Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

trained on me. They’d been taught to be wary of strangers.
    I searched up and down the surrounding streets, first close in, then farther and farther away, my frustration growing. The playground was gone. Something had replaced it, but I couldn’t be sure if it was the small fire station that looked relatively new or the block of townhouses with scrawny trees lined up in front.
    I told myself it didn’t matter. Seeing the playground again wasn’t necessary. Yet I felt as if I’d lost a vital piece of the puzzle that was my life. Strangers had obliterated the very spot where my universe altered in an instant.
    Reluctantly abandoning the search, I stopped at a fast food restaurant and went in for a cup of coffee. The hot greasy smell of fried chicken made me realize I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, when Luke badgered me into finishing a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice.
    Luke. How far away he seemed.
    I ordered a chicken breast and a salad to go with my coffee and sat down to eat, marveling that appetite persisted in the face of calamity.
    ***
    There was no point in rushing back to Minneapolis. I needed time to absorb what I’d discovered and decide what to do next. As dusk faded to night, I checked into a motel. I took a long steamy shower and pulled on my comfortingly familiar terry cloth robe.
    I stood at the window for a while and watched the trucks and cars that rolled past on the highway, their long beams piercing the dark and just as quickly vanishing into it again. No one, not even Luke, knew where I was.
    When I felt I was ready, I drew the curtains closed. I pulled the chair from the room’s small desk, sat next to the bed and opened the folder I’d placed there. I arranged the newspaper clippings in order of their dates, gradually covering the surface of the pale green bedspread.
    I picked up the stories one by one and followed my parents on their odyssey through a landscape where all that was right and normal had taken on terrifying forms. Tearful pleas. Neighbors questioned. A man on the next block with a history of molesting girls, briefly under suspicion, cleared when his alibi was confirmed. Hints, then blunt statements that John Dawson was a suspect.
    I lingered over the only story that was about my sister and me rather than the distress of the adults around us. Cathy and Stephanie Dawson had been inseparable. Cathy, so young herself, watched over her little sister. They were good girls, sweet and bright and lively children.
    Two weeks before the abduction, Stephanie had turned three. She’d had a small party and received a bike with training wheels. Cathy’s fifth birthday came four days after the girls disappeared. Her gifts remained unopened on a closet shelf.
    Mother had given my sister a second birthday celebration that first year we were with her, while my real birthday was ignored and the celebration put off for months. Some memory of that had stayed with me, causing ripples of vague resentment and a sense of loss.
    When I’d read all the clippings, I dug into my bag for the photocopied story about the Goddards’ accident and the note on blue paper I’d taken from Mother’s study. I smoothed the three sheets of paper and laid them on the bed in their proper place, at the beginning, first the note, then the accident report.
    I believed I knew most of the story now. I could put it together in a way Detective Steckling never could, because he would always be missing a vital piece.
    Barbara Dawson had an affair with Michael Goddard when they worked at the same law firm, he a young partner, she a secretary. She became pregnant. Her husband found out about the affair and left her.
    Why hadn’t she gone to Michael, why hadn’t they begun a life together? Because he was already married to Judith, who was also pregnant with his child. Perhaps he rejected Barbara’s claim on him, made it clear she and her child would never be part of his life.
    Judith didn’t know about the affair and Michael’s other baby. Not yet.
    John Dawson resumed his life with Barbara and the two girls, one his and one not, on condition that they move away from Minneapolis. Distraught over the hopelessness of her relationship with Michael, Barbara agreed. When she was alone with John and the girls in a new place, no work to occupy her, she became more depressed, less attentive to her children. And to her husband. The voices in my memory, the shouts, the sobbed pleas, were a legacy of their unhappiness.
    I