The Truth About Comfort Cove (5 page)

A
melia
H
ardy was almost
ninety, with steel-gray hair pinned in a tight bun on the back of her head. She’d been in the same apartment, about seven miles from the ocean and twelve from the Comfort Cove tourist district, for more than seventy years, she told him. Using the same furniture, Ramsey suspected. The small living room was clean, uncluttered and yet very full. Books lined the built-in shelves and figurines stood in front of them.

The claw-footed cherry coffee table and matching end tables bore white doilies and live plants, clear-glass coasters and magazines.

“Please, have a seat,” Amelia said in her slightly unsteady birdsong voice. Glancing between the claw-footed embroidered sofa and the claw-footed matching peach wingback chair, Ramsey chose the chair. Amelia put his hot chocolate on a coaster on the end table beside him.

“You have a nice place here,” he told her, noticing the drywall tape coming through the wall in one corner of the small room.

“Thank you.”
“Does your landlord help you with the upkeep?” “No. I own the place.”
“The whole building?”
“No. Just this unit. The building was sold and turned into

condominiums about ten years ago. Funny, you know.” She sat on the sofa and faced him, her feet, encased in black leather slip-on shoes, resting on an upholstered step stool, her calflength silk dress pulled down over her knees. “
Condominium
sounds like such a fancy word. But this place is still the apartment I rented when I graduated from teacher’s college when I was twenty-one.”

