Текст книги "Shattered Secrets"

Автор книги: Karen Harper

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

10

Tess ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for an early lunch, then did something she knew she shouldn’t. While pacing from the kitchen to the living room as she had while she’d eaten, she poured herself a glass of wine and downed it fast. Then she realized Gabe would smell it on her breath, or if she drove erratically and he or his deputy picked her up—but no, they must be busy with the Kenton case.

She drove carefully, wondering whether to try the gift shop or the police station first. She should have called Gabe and let him come to her, but she didn’t want him to think she’d remembered something big. Maybe the books Miss Etta had left would trigger something.

About ten media people more or less camped out near the gazebo on the town square with two satellite trucks parked nearby. It was enough to make her turn back, but she only ducked her head and hurried into the station—unnoticed, she hoped.

She saw Ann on the front desk again. Three strapping men in jeans and flannel shirts waited nearby, talking among themselves. Had Gabe found a suspect, or arranged some sort of lineup? Not for her to view, she hoped, but then they were all too young to have had anything to do with her abduction.

Ann got off the phone and spoke to the men. “You’ll have to go without me, bros. Too much going on here. Hi, Tess. The sheriff’s in the conference room if you need to see him again. How was the waterfall? It’s one of Gabe’s and my favorite places.”

Tess could have fallen through the floor. Ann and Gabe—together—that way? She’d had no idea, but she could tell the three men did. Ann’s brothers might be triplets since they looked like clones of each other. She overheard a few teasing remarks about Ann and Gabe, including something about “the sheriff of Hot Creek.”

“I suppose,” Tess said, suddenly having trouble forming her thoughts. “Did the sheriff tell you about the graffiti we went to see? If you would tell him I’m here, I’d appreciate it.”

Ann nodded but narrowed her eyes. “These are my brothers, triple trouble. They work at the lumber mill just outside town, and they can’t get it through their wooden heads I’m totally tied up with this case right now and have to miss our weekly pub lunch. Just ignore them.”

Ann’s brothers resembled Paul Bunyan–type lumberjacks. They hardly seemed the type for the English pub, but then appearances were often deceiving.

Tess nodded, but she could hardly ignore what she’d just learned. Gabe and Ann were seeing each other. Yet he’d kissed her, held her. Some sort of magnetic force pulled them together. But—had that just been her imagination? Or had Gabe been cleverly coercing information from her?

Frowning, Ann punched a button and spoke into the phone. “Tess Lockwood’s here. Want me to send her back or have her wait? I figured. He’s coming out to get you,” Ann said even as Gabe appeared in the hall and gestured for her to come back. He met her partway and took her elbow.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I just wondered what you’d uncovered so far—if that might spark something in my molasses-thick thoughts. And Marian Bell’s friend Erika Petersen stopped by with a cash offer for my house—if I meet with Marian to help her find her daughter.”

“Clever move since I told Marian to steer clear of you. I didn’t take out a restraining order but threatened to. But I still can’t blame—”

“Me either. Blame her. I guess I’d move heaven and earth to get my girl back.”

Tess thought again of Lee and Gracie in that religious group. They wanted to help their kids, but as far as she was concerned, they were actually endangering them.

“I kind of got the idea just now that Ann considers you her very close friend,” Tess blurted out.

“We’ve dated, but I’m not as close to any next steps as she—and her band of brothers—like to think.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding stupid to herself. This was not only the wrong time and place for that talk, but truly none of her business. Except for that kiss.

“Want to see Victor Reingold after all this time?” Gabe asked. “We were just going over things, so maybe you can help—and if not, fine. Anything else new?”

“I’ll see him. Like I said before, though his hard work didn’t locate me, I’ve always been grateful to him, and Mom was too. But nothing else is new.”

She almost told Gabe about the screams at the Hear Ye compound. It was like lying to him not to, but she’d tell him later, if she was sure he and Agent Reingold wouldn’t go in there like gangbusters. Or maybe they’d tell her something so that she could explain her suspicions to them. Maybe it would be better if she went back in there without law enforcement.

Gabe walked her down the hall, past his deputy’s office and his own to the last room before the door that said Detention. It had a big lock and a grated window high on the door, so it must be the jail cell.

“Vic, you remember Tess Lockwood,” Gabe said as they entered a big conference room.

“Sure do, but not looking like that,” Vic said as he got up to come around the table.

