Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

hair I recalled, but John Dawson’s hair wasn’t the pale blond I’d expected, the hair my sister had inherited. It looked light brown, or sandy, like Luke’s.
    I touched the faces with a fingertip. Vague images swam into my mind. I’d pushed open a door in my memory, just a crack. I watched him yank dresses from her hands, from a half-filled suitcase, and slap the hangers back over the closet rod. Clink, clink. Metal on metal.
    “You said you wanted to know about the effect on the parents?”
    Steckling’s voice brought me back to the present. The memory dissolved.
    “Yes.” I pushed the clipping aside, out of my line of vision. “I thought I might like to talk to them.”
    “Well, I’m afraid you can’t talk to him because he’s dead.”
    The shock was swift, deep, and left me momentarily speechless.
    Steckling went on, “He killed himself a couple years after the girls disappeared.”
    “Oh my God,” I breathed.
    The detective nodded. “It never was officially ruled a suicide, but I always thought it was. Shot himself in the head while he was cleaning his hunting rifle. This guy was a hunter since he was a kid, he knew guns, he knew gun safety. That wasn’t any accident. But the insurance company couldn’t prove suicide, so they had to pay for accidental death.”
    I licked my dry lips. “But why did he do it? Was it grief?”
    “More like a guilty conscience, if you ask me.”
    “A guilty conscience? Over what?”
    “My theory was, he took the girls and killed them.”
    “You’re not serious.” The words came out on a burst of astonished laughter.
    Steckling started to speak, changed his mind, then changed it again. He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “I’ll tell you something we never did make public. This is confidential, you understand? But if you’re going to talk to the mother, you probably ought to know about it.”
    He meant what he’d said. He thought our father killed us. But it was absurd, it was crazy. Caught up in these thoughts, I wasn’t braced for what he said next.
    “John Dawson wasn’t the younger girl’s real father.”
    I stared at him.
    “That came out when I questioned them. We always start with the family, any time we get a crime like this, and no witnesses. Dawson just broke down and spit it out, said he wasn’t Stephanie’s father. He left Barbara for a while when he first found out. Then they got back together on condition they’d move to a new town and start fresh. They came to St. Cloud when Stephanie was a few months old. Dawson sold insurance, he got a transfer to the St. Cloud office.”
    “Who—” My voice was so weak I barely heard it myself. I took a breath and started over. “Who was Stephanie’s real father?”
    Steckling shrugged. “That, I never could get out of them. I really leaned on them, I even threatened to charge them for withholding evidence, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. Dawson swore he didn’t even know for sure who it was, and Barbara said it was somebody who was long gone.”
    I gave my head a slight shake, trying to clear it. I had to be careful what I said, had to avoid questions that betrayed too much knowledge. “What made you think John Dawson was capable of murdering both girls?”
    “Stranger things have happened, I’ll tell you. A man finds out his wife’s been carrying on an affair with another man, had a kid by him, he broods about it, starts thinking maybe the other one’s not his either. Hell, who knows? Maybe she wasn’t.”
    A clutch of pain deep inside almost made me cry out a protest. Maintaining a calm, interested expression took all my self-control. “Did he tell you he thought neither girl was his?”
    “No, but that’s no proof he didn’t think it. And even if he believed Cathy was his, he could’ve killed her too just to get back at his wife. People that do things like that, sometimes their motives are pretty twisted. Of course, he claimed he loved them both, and he swore he never treated Stephanie any different. But if you ask me, that’d be damned hard for a man to do under the circumstances, treat her like she was his.”
    “You never found any evidence against him,” I said, and wished I’d made it sound like a question instead of a flat statement of fact.
    “No. We watched him real close, but he was careful. He never led us anywhere.”
    Because there was nowhere to lead you . “How did they act after the disappearance? What was it like for them?”
    “Well,