Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

door.
    “Did anybody see what happened?” I said.
    Steckling shook his head. “We had witnesses that saw them in the playground that day, but nobody saw them leave. You see, there was a thunderstorm, and everybody on the playground, the mothers and their kids, they ran for cover when it started.”
    Everybody went away and left us alone. “Didn’t anybody try to get Catherine and Stephanie out of the rain?”
    “A couple women said they worried about them, but they figured the mother would come get them pretty quick.”
    “Why didn’t she? Did she say?”
    “Oh, she came after them. But it was too late. As best we could figure it, there was about a five-minute window between the time the other mothers and their kids left, and the time Barbara Dawson got back to the playground. Somebody snatched them in those five minutes.”
    “What did she do then? The mother.”
    “She figured they’d gone looking for her. So she went back up the block, ran around in the rain, looked in all the stores and the diner. Then she thought maybe they’d headed home—they only lived about four blocks from the playground. So she went home. They weren’t there, so she started going around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking if anybody’d seen them.”
    “Wasting time,” I murmured.
    “Wasting a lot of time.” He grunted in disgust. “She didn’t call us for three solid hours.”
    And by then we were in Minneapolis in Mother’s packed-up house.
    “Did you search outside the St. Cloud area?” I asked.
    “We put out a statewide bulletin. Got press coverage. Kept looking, checking out leads. That’s about all we can do in cases like this.”
    Cases like this . He had no idea. “Did anybody ever call and say they’d seen—” I stopped, horrified that I’d been on the verge of saying seen us . I finished, “—the girls?”
    He barked a humorless laugh. “Oh, yeah. This kind of thing, you end up wading through a blue million dead-end tips, looking for one that means something. Everybody was seeing them everywhere. Once the story got picked up by out-of-state papers, we started hearing from people in Wisconsin, Michigan, even Canada.”
    The wrong direction. “How long did you look for them?”
    “Hell, I guess I’m still looking for them.” 
    My pen slipped from my hand and landed on the carpet without a sound. I leaned to retrieve it. “Why? After all these years?”
    “It just eats away at me, that I never could find them, couldn’t close the case. Most of the time, a kid disappears, you find him, one way or another. He runs away, he comes back. The father grabs him to get back at the wife after a divorce, and you catch up with them. Or you find the kid dead somewhere. You get some closure. This case, though, we never had a clue. They just vanished into thin air, like the saying goes. I know they’re dead, but I’d like to prove it.”
    His breath came out in a long sigh as he sat forward. “You want to see some of the newspaper stories?”
    “Yes, please, thank you.”
    He was already on his feet. “That stuff’s in another room. Sit tight, I’ll be back in a minute.”
    It was much longer than a minute, long enough for me to start feeling disconnected again, to start wondering if any of this was really happening and whether I wanted to go on with it. The other policeman—it was the younger one, a tall blond—left the room and I was alone.
    Steckling came back with a bulging file folder. When he plopped it onto his desk a musty odor rose from it.
    “This is just part of it.” He sat down. “The whole case file’s about ten jackets this thick, mostly tips and dead ends and stuff that doesn’t mean anything.” He opened the folder. “Here’s the first story.”
    He slid a large clipping across the desktop.
    My childhood face, and my sister’s, smiled back at me. We leaned together, arms around each other, her hair light, mine dark. We wore pants and tee shirts. The caption read Catherine and Stephanie Dawson in a photo taken last week .
    I didn’t realize how long I’d been staring at the picture until Steckling said, “A real tragedy, huh?”
    “Yes.” My voice was a dry rasp. “It’s a tragedy.”
    He placed more clippings in front of me. In another picture a couple clung to one another, their faces distorted by crying. Barbara and John Dawson plead for the return of their daughters.
    The mother—it was so hard, even now, to think of her as my mother—had the dark