One Last Scream (28 page)

“I understand,” George murmured, nodding.

Caroline glanced out at the playing field again. “You know, years later, when Annabelle was fourteen, she asked me to explain what her uncle had done. I told her what I could. And then Annabelle said something very strange. She remembered her Uncle Duane asking her several times if she knew where Amelia was. Isn’t that peculiar?”

Caroline pushed back her windblown hair and sighed. “How did he expect that little girl to know where her sister was living when her own father didn’t even know?”

“Yep, I have the appointment book right in front of me,” Jessie said on the other end of the line. “I’m in your office. It’s here in the book: Amelia Faraday, Monday, October fifteenth, two
P.M
. And there’s a red checkmark beside it.”

That was Karen’s way of indicating the client had shown up for the appointment and needed to be billed.

“Then her twin must be alive,” Karen whispered. She slouched back against the phone booth’s door.

“What are you talking about? Whose twin?”

“Um, I’ll explain later, Jessie.”

The lights went on outside Danny’s Diner, and Karen realized it was getting dark. “Listen,” she said into the phone. “Is everything okay there?”

“Terrific. The kids are playing with Rufus in the kitchen, and he’s lapping up the attention. We’ll take him out to the backyard so he can do his business. Is there anything else you need done here before we head back to George’s?”

“No, thanks. You’re great, Jessie. Remember everything I told you this morning? Well, it still stands. If you happen to see my car or if Amelia shows up at George’s—”

“I know,” Jessie cut in. “Be careful…she could be dangerous…call the police…do not pass Go, do not collect $200…”

“I’m serious,” Karen said, “doubly serious now.”

“We’ll be careful, hon. You drive safe. Talk to you soon.”

“Thank you again, Jess.”

She hung up, then immediately called George again. She was charging all these calls. Her American Express bill would be nuts, but right now she didn’t care.

George answered on the second ring. “Karen?”

“Yes, hi—”

“Looks like you’re still in that phone booth by the diner,” he said. “I have the number on my cell. Let me call you back there in fifteen minutes, okay?”

She hesitated. “All right. But have you talked with Annabelle’s teacher yet?”

“I’m doing that right now. Sorry to make you stick around there. Go inside the diner and grab a Coke or something. I’ll call you in fifteen.”

“Okay, but you should know—” Karen heard a click.

“Annabelle’s alive,” she said to no one.

“Can we take Rufus home with us?” Stephanie asked. She wouldn’t stop petting him, even while the dog lifted a leg and peed on the hydrangea bushes near Karen’s back door.

“Well, I don’t think Karen would like coming home to an empty house tonight,” Jessie said, standing on the back steps. The kitchen door was open behind her.

Jody held Rufus by his leash. He pulled his kid sister away from the dog. “Leave him alone for a minute so he can take a dump. Jeez!”

Stephanie resisted for a few moments, and finally turned toward Jessie. “Why don’t Karen and Rufus come live with us?”

“I’m working on that one, honey,” she replied. “Now, Jody’s right, you have to leave Rufus be for just a minute or two. And you need to calm down, too.”

Stephanie had asthma, and she’d left her inhaler at Rainbow Junction Daycare this afternoon. They’d be on pins and needles until they got back home, where she had two more inhalers. In the meantime, Steffie wasn’t supposed to exert herself or get overexcited.

“Just take it easy, sweetheart,” she called to her. “Why don’t you…” Jessie trailed off as she heard a noise behind her in the kitchen.

She turned around, and gasped.

Standing by the breakfast table, she wore a rain slicker and clutched her purse to her side. She had a tiny, cryptic smile on her face.

“Oh, my God, you scared me,” Jessie said, a hand on her heart. “What are you doing here, Amelia?”

“Sorry about the interruption,” George said, tucking the cell phone in his sports coat pocket. He’d stepped down to the playing field to take Karen’s call. Now he made his way back up the bleachers. “Where was I?”

“You asked me about the fire,” Caroline Cadwell said.

