in the car and had drowned. My stepmother was missing. I was in shock. There was a sound toward the back of the house. I figured it was Lindy. The officer heard it. He asked if I was alone. I told him my stepsister was in the house. He insisted on talking to her.
“The two of us looked around the house, calling for her. She was nowhere to be found. But we found the backdoor was standing open. I had locked it earlier. I figured Lindy had come in the unlocked front door and gone back out when she’d seen the cop. The officer got his flashlight and went out back to look for her...” Again her voice broke.
“He found her back by the creek. She had been attacked and brutally murdered—at least that’s what I heard later. The police thought it might have been some vagrant staying in one of those old abandoned buildings nearby next to the railroad tracks. I just knew that she was dead and it was my fault.”
“No,” Shep said too sharply. “You couldn’t know that there was a killer outside. Anyway, you heard her come back in and go out again.”
She shook her head. “The policeman said she had been dead for some time. I couldn’t have heard her on the stairs.”
He didn’t know what to say for a moment, but she didn’t give him a chance anyway.
“I could have opened the door and it wouldn’t have happened,” she rushed on. “As it was, I never told anyone what I’d done, especially the policeman. At first I was in shock. Later I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth.”
He sighed. “You were fourteen.”
She nodded.
“You were just a kid. What happened to you after that?”
“Foster care.”
He did the math. “You were sixteen when we met the first time.”
Her smile was full of regrets and guilt. “I had started acting out in foster care, getting into real trouble until I was caught and had to go before the judge.”
“It’s understandable after everything you went through. Did you ever talk to anyone about what happened? Get some help?”
“You mean like a psychologist? I know what you’re thinking. That I’m seeing Lindy again out of my guilt for getting her killed.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“I felt like I deserved whatever bad thing happened to me. I’d killed Lindy—”
“You didn’t kill her.”
She gave him an impatient look. “She would be alive if I had opened that door.”
“You said you heard her come back into the house. She wasn’t locked out then.”
“Maybe I’d just imagined that I heard her come in and start up the stairs.”
“I don’t believe you imagined it. Someone was in the house. If the cop hadn’t arrived when he did... Charlie, it could have been the killer. Maybe he knew that there was only the two of you home that night.”
She paled. “I’d never thought of that. If it wasn’t Lindy...”
“The killer could have been in the house with you.” He raked a hand through is hair. “You could have been his next victim.”
“Maybe I deserved it.”
Shep let out a curse. Why hadn’t she told him all this years ago when they’d first met? He couldn’t bear that she’d been living with this all these years. He put down his wineglass and reached for her, taking her hands in his.
“Listen to me, you can’t think that way. You were unsupervised teenagers. Your stepsister was terrorizing you and you had no one to go to for help. You have to stop blaming yourself.”
Tears filled her eyes again. “How do I do that?”
He pulled her into his arms. “Admitting what happened that night is a beginning. But you need to talk to a professional. You didn’t cause her death.” He smoothed her hair as she cried quietly in his arms for a minute.
She gave him a pained smile as she leaned back to look into his face. “What about now? Are you telling me that I only imagined seeing Lindy out of guilt?”
“You’ve been through so much. I think you haven’t dealt with the past, but I don’t think you imagined what you saw any more than you imagined hearing someone come back into the house that night and start up the stairs. Have you told anyone what happened?”
“Not even the judge knows the whole story.”
He nodded, again wondering how the judge thought this was something Shep could handle. “What I don’t understand is why now? Why are you seeing Lindy after fifteen years have passed. What’s