It was what Tess could only call a war room. Kate had taken her to London for a week a few years ago, and they’d seen Winston Churchill’s World War II war rooms deep underground. This was similar to what they’d seen there—wall maps with lines of yarn stuck in with pins on bulletin boards, piles of papers, strewn photos. But here, two laptops sat on the table.

Agent Reingold walked closer, limping. Had he always limped?

“Hey, my favorite survivor,” he said, his voice gruff. The man had tears in his eyes. He held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders and studied her. “You look great, Ter—Tess.”

“You too, Agent Reingold.”

“Hey, no little white lies now,” he said, making her feel guilty again as he pulled out a chair for her and Gabe sat beside her. Agent Reingold made his way back around the table. “We appreciate your trying with Gabe—to remember anything,” he added hastily. “And you can call me Vic, since we go way back, okay?”

“Okay, sure. I don’t mean to intrude, but I thought if I knew about Sandy Kenton’s clues—disappearance—it might make me remember something, if, that is, it’s not privileged information.”

“What is privileged, we’ll keep quiet,” Gabe said, “but we’ve scheduled a news conference in about half an hour in the town square. You might want to keep a low profile until the media scatter—if that even gets rid of them. Then we could walk down the alley if you want to see the storage room the girl disappeared from, but it’s a far cry from a cornfield.”

A far cry, echoed in Tess’s head. She heard again that girl’s screams from that Hear Ye building, even heard her own scream years ago before the monster came and darkness descended.

“That would be fine,” she said.

“You can just wait here,” Gabe said. “It does appear Sandy might have known her abductor, because she evidently walked a ways outside with him—or her—before getting in a vehicle. We figured that out from using a tracker and his dog. I’m not sure you ever knew this, Tess, but when you were taken, Sam Jeffers and one of his tracking dogs followed your scent through the cornfield. When the hound lost the trail, we tried to go by where the corn looked pushed aside or disturbed.”

Disturbed. Why hadn’t Gabe, her mother—someone—ever told her they’d tried to track her before? They’d tried to protect her when facing memories might have been better. She was desperate to face—and recall—them now.

“Also,” Vic said, “when the dog lost your scent—probably because you were then being carried—we tried to lift the hound to see if he could catch your scent off cornstalks or hanging ears you might have brushed against. No go.”

“A minute ago you referred to my abductor as him or her. Do you think it could have been a woman?”

“Standard procedure,” Vic said. “We assume it’s a man, but we don’t know for sure. A young girl’s taken, then people jump to conclusions. But you came back physically intact, Tess, and that’s hardly ever the case if a man takes a young girl.”

Not raped, he meant. Yet she’d been drugged and beaten. But how that happened or by whom was long gone.

Leaning closer to her, Gabe said, “You’ve got to realize if you sit in with us—which we both want you to—the talk gets tough at times.”

“I understand. And you handled that very carefully—I was returned intact.” But I still feel like I’m in a million pieces sometimes, she told herself. Then she recalled the reason she came.

“Gabe, about dealing with Marian Bell. Was there anything in her daughter’s disappearance that could be a tie-in to me or the others who went missing?”

“Only that she was taken from her backyard, which Marian says is a big enough link,” Gabe explained. Vic looked up from writing something down, longhand, when a laptop was right beside him.

Gabe went on, “She was out there with her pet cat, which was left behind. Not a peep, not a sound. Did take her jacket though, which she’d earlier discarded. It was as if the abductor cared that she stayed warm and was not in a total rush to grab and go. No drag marks, tire marks, no trace, no witnesses, so basically that’s the same.”

“So why aren’t you convinced Amanda could have been taken by the same person?”

“Her father took flights from Columbus to Miami to Rio the next day. No child was with him, but there was one who matched Amanda’s description with a woman on an earlier flight to Rio. The child had a passport, of course, but not with Amanda’s name. And then, even though her father had done business in Rio and had contacts there, the trail—Amanda’s father, Peter Bell, the woman’s and the child’s—grows completely cold.”

“Poor Marian.”

“First we worked with the police in Rio. Now Marian’s hired a private detective. I’d bet my house Amanda’s father is down there under an assumed name with his daughter and the woman he loves. He and Marian were going through a bitter divorce and they both wanted custody of their only child.”

A bitter divorce, like my parents, Tess thought, though that similarity obviously ended there. The order of her being taken and Dad’s leaving was the reverse of what had happened to Marian and her daughter. But, because Tess was a tomboy when she was small and her older sisters were more like Mom, Tess had always felt—Kate and Char had too—Dad favored Tess. But there was no way her own father would have taken her, even if Amanda’s did.