Nodding, he sat down beside her. “So the police called you late one night in July….”

“Yes, I had no idea Lon put me down on his insurance policy as his emergency contact. There was no next of kin, so they called me to identify the remains.”

“Did you drive out to the ranch that night?”

“Oh, no. They didn’t get the bodies out of there until about two in the morning. Because the ranch was so remote, it took a while for the fire trucks to arrive and even longer to get water in the hoses. In the meantime, the whole upstairs was burnt, along with most of the first floor. You can still see what’s left of the place if you drive a couple of miles outside town. They haven’t leveled it yet.”

Shuddering, Caroline rubbed her arms. “Do you mind if we head inside? I’m starting to feel a chill.”

“Not at all,” George murmured.

“Can you imagine?” she said, heading down the bleacher steps with him. “All that destruction, a house left in cinders, because someone was smoking in bed. But that’s how it happened, just like the old cliché. Lon had a Camel going, and he dozed off. What a stupid waste. Anyway, they asked me to come to the morgue the following morning at 9:30. I don’t know why they put me through it. I mean, the fire was at the Schlessinger ranch. Lon was forty-six and Annabelle was sixteen. The two bodies were a male in his late forties and a female in her late teens. It wasn’t too tough to figure out who they were.”

George walked with her along the playing field toward a side door into the school. It was an ugly, three-story granite building from the Reagan era. Eyes downcast, Caroline kept rubbing her arms. “It was pretty awful,” she muttered. “I had to go into this cold, little room that smelled rancid. I’m sorry, but the stench was horrible. That was one of the worst parts. The bodies were covered with white sheets, and they had them on metal slabs. First, I identified Lon. There was nothing left of his hair. His face was just blood, blisters, and burn marks, but I still recognized him. However, Annabelle—well, she was a skull with blackened skin stretched over it. Her mouth was wide open like she was screaming….”

George noticed tears in Caroline’s eyes. He gently rested his hand on her shoulder.

“I’d known her since she was a little girl,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’d watched her grow up into a beautiful young lady. I had a hard time believing that—
thing
was Annabelle. The height and body type were Annabelle’s, but I couldn’t say for sure it was her. Then I remembered the bracelet.”

“What bracelet?” George stopped with Caroline as she pulled out a handkerchief and blew her nose.

“Annabelle had a favorite bracelet, silver with these pretty roses engraved on it,” Caroline explained. “She wore it all the time. It used to be her mother’s. The bracelet was about two inches wide, and covered up an ugly scar. Annabelle had burned the back of her wrist rather badly when she was a child.

“Anyway, I asked the attendant in the morgue if I could see her left arm. He lifted the sheet and showed me. And there was the wide silver bracelet, almost melded to her burnt skin and bones. Then I knew it was her.”

“That’s how you identified Annabelle’s body?” George asked. He wondered if the local police and coroner realized Ms. Cadwell had based her positive ID on a piece of jewelry around the wrist of a charred corpse.

“Well, what other proof do you want?” she shot back.

“Maybe dental records,” he muttered. “Did they check their dental records?”

“I don’t think so. Why should they?”

Because I know someone who thinks Annabelle could still be alive
, George wanted to answer. But he didn’t want to argue with Caroline Cadwell over something that had happened three years ago. She had no reason to be suspicious about the fire. And she’d been very forthright with him.

George held open the door for her, and Caroline strode into the school, murmuring a thank-you under her breath. She stopped and leaned against a trophy case in the school hallway. Wiping her eyes again, she gave him a tired smile. “I always get emotional when I think about Annabelle. I was sort of her honorary godmother. It’s no wonder I had a hard time identifying her remains. If only you knew how pretty she was….”

“But I do know,” George reminded her. “My niece is her twin. I know exactly what you mean. Amelia’s very beautiful.”