“You taught here in Comfort Cove?”
“No, at a private school for girls in Boston. For the first few years I roomed on campus during the week and drove here for the weekends. I grew up in Boston, but I always loved the ocean and knew this was where I wanted to live.”
The place smelled like…lilacs, maybe. Reminding him of his mother’s bedroom when he was a kid. Or maybe her bathroom. After she’d showered, he’d go in there and the floor would be lightly dusted with a white powder that smelled just like Amelia’s living room.
Amelia had few photos. A young woman and a young man, standing on the beach. Next to a tree. In front of a car.
“Did you ever marry?” he asked her, sipping cocoa when he should have been finding out what she knew about Jack Colton and then getting the bag bearing the dead man’s suit back to the precinct for processing.
“No, sir. My Hank was called up to go to war six months before our wedding. He never made it back.” Her smile bore the sadness of many ages as she glanced toward her photos.
“So he never made it here? To this apartment?”
“No, Hank never made it here, but you guessed that I got this place while he was away, didn’t you? In preparation for him to come back. In preparation for our marriage.”
“I suspected.” Because the room spoke of standing still. And the only clue to the reason was those photos.
“This was to be our first home,” she said then, sitting back with a faraway look. “I spent hours furnishing the place. Sewing curtains and quilting a spread for the bed. I’d saved every memento from every date we ever had and put the knickknacks up on the shelves. Every time I added something new, I took photos and sent them to him. I’d make the hour drive from Boston every Friday night and spend the evening here writing to Hank. He’d write back to me that he laid in bed at night and pictured me here—us here. He’d tell me of the things we’d do as soon as he got home… .”
Ramsey would bet his life that Amelia still had every single one of those letters. And that she read them regularly, too.
He sat listening as, over the next half hour, Amelia talked about the three years her fiancé was away. About the wedding plans that she made, in anticipation of him coming home, and then had to put off. Again and again.
He was waiting for the story to turn tragic, for the phone call, or the knock on the door, that would signify the end of Amelia’s hopes for the future. But before she got there, she sat forward, clasped her hands together and smiled at him.
“You wanted to know about that young man, Jack,” she said, sounding as happy and content as if she’d been offering him the cup of cocoa. Standing, she moved to an old secretary, a three-foot-wide china cabinet with drawers and a pulldown desk shelf. Ramsey’s grandmother had had one that she’d passed down to his sister, Diane. It still stood in Diane’s bedroom in their parents’ home, filled with Diane’s things. As far as he knew, his mother still dusted the antique every week, when she cleaned the rest of Diane’s room.
“I do remember him.” Amelia’s voice sounded distant, and Ramsey realized the woman was looking at the picture he’d handed her earlier. She’d obviously set it down on the secretary. The magnifying spectacles were perched on the end of her nose.
The old woman walked toward him, handing him back his photograph as she held the glasses and sat on the end of the couch, her knees almost touching his.
“That’s Jack,” she said, and then continued. “Mostly he was a boy of few words, but I’d say I knew him fairly well. You see, I, too, am a pretty good judge of character,” she said. “It wasn’t that long ago that he was here.”
“How long ago?” Ramsey’s demeanor didn’t change. His focus was acute.
“I’m not sure. He was still living here when I retired, I know, because I’d be walking down to the bakery just after six when he left for work in the mornings. One of the pleasures of my retirement was that I could be at the bakery as soon as the last loaves of bread came out of the oven. There’s nothing like freshly made bread. Don’t you agree, Detective?”
Ramsey had a flash of his mother, standing in the kitchen, hands covered in flour, and Diane beside her, flour on her cheek and on her chin, as she tried to get the hang of kneading bread.
He nodded at Amelia. And quickly asked, “When did you retire?”
“Nineteen eighty-six. I was sixty-seven and getting a little nervous about the hour’s drive to Boston during the winters. After those first few years, I commuted back and forth every single day.” She frowned, and then her expression cleared. “After I retired, I taught kindergarten at St. Francis down on High Street, and I remember your young man helping me carry my trash down one morning when I had my hands full. You remember St. Francis, don’t you? It burned down a few years ago… .”
Fifteen years ago, before Ramsey had moved to Comfort Cove. Even before he’d met Tom Cook and introduced the citified Greer boy to his older sister.
“Was this young man still living here when St. Francis burned down?” he asked.
Frowning again, Amelia shook her head. “No, you know, I don’t think he was. I’m sure he wasn’t. Because we were all gathered out on the stoop that night. We could see the flames from here. And the nice young woman who married that teacher from the high school in town was talking to me. She moved into Jack’s apartment not long after he left. Cheryl, her name was. I can’t remember her last name. Doesn’t matter, though, since she’s married now. I don’t remember her husband’s name, either. Dirk, I think.”
“Do you remember Jack’s last name?” Ramsey asked. Had Colton been living under an assumed name?
“No,” Amelia frowned, shaking her head. And then her brow cleared. “It started with a
C,
though. Jack C. I know that because of his mailbox. Our mailboxes are all lined up together in the laundry room. He was the only person who put just their last initial instead of their whole last name on the box. He’d written his first name too large and couldn’t fit the whole last name on the little tab. Funny the things that stick with you, huh?”
And not funny at all the things that you couldn’t get rid of. Claire Sanderson’s case was one that was haunting Ramsey. He’d been on it for months and couldn’t get a break.
Or get rid of it, either, physically or mentally.
It stuck with him day and night. And it wasn’t funny at all.

J
ack
C
olton had been
a delivery truck driver twenty-five years earlier. A house on his regular weekly route was two doors down from the home where two-year-old Claire Sanderson had been abducted. Jack’s truck had been seen on Claire’s street the morning she went missing—a piece of information Ramsey had only just uncovered, when he’d reopened the cold case over the summer, to find out if Claire Sanderson was one of Walters’s victims.

