Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(43)

The high, sweet, little voice went on. But...but Jill Stillwell was the name of the second girl who had been abducted, taken years after Tess’s family had moved to Michigan. She sounded so real, as if she was just on the other side of this door!

Carefully, quietly, Tess turned the doorknob. She only meant to open the door a crack, but it swung inward with a loud creak. She gasped and gave a little cry at what she saw, just as Gabe turned around to glare at her.





14

“Tess!” Gabe cried as he jumped to his feet. He killed the sound track—he’d been sitting at a laptop—and came at her as if to block her from seeing what was here. Or was he going to grab her?

“I heard—I heard a girl’s voice,” she said, retreating into the hall. “Jill Stillwell’s, one of the kidnapped—”

He grasped her shoulders in hard hands. “It’s a recording her family gave me from their Facebook page. It helps me to remember.”

It scared her how she recalled that some murderers kept relics of their victims. In the brief glance into the room, she wondered if it could be like a big memory box, a memorial to the lost girls. She’d glimpsed a large blown-up picture of a child who must be Amanda Bell, next to a map with all kinds of lines and other pictures. Were there things in there about her too?

Gabe gave a huge sigh that seemed to deflate his body. His broad shoulders slumped. “You’re not dressed,” he said as his eyes went over her. “And it’s cold tonight. Go get something on so you don’t distract me even more, and I’ll show you what I’ve never shared with anyone. I do have some stuff like this at the office, but I’ve got more here—maybe it will jog something loose for you.”

Hurrying, shaking, she did as he said and joined him in the big room that had been his parents’ master bedroom. Two walls seemed dedicated to the two earliest victims, Teresa Lockwood and Jill Stillwell. He’d posted photographs of the kidnap victims and their families, with lines drawn out to what he explained was “a circle of acquaintances.” On the next wall, narrower because of windows, he’d started to put up things about the Sandy Kenton kidnapping.

Each wall was a collage of evidence. He’d written in times, places, even things like height and weight of the victims. For each, he’d posted an age-advanced photo of what she might look like now. Tess was amazed at how close to reality the one of her came.

Amanda Bell’s area covered only the double-closet doors, but it included a big map of Brazil with cities and roads highlighted with a black pen. Sandy Kenton’s wall shared space with a four-by-four-foot bulletin board with a map of Iraq. It was marked where, as Gabe put it, “those sites had victims too. We worked hard to disrupt bombs.”

“Those red dots?” she asked, mesmerized by all that he was sharing, and still hesitant to look too closely at her own wall.

“No, the black ones. The red ones show where we didn’t get there in time. Where the bomb went off. This one,” he said, pointing at a dot nearly obscured by men’s first names, “was where I...I lost my friends—and I was in charge.”

She touched his arm, slid her hand down to hold his. He gripped her fingers so hard it hurt, but he didn’t look at her, only at the names.

Finally, she steadied herself to turn away and move closer to the wall dedicated to her. There were newspaper articles about her abduction, all laminated. From somewhere, probably her mom years ago, he’d gotten four photos of her, one alone, two with her sisters, one with the whole family. She stared at her parents, so young. What did her father look like now? And her mother was gone. Gabe had also posted a photo of his father in his sheriff’s uniform. And down by the floorboard a map of the area with Dane Thompson’s house and grounds diagrammed and labeled. She bent down to look at it closely. “So Dane really was your father’s number-one suspect?”

“But he couldn’t make it stick.”

“Dane had an alibi?”

“That he was out of town at the time of the abduction, heading for a meeting in Chillicothe.”

“A meeting?”

Gabe squatted beside her. “Yeah, with a woman, a colleague who still has a vet clinic there. She covered for him with a lie—at least Dad thought so. I have copies here of all the affidavits filed, the investigation files. I go over them, go over everything. It’s kind of like looking for the missing link.”

“But Sandy’s and Amanda’s disappearances are different from...from mine and Jill’s,” she said as they stood.

“Yep. No cornfield escape. But Jill was taken right out of a small tent she was sharing with her brother, near the cornfield that abutted their backyard. Why she didn’t wake up and scream, we never figured out.” He got up, walked across the room and pointed to a picture of a boy. “Mrs. Stillwell said both Jill and her brother were light sleepers.”

“Maybe the kidnapper gagged her right away.”

“Or used chloroform or some drug—jabbed her with a needle, since you’d been given shots of some sort. If we’d gotten you back in this day and age, they’d have run tests to pinpoint exactly what you had in your system instead of just having you treated by the small-town doctor your father insisted on.”

“So the answers are still out there. And that’s why this memory room.”