Mother's Day Murder (3 page)

“I suppose that’s okay,” he said, grumbling.

It was only a short drive over to the ball field behind the high school, where Lucy was supposed to pick up Sara. Today the boy’s baseball team was playing archrival Gilead, and there was a lot of interest. Quite a crowd had gathered to watch the game, and she could hear groans as a Tinker’s Cove player struck out, ending the game with a loss. She stood by the gate as people left the field, exchanging greetings with many of them. As the crowd thinned, and there was no sign of Sara, she began asking if anyone had seen her.

“She was here,” recalled Wilf Lundgren, the letter carrier. “I saw her with a couple of other girls.”

“When was that?”

“Second, mebbe third inning. Bases were loaded, and that Gilead kid everybody’s talking about hit one right over the fence. It was a grand slam.” He sighed. “Gotta give it to the kid. He’s a phenom.”

“But you didn’t see her after that?”

Wilf shook his head.

As Lucy followed the last of the stragglers to the parking lot, she checked her cell phone, just in case she’d missed a call. She hadn’t. She clicked the phone shut, unpleasantly aware of a tightening in her chest. Darn it, she thought angrily, everybody was all sweetness and light on Mother’s Day, but what about the rest of the year? Sara knew she was supposed to check in with her mother if she changed plans.

The thought stopped Lucy in her tracks. The truth was, Sara was very good about calling. What if something had happened that made calling impossible, like an accident?

No, if there had been an accident, she would have heard. There would have been sirens, at least.

The tightening feeling in her chest was getting worse, and now she was aware of a sinking feeling in her gut as Elizabeth’s words came back to her.
Sexual predators prowl MySpace, looking for unhappy, vulnerable kids.
And Sara had been crying under the covers last night. Maybe she had a secret life on the Internet; maybe she had foolishly agreed to meet some weirdo at the game. Or somewhere else. She could already be miles from home, at the mercy of some serial killer who preyed on young girls. Lucy screwed her eyes shut. “Please, oh please don’t let Sara be the next Corinne Appleton,” she prayed. Opening her eyes, she realized she was all alone. Everybody was gone. She hurried to the car and drove home as fast as she could, trying to think what she should do. Call Bill? Call the police? She had decided to start with Sara’s friends when she pulled into the driveway and hurried up the porch steps. When she opened the kitchen door, the first thing she saw was Sara, standing in front of the open refrigerator, looking for a snack.

She stood a moment, waiting for the pounding in her heart to slow down.

“There’s nothing to eat,” complained Sara, shutting the refrigerator door. “Not even a piece of fruit.”

“Elizabeth took it.” Lucy remembered she’d meant to stop at the grocery store, before she’d been distracted by Sara’s disappearance. “Where were you? I was worried sick when I couldn’t find you at the game!”

“Oh, sorry, Mom,” said Sara, leaning casually against the refrigerator. “I got a ride home.”

“Well, I wish you’d called and told me. I got so worried that I completely forgot we don’t have anything for supper. Elizabeth cleaned us out.” She thumped down in a chair, her purse in her lap. “And who gave you this ride, anyway? You’re not supposed to accept rides from strangers.”

Sara crossed her arms across her chest and hugged herself, a dreamy expression on her face. “It was Chad Mackenzie, Mom, the most popular boy in school!”

S
ara was still giddy over her social triumph at breakfast the next morning. Instead of the usual moans and groans, she was positively bubbly as she poured herself a glass of orange juice.

“Would you like an egg? Some toast?” asked Lucy. She hadn’t wanted to ruin Sara’s mood last night by confronting her about the text-messaging, and now there wasn’t time, but she hadn’t forgotten the matter, either. She intended to bring it up when the time was right.

“No thanks,” replied Sara, practically singing. “Just juice.”

“You need more than that to get through the morning.”

“I want to lose a few pounds.”

“She wants to get skinny for Chad,” offered Zoe in a singsong voice.

“That might be a mistake,” said Lucy. “He probably likes you the way you are. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have bothered to give you a ride.”

