Silent Fall

want to go, that she needed me, and that she was going to make me pancakes for breakfast. I guess I didn’t realize she was dead."
    The rawness of her story shocked Dylan. He’d covered murders in his job, but this one was different. This one had happened to Catherine, and he could feel her pain. He wanted to tell her to stop, but now that she’d started she seemed determined to keep going. He had to listen, no matter how uncomfortable he was.
    "The rest of that night and the next few days are a blur," she continued. "I know I spoke to the police, social workers, a psychiatrist. They all asked what had happened. Had I heard anything? Had I seen anything? Where was my father? Had my parents been fighting? I couldn’t tell them anything. I felt frozen."
    "God, Catherine." He leaned over and brushed her hair away from her face, then cupped her head with his hand. "You don’t have to go on."
    "I do. I’ve never told anyone about that night -- not the other kids in foster care, no one."
    Dylan didn’t know if he wanted to be her confidant. He was terrified of getting closer. But he could see that she desperately needed to unload the burden she’d been carrying for so long. And he would have to take it. He owed her that much. "I’m listening."
    "My father had an alibi, a woman who said she was having an affair with him and that he was in her bed the night my mother was killed. The police, however, didn’t believe her or my father. My dad had a history of drug abuse, and he’d been in jail two or three times already for assault. He’d worked odd jobs, and every one of those employers said he had an explosive temper. Plus, there had been a nine-one-one call about six months earlier, when my mother said that my father hit her in the face. She decided not to press charges, so nothing happened." Catherine licked her lips. "You have to understand that this is all stuff people told me later. I was only six years old. I didn’t know anything about their relationship, or if I did I couldn’t remember it. The police and the district attorney did everything they could to get me to name my father as the murderer, but I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t say he was for sure." A tear trickled down her cheek and she ruthlessly wiped it away.
    "Catherine, I’m so sorry," Dylan breathed, rubbing his thumb along her tight jaw.
    "They said he beat her and stabbed her with a kitchen knife twenty-seven times," she continued in a cool voice, as if the horror of it no longer touched her, but Dylan knew that it was there with her every single night. "The police said the violence was unspeakable, and perhaps that’s why I couldn’t speak it. In the end there wasn’t enough evidence to put my father in jail -- no murder weapon, no DNA, nothing -- so he got off. I had been put into foster care while they were investigating him, and after the charges were dismissed I thought he might come and get me, but he didn’t. I never saw him again. I asked the social worker once, and she said that they’d lost track of him, and that after enough time went by, if he didn’t show up and they still couldn’t locate him, they would terminate his parental rights so I could be adopted. Of course, no one wants to adopt a traumatized little girl whose father was probably a murderer, so that was a moot point."
    "I don’t understand how your father could have gotten away with the crime. He must have left his fingerprints at the scene, and if it was that bloody, that vicious a fight, I’m surprised there wasn’t DNA all over the place."
    "His fingerprints were in the house, but he lived there, so that didn’t make him the killer. Apparently there wasn’t any DNA evidence on her body, because I’m sure they would have done something with it if they’d found it. Although it happened twenty-four years ago, and I don’t know what kind of tests they had back then."
    "So your dreams... they’re about that night, aren’t they?"
    "For a long time they were. I always wake up at four forty-four -- I think that’s when she died. I believe the screams I hear in my head are those of my mother."
    He stared at her for a long moment, wondering if he should push any further, but they’d gone this far. "How do you think you managed to escape?"
    "No one knows." She met his gaze, haunting shadows in her eyes. "They found my blanket in the back of a