He slowly turned her to face him. “What about now, Charlie?”
“How can you even ask that, given what you now know about me?”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Shep, anyone who knew about the bullying believes that I killed Lindy. I can’t be sure what happened that night. Maybe I did this. At first I thought it was guilt bringing Lindy back—a figment of my imagination. But what if someone knows the truth about what I did and now they just want me to admit it?”
“You didn’t kill her.”
“How can you be so sure of that?” she cried.
“Because I know what’s in your heart.”
She shook her head, remembering how her heart had filled to overflowing with that terrifying, malevolent, dark hatred as she stood at the locked door, listening to her stepsister’s screams. “And if you’re wrong?” She pulled away. “Until I know—”
“All right,” Shep said, turning her again to face him. “I’m going to prove it to you and then...” His gaze softened.
“And then...” she whispered as he pulled her into his arms. She leaned into him, wanting to believe he could see into her heart. Wanting to believe that guilt wasn’t the reason her past had come back to haunt her.
* * *
CHRISTMAS EVE, CHARLIE announced she was going into work. “I want to get everything in order before the new year. The office should be empty, so it’ll be quiet.”
Shep understood. He liked to get into his classroom early before any of the students began arriving and prepare himself for the day.
But after walking her to work, he found himself at loose ends. He felt stuck. The murder had been too long ago. He’d talked to everyone he could think of. Now he just felt confused. He couldn’t understand what the Lindy sightings were about any more than he could understand the destroyed doll. What did whoever was doing this hope to accomplish? The Lindy look-alike could be acting alone, but who was behind it all and why? It made no sense.
As he walked back to the apartment along the busy snowy Main Street, he stuffed his hands into his coat pocket and felt a crumpled-up piece of paper.
Pulling it out, he stared at the scribbled writing. It took him a moment to recognize what it was. The list Wagner had given him with phone numbers for his stepsons. He could barely make out the names: Patrick, Frank and Allen.
Back at the apartment, Shep tried the phone number for Patrick. He got voice mail. He left his name and number and asked Patrick to give him a call, saying it was about Lindy Parker. Disconnecting, he wondered if any of three stepsons would even remember the name.
He called Frank next. A woman answered and told him Frank was at work. He left a message for the man to call him, saying it was about a family who lived near Frank’s stepfather and a tragedy fifteen years ago.
Allen answered on the fourth ring. “Lindy Parker? Sure, I remember the murder. It’s all the old man talked about for months. You’d have thought he knew her.”
“Did you know her?” Shep asked.
The man scoffed. “Those girls were kids. I was almost thirty.”
“So you didn’t have any contact with them?”
“I saw them a couple of times coming out of the house headed wherever.”
“Did you ever wave at them?”
“Seriously? In the first place, I was happily married. In the second, like I said, they were kids. No, I didn’t wave at them. Is that all?”
“What about your brothers. They’re younger, right?”
“You’d have to ask them but to my knowledge they didn’t have any more contact with that family than I did.”
Shep disconnected. Another dead end. He called the judge to ask if they had DNA back on the scarf. He was anxious since it was going to take a strange woman’s DNA on the scarf to prove to Charlie that she hadn’t seen the long-dead Lindy Parker.
“Not yet. Tell me what you have so far,” Landusky said in his no-nonsense voice. But the judge sounded less gruff than usual.
Shep ran through all of it, which didn’t seem like much, and waited for the judge’s reaction. When he said nothing, Shep added, “I was thinking I would try to track down Lindy’s father.”
“I’m afraid that could be a problem. Apparently Kathryn never married him so there is no record of a husband. Nor is his name on the birth certificate. Lindy’s birth certificate says it was a home birth in Brazil.”
“Another dead end,”