“What else do you remember about Jack?” he asked now, his voice as kind as it got.
“Nice young man,” Amelia said. “Polite. Hard worker. He drove a truck. He was always so punctual, and when I asked him about it he said because time meant money. He delivered meat, which couldn’t just be left at someone’s door. The customer had to be present to take delivery. He had a set route with regular customers and he got paid per stop. The more timely he was, the more customers he’d be given. He had his schedule down almost to the minute.”
Jack hadn’t told Ramsey about being compensated per job, or about the schedule he’d kept, when the now forty-eightyear-old semitruck driver came in for an interview over the summer. But what Amelia said made sense.
“Did you ever see the truck?”
Shaking her head, Amelia said, “He never brought it home. It was against policy. He caught the bus down at the corner and rode it to the warehouse where he picked up his truck.”
Colton had been delivering meat to a home two doors down from Claire’s every Wednesday morning, at the very same time, which was partially what had helped him pinpoint more accurately the window of time in which Claire disappeared. Amelia’s insight into the driver’s schedule fit squarely with what Ramsey already knew.
Colton’s presence near the scene had never come up in the initial investigation and Ramsey was the first and only officer to question Colton on the matter. So far, there was no reason to suspect the guy, except that he’d been in the area. A normal occurrence for him and not a crime.
“Do you know if Jack ever lost a stop for being off schedule?” Ramsey asked.
“I have no idea. If he did, he never said so.” She glanced toward the photo on the table closest to her. “My Hank was a hard worker, too. He was in college, in Boston, when he was called up. That’s how we met. In college. And in the evening and on weekends, he stocked shelves at his daddy’s hardware store. Jack kind of reminded me of Hank the way he was so good at fixing things.”
“Your Hank had you.” Ramsey took the lead she’d offered. “Did Jack have a girl in his life?”
Was the man as upstanding as he’d seemed? Or had Jack and Frank Whittier—the live-in fiancé of Claire’s mother, Rose Sanderson, and the only suspect in the case—somehow been partners in the most hideous of crimes? There was a lot of money to be made at selling children on the black market and Frank Whittier had been taking on the responsibility of a new wife and two children, in addition to his own son. Three more mouths to feed. Two more college tuitions. By all accounts little Claire had been a handful. And a charmer. Rose had been completely devoted to her. Frank could have been resentful of all the attention the woman gave to the toddler. Or jealous of the fact that he hadn’t fathered the little girl.
It wouldn’t be the first time Ramsey had seen something like that.
A couple of months ago, Jack had cleared Frank’s name in the case, releasing the sixty-two-year-old from twentyfive years of suspicion. Frank was back in school, taking the continuing-education classes that would allow him to get his high-school teaching certification again. Before his initial arrest, he’d been the principal of a well-known boy’s school, and a winning basketball coach at a public school, as well.
When Ramsey had finally located Jack Colton, based on private writings that Cal Whittier, Frank’s son, had turned over to him, Jack had testified that he’d seen Claire Sanderson alone in her front yard, watching as then seven-year-old Cal walked down the driveway, on his way to school. He said that Claire had gone back to the house. Because she’d only been two, he’d swung back by after making his delivery to make certain that she’d made it inside, and he’d seen Frank Whittier, alone, open the back door of his car—exposing its emptiness—to drop his briefcase on the backseat. The man had then gotten in the front of his car and driven off to work.
His testimony and timeline followed Frank’s own testimony from twenty-five years before regarding his actions that morning. He’d come out of the house at 7:20 a.m., five minutes later than usual, dropped his briefcase on the backseat of his car, climbed in the front and driven away. He’d never seen Claire outside of the house.
He hadn’t seen her inside the house just before he left, either, but that wasn’t unusual as she’d have been back in the bedroom with her four-year-old sister, Emma, waiting for their mother to brush their hair and put it in ponytails.
The only unusual thing in their routine that morning had been the babysitter’s call saying she was sick, which meant that Rose was on the phone trying to make other arrangements for Claire and Emma, and for Cal, for when he got home from school. She’d been on the phone when Frank left.
“Jack didn’t just have one girl, like my Hank did,” Amelia was saying. “He had a few of them.”