“Jill Stillwell, the second girl who was taken, and then Sandy—no problems between the parents, right?” she asked.

“Not a factor,” Gabe and Vic said, almost in unison.

“Good head on your shoulders though, Tess,” Vic said. He looked back to what she assumed were his notes for the news conference.

Gabe, elbows on the cluttered table, said, “Let me go over with you what we do know and can share about Sandy’s disappearance.”

He talked about the child’s play area in the back room of the store. He mentioned a well-timed phone call her mother took from a customer, which might have been part of a setup—a call they were trying to trace. The fact that the girl had never strayed on her own was noted. The chaos of the crime scene. The Barbie doll and the soiled, tattered scarecrow they couldn’t account for.

Tess gasped. “A scarecrow?” Now, why, she thought, did that mere word make her stomach cramp? Had she seen one in the cornfield the day she was taken?

“Yeah,” Gabe said as Vic looked up again. “One Sandy’s mother said had never been in the shop anywhere, though she had ordered some small ones that had not arrived.”

“A scarecrow?” Tess repeated, frowning.

“So?” Gabe prompted.

“Nothing. It just seems weird. Maybe it’s just the word scare I’m reacting to. Even though all this happened to me years ago, and I know I’m safe now, the whole thing still scares me.”

“Let’s get the scarecrow from the forensics lab in the truck and unbag it, get Mike to drive back here,” Vic said. “He’s only been on the road to headquarters about fifteen minutes. I agree the scarecrow’s weird, but so is all of this.”

“I’ll have Ann call Mike,” Gabe said. “He ought to make it back right after the news conference. Tess, you want to wait here for us? There’s a smaller conference room, empty, that might be better next door.”

“Yes, fine. You know, I was afraid I’d be spotted coming in.”

“I’ll have Ann tell Mike not to bring the scarecrow in until you and I are back,” Gabe told Vic as he escorted Tess out.

He walked Tess next door to a much smaller room with a regular door, a narrow table and two chairs facing each other. There was no evidence of the investigation in here.

“An interview room?” she asked.

“Multipurpose, but yes.”

“With all those reporters out there, I feel like it’s my safe room.”

“I don’t want you to feel that way—as if you’re under attack, or we’re grilling you.” He put his arm around her waist as he pulled out a straight-backed chair for her and she sat down. One hand on the table, he bent closer to her. She could tell he’d had pizza or something Italian for lunch, but on his breath, it was enticing. She leaned slightly toward him.

“You really reacted to the mere mention of a scarecrow, Tess. Anything else that comes to mind then?”

“Fear. Something flapping in my face. Maybe being hit—smackings.”

“Smackings? Is that a word your parents used with you?”

“I don’t think so. I can ask my sisters.”

“If not, your using that term would not relate to anything in your own family, like a punishment or spanking paddle.”

“Right. I really don’t think my parents had anything like that.”

“So that could be a memory of your time away that popped out. And once there’s a trickle of memory, there could be a gush of it. Well, I read that in a book somewhere.”

“Oh, Miss Etta gave me some books on childhood trauma I’m going to read.”

“Let me know if something stands out.”

She did think then of hearing that a Hear Ye girl was being spanked for stealing. Should she tell Gabe right now that she was determined to learn all she could about that girl, maybe to help her if she was imprisoned at the compound?

“Gabe, let’s go!” Vic’s voice came from down the hall.

Gabe squeezed her shoulder. When he moved away, his hand brushed through her hair, almost like a caress. But this was no time to imagine things, not about the past or the present. Especially since it seemed Gabe and Ann had something going on. And what did it matter to her? She wanted to sell her house and get out of here just as fast as she could, but if she could help herself or others in the short time she was here, then—

A voice interrupted her agonizing. Ann.

“Gabe said to bring you coffee and a donut,” she said as she put the mug and a powdered sugar donut in front of her. “I’m going out to watch the news conference. My brothers are gone, but Peggy, our night dispatcher’s, out front if you need anything.”

“Thanks, Ann.”

“Think nothing of it. But think about this,” she said, her tone hardening. “Gabe’s obsessed with this case—yours and the others, of course. But if you can’t help him, you should clear out so having you around doesn’t keep reminding him of his father’s failures. You know what I mean. Maybe you should talk to Aaron Kurtz, who owns all those fields around your place. Maybe he’d want to buy your property, demolish the house and garage for more arable land. He’s always trying to expand his holdings. You know, think outside the box to sell your house fast.”