“He probably felt sorry for her, standing there all alone like a little lost lemon drop, waiting for her mother to come,” declared Zoe.

Lucy gave her youngest a sharp look.

“I was just joking, Mom,” Zoe added.

“I guess I will have a yogurt,” decided Sara. “It’s got calcium, and that’s supposed to help you lose weight.” She smiled dreamily. “You know what Renee and Sassie think? They think Chad might ask me to the prom.”

“Oh, my,” said Lucy, who wasn’t sure how she felt about her freshman daughter going to the prom. She was about to add, “Don’t get your hopes up,” but managed to bite her tongue before uttering the fatal phrase. There was no sense spoiling Sara’s happiness, however brief it might be. Especially since her change of mood had infected the whole house; even the dog was wagging her tail more enthusiastically than usual when the girls ran down the drive to catch the bus.

Lucy, too, felt especially chipper as she drove to work. She was the first to admit it wasn’t easy to have a daughter in high school. It brought back her own memories of adolescent insecurity, to the point that she suffered sympathy pains whenever Sara’s feelings got hurt, and shared in her joy when she scored a coup. It was a real roller coaster, but today, at least, spirits were high.

Until, that is, she got to work. There was a very different vibe at the
Pennysaver
, where Phyllis was sniffling and dabbing at her eyes, and Ted was grimly poring through old issues from the morgue.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Phyllis reached for a tissue and blew her nose. “They found Corinne Appleton’s body,” she said.

Lucy’s happy mood instantly evaporated as she waited to hear the rest of the story.

“What they think is her body,” corrected Ted. “There’s only a few bones.”

“And a piece of a bra,” added Phyllis.

“A hiker made the discovery,” said Ted. “Out near Shiloh.”

“Her poor parents,” said Lucy. They had been on TV so often, pleading for their daughter’s return, that Lucy felt as if she knew them. She could picture them clearly, the tall, quiet, whiskered father and the frizzy-haired, emotional little mother. Lucy couldn’t help identifying with them, especially when Joanne Appleton appeared wearing the same quilted jacket that Lucy owned.

“It’s tough,” said Ted, closing one of the big books of bound
Pennysaver
s with a thud. “There’s a press conference at ten in Shiloh. I’ll cover that. Lucy, I want you to write some background. We covered it pretty extensively, so it’s all here, in last summer’s papers.”

“Right,” said Lucy, wishing she could wiggle out of it somehow. It was hard enough writing about it the first time, and she didn’t want to go over it all again.

“At least now her parents know for sure what happened,” said Phyllis. “They’ll have closure.”

“Whatever that is,” muttered Lucy, studying the photo of Corinne that had appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the state, maybe even in the whole country. It was one of those stories that the media, and the public, couldn’t get enough of. She was only sixteen, a pretty girl with a round face and long dark hair. She was smiling in the photo, and there was a dimple in each cheek. Like most towns in the area, Shiloh offered a recreation program for kids during the summer school vacation, which included games, field trips, arts and crafts, and even swimming and boating lessons. Corinne had been a counselor for the eight- to ten-year-olds. It was her first job.

The rec program started at nine in the morning and ran until noon, but Corinne’s mother had dropped her off earlier, before eight thirty, because that was when she had to be at her job at a bank. “It seemed safe,” she was quoted as saying. “A park, right in the center of town. This is her home, after all. Everybody knew her and she knew everybody. If a girl isn’t safe in Shiloh, she isn’t safe anywhere.”

Nobody had seen anything out of the ordinary. One moment Corinne was there, sitting on the bandstand, reading a book, and the next time anybody noticed, she was gone. Nobody had thought anything of it. Maybe she’d gone to get a cup of coffee or a bottle of sunscreen; maybe she’d gone inside the supply shed to get balls and bats for a planned baseball game. But when everybody assembled for the morning exercises, when they raised the flag and sang “This Land Is Your Land,” she wasn’t there. The recreation director had noted her absence and assigned someone else to take her place. He’d meant to call and see if she was sick, but nine-year-old Tommy Branson tripped on a rock and fell, breaking a tooth, and what with calling his mother and getting him off to the dentist, the director had forgot all about Corinne until her mother called sometime after noon, wondering why she hadn’t shown up at the bank, as she always did, so her mother could give her a ride home on her lunch break. By then she’d been missing for nearly four hours, time for an abductor to have taken her more than two hundred miles away.