New information. New leads?
“He had them here?”
“Yes. They were sweet girls.”
“And it didn’t bother you that Jack wasn’t faithful to them? That he had more than one of them?”
“Oh, my, Detective, I’m sorry if I misled you. He didn’t have them at the same time! There was one girl he dated for a bit, but it didn’t last long. I remember seeing her a time or two. She had red hair, I think. And then there was the girl who moved in with him. I never met her. I was filling in for a dorm mother at school and was only home on Sundays the semester she was here. She broke up with him. I know about her because I heard him crying one night and I asked him about it. I knew, you see, that Jack wasn’t close to his family. He was the only child of an older couple who never quite made room for him in their lives. He learned how to fend for himself quite young. But a man that young shouldn’t have to fend for himself all the time. Growing up is hard. Being an adult is hard. If I could give him some advice, then that’s what I had to do. He was embarrassed that I knew he’d been crying, but I told him that all men cry now and then. It was nothing to be ashamed about. Don’t you agree, Detective Miller?”
Hell, no, he didn’t agree. Not all men cry. Ramsey needed information. He nodded.
“So then, after this girl broke his heart, did he live alone?”
“For a while. And then another girl moved in. Melanie was her name. I liked her. But I don’t think it worked out, either. I asked him once if he was going to marry Melanie and he told me that he wasn’t in love with her like a guy should be in love with a girl he was going to marry. I’m not sure what ended up happening, though. Jack moved out and I lost track of him.”
“He never came back to see you?”
“I’m not even sure he was in state. He’d said he wanted to travel. And to make more money.”
Ramsey, with all his senses tuned in and alert, relaxed farther back in his chair. “These girls he was friends with, did any of them have kids?”
Say, two-year-old blonde girls?
“No. I’m absolutely certain about that. Hank and I planned to have a house full of children, and anytime there was a little one living here, I made certain I was first on the list for babysitting duty.”
“So you’d have noticed if there were ever little children here, even just for visits?”
“Absolutely. Except that semester I was gone.”
“Were you here on October 13, 1987, in the morning?”
It was a long shot. There was no way anyone could be expected to remember a specific day more than two decades before.
Unless it stood out in their minds for some reason.
Like maybe Frank showing up in a vehicle—his delivery truck—with a precocious toddler in tow?
Amelia didn’t immediately shake her head as he’d expected she would.
With her magnifying spectacles in hand, the older woman stood. She went over to the bookshelf—a couple of shelves filled with black leather bindings. Putting on her glasses, she pulled out one black binder, and then another. Thumbed through that one until she found what she’d obviously been looking for.
“Yes, I was here.” She shocked him with her answer.
Amelia was old. And obviously spent a lot of time alone. Wouldn’t be at all unusual for the woman to get confused.
Or to want to please him just to keep him there.
Ramsey watched her closely and said, “You sound sure about that.”
Making her way slowly toward Ramsey she gave him the book. “I have a calendar for every year of my life here,” she said. “Originally I kept them as part of an agreement between Hank and me, a plan we had to keep close to each other. The three years he was overseas, I cataloged my days so that I could share them with him. After…well, I was so used to keeping the books that I continued to do so. I thought about quitting a number of times, but I like having them there. I never married, never had children. There’s no one to help me remember the things an old lady might forget. I’ve got my books to remind me.”
Ramsey looked at the entry for October 13, 1987. Amelia had been home that day waiting on a delivery of fabric she was using to make dresses for the church disaster-relief closet. The fabric had arrived at two and she’d had the first dress done by six.
And she’d watched the news.
“You wrote about the little girl who was kidnapped.”
“Claire Sanderson, yes,” Amelia said. “She was from right here in Comfort Cove and close to home, you know? I felt her disappearance personally, like it happened to me. Followed the case for years. Her mama and sister lived here and I could just imagine how it would feel, always waiting… .
“I used to think I might run into them someday, but then I heard they were speaking locally and I didn’t go. I just hurt too much for them. I couldn’t go see them hurt.”
Ramsey had met the woman the month before. And Amelia was right, it was worse when you watched them hurt. Much worse.