And get away from Gabe fast, was the rest of the message.

“Thanks for the suggestion,” Tess said, gripping the hot mug between her hands.

“Yeah. Sure,” Ann said. She almost ran from the room.

Think outside the box. Someone was still taking little girls, someone local, maybe right under their noses. So she was definitely going to take a closer look at the goings-on at Hear Ye. And maybe she should go talk to Aaron Kurtz, although, obviously, Gabe and Vic had crossed him off their list long ago. Both of those decisions scared her.

But what really churned up long-buried terror was the mere mention of a scarecrow.

11

Time crawled for Tess. One of those big, round schoolroom-type clocks glared down from the opposite wall of the tiny office. Not only did the minutes seem too slow, but the clock hands jerked with a strange sound not quite a ticktock.

Half an hour passed. Wasn’t the press conference in the town square over yet?

She heard footsteps in the hall. Good! Gabe was back, but did he have the scarecrow? Surely it wasn’t just that she’d seen a scarecrow the day she was abducted. No, it was something more than that.

She stood, facing the door, bracing her thighs against the edge of the table. When the door opened, it wasn’t Gabe, but a man she knew even after all these years, though he was heavier than she recalled.

Mayor Reese Owens paused at the door, as if to see if she recognized him.

“Mayor Owens.”

“Nothing amiss, Teresa. Or it’s Tess now, I hear. The sheriff and Agent Reingold are still taking questions at the press conference. I made an opening statement. Ann told me you were in here, and I wanted to both welcome you back and suggest– Just a minute,” he said, holding up a hand. He was out of breath and leaned over to prop his fists on the table. “Suggest you not stay long,” he rushed on as he seemed to get his breath again. “Not stay long in town and the area, I mean. I know that sounds terrible here in friendly Cold Creek, but it’s for your own good as well as the community’s. You showed sound judgment in not attending the press conference. I hear your presence here has already stirred up reporters, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. I’m thinking of you too.”

“Then perhaps you’ve heard I don’t intend to stay long. I only want to spend time with my cousin’s family, sell my house and head back home. If I’m such a liability, you could buy my house and land—take up a community offering—to get me out of here quickly.”

“Now, I know you’ve been through the mill, your family too. But as mayor, I’m charged with protecting the greater good. Sorry I came on so strong.”

He edged around the table toward her. “I knew your father, you see. The day you disappeared he should have been sticking closer to home.”

“He was working that day. Out of town.”

He made a snorting sound. “I don’t want you and Gabe to get so close you start thinking you’re on this case too. Bad enough having Agent Reingold back in everyone’s hair. Just keep clear of the investigation and Gabe. Those who don’t pay attention to history are condemned to repeat it. This is police business and mine too.”

“I see you make it your business to know everyone’s business. And why, if you want this case—cases—solved, don’t you want all the help you can get, Agent Reingold’s, mine, anyone’s?”

“Don’t you go getting snippy with me,” he said, shaking a finger at her. “Like I said, I’m thinking of you too. In other words, don’t you and Gabe go repeating the sins of the parents, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yeah, well, here’s your daddy’s phone number out Oregon way if you’re so big on reunions,” he said, digging in his jacket pocket. “And speaking of that, here’s hoping that crazy Bright Star Monson doesn’t suck you into his cult like he did your cousins.”

Before she could tell him that he ought to find a way to get the Hear Ye community out of the area instead of her, he stopped shuffling toward her, cocked his head and backtracked.

“I hear the others coming and I want to know how they did,” he said, and hurried from the room.

Tess slumped back in her chair. How had that man been elected, over and over, for at least two decades? He was obnoxious and kind of creepy.

She picked up the small piece of lined paper the mayor had tossed on the table. The phone number had her father’s name, Jack Lockwood, scribbled in big, loopy writing.

Why did the mayor want her to call her father? Maybe her father wanted her to contact him because he was afraid to approach her after everything that had happened. Maybe he knew something that could help. But had the mayor suggested her father had done something wrong? Sins of the parents?

She heard muted voices down the hall and sat in her chair, waiting. Waiting for the scarecrow.

* * *

It was barely five minutes later when Gabe came into the room. He carried a large, clear plastic bag with him, but he kept it behind his hip. She gripped the edge of her chair seat and shifted back in it.

