Mona clasped her hands together at her narrow waist. She wore a blue dress in the almost exact color as the shutters, cinched at the waist with a fat white belt.
“And your wife is already dreaming of her new home.” Mona tapped her pink fingernails on the arm of her chair. “There’s a beautiful Colonial that came on the market not two weeks ago. Right downtown. You could walk to it from here. A little white gazebo in the backyard for entertaining your friends.”
Jesse blinked at her.
“My wife is really fixed on the Kaiser house.”
Mona pursed her lips and studied him.
Jesse wanted to wriggle out from under her stare and pressed his hands into his thighs to keep his leg from bouncing.
“The Kaisers haven’t been around these parts in twenty years. Adele Kaiser and Stephen Kaiser. They’re the only two, unless he’s married and had a few baby Kaisers, though I doubt it. He always had an odd look in his eye, that boy.”
Jesse feigned mild interest.
“Do you know how to reach them?”
Mona cocked her head.
“It’s possible to reach them, but do I know how? No, I surely don’t. Adele and I were not exactly friendly. She kept to herself, her and her boy. And not to be a terrible gossip, but the women who befriended Adele Kaiser soon saw their husbands visiting for tea more than themselves. She was a widow. And some might have reasoned, she grieved by…” Mona fluttered her hand, “having loose morals, but Adele’s reputation developed long before her husband died. Some whispered her infidelities drove him to it.”
Jesse sat back. Mona was repeating the same story he’d heard at the bar.
“I don’t make a habit of speaking ill of others, Mr. Kaminski. I’m just telling you, finding Adele won’t be an easy task. She didn’t leave many friends in this town. I hate to say the same goes for her child, largely thanks to his mother.”
Jesse bought a burger and fries at the Silver Spoon Diner, sliding onto a stool at the counter.
The diner was busy, most of the booths filled with teenagers sharing milkshakes and cheeseburgers.
He ate quietly, mulling over the stories offered by Mona and the men at the bar. Their revelations told him little about the body in the closet, but a picture of the family who’d occupied the house had begun to emerge.
As he stood to leave, a bulletin board by the door caught his eye. He paused and gazed at listings for free kittens, furniture for sale, and piano lessons.
In the top right corner of the board, a missing poster hung. The image was in black and white and portrayed a young woman with bouncy dark curls and diamond-shaped eyes. She smiled with an easy confidence that Jesse remembered from the girls he went to high school with, the girls who knew they were pretty and expected you to notice.
Beneath the word Missing he read:
Victoria Ann Medawar.
Last seen: October 31, 1945
Age: 17 at time of disappearance.
Please help us find our missing daughter.
The waitress, a girl of no more than seventeen herself, saw him looking.
“That’s my aunt,” she told him.
“Your aunt?” Jesse glanced away from the poster. The waitress before him looked uncannily like the missing Victoria.
She bobbed her head up and down.
“I wasn’t born when she went missing. Scary though, right? I’ve never been to a Halloween party. My dad forbids it.”
“Did she disappear at a Halloween party?” Jesse asked.
“Just a sec,” the girl told him, delivering the milkshake on her tray. The boy she handed it to reached out and tugged a strand of her long dark hair. She giggled and swatted his hand away.
Jesse felt self-conscious standing and staring at the board. He returned to the counter.
When the girl reappeared, he read her name tag: Katie.
“Katie, I think I’ll have one of those milkshakes, too. Strawberry, please.”
Gabriel hadn’t lived long enough to have a favorite milkshake flavor, but Jesse liked to imagine he would have preferred strawberry. Wild strawberries grew behind their farmhouse, and Nell would spend hours picking the tiny fruit. Gabriel ate it faster than she could pick it and would immediately demand ‘moe-beawwies.’
Katie delivered his milkshake.
“Have there ever been any leads?” He pointed back toward the corkboard.
Katie tucked her dark hair behind her ears and shook her head.
“No. My grandparents put up a reward and everything. Nobody’s ever come forward. She just walked out the door and disappeared.”
“Do they know where she went that night? You said a Halloween party?”
“My dad told me she was secretive about it. She said she was going to a costume party and put on the big fancy dress she’d worn to her sweetheart dance the year before. That was the last anyone saw her.”
Jesse took a sip of his milkshake, remembering the flash of a girl running down the stairs. In the darkness, he’d barely made her out, and yet he thought she wore a dress, a fancy dress.
An image of the trunk immediately followed. He saw the dark coils of hair, and his stomach turned sour.
He pushed the milkshake away.
“You don’t like it?” she asked.
“No, I do. Brain-freeze.” He tapped his temple, and she grinned, gliding to the counter to grab a tray of food as the cook rang the little bell.
“We’re busy, Katie. No time for yakking,” the cook told her.
“Chill out, Dad,” Katie replied, rolling her eyes.
Jesse gazed at the man through the little window. He could only see the top half of his head over the plates of burgers.
The man shifted his stare to Jesse, catching him with searching eyes.
Jesse looked quickly away. He took a final drink of his shake and pushed back from the counter.
He strode into the warm August day troubled by the image of the girl missing for twenty years.
Chapter 26
Stephen
Stephen tried to slip by unnoticed.
He heard his mother’s deep laughter reverberate from the parlor. Without seeing her, he knew her head would be thrown back, her delicate throat exposed to the man she entertained.
“Adele, you do surprise me,” the man said, and Stephen recognized the tone. The flirtation, the seduction, eventually the rhythmic creaks from her bedroom.
He paused at the door, grinding his teeth as he twisted the knob. It groaned beneath his fingers.
“Stephen?” her voice called out, not in the usual shrill tone she spoke his name, but the soft, melodious venom she chose in the presence of others.
She stepped into the hall, her face flushed, and she narrowed her eyes at the open door.
“Mr. Hardwick and I have run out of wine. Run down to the cellar and fetch us another bottle.”
Stephen clutched the door handle.
He wanted to run into the daylight. He hated the cellar. The damp, musty cellar with its stone walls and high beams. He could still see his father there, naked feet swaying back and forth over the dirt floor. A small pool of blood lay below the body. His father’s nose had bled when he hung himself.
“I’d rather not, Mother.”
Adele’s bright lips pulled away from her teeth in a snarl.
She would punish him now whether he got the wine or not.
“Now,” she hissed.
She reached out and snatched the collar of his shirt, her sharp nails digging deep into the flesh below his neck. He didn’t cry out, but winced as she pulled him away from the door and shoved him in the direction of the cellar stairway.