Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

had shoulder-length hair that might be auburn, like mine. My father was tall and lanky. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was blond. That must be where Michelle got her coloring.
    I rushed to the circulation desk and asked the clerk if the library had back issues of the St. Cloud papers. He flipped through a little box of cards. His casual, “Nope, sorry,” was like a punch in the stomach.
    But I had the names. It was a beginning. I made a copy of the little story that would lead me back to my real parents. Then I made another copy of the story about Michael Goddard’s accident. It was a part of the puzzle. Someday soon I might have all the pieces, and the complete picture would come clear. I didn’t know yet whether I would go any farther than that.
    ***
    “Are you sure you want to do this by yourself?” Luke said.
    I was packing a suitcase. The cast had been taken off my arm that day and the muscles protested at being put to use again, so I folded blouses and slacks mostly with one hand. The doctor wanted me to start physical therapy at once, but I’d told him it would have to wait. I had something to take care of first.
    “Let me go with you,” Luke said. “I’ll cancel my appointments for a week—”
    “No,” I said firmly. “I’ll be fine.”
    I didn’t feel fine. Dread of the unknown threatened to paralyze me every time I stopped to think about what I was doing.
    Luke came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me, kissing my cheek. “Just come back to me.”
    I felt a wash of tenderness for him, and gratitude for his steadying presence in my life. I turned and embraced him. “Oh, I’ll be back. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

Chapter Twenty-five
    I had a plan. I had a script written in my head, and I rehearsed it all the way to Minneapolis on the plane. Driving north to St. Cloud in a rental car, I spoke my lines aloud again and again, until I began to worry that they’d sound phony and stiff because they were over-rehearsed.
    I walked into police headquarters with a notebook and a tape recorder in the big canvas bag slung over my shoulder. The recorder had been a last-minute thought, tucked into my bag just before I left Luke’s apartment that morning. It would make me more believable, and it would catch any bits of information that emotion prevented me from absorbing.
    The receptionist at the front desk, a middle-aged woman with ruddy cheeks and flyaway blond hair, was eager to help. She made a couple of phone calls, telling invisible strangers about my interest in a twenty-one-year-old case. When she replaced the receiver she was beaming with accomplishment.
    “Guess what?” she said. “The detective that headed up that case, he’s still in the department. You can get the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth. Soon as he gets in. He’s out on an interview, but it won’t be long. Want some coffee while you wait?”
    The man who investigated our disappearance. Fear and doubt seized me. I couldn’t pull this off. I would give myself away the moment I met him.
    I turned abruptly.
    The startled receptionist said, “Is something wrong?”
    I faced her again, shook my head, smiled. “No, no,” I said. “I’ll pass on the coffee, but I’d love a cup of water.”
    Almost an hour went by. I sat on a hard wooden bench inside the front door, next to a metal container of sand bristling with cigarette butts. The place reeked of stale smoke. No one else came in, and between occasional phone calls the receptionist chattered about Princess Diana, the subject of a book she was reading in idle moments.
    “I blame that husband of hers for everything,” the woman said, shaking her head. “If he hadn’t been carrying on with that old girlfriend of his, I bet him and Diana would still be married to this day, and she’d be alive and those two boys would have the kind of home they deserve.”
    Now and then, even as she seemed consumed by details of the royals’ lives, the woman’s gaze slipped down to the raw scar on the back of my left hand. But she didn’t ask about it. Her glances made me acutely conscious of the far worse scar that was hidden by the sleeve of my blouse. The silk fabric felt like sandpaper scraping across it.
    At last a tall gray-haired man walked through the front door. “Detective Steckling!” the woman exclaimed. “This young lady’s been waiting for you. She wants to talk to you about the Dawson sisters.”
    I stood and shook his hand, aware