“If Jack, or any of his girlfriends, had brought a child to visit that day, you might have missed them, then, if you were sewing.” Stick with the case. The investigation. The search for facts.
“Nope.” Amelia let him keep the book as she took her seat on the couch. “My sewing room—what used to be the spare bedroom when this was Hank’s and my home—is directly beneath the unit where Jack lived. If he’d had a child up there, I’d have known.”
Unless the child had been unconscious.
“Does that room have a window?” Ramsey asked.
“Yes, sir, looking directly out at the street. That’s why I chose that room to sew in. So I can see what’s going on.”
“You keep pretty good track, then, of who comes and goes around here?”
“Not like I used to, but yes, a girl living alone has to always be aware of her surroundings to keep herself safe.”
True. Wrong that it should be that way, but true.
“Did you ever notice any other visitors to Jack’s place?”
“No. Nothing that stood out. The boy worked so many hours it would have been hard for him to do much entertaining. Besides, Jack was a quiet boy. He liked to read. Watch TV. And work. He was always concerned about saving his money. Didn’t waste it on eating at restaurants. That boy would paint a room in exchange for some of my stew. I’d give him soup and two days later the bowl would be outside my door empty and clean. I started leaving him a list of things on sale at the grocery store every week and the next thing I knew, he was insisting I leave my trash just outside my door, and it would always disappear.”
So Jack needed money, too. Motive.
“Did you ever know him to drink?”
“Alcoholic beverages? Jack? Never. He didn’t use tobacco, either. He lived right above me, Detective, and he never gave me one bit of trouble.”
Amelia nodded toward his mostly full cup. “You aren’t drinking your cocoa, Detective Miller.”
Ramsey wasn’t real fond of hot drinks. And after a full day of investigating chocolate in relation to two missing little girls, he didn’t relish it, either. But the obviously lonely woman had taken the time to prepare it for him so he picked up the cup.
“Is there anything else you can remember?”
She watched him sip. “Mmm, good,” he said, winning him another one of her smiles.
“Jack liked my cocoa, too,” she told Ramsey. “He helped me out in exchange for my homemade cooking, but he made extra money doing odd jobs around here for the landlord and was called upon to change my furnace filters a time or two. And to fix the leak in my kitchen drain. He put new flooring in the bathroom, too, a real nice tile instead of linoleum. You want to see?”
He had to get going. Ramsey drained the now-cooled cocoa and stood. “Sure,” he said, slipping Jack’s picture back into the inside pocket of his suit coat.
Slowly leading the way down a narrow hall with gleaming hardwood floors covered with peach throw rugs, Amelia turned left at the first door and flipped on a light switch.
“There, see?” She pointed toward the floor.
Ramsey glanced, and did a double take. The flooring was clean, but the edges were sharp in places where the mortar had worn away. The tub was claw-footed. In pristine condition. Probably worth some money.
The bottom of the toilet was missing mortar or caulk, and the crevice in between the porcelain and the tile was an ugly brown.
The bathroom floor was as clean as the rest of the house; the peach and white swirled tiles sparkled. All the room needed was a little TLC—a little time.
Looking at the floor, he tried to picture Jack Colton there, down on his haunches, helping an old woman in exchange for cocoa and the probable pittance his landlord would have paid him. The image fit.
Ramsey should help her caulk her floor. She’d given him cocoa. And information.
No. He had work to do.
She was lonely.
He was a loner.
He followed Amelia back out to the living room. “Thank you very much for your time,” he told the older woman, making his leave known before she sat back down and had to get up again to lock up after him.
“Come back anytime,” she said, her smile still broad as she stood, hunched, in the middle of her living room.
He made it to the door. She wasn’t following him. Probably something to do with the limp that had become more pronounced, the gait that had slowed considerably, on the short walk from the bathroom.
“I noticed some drywall tape coming lose in the corner over there.” What in the hell was he doing, making her worry about something she obviously couldn’t fix? Or afford to hire out? She was a retired teacher. From a small girls’ school. With no apparent kin.
“Oh?” Wide-eyed, she turned, and Ramsey was fairly certain that, although she studied the wall, she couldn’t see the damage he referred to.
“I could fix it for you.” No, he couldn’t.
“You could?”
Technically. He knew how. Thanks to his father who made certain that Ramsey knew the basics of home maintenance and repair.