The Bad Daughter(12)

“Pretty much blown off,” the sheriff had said.

She stifled yet another cry.

“You can talk to her if you’d like,” the sheriff urged.

Robin recognized the command inside the gentle request. “What do I say?”

“Anything.”

Robin reached for Cassidy’s hand, finding the child’s fingers cold and unresponsive inside her own. “Hi, sweetheart,” she began. “My name is Robin. I don’t know if you remember me. I haven’t seen you in a long time. But I used to be good friends with your mother.” She received no response and glanced back at Sheriff Prescott.

Keep going, he said with his eyes.

“We met in the fifth grade. I was in Miss DeWitt’s class, and she was in Miss Browning’s, and for some reason I got transferred into Miss Browning’s class about halfway through the year—I don’t remember why. We were ten years old and I was very shy. I didn’t have a lot of friends. Your mother was the exact opposite. Everybody wanted to be friends with her. ‘A real little firecracker,’ my father used to say.” Oh, God. A deepening pressure on Robin’s larynx put a temporary stop to her words. “Anyway, for some reason,” she continued, scraping the words from the back of her throat, “your mother decided she liked me and she took me under her wing, made sure that everybody was nice to me.”

Everybody but Melanie, who’d always been impervious to Tara’s charms.

Strange that it had been Melanie who’d been the one to accept Tara’s marriage to their father, Robin thought with her next breath. That it had been Melanie who’d made nice and continued to live under the same roof with her until construction had been completed on the house next door.

“We were best friends all through high school,” Robin continued, putting the brakes on her interior monologue. “We were pretty much inseparable, your mother and I, even after she married your father. In fact, I was maid of honor at their wedding.”

Robin pictured Tara, stunning in the secondhand wedding gown she’d paid for herself, standing in front of the justice of the peace beside dark-haired, charismatic Dylan Campbell, the archetypal bad boy she’d fallen for and married right after their high school graduation, despite her parents’ disapproval. Or maybe because of it.

It soon became clear that Tara’s parents had good reason to be concerned about Dylan, who turned out to be even worse than anyone had imagined.

The abuse started when Tara was pregnant with Cassidy, and it had continued until Dylan was jailed for breaking and entering in the third year of their marriage. Tara had seized the opportunity to file for divorce. She was all of twenty-one.

Where was Dylan now? Did Sheriff Prescott know about him? Was he in prison somewhere? Was he a suspect? Had he shot his former wife? Had he tried to murder his own child?

Robin spun toward the sheriff, about to voice these thoughts out loud when she noticed Melanie standing just inside the doorway, a bemused look on her face. When had she come in? How long had she been standing there?

“Please don’t let me interrupt this little jaunt down memory lane,” she said.

More not-so-gentle pressure on Robin’s windpipe. “Your mother was so beautiful,” Robin said, turning her attention back to Cassidy and squeezing her hand. “She was the most beautiful girl in Red Bluff.”

“Was being the operative word,” Melanie said, only half under her breath.

Cassidy’s eyes opened wide.

“Melanie, for God’s sake.”

The child’s enormous brown eyes moved from Robin to Melanie, widening even further in alarm.

“Hey, kiddo,” Melanie said. “You know who I am, don’t you? It’s Melanie. And this is Robin. You probably don’t remember her. You were still pretty little when she moved away.”

“How are you feeling today?” Sheriff Prescott asked, approaching on the other side of the bed.

Cassidy’s eyes traveled from one face to another, although she showed no signs of recognition, or even that she understood what they were saying.

“Cassidy,” the sheriff said, “can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

The girl stared at him, said nothing.

“You’re in the hospital,” he continued. “You were shot. Do you remember that?”

No response.

“Can you tell us anything about what happened?”

Cassidy shifted her gaze from the sheriff to Robin to Melanie.

“Cassidy,” Sheriff Prescott repeated, “can you tell us who did this to you?”

Cassidy’s eyes drifted up toward the ceiling, then closed.

“Maybe we should go,” Robin suggested after several seconds had elapsed. The air had become very thick inside the small room. She was having trouble breathing.

“Guess we’ll try again tomorrow,” the sheriff said.

Robin nodded, although returning to the hospital was the last thing she wanted to do. She’d hoped to be on a bus back to Sacramento by then, followed immediately by a plane to Los Angeles.

That was unlikely to happen until some of the sheriff’s questions had been answered. She’d already agreed to accompany him to her father’s house the next morning, so she’d likely have to hang around at least a few more days. Maybe by then Cassidy would be able to tell them something.