Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

Barbara, the mother, she blamed herself for leaving them on the playground.”
    “They were so young,” I murmured. Did I really remember her walking away, leaving us behind, or had my imagination supplied the desolating picture? “To be left alone like that.”
    Steckling sighed. “Well, she wouldn’t have won any mother of the year awards, that’s for sure. What I think—well, what I know—is Barbara Dawson was depressed, real bad depression, over a lot of things. Look what happened to her. An affair, a baby that wasn’t her husband’s, a breakup with the baby’s father, a separation from her husband, leaving a job she liked, moving from the Twin Cities up here where she didn’t know anybody. She was pretty low, she admitted it.”
    “So depressed that she neglected her children.”
    “I think she took pretty good care of them most of the time. But I guess she needed to get away from them for a few minutes now and then. So she left them where she thought they’d be okay and she went off by herself. Just careless, like I said.”
    A careless moment that changed so many lives.
    “How did John Dawson behave afterward?”
    “Oh, he was really determined to punish his wife. Kept telling her it was her fault, she couldn’t be trusted. He said that right in front of me more than once. The more I heard, the more convinced I was that he did it himself, to hurt Barbara. It was brutal, some of the things he said to her.”
    I recalled, with exquisite precision, the sensation of smothering when I pulled my pillow tight over my head to block out their quarreling voices in the next room.
    Sour bile rose to burn my throat. I swallowed. “Couldn’t he account for himself, where he was when they disappeared?”
    “He always claimed he was working in his office all afternoon, up to when his wife called him—she called him before she called us—but the only other person he worked with was a secretary, and she was on vacation. So, no alibi.”
    What would this man say if I told him the truth? My father didn’t kill anyone. Look at me. I’m right here in front of you, and my sister is sitting in a classroom in Washington. He wouldn’t believe me. He might be very hard to convince.
    I said, “How would you have identified the girls if you’d found them?”
    “Decomposed bodies, you mean? Well, we had up-to-date dental records. General descriptions, hair color. Hair lasts a long time, even when there’s nothing else left but a skeleton. We lifted fingerprints from their room, but that wouldn’t do much good unless we’d found the bodies early enough—” He broke off with a shrug.
    I looked down at my hands. Fingerprints. The never-changing stamp of identity. I could prove who I was whenever I was ready.
    “What happened to Barbara after John Dawson’s death?”
    “It took her a while to pull herself together,” Steckling said. “She was still in pretty rough shape when her husband died. It was tough on her. But she put her life back together.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “She sold the house here, moved back to Minneapolis and—”
    “Minneapolis?” I said sharply.
    “Yeah. She got a job at the same place she’d worked at before.”
    “Where was that?” I poised my pencil over my pad, realizing I had yet to write anything down.
    “A law firm. One of those big ones with a dozen names. I don’t remember—Let me look here.” He turned to the front of the thick folder, where a sheet of paper was stapled to the inside of the cover. “Here it is. Jensen, Dubie, Goddard, and Brown. Well, I guess that’s not a dozen names, it just seems like it.”
    My hand reached reflexively for my bag, where I carried the accident story that gave Michael Goddard’s place of employment. Jensen, Dubie, Goddard, and Brown.
    I drew my hand back to my lap, anchored my fingers around the notepad. “She worked there.”
    “Yeah, she was a legal secretary. Good one too, I guess, to work in a firm like that. She told me she was going back to work for one of the senior partners. He’d had three or four secretaries since she left and hadn’t been satisfied with any of them.”
    “Is she still living in Minneapolis?”
    He nodded. “Far as I know. She kept in touch for a long time, called regularly. She had this idea the girls might somehow find their way back home, and she wouldn’t be here for them. Well, I knew they were dead, I was always sure of that, but I’d talk to her, listen to her. She always wanted