Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (red white royal blue TXT) 📗

have guessed. “Real good too. Could have gone off to university, he had some offers.”

He had indeed; I’ve already found the letters. But none of them offered a full ride, and I knew Tommy would have had to give up on that dream. No way Abraham could afford college for his son without a scholarship. Tommy, I guessed, was a solid player but not a star. Same as his schoolwork.

I check the closet. I half expect to find Tommy hidden in there like some nightmare, but it’s empty except for old wire hangers swinging gently on the rod, and a collection of abandoned high school tees. A letter jacket with his name on it. I understand the message of this room: when Tommy left, he put childhood things away. He left fully intending to become a man on his own terms.

And then he ran away when it got too real? Maybe. But instinct is starting to pull me in a different direction.

Abraham suddenly says, “You didn’t come about Tommy, you said. What brought you out here?”

He’s going to find out anyway; it’ll be all over the news soon, if it isn’t cooking already. So I say, “His wife, Sheryl, has gone missing.”

“Oh lord,” he says, and looks briefly taken aback. Then worried. “Did she leave them girls? Who’s got them?”

I break it to him very, very carefully, and there’s something especially grim and sad about seeing an old, proud man like this break down. He sinks down on his son’s bed and puts his head in his hands and cries—huge, heaving sobs. I sit next to him. Don’t touch him, but I wait for the storm to pass. He’s lost everything now . . . his son gone, and now his two grandchildren.

He finally whispers, “She never let me see them girls. Not even once.”

I swallow a painful lump in my throat and say, “They didn’t suffer, sir.” That’s a lie, but I can’t tell the man the truth. Not now. “I’m looking into what happened to them, and to Sheryl.”

He nods. His whole body is shaking with the force of his grief. I stand up, finally, and put a hand lightly on his shoulder. I take my business card out and place it next to him on the bed.

Then I leave, shutting the door behind me on the hell that I’ve brought. Once I’m back in the car, I take a deep breath and reach for my phone. I text ACOM, which Prester will read as all clear old man. Prester’s recently discovered emojis, a fact that amuses me to no end, and I smile when he sends me back the cussing smiley face. It’s not much of a smile, but it’s something.

The smile fades fast, and the small comfort along with it. I’m almost sure that Tommy Jarrett is dead.

Which means in the morning, I need to get into Sheryl Lansdowne.

Hard.

9

GWEN

By the time I’m home, it’s pretty late in the afternoon, so I dive right into Sheryl Lansdowne research. Kez is going to be tied up on that grid search outside Norton until dark, so best I make some headway for her with basic stuff.

It doesn’t turn out to be basic at all, because it quickly becomes evident that Sheryl isn’t who she seems to be. In fact, records for Sheryl Lansdowne begin just three years back.

It’s a false identity, and not a very good one at that. Good enough to get her a real driver’s license, but the social security number she’s using is false. She’d be kicked out fast if she had a job, claimed benefits, or had an employer who’d ever paid in for her, but it doesn’t look like Sheryl worked in any official capacity at all. Didn’t even apply for assistance, as far as I can tell, which is rare around these parts. Maybe she had some kind of gig that paid her cash? It’s not really possible to tell yet.

I use our firm’s proprietary facial recognition software to try matching Sheryl to the driver’s license databases.

My first hit comes from Iowa.

Sheryl Lansdowne’s original name is Penny Carlson.

Penny is a missing person. Last seen driving off, but she never arrived at the university she was scheduled to attend. Extensive searches were conducted for her car, and she was considered endangered missing, but since she wasn’t a child—she was eighteen at the time—there wasn’t much more to be done. As a legal adult, she had the right to disappear if she wanted. She packed up her life, got in her car, and vanished like a bad memory. I find a website dedicated to finding her, probably put up by family or friends, but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated for a long time. Several years, at least. They’ve given up.

Maybe Penny had decided that college wasn’t for her, that she wanted to start over entirely differently. But my instincts catch fire when I realize the time gap between Penny Carlson and Sheryl.

Ten years from Penny’s disappearance to Sheryl’s arrival in Valerie. So where was she during that time? What had she been doing? My brain keeps trying to connect random dots, but I don’t have enough to go on, just a deep sense of unease. None of this makes sense.

Sometimes it just doesn’t, part of my brain says calmly. And while it’s right, I’m not about to admit defeat. Not yet.

I widen the search to more states. Results slow down, and I get too many false positives. I’ve lost track of time when I finally hear the kids come home. Lanny appears in the doorway to say, “School’s boring, Connor aced a test, nobody’s bleeding, in case you’re interested. Did you eat?”

I hold up the empty plate that once held pie, gaze still fixed on the computer screen. I see her shrug in soft peripheral focus, and then she turns to go.

I wrench myself away from the screen and say, “Honey? Thank you for asking.” It disconcerts me to realize