Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(31)

“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.”