That time, not so much.
“Stalking. Harassment. Statutory rape.”
“She was nearly eighteen, Carl. And nobody knew she was pregnant.”
“All I could think was, what if it had been Sara?” Her father had broken down then, the sound of his harsh sobs sending chills up Sara’s spine. She’d sneaked back upstairs to her bedroom and curled up under the bedcovers, shaken to the core, as much by her father’s reaction to Renee Lindsey’s death as by the murder itself.
“You still think he did it, don’t you?” she asked her father.
Over her father’s shoulder, Ann Dunkirk gave her daughter a warning look. Apparently the Renee Lindsey murder was still a volatile subject in the Dunkirk household, all these years later.
“I don’t know,” Carl answered after a pause. “He was always the most likely suspect.”
“Even though he wasn’t the baby’s father?”
“That might have been the motive.” Carl scraped his empty coffee cup in a small circle across the table in front of him. “Maybe she told him about the baby and he killed her in a jealous rage.”
“Did you know he was in the Army?”
Carl shot her a skeptical look. “He tell you that?”
She nodded. “You think it’s a lie?”
“Hard to imagine that wild buck making it through boot camp.”
“The military can sometimes straighten a person out.”
“Sometimes. If he wants to change.”
Sara put her hand on her father’s cup, stopping him from scraping it across the table again. “He struck me as different from the man I remembered.”
“Apparently he’s been trying to talk to some folks at the sheriff’s department about Donnie’s accident.”
Sara tried not to react, but she could see by the narrowing of her father’s eyes that she’d failed. Her mother stopped stirring the chili and turned to face them again.
“Why would he be looking into Donnie’s accident?” she asked.
“He was first on the scene, remember?” Sara murmured. She didn’t actually remember seeing him; she didn’t remember anything about the accident, really. But she’d heard what Cain had done to save her life.
And she’d never even told him thanks.
“You’re not entirely surprised to hear that Dennison’s been asking questions, are you?” Carl asked bluntly. “What do you know?”
She sighed and pushed the coffee cup back toward him. “Before I went to Crybaby Falls, I went to the roadside memorial Joyce maintains for Donnie on Black Creek Road.”
“She went there instead of the cemetery,” her mother told her father before turning her gentle, dark eyes toward Sara. “I called Joyce after we talked earlier. To let her know where you’d been.”
Sara felt a flutter of guilt. “I should have called her myself.”
“I tried to explain to Joyce that you deal with your grief in private ways. You always have.”
“Joyce wasn’t happy, I guess.”
“Joyce hasn’t been happy in eighteen years,” Carl said bluntly. “And she never liked that you and Donnie got married.”
It was nothing she didn’t know already, of course, but hearing her father say the words out loud stung more than she’d anticipated. “Yeah, well. Back to what happened when I went to the roadside memorial—to get there, you can either park on the shoulder, which is practically nonexistent on Black Creek Road at that point, or you can park at the scenic overlook up the mountain and walk back down to the curve. Which I did. When I got back to the scenic overlook, I noticed a truck with a humorous red bumper sticker as I was leaving. Didn’t think anything about it, until I saw Cain Dennison driving away from Crybaby Falls in that same truck.”
Her father’s forehead crinkled. “So you think he followed you to the roadside memorial, then to Crybaby Falls, too?”
“Hell of a coincidence if he didn’t.”
“Language, Sara,” her mother said automatically, then shot her an apologetic grin.
Sara smiled back, though inside, her guts were twisting a little at the news that Dennison had been asking questions about Donnie’s death.
Why would he do that? Asking about Renee’s murder, she could get, but why Donnie’s death? Was he somehow invested in the answers because he was the one who’d found them after the accident? Maybe he felt a sense of responsibility, as if he owed it to Donnie, somehow, to get the answers nobody had seemed able to provide.
“He’s working at that new private eye place that’s opened in the old mansion on Magnolia Street,” Carl said. “The Gates, I think they call it.”
“Odd name,” Ann commented.
“I think it’s probably a play on the whole ‘gates of purgatory’ thing,” Carl said.
“Someone opened a detective agency in Purgatory?” Sara asked, surprised. “How do they get enough business to keep the doors open in a little place like this?”
“Oh,” Ann said suddenly, turning to look at them. “I wonder if that’s what Joyce was talking about today at the cemetery.”
“What did she say?” Carl asked.
“Well, I was telling her how sorry I was about all she and Gary have gone through, losing both their children, and she said something like, she hadn’t been able to prevent what had happened to them, but she’d do anything, pay anything, to get the answers about their deaths.” Ann slanted a troubled look at Sara. “I didn’t want to argue with her about Donnie’s accident, but she has to know that’s what it was. An accident.”
“Mom, I don’t blame her for wanting answers. I’d like a few myself. Like why we were even in Purgatory that night to begin with.”
“You think maybe she’s hired The Gates to look into Donnie’s accident?” Sara’s father looked thoughtful.
“Well, you said the Dennison boy is working at The Gates, and you said he’s asking questions about Donnie’s accident. Maybe those things are connected.”
“Who on earth would hire Cain Dennison as an investigator?” Sara asked. “I mean, even if he was in the Army and all that, he’s still got a pretty sketchy background for private-eye work, doesn’t he?”
“From what I hear, the fellow running the place has taken on more than one hire with a checkered past. Heard of a fellow named Seth Hammond from over Bitterwood way?”
The name sounded familiar. “Meth mechanic or something like that?”
“No, that was his daddy, Delbert, who blew himself up about twenty years ago. You might have remembered the name from that. Seth, on the other hand, made quite a name for himself as a con artist before he supposedly went on the straight and narrow.”
“Hell of a chance to take, hiring a retired con man as a private eye.”
“You think that’s something, apparently he’s also just hired Sinclair Solano.”
“That hippie boy from California who became a terrorist?” her mother asked, her eyes widening.
“Actually, he spent most of the time he was on the FBI’s most wanted list working for the CIA as a double agent,” Sara corrected. The story of the radical turned spy had made every major daily newspaper in the country when the truth had come out about a month ago.
“I guess the CIA connection might explain that hire, then,”