night.

  Another noise, more than just the wind whistling through the branches, stopped her for a second. She could go back. The car was only thirty feet away. But she was with Sandy all day on Sunday. And Monday she started five shifts—two evening rotations to allow her to be at home with Sandy for Thanksgiving dinner—and then it was off to Comfort Cove for Emma’s wedding.

  She couldn’t wait another eight or nine days to check these coordinates.

  She wasn’t leaving.

  She heard more rustling and almost changed her mind. Until her light passed over a turkey hurrying through the brush toward the road. Presumably to get away from her—the human who’d disturbed its Saturday-evening repose.

  Walking on, Lucy shined her light first in front of her and then, turning, behind her, studying every inch of the ground she passed from both angles.

  She felt as if she had to pee, but knew she was just scared. About twenty minutes into the trek, she was studying a mound of earth and tripped over a tree root. Her hands came out in front of her, the flashlight flying out of her grasp as she broke her fall, but her left hand slid on the leaves and she came down hard with her chin on another part of the root. Or a different root.

  She couldn’t be sure. She just knew that her head was spinning, her mouth was bleeding where she bit her tongue and her chin stung. Lying still for a moment, Lucy took stock of herself enough to know that nothing was so severely damaged that she couldn’t move.

  Slowly, gingerly, she sat up. To face the mound of earth that was now right in front of her. There was something odd about the mound, which was what had stolen her attention to begin with, causing her to miss seeing the root she’d tripped over. Grabbing her flashlight, and still sitting down, she scooted closer to the mound of earth.

  It wasn’t new earth. Wasn’t disturbed earth. But it was different earth. The entire foot and a half round piece of earth not only hilled up slightly, but it was covered in a thick growth of moss. Not roots. Not the dry, long strands of grass that covered the rest of the earth around her, but moss.

  She hadn’t seen any other moss in the area and shined her light around just to make sure.

  At the same time, she remembered reading once about how things being buried below the surface of the ground affected what grew on top of the ground, which was one reason why topography could change from one inch to the next even under the same sky with the same weather in the same climate.

  Dizzy, with a wet and stinging chin—bleeding, she suspected—Lucy figured that she was in over her head. She was supposing based on need, not on fact, or evidence. And she couldn’t let it go.

  Some part of her recognized that she was losing it as she clawed at the dirt. She knew, on some level, as she felt the dirt and growth beneath her nails, that she should stop. She should get in her car, drive home, take a hot bath and go to bed. Or call someone for help.

  What kind of help she wasn’t sure. Didn’t matter. She had to dig. She had to do this herself.

  Didn’t matter what her mind told her. Didn’t matter if she looked crazy. If she was crazy.

  She couldn’t stop. Her fingers dug. She hurt all over. She was aware of her own cries in the darkness. And she couldn’t slow her arms down.

  Tasting blood, but driven from the inside out, Lucy continued to dig. She’d tire herself out. Satisfy herself that she’d done all she could do. She’d drive away and no one would ever know that for a short time on a Saturday night in November she’d taken leave of her senses.

  Several minutes later, she was still digging, stopping only long enough to take off her scarf, place it over her chin and tie it at the back of her neck. Pulling her gun out of her holster, she used the butt to get through some rock. Something caused that moss to grow, and Lucy had to know what it was.

  Maybe an underground trickle of water. A leak in the water table? Was such a thing possible? Probably not.

  She kept digging. With both hands. When the hole got too deep for her to reach sitting up, she lay down on her belly. Her cell phone dug into her hip bone. She didn’t care. She dug.

  The back end of her pistol was covered in dirt. She didn’t care. She dug.

  Time passed and she had no idea how late it had grown. Or how early it might be. Her head throbbed. Her chin stung. She still tasted blood. And she dug.

  She hadn’t found anything yet.

  She had to find something.

  Had to find what made that moss grow.

  She was crying. Her tears were dripping off the end of her nose into the dirt. They made her face itch but she couldn’t scratch. Her hands were caked with dirt. The tips of her fingers had grown numb. And she just couldn’t stop.

  And then she did. With her right hand, Lucy scooped down as far as her arm would go, scooping out the next handful of dirt, and scraped her knuckles on something hard. And sharp. And crusty.

  A rock, she first thought. Turning her hand, she felt the object with blistered and bleeding fingers. And froze. Lucy’s head fell to the earth, catching on the opening of the hole she’d dug, stopping there as her arm hung in the ground. She couldn’t pull up the object in her fingers. And she couldn’t let go.

  She wasn’t sure what she held, at least not on a conscious level. Her whole body was shaking. Her heart pounded and she was breathing like she’d run a marathon. After a couple of minutes of lying still, she gave a tug. The object gave way and Lucy brought it to the surface.

  A bone.

  She’d known. Maybe. The second her fingers felt the aged piece of calcium in the ground.

  But she didn’t want to know. It was probably an animal bone. Something that died long, long ago.

  Maybe even a dinosaur bone.

  Sitting up, the piece of bone still in her hand, Lucy stared into the hole. She couldn’t dig any farther without a tool.

  And through the fog surrounding her mind, she had the thought that she probably shouldn’t do anything more, anyway. Just in case this was a crime scene.

  She should never have distur
bed a crime scene.

  Looking down, she stared in the darkness at the fragment in her hand. She tried to loosen her fingers, to see if she could tell anything about the bone—what kind of bone, from what kind of creature—but she couldn’t let go. Tears dripped onto her fist. She didn’t want to wet the evidence.

  With her left hand, Lucy reached for her cell phone. Pushed a button. Listened to the ringing.

  “Aurora Police.”

  “This is Detective Hayes.” It didn’t sound like her.

  “Yes, Detective, I recognize your cell-phone number.”

  Lucy should know who she was talking to. She didn’t.

  “Can you please put me through to Captain Smith?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Are you all right, ma’am?”

  “I’m fine, just—”

  The ringing on the line as the dispatcher connected her interrupted Lucy’s sentence.

  The phone crackled and she jumped. “Smith.”

  “Lionel? This is Lucy.”

  “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

  Oh, God, she didn’t know. Yes, she knew. No. No, she didn’t.

  “Ping my cell, Lionel. I’m in the woods. I have a bone. And my head hurts… .”

  She got the pertinent stuff out. Then, hanging up, she sat there in the dark, clutching the bone. Prepared to wait.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  R amsey drove home from Boston with one thought on his mind. Calling Lucy Hayes. He’d had a long day. An up and down day. A good day in some ways. And still, he thought about Lucy.

  He was changing. He wasn’t happy about that. But he wasn’t fighting it, either. He knew better than to fight the inevitable. Best just to prepare to survive it.

  This “thing” with Lucy would be short-lived. She’d made it clear she wanted nothing more than a professional relationship. That’s all he wanted or had time for. That was all he’d trust himself to entertain. They lived several states apart. As soon as they solved the cases they shared an interest in, they’d wander off in other directions and lose touch.