Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,103

kids, too, all dressed for Christmas, their hands on each other’s shoulders. In the latest picture, which was bigger and placed in the middle, they were posed outside the house, by the rail fence. Easter, maybe. There was Harlan, impossibly good-looking, his charisma all but leaping out of the frame, with a little girl on his shoulders, her white-blonde hair in neat French braids, smiling out of her whole face while their sisters perched on the top rail on either side and a black-and-white mutt of a dog lay on the grass in front of them, its tongue lolling as if it had stopped chasing a ball a minute before. A sea of multicolored tulips burst out of the ground around them, so there had been flowers here once. And a dog. And happiness.

“They’re not here,” Harlan finally said, and asked Annabelle, “When did you last see them?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They weren’t at the top of the box anymore. Maybe … a couple years? I didn’t really … like to look at them anymore.”

“What did the postcards say?” the detective asked.

“They said she missed us,” Annabelle said. “That she’d see us soon. That the weather was nice. The last one said that she was going to get a house with lots of bedrooms, so there’d be room for us.” She looked at Harlan. “What else?”

“They were from different places,” Harlan said. “Like they were moving around. But the last one, the one about the house, was from Phoenix.”

“They were moving around?” the detective asked. “Who’s ‘they?’”

Jennifer thought, Wait. The postcards had been here for years, and now they were gone? When only Annabelle and her father were living in the house? She was betting Johnson hadn’t missed that.

“A guy who worked at the bookstore,” Harlan said. “Austin Grant. He was sort of a hippie. Very laid-back guy. Older, maybe fifties, because he had some gray. And a ponytail. I remember that, because it was unusual at the time. She used to go in and buy books after work and talk to him, I think. She worked as a school nurse, but I guess you know that. He was the one she left with, Dad said.” He stopped. “I guess he wasn’t. I guess he just left at the same time … she did. I hired a private detective a while back to look for her. He managed to find him, but Grant said he hadn’t left with her at all. His story was that he’d just moved on. He thought he’d told her he was going, he said, but he couldn’t remember. He was surprised she was gone. Said he had no idea. The detective thought he might be lying, and I was sure he was, but I didn’t know what to do about it. The detective couldn’t find her at all, not in Phoenix or anywhere else. I guess we know why now.” He told Annabelle, “Sorry, Bug. I was going to wait to tell you until I saw you. Didn’t want to say it on the phone.”

She said, “That’s OK.” She was looking down, and Jennifer could feel Harlan thinking, I need to do something about this. About her. And his frustration that he couldn’t think what, and he couldn’t do it now anyway.

He looked at the Johnson again and asked, “Have you talked to her parents? Our grandparents, in Florida?”

“We have,” the detective said. “When we found her. They provided the DNA samples that we used to identify your mother’s remains.”

Remains. The word sat there like a boulder. Impossible to ignore. Impossible not to think about exactly what they’d found when they’d opened that car door, twelve years later. Jennifer could see Harlan thinking it, and she could see him hoping that Annabelle wasn’t.

After a minute, Johnson asked, “Did you know that your grandparents contacted the police here after your mom disappeared?”

Harlan got still. And then he took Annabelle’s hand, gripped it, and said, “No. But I wasn’t here.” The words came out tight. He was thinking, Jennifer was pretty sure, Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I ask? He went on, though, “Did you know, Bug? Did they come here?”

She said, “I don’t remember. I was too little. I remember them coming sometime, maybe when I was in first grade? Second grade? But Grandpa had a fight with Dad, and they left. Sorry,” she told the detective. “That’s all I know.”

“My other sisters will know more,” Harlan said. “Mom wasn’t real close with