The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(78)

“I hope you get the guy who killed her.”

“I hope so, too . . .” I stop when I realize what he just said. “Wait . . . your mother died of an overdose.”

“Right. But she didn’t put that needle in her arm. Somebody else did and gave her a lethal dose.”

I slide the police report out of the folder and read through it again. The cause of death is listed as accidental overdose. This might be too much for Robert to cope with, although he said that with so much conviction.

“You don’t think your mom had a relapse?”

Robert points to the table where he sat as a child. “Last time I saw her was right there. She finished her shift and went outside to grab a smoke. She never did that around me. And she never came back. Two days later they found her twenty miles away in a motel room.” His voice begins to rise. “My mother may have been a lot of things—hooker, junkie, thief—but she was a good mother, damn it. She adored me. If she wanted to run off with some old boyfriend and shoot up, she would have dropped me off at my grandparents’, not abandoned me.”

His face is filled with rage. Not just at me but at the injustice the world did to him.

“I’m sorry, Robert. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

He stares out into the parking lot and calms down. “Sorry. It’s something that I think about every day. When you called, I just assumed it was about that. That they’d solved the . . . what do they call it? The cold case. I guess it was too much to hope for.”

“No, it’s not. Why do you think someone would want to kill your mother?”

“I don’t know. As a kid, I thought it might be like a crime movie, where she saw something she shouldn’t have. Now? I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine anyone hating her.”

“What did your father say?”

“Nothing. We don’t exactly have a close relationship. Maybe he mentioned something once about her going to shoot up with a junkie boyfriend. But ask anyone here that knew her and they’ll tell you she wouldn’t have just left me here like that. Not unless it was against her will. I mean, who would leave a kid here, all alone?”

“I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know. But I’ll look into that.”

It’s not an empty promise. But to get to the bottom of it, I need to start at the beginning of Sarah’s darker life—and possibly where she first encountered the killer.





CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE


HOMESTEAD

Julie Lane greets me at the door with a warm smile on her worn face. There are a few traces of gray in the dark hair she wears pulled back in a turquoise band, making estimating her age difficult.

From the late 1960s to the early ’80s, she and her husband ran a foster home out here on this farm at the edge of Red Hook. Her large house, set against the Montana mountain backdrop, is surrounded by tall fir trees that stand out in the otherwise flat grazing land.

“Mrs. Lane, I’m Theo Cray. We spoke on the phone? I’m doing some research on Montana history.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” She opens the door and ushers me in.

A faded-orange couch sits in a living room that seems trapped in time from the 1970s. About the only modern concessions are a flat-screen television and an iPad with a crossword puzzle on it.

I take a seat on the couch next to her easy chair. “As I said on the phone, I’m doing some genealogy research and wanted to talk to you about some of the children that came through here.”

“Right. To be honest, I don’t know a whole lot about where they came from. We had all kinds of children here. White, brown, Indian, mixed. It didn’t matter. We just wanted to give them a good home, and we did the best we could.”

I want to jump right in and ask if any of the children were potential homicidal maniacs but have to ease my way in.

“What were their ages?”

“We specialized in teens. Troubled teens, as my husband used to say. But they were good.”

“No behavior problems?”

She laughs. “They were teenagers. They all had behavior problems. But it was just acting out.”

“I see. Do you remember a girl by the name of Sarah Eaves?”

Lane’s expression changes for a moment; then she makes a small shake of her head. “No . . . not really. Maybe? Was she one of ours?”

“She was here in the early ’80s. For two years, until she left home. She ended up not too far from here.”

“Possibly. Perhaps if I saw a picture?”

I show her a photo Sarah’s son gave me. “This would have been her around twenty.”

“Yes,” she says after a looking at it for a while. “I remember her now.”

“Do you remember anything about her?”

“No, I can’t say that I do. Like I said, I don’t remember all of them. So many faces. You know how it is.”

It’s quite obvious to me that this woman is holding much more back than she cares to say.

“I just spoke with her son. He was quite interested to know what his mother was like as a child.”

“Her son? Sarah had a boy?”

The way her face lights up at the mention of a baby and the way she said “Sarah” tells me she’s much more familiar with her than she’s let on.