“Sorry if Mayor Owens bothered you. He says you were defiant and sassy—I like the sound of that.”

Tess looked at him instead of what he held. She knew he was teasing—was he flirting?—but she was too upset to respond to that.

“He did bother me,” she admitted. “I think he was implying my father knows more than has been said about the day I disappeared. He gave me his phone number.”

“I have it and may use it. But if the man hasn’t contacted any of you for years...”

“I just might let you call him, though I’ve thought of doing it myself many times. I’ll talk to my sister Char. She’s a social worker, good at those kinds of things...counseling and comforting. I meant to call her anyway.”

“Tess, Mike brought the scarecrow back. Want to have a look?”

“Not really. But it’s something important, I know it is. And I’m doing it for Sandy, Amanda, that second victim, Jill Stillwell too. It’s not just for me.”

“Okay,” he said. He closed the door behind him. Maybe he didn’t want the mayor or even Vic Reingold to hear her comments for some reason.

He came around the table and put the nearly two-foot-long bag down on it. Weren’t field scarecrows a lot bigger than that?

He smoothed the plastic to show the scarecrow clearly. He watched her face. She bucked back so hard her chair nearly tipped over. “It’s him! It’s him!” she shouted.

Gabe put a firm hand on her shoulder. “It’s who, Tess? Who?”

“Mr. Mean,” she said, and burst into tears. “See his face? See how awful he is? It’s not me that’s bad, it’s him!”

Gabe grabbed the thing, threw it facedown on the floor and kneeled beside her chair. He pulled her into his arms, and held her.

“It’s all right,” he said, rocking her as if she were a child. And that’s what she felt like. A frightened child. The face on that thing—glaring eyes, frowning face, teeth showing. But not huge teeth like on the green monster.

“Tell me more about Mr. Mean,” Gabe said, his voice gentle. “He’s the one who hit you?”

“Yes. Yes!”

“But who made him hit you?”

“I did. If I was bad.”

“Tess, are you sure it wasn’t your mother or father who had Mr. Mean?”

“No—ask Kate and Char.”

“Okay, okay. But tell me about Mr. Mean.” His voice was soothing, coaxing. “I won’t let him hurt you ever again.”

Suddenly, though she felt safe in his arms, she also felt silly. Exploding in tears like that. Almost using baby talk. Clinging to Gabe the way little Kelsey had clung to her at the Hear Ye compound earlier. She was acting like an idiot, when she had to keep control.

“Tess, are you seeing or hearing anything else? Did the scarecrow trigger any other memories?” Gabe asked.

She shook her head, then sniffed and sat up straight, wiping her wet cheeks with the palms of both hands. She wriggled out of his arms, and he helped her stand. Keeping her back to the thing on the floor, she moved a few steps away, fumbled in her purse for a tissue and blew her nose.

“Sorry I acted like a kid,” she said.

“I’ll bet you need to get back to that again to remember.”

“Like I said—it’s all I can recall.”

“Smackings and Mr. Mean. It’s a start. I know I’m asking you to go to a place you don’t want to face, Tess.”

“A place I can’t face, not from fear, but because I just can’t remember more. The helplessness, feeling abandoned by my family—I can’t get more than that. But why was that thing left when the kidnapper took Sandy? Surely not to scare or warn me.”

“I’d hate to think so. Maybe in hustling Sandy out the door, it was dropped, not deliberately,” he said. “I swear, we’ll go over this dirty, crude scarecrow with a fine-tooth comb.”

“I can’t believe I blurted that out—Mr. Mean,” she said, wiping under her eyes. “I don’t think it’s the monster from my dreams. That one is bigger, louder—more like that corn reaper.”

“How about you go with me to Aaron Kurtz’s to take a close-up look at his harvester?”

“But he’d get suspicious. What if he did see something, if those presents he sent all of us that next Christmas were because of guilt? Besides, I was thinking of seeing him on my own. You might spook him.”

“Tess, that’s not a good idea.”

“All I know right now,” she said, “is that I need to head home. I’m glad you’re going to take that scarecrow apart and maybe trace something.”

“About Aaron,” Gabe continued, “I usually have good instincts about people and I think he’s a good guy. Vic and my dad looked at him, interviewed him years ago.”

“Years ago...” she echoed as she headed for the door, giving the scarecrow a wide berth. “I’m going to get it all back, Gabe, whatever it costs.”

