Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

me to know what was going on with her.”
    “What was going on?”
    “She got married again after a few years. Had two more kids, one right after the other. She was getting close to forty, and she said she wanted to hurry before it was too late.”
    In all my imaginings, I hadn’t considered the possibility that my sister and I had been replaced, that our mother had another family now. She hadn’t simply waited for us to return.
    “How old are they?” I said. “The children.”
    “Teenagers, fourteen, fifteen. A girl and a boy.”
    My half-sister, half-brother. “Do you know their names?”
    Steckling narrowed his eyes at me. “You ought to talk to Barbara about all that, see if she wants to get into it. Call her first, ask her if she’s willing to talk to you. I wouldn’t go knocking on her door without being invited.” He smiled, and suddenly looked a decade younger. “But you don’t strike me as somebody who’d do that anyway.”
    My answering smile was automatic. “No, I wouldn’t.”
    Then he said, “Caroline and Mark, that’s their names. The girl’s the older one. The boy’s named after his father. Mark Junior.”
    “What’s their last name?”
    “Olsson.” He spelled it, then laughed. “Easy to remember. A million of them in Minnesota.”
    I produced another smile. 
    “You’ll be careful how you approach Barbara, won’t you?” he said. “She’s always been pretty willing to talk about it, but this business about her husband not being Stephanie’s father—”
    “I’ll be careful.” I added what I thought he wanted to hear. “I won’t let her know that you told me. If she doesn’t bring it up, I won’t either.”
    “I’ll give you her home number.” He reached into his shirt pocket for a small notepad, consulted the sheet stapled inside the folder on the desk, jotted her name and number. He tore the page from the pad and held it out, with no idea of what he was giving me.
    My fingers closed round it.
    “You want copies of these newspaper stories?” he said.
    “Yes, thank you.”
    While a clerk did the copying, Steckling brought us coffee in Styrofoam cups, and we chatted about the weather differences between the Washington area and Minnesota. A couple of times I noticed him looking at my scar, but he never asked about it.

Chapter Twenty-six
    For a long time I sat behind the wheel of the rental car in the lot next to police headquarters, watching the late afternoon sunlight slowly recede along the rows of vehicles. The folder full of newspaper articles peeked from underneath my bag on the passenger seat, both luring and repelling me. 
    I wanted to devour every word, follow my parents through the days after my sister and I disappeared into Judith Goddard’s life. Yet I wondered how much more of their anguish I could bear to learn about and share. The things I’d heard from Steckling left me feeling battered and threatened. A few steps farther and the quicksand of the past would be sucking at my feet.
    I could stop this now. Go home to Luke. To my sister.
    I dismissed the thought as soon as it formed. I was here, so close. I had to go on. I reached into my bag and pulled out the St. Cloud map I’d bought at the Twin Cities airport.
    The street we’d lived on at the time of the abduction was three or four miles from police headquarters. I drove toward it. Now and then some detail jumped out at me from the ordinary streets—a dry cleaner’s sign, a grocery store parking lot, an ancient gnarled oak tree—and I had the sensation that I was driving through the landscape of a half-remembered dream.
    When I saw our house, I knew it. It was different, yet the same. A siding-covered house in a middle-class neighborhood, on a narrow lot of maybe a quarter acre. Smaller than my vague memory of it, but then I’d been seeing it through the distorted lens of a child’s perception.
    The house was still white, the shutters still black, but now the door was bright red. Someone had cared enough to bring the small front lawn to perfection, a smooth unbroken green in contrast to the half-bald yard I remembered playing on. Low dahlias bloomed in beds along the walk leading to the door. The clear bright colors made me think of Mother’s gardens, and the blossoms I’d hacked to bits.
    I parked at the curb across the street and sat there until a group of children in a nearby yard noticed me. When I glanced at them, I saw small bodies pulling closer together, suspicious eyes