The story hit a nerve; it was all people in the region talked about for months. Many volunteered for search parties and spent long, hot hours trudging through the buggy woods; others put up posters on trees and utility poles. The Shiloh selectmen debated discontinuing the recreation program, fearful it was putting the town’s children in jeopardy. In the end, a police officer was assigned to patrol the park while the program was in session. The summer ended without further incident. No further abductions were attempted, and Corinne remained missing. Some people even speculated that perhaps the Appletons weren’t as nice as everybody thought, and perhaps Corinne had run away because of problems at home.

“Now,” wrote Lucy, “ten months after her disappearance last July, the longstanding mystery of Corinne Appleton’s fate appears to have been solved.” She typed slowly, weighing her words, trying to chart a course between a cold, factual account and a maudlin appeal to readers’ emotions. When she finally finished, she was exhausted.

“I think I’ll take a little walk before I tackle the listings,” she told Phyllis, but she hadn’t got out the door before Ted returned.

“What did they say?” demanded Phyllis. “Is it really Corinne?”

Ted nodded, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the coatrack. “Her mother identified the bra. It was pink with flowers. She said she’d washed it many times.”

Lucy thought of the many times she’d handled her own girls’ clothing, taking the clean bras and underpants and shirts and jeans out of the dryer and folding them, making neat piles topped with their rolled-up socks, which she placed on their beds for them to put away in their dresser drawers.

“There wasn’t actually much of her body left,” said Ted. “Just a few bones. They think the body might actually be elsewhere, maybe even buried, and animals dispersed the bones, but there’s enough that they can do DNA testing.”

“What’s that mean? That animals dispersed the bones? Did they eat her?” asked Phyllis, never one to mince words.

Ted sighed, reluctant to answer. “There are tooth marks on the bones.”

“Is there anything that indicates how she died?” asked Lucy.

“Not so far,” said Ted, “but forensic teams are going to comb the area where the bones were found. They’re confident that they’ll find more evidence.”

He left it there; he didn’t say the obvious. It now seemed clear that Corinne had not voluntarily run away; someone had abducted her and killed her. And the evil predator who had done it was still at large.

That night, Lucy and Bill sat down with Sara and Zoe for a little talk about safety.

“We don’t want you to end up like poor Corinne,” said Lucy. “You can’t ever get in a car with a stranger.”

“Or even somebody you know, unless you have our permission,” added Bill.

“That’s crazy,” complained Sara. “Do I have to call every time one of my friends offers me a ride?”

“No. You know what I mean. People we know but don’t really know. Like bag men from the supermarket…”

“Are the bag men kidnappers?” asked Zoe.

“Probably not. We don’t know. That’s the point,” said Bill. “Just because you recognize somebody doesn’t mean you really know them.”

“Like the fathers, or even mothers, of your classmates,” said Lucy. “If Dad and I don’t know them, you need to be cautious and check with us.”

“But if you don’t know them, how will you know if they’re bad?” Zoe asked.

“That’s not the issue,” said Bill. “We’re not making judgments about people. We just want to know where you are and who you’re with.”

Sara didn’t like this at all. “So I have to tell you everything I do, everywhere I go?” she protested angrily. “That’s crazy. I won’t have any privacy at all.”

“We’re not trying to control your life, or keep you from your friends. We just want you to be safe,” said Lucy, frustrated that this was turning out to be so difficult. “Poor Corinne is nothing but a pile of bones now. I couldn’t stand and your dad couldn’t stand, for that to happen to you, to either of you.”

Sara’s face was set in denial. “That couldn’t happen to me. Corinne was dumb. It said in the paper that she was playing around in Internet chat rooms and that she probably made a date to meet someone.”

