Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(80)

She shook a finger at him. Her entire body shook with rage. “You think I don’t know what you did? I figured it out. I know it was you. I know what you did to my… my…. Ramona. Now you tell the truth, you sick bastard.”

At the name Ramona, Josie felt all the color drain from her face. “Gram?” she said again, her voice weakening as she looked over at a woman she barely recognized. This woman was not her grandmother. This was a different woman. A woman with hate in her eyes and vengeance quivering through her body. The only thing that seemed to stop her wrapping her fingers around Gosnell’s throat was her walker.

Gosnell laughed noiselessly again. Then he looked at Lisette and pressed his device into his throat. “She was perfect. You did a good job making her, Lisette. I hated putting her down. I would have kept her forever.”

Tears streamed down Lisette’s cheeks but she refused to acknowledge them, letting them fall to her shirt. She said nothing.

“You think I didn’t know?” he said to her.

Still, she remained silent.

“It was that army boy, wasn’t it? The one who boarded with your family for the summer? I saw you in the woods with him once. Gave it to you good, he did.”

Lisette gasped. Noah remained completely silent and still, letting the whole thing play out. Josie’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Gram, what is he talking about?”

Lisette kept her eyes on Gosnell. “I was a girl,” she said. “Only thirteen. My parents rented out a room in our house to make extra money. One summer we had a soldier on his way from one place to another. He stayed a few months. He wasn’t that much older than me. I thought I loved him. After he left I realized I was pregnant.”

“What? Dad was your only child.”

“He was, as far as anyone knows. My mother told everyone that she was pregnant. As soon as I started to show, they kept me home. Told everyone I was sick. I gave birth at home to a beautiful baby girl. My mother passed her off as her own. My sister. Little Ramona.”

Gosnell mouthed her words. Little Ramona.

Josie’s voice trembled. “How long did she… did she live?”

“She was eight years old. I was hanging wash at the side of the house and she was playing there in the yard. Running around, chasing butterflies. Then she was gone. Just like that.” She glared at Gosnell. “He took her.”

“Wild animals ate her,” Gosnell said.

“The only animal that got her was you,” Lisette shot back.

More silent laughter shook his body.

Lisette said, “I searched the woods for her. My father searched with me. For days. We had the law up there looking too. Then, after about a week, we found her clothes there in the woods. Torn up. Police said she must have been attacked by a bear, or coyotes. They probably dragged her off. They tried to find her body for a few weeks but couldn’t. We buried an empty coffin.” Her voice choked in her throat. In a whisper she added, “An empty little coffin.” She took a moment then to wipe her tear-streaked face with the back of one of her sleeves. “My mother was happy to brush the whole thing under the carpet. I never believed a wild animal got her, but what else could have happened to her? Back then we didn’t have Megan’s list and all those things. People didn’t talk about sex crimes or child molesters. I just knew in my heart something bad happened to her, and it wasn’t an animal that did it. I was in those woods my whole life and never even saw a coyote. When you told me about Nick and about the women, I knew. I knew the kind of man Alton is—you don’t hear the things he says to the ladies here. It wasn’t a stretch that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

Like father, like son.

Goosebumps rose along Josie’s arms.

Lisette jarred the bed again with her walker. “What did you do to her, you son of a bitch?”

Gosnell looked away from her. His smirk disappeared. He had an almost pained look on his face. “She was my first,” he said. “I wanted to keep her, but after a few days of people searching for her, I realized I couldn’t. So I put her down. Kept her somewhere no one would find her and left the clothes so everyone would think a bear got her. I thought for sure they would come for me. I waited.”

“Did you hurt her? Did you touch her?”

His eyes glazed over again. “Not the way you think,” he said. “There was no time. My wife—she was still alive. My boy was there always asking questions. I couldn’t risk it. Every time I went to see her, one of them ruined it.”

Josie moved over to Lisette and put a hand over her grandmother’s forearm. “Gram,” she said.

“But she was the first one I took,” Gosnell went on. His eyes lit up. “And I never got caught. Then I knew I could do it.”

I knew I could do it.

Josie knew from the bodies being unearthed on the Gosnell property and the videos that all of the Gosnell victims were teenagers or older. If Alton’s appetites ran along the same lines as his son’s then eight-year-old Ramona would have been a victim of convenience, not necessarily chosen based on his sexual desire. He knew she was illegitimate, and she was easily plucked from the neighbor’s yard. The perfect test subject.

“How long?” Josie asked. “How long were you thinking about taking a girl before you took Ramona?”