“I saw Shiloh myself.” He folded the paper as she dropped into one of the side chairs. His hair, once as dark as hers, was now shot with silver, and his sharp eyes had dimmed a bit, forcing him to wear glasses that he vociferously hated.
“I didn’t think she’d ever return.”
“Her mother passed away a few days ago.”
“I heard. But—” There hadn’t been a lot of love between Faye and her firstborn daughter. And once Shiloh took off, she’d never returned. Nearly vanished. Kat hadn’t heard from her. Not a word.
“I know, I know. I didn’t expect her to ever set foot in this town again. She was vehement when I talked to her.” While on the force, Detective Patrick Starr had been working on the investigation of the teenagers who had gone missing fifteen years earlier. Erin Higgins and Rachel Byrd had never been located, and their missing persons cases had crushed Kat’s father. Sometime after their disappearances, a third girl, Courtney Pearson, never returned home. That was about a month before Ruthie’s rape, and she’d never been seen again, either.
That was the one that really gnawed at Kat. Her worst fear was that Courtney had fallen victim to the same man who’d raped Ruthie—and that she and her friends could have prevented it if they’d only stepped forward.
Kat had wanted to come clean about the night at the lake. It was hell keeping mum, but she’d made that promise to Ruthie. But what if the three girls’ silence had put Courtney Pearson at risk? Could they have prevented her disappearance? If they had just gone to the police, told what they knew, maybe talked to a police sketch artist and come up with some kind of composite picture of the attacker, would things have turned out differently? Would the son of a bitch be serving time?
Worse yet, Kat had been forced to face her father every day, the very man who was leading the investigation, a man who had poured his heart and soul into his job rather than deal with the pain of a sickly wife. Those had been horrible years, when only Kat, it seemed, faced the fact that Marilyn Starr had been dying bit by bit, that the chemo hadn’t been working.
Even now, seeing the lines on her father’s once-ruddy face, she felt a renewed sense of guilt. And still, to this day, when she was a detective with the department herself, she’d held her tongue. Though she’d never actually lied to her father, she knew now that there were lies of commission and lies of omission, and she was certainly guilty of the latter.
“I think I’ll look Shiloh up,” she said. It was time to rectify her mistakes.
“I always liked that kid, but I thought she got a raw deal with that stepfather of hers. A mean cuss. No one ever filed any charges, you know, but I had a gut feeling about him.” Patrick’s face tightened. “I should’ve asked some questions, y’know.”
“It’s long over.”
“I know, but there’s the right thing to do, and then there’s the wrong. Not a lot of gray area in between. I didn’t do the right thing.”
“We’ve all made mistakes,” Katrina said, meaning every syllable. She desperately wanted to get the story on record, but first she had to talk to Ruthie, and with Shiloh back, maybe the two of them could convince her to come forward. Ruthie, or Ruth, as she apparently went by now, had recently returned to Prairie Creek after years away, though Katrina had yet to run into her.
Ruth hadn’t made any concentrated effort to connect with her onetime friend, either. Since in a town the size of Prairie Creek that was nearly impossible, Kat guessed it was by design rather than happenstance.
But with Shiloh back in town, there was no more waiting, as far as Kat was concerned. The three of them needed to come clean about the night of Ruth’s rape.
“I was just too involved with my job at the time to take on much more,” Patrick was saying. “And then there was your mom, may she rest in peace.”
Kat watched as a particular sadness settled over him the way it always did when he spoke of his wife. Though Marilyn had been gone nearly fifteen years, he’d rarely dated, though he’d had many opportunities. He’d struggled to be around Marilyn while she was dying. He’d loved her fiercely, but he couldn’t watch her suffer. Kat understood that now, though at the time she’d been deeply angry with both her father and her brother for leaving her with the bulk of her mom’s care. She’d forgiven both of them over the years and had forged new, happier relationships, but it had been a long struggle.
“You look like her, you know,” her father said wistfully.
“Yes.” She’d heard the same thing all her life. While Ethan was tall and rangy like their father, she’d inherited her mother’s shorter height, if not her sunny disposition.
“You may have gotten my temperament, but thank God, you got her looks. She was a beautiful woman, Kat. You’re lucky.”
“I know, Dad.”
“I should have paid more attention those last years. Been there with her,” he said.
“I know that too.” She sought to head him off from the maudlin track he was about to embark on.
He nodded, just managed to stop himself from going there. A big, strapping man who thought nothing about staring down the barrel of a shotgun pointed in his direction, Patrick Starr had been leveled by the insidious disease silently killing his wife. Rather than sitting for hours at her bedside, he’d found excuses to be away. He’d turned his attention to finding the missing girls most people thought were runaways. That was his way of coping.
Still, despite his efforts, every lead in the investigation had turned into a dead end.
Patrick smiled sadly at the picture of his deceased wife, and Kat’s restless mind wandered back to the investigation that had become her father’s Waterloo. Rachel’s parents, Paul and Ann Byrd, had never given up hope that their daughter would someday be found. With their remaining daughters at their side and the news cameras rolling, they had let it be known they blamed the police as a whole for not finding Rachel—and Patrick Starr, in particular. Anytime there was an issue in the family that required involvement with the Sheriff’s Department—and there was a small one developing now—Paul Byrd used the opportunity to complain anew about the department’s failings.
Erin Higgins’s parents, Alan and Dora, though divorced, were united in their belief that Erin was alive. They were less angry with the authorities than the Byrds, but they were steadfast in their belief that their daughter would come home someday. Their son, Bryce, had been one of the most loyal searchers for Erin and had never given up trying to find her.
And Courtney Pearson’s mother, Jan, believed that the Lord would bring her daughter back to her. Courtney’s father wasn’t in the picture and was in fact, long gone; broken, he’d walked out soon after his only daughter disappeared.
When Shiloh had first disappeared, Faye Silva-Tate had shrieked at the police to find her baby, too. Kat had been miserable and had been on the verge of telling her father about the attack at the lake, but again Ruthie had shut her down.
“What good would it do?” she’d demanded. “Did you recognize him? No. None of us did.”