Caroline nodded pensively. “You know, it’s ironic. I used to worry about Annabelle spending so much time alone on that ranch in the middle of nowhere. Lon continued to go off fishing and hunting for days at a time.” Frowning, she shook her head. “I just didn’t understand his nonchalance. You see, for several years, we had a—a series of disappearances. Several young women in the area vanished without a trace. A few were even former students of mine. So, maybe I was more sensitive and worried about it than some people. But I couldn’t help thinking about Annabelle, alone on that ranch, a perfect target for whoever was out there preying on young women.” She shrugged. “And after all my concern, Annabelle ended up dying in a fire, started by her father’s cigarette.”

George stared at her. “How many girls disappeared? Did they ever find any of them?”

“At least a dozen or so in a period of about ten years,” she said. “A while back, they discovered the partial remains of a young woman in a forest about twenty miles from here. They never found any of the others. And they never found the killer either.”

“So he’s still out there somewhere?” George asked.

“I think he’s moved on to a different area,” Caroline said, shuddering again. “Like a predator finding a new kill zone. Anyway, it’s been about three years since the last girl disappeared. Her name was Sandra Hartman. She graduated from here just two months before her disappearance. I taught Sandra her sophomore year. She was supposed to meet some friends for a movie, but never showed up.”

“You said this was three years ago?” George asked.

She nodded.

“Was this before or after the Schlessinger ranch burned down?”

“About a week before,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m not sure,” George replied truthfully. It just seemed strange that the girls stopped disappearing once Lon Schlessinger had smoked his last cigarette.

Karen glanced at her watch again. It had been almost twenty minutes now. She sat near the phone booth at one of the picnic tables in front of the diner. While waiting for George to call back, she’d gone into the restaurant and ordered a Diet Coke and a serving of fries to go. She’d come back out, sat down, and tried to eat. But she’d been too nervous; and after only a few fries, she’d tossed the bag out. Her soft-drink container was still on the table in front of her.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Amelia’s twin. If Annabelle was alive, it would explain so much.

Months ago, Shane had thought he’d spotted Amelia inside a strange car with a strange man at a stoplight in the University District. Amelia had had only the vaguest memory of it, after Shane had prompted her with a description of what he’d seen. Had he actually spotted Annabelle?

Karen remembered Amelia coming by her place the day before yesterday. She’d been acting so peculiar, and even looked a bit different. Hell, even Rufus had detected something wrong with her, and kept growling at her. Then she’d walked off with Koehler. Karen had figured the
other
Amelia had walked into her house that afternoon. She’d thought the
other
Amelia might have killed Koehler.

But there was no
other
Amelia. It was another person entirely.

How could Amelia—even with multiple personalities—be in two different places at one time?

She’d been in Port Angeles when Koehler had disappeared a hundred miles away in Cougar Mountain Park. And she’d been on a Booze Busters retreat in Port Townsend when her brother had died in Bellingham. The Faradays’ next-door neighbor hadn’t seen
Amelia
hosing down the dock around the time of Collin’s death. No, she’d spotted
Annabelle,
washing away his blood after she’d bashed his skull in.

Karen shifted restlessly on the picnic table bench. She gazed at the darkening horizon, and then over the treetops in the direction of the Faradays’ lake house.

Helene Sumner had seen Annabelle, and her boyfriend, Blade, at the house just days before Amelia’s parents and aunt were brutally killed there. The Faradays would have opened the door to Annabelle, believing her to be their daughter. They may not have even lived long enough after that to realize their mistake. In Amelia’s all-too-accurate dream, she remembered her Aunt Ina’s last words before a bullet ripped through her chest: “Oh my God, honey, what have you done?”

Everything started to make sense, if Annabelle was indeed alive. She was the killer. But what was her motive? And what accounted for Amelia having these fragmented memories of her sister’s violent actions?

An SUV pulled into the lot by Danny’s Diner. Karen glanced at her watch again. She got to her feet and checked the phone inside the booth. Had she hung up the receiver improperly after her last conversation with George?

No, there was nothing wrong with the phone, except George’s call hadn’t come through on it yet.

“God, you’re right!” a girl shrieked. “My cell phone isn’t working. Shit! And I told Tiffany I was going to call her.”