“That was never proved,” said Lucy. “As far as I know, she was just waiting for the rec program to start. She had a job. I don’t think she’d make a date for a morning she was supposed to work.” She paused. “But since you brought it up, I know you’re no stranger to the Internet yourself.”

Bill’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

“So I have a page on MySpace. So what?” Sara demanded defensively. “Everybody does it. Everybody has one.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Bill, his jaw set. “We’re going to look at this page right now. Let’s go.” He marched over to the computer in a corner of the family room. “Show me.”

Zoe was fidgeting nervously with her armful of friendship bracelets. “What do you think happened to her, Mom?”

Lucy had done plenty of research; she knew how these things happened. “I think some very bad person tricked her with a fake story, like her mom was sick or had an accident, or there was an injured dog that needed to get to a vet fast, something like that. He told her to get in the car, that would be the fastest way, and she fell for it, thinking she was needed, that she was helping.”

“And then he killed her?” asked Zoe.

“Probably a lot more than that,” said Sara, earning a warning look from her mother.

“We want to believe everyone in the world is good, but that’s just not the case,” said Lucy.

“Like Osama bin Laden,” said Zoe.

“Exactly,” said Bill, who was leaning over Sara’s shoulder, staring at the monitor. “Only some bad guys don’t go around in funny clothes, like Osama, and we haven’t seen their photos on TV. So if somebody seems to be acting oddly to you, or asks you to do something you’re not sure you should, you should say no and get someplace safe as fast as you can.”

Seeing that Zoe’s fidgeting was becoming frantic and she looked as if she was going to cry, Lucy put an arm around her shoulder and hugged her. “You don’t need to be afraid. Chances are this will never happen to you. But we want you to know what to do if it does, okay?”

Zoe nodded bravely. “Okay.”

“Well, this MySpace thing looks okay,” said Bill, speaking slowly and straightening up. “But both of you girls know that you must never, ever under any circumstances agree to meet somebody who has contacted you on the Internet, right?”

Both girls nodded.

“And I do think there are better uses for the computer, like for schoolwork,” he continued. “I think you both ought to get started on your homework.”

“I’ve got to call Chad,” said Sara, standing up and smoothing her jeans. “He asked me to the prom, you know.”

“Did you say yes?” asked Zoe, clapping her hands together.

“I told him I’d think about it,” said Sara.

Zoe was shocked. “Aren’t you going to say yes?”

“Of course, I am, but not right away. I don’t want to seem too eager.” She looked at her parents. “And I know I need permission from you.”

Lucy’s and Bill’s eyes met. Who knew their daughter was such a femme fatale?

“Everybody thought he was going with Ashley,” said Zoe.

“He broke up with her,” said Sara, looking smug. “Just like he broke up with Heather last year. Those girls are getting old.”

“Old? They’re sixteen,” said Bill.

Sara corrected him. “Almost seventeen.”

“Positively ancient,” said Lucy, sarcastically.

“That’s right. They’re ancient history. They’re almost seniors. Nobody dates seniors,” Sara noted.

“Why not?” asked Lucy.

“Like I said, they’re old. Boys, even seniors, like younger girls, like freshmen,” Sara explained. “It looks like me and my friends are going to be the new popular kids.”

Zoe’s eyebrows shot up. “You?”

Sara rolled her eyes. “What’s so strange about that? We’re cheerleaders. We’re cute. Justin Crane asked Renee to the prom, and Will Worthington gave Sassie a ride home today. I bet he’ll ask her, too.”

“What about Tommy?” asked Zoe, referring to a neighbor boy, also a freshman, who had shown some interest in Sara.

“He’s nice,” said Sara, “but you have to be a senior to buy tickets to the prom.” She got up. “Well, I’ve got to call Chad. What shall I tell him? Can I go?”

Lucy’s first instinct was to say no. Sara was too young and inexperienced to go out with a senior, especially to something as significant as the prom. She knew full well that many kids considered the evening incomplete unless it included sex and alcohol. But she also knew that she was probably alone in this. Despite his recent show of fatherly discipline, Bill was a notoriously soft touch where his daughters were concerned.