* * *

After Tess left the room, Gabe picked up the scarecrow and looked at it closely. He knew it might take days for the BCI lab to check this out, and he needed something now. Tess’s reaction when she saw the scarecrow had reminded him of soldiers with blast-induced trauma. In her cry, “It’s him! It’s him!” he’d heard shouts of “Incoming fire!”

The scarecrow had an orange, pointed cap. He might be crazy, but the stitching on it looked done by hand, not a machine. There was no tag on the cap. He squeezed the hemp-cloth head, tied with frayed cord at the neck. Nothing seemed to be secreted within except the stick it was on, spearing the body crotch to head. The hair was yellow yarn, the outfit black cotton, but even that color didn’t keep the dirt from showing. The thing looked really old. And it was far smaller than the scarecrows he’d seen used to keep birds out of a garden or field.

It had no resemblance to the friendly-looking scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz movie that ran on TV every year. Yeah, Mr. Mean did look scary, as if he was made specifically for Halloween, perfect for this time of year. Some of the straw from the stuffed body stuck out where the wrists and ankles would be. It had no arms or legs, only smaller pieces of gray wood to simulate limbs that must be nailed to its wooden backbone. Swung hard, it could definitely hurt a child, be used as a paddle or weapon.

Looking closely, he thought that the pieces of straw stuffing poking out of the body looked fresh. But the wooden stick backbone looked old.

And then he saw what he was looking for—anywhere to start a search, find a link.

Just showing under the cloth of the body was a price tag still stuck to the wood. The machine printing was smudged, and there was no bar code, so the purchase couldn’t be too recent. At the top of the tag, he could barely read the words. Mason’s Mill. The local lumber mill, owned by his friend Grant Mason, was just outside town.

* * *

Tess was more determined than ever to get inside the Hear Ye compound. They had lots of gardens there, so maybe they had scarecrows too. Tess took her father’s old dowsing wand and drove down the road to the small parking lot. What luck that Lee had said he’d needed her to give a second opinion on his dowsing site, so she had an excuse to come back. Even if she did not locate the girl who had screamed—and she knew how they guarded everyone here—maybe she could at least get more information and then tell Gabe.

She parked and walked up the gentle hill Lee had pointed out. From there, she gazed out over the fenced-in buildings to the fields beyond, stretched out above Cold Creek. Not a scarecrow in sight in the pumpkin patches or gardens with late tomatoes or dying pepper plants tied to wooden stakes. There was a small cornfield, probably just for the use of the community, since so many booths at the Saturday farmers’ market uptown had corn. No scarecrows there either, though she did see a couple of tin pans attached to stakes by strings, dancing in the breeze to keep the birds or raccoons away.

She noticed a more distant field, where they had erected what some around here called hoop houses, plastic-draped tunnels that were unheated but could extend the growing season as if they were little greenhouses. No scarecrows were needed there, though the crops, hidden beneath what looked like long gravestones, would have to be watered.

The dried dowsing wand in her hand made her think of what Mayor Owens had said about her father. She’d wanted to call him for years, but she knew it would upset her mother and sisters. The mayor had warned her and Gabe not to repeat the sins of their fathers. For Gabe, perhaps he meant that he’d better not fail to solve the abductions as his father had. But for her, the warning made no sense.

“Hey, Tess!” Lee’s voice interrupted her thoughts. He was running up the knoll, waving a dowsing wand. She’d figured the guard at the gate had announced her presence. As old-fashioned as the Hear Ye cult people dressed, did they carry cell phones or walkie-talkies to be able to communicate so fast?

“How is everyone?” she asked. “I hope Kelsey and Ethan at least get some time with the gifts I brought them.”

“Oh, sure. Sure, they will.”

It scared her to realize she didn’t believe him, didn’t trust her own cousin. Had Sandy Kenton learned the hard way not to trust the person who must have approached her in the familiar back room of the store, where she played so happily with her mother nearby? Had Tess herself known her abductor and was the shock so awful that she’d forgotten who it was? Maybe the drugs the kidnapper gave her also caused amnesia. But when the drugs wore off, why didn’t her memories come back?

“Tess, don’t look so upset. I’ll see that the kids play with the things and remember who they came from. You’ll see us all again. How about we do a family picnic down by the creek before it gets real cold?”

“That would be great. Lee, I was thinking it would be optimal if you had the well inside the compound,” she said, hoping to get him to take her there. “I see a lot of land there. How about we pace that off, then check out here after? If the same water source you think you’ve found up here could be located on lower ground, then—”