Karen saw three young teenage girls, and the haggard-looking mother of one of them, coming around the corner from the Danny’s parking lot. All the girls were talking at once, and loudly, too. But Karen heard one of them over the others: “Look, there’s a pay phone!”

Karen quickly ducked into the booth and closed the folding door. She picked up the receiver, but kept a hand over the cradle lever, pressing it down. “Oh, yeah? Really?” she said into the phone. “Well, I’m not surprised….”

A gum-snapping girl with long brown hair stopped in front of the booth while her friends and their chaperone filed into the diner. She fished a credit card out of her little purse. What a 14-year-old was doing with a credit card was beyond Karen. She turned her back to the girl, and kept up her pretend conversation on the phone: “I had no idea. Well, she should take care of that right away.”

After a few moments, Karen heard a clicking noise behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. The girl was tapping her credit card against the phone booth window. She glared at Karen, and then rolled her eyes.

Karen opened the door. “Hey, I have another important call to make after this,” she said. “So, you may as well just buzz off, okay?”

“Bitch,” the girl muttered. Then she swiveled around and flounced into the restaurant.

Suddenly, the phone rang. Karen’s hand jerked away from the receiver cradle. “Yes? George?”

“Yeah, hi,” he said. “Listen, I think you’re right about Amelia’s twin. There’s every chance Annabelle is still alive….”

She stood in Karen’s kitchen, gazing at the housekeeper.

Outside, in the backyard, George McMillan’s children played with Karen’s dog. They hadn’t noticed her yet.

“Amelia, everyone’s been searching high and low for you, honey,” the housekeeper said. She furtively glanced over her shoulder at the children, then took another step inside and closed the kitchen door behind her.

“Where’s Karen?” she asked.

“She drove to the house in Lake Wenatchee, looking for you,” Jessie said. “She rented a car. Her own car’s missing. Did you borrow her car, honey?”

“No, I didn’t.” Her eyes narrowed at Jessie. “Do you know if Karen has been to the lake house yet?”

Jessie nodded, and moved over to the cupboard. “She called about fifteen minutes ago from some diner up the road from there. You just missed her.” Jessie pulled a container of lemonade mix from the cabinet. “I promised the kids I’d make them some lemonade. Would you like some, honey? Or maybe a nice cup of tea?”

“Don’t bother yourself,” she muttered.

“Sit down and take a load off, for goodness sake.” She moved over to the refrigerator and took the ice tray out of the freezer. “I’ll make enough lemonade for you, too. You have something cool to drink, and then we’ll call your Uncle George. He’s been worried about you, too.”

She sat down at the breakfast table. “Where is Uncle George?”

“He had to go down to Oregon for some research thingy,” Jessie said, retrieving four tall glasses and a pitcher from another cabinet. “He’ll be back tonight, though. Karen, too. I guess we have to wait before we can reach her on her cell—something about bad phone reception around there.”

Past Jessie’s chatter, she heard the children outside, laughing. The dog let out a bark now and then. She glanced down at the purse in her lap. Inside, something caught the overhead kitchen light, and glistened.

The serrated-edged, brown-leather-handled hunting knife in her purse was a souvenir from the ranch. It had belonged to her father. He’d skinned his kill with it on hunting trips. He’d also used it on some of his women once he’d finished with them.

She remembered back when she was just a little girl, those furtive trips at night had seemed like such long ordeals. But in reality he’d done a quick job on the women they’d picked up together. The longest he’d gone on with one of them had been close to two hours. He’d dug their graves ahead of time, and driven them out to the preselected spot. She remembered those nights alone in the car, listening to the screams, waiting. He’d come back, covered with sweat, and often blood. He’d pull a piece of candy out of his pocket, and toss it to her. “That’s a good girl,” he’d say. “You’re daddy’s little helper.” Then he’d pop open the trunk, get out the shovel, and promise to be back soon.

And he’d kept his promise. He’d always return within a half hour.