Sweet Dreams, Irene

“You’re making perfect sense,” I said. “Other people – well, it’s easier to be with the two of you. You were there.”

“That’s it.”

I turned to Frank. “What happened while I was gone? How did you find me?”

“I was home. I was worried about you and was just about ready to call the hotel and ask if you had left yet. If you were still there, I was going to have you paged and meet you there.”

He didn’t say anything more for a while. For long minutes, the only sounds were Cody’s loud purrs and the crackling of the fire.

He sighed, then went on. “I got a call from the department, saying they had Brian Henderson’s son on the line, and that he insisted on talking to me, that you were in trouble. They patched the call through; it was Jacob, and he was frantic. I guess he had found one of my cards in your car. When he told me what had happened, I told him I’d meet him back at the field. I made a quick call back to the department, then left. Drove like a maniac. I got there not long after Jacob. He was a mess.

“He told me that although he hadn’t seen them drive up, as he was leaving he had seen a Blazer parked on the corner.”

I smiled. “Thank heaven he saw it. I thought he would be too rattled by what was going on to notice it. I think that kid really is going to be a reporter someday.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “God help him. Anyway, Jacob was a big help. And not just with the Blazer. But to go back to what was happening that night, we weren’t there for very long when the black and white units were pulling up, and we had Jacob take us to where the body was. We made him take us along a different path, so that we wouldn’t disturb footprints in the places where the weeds were matted down.

“To make a long story a little bit shorter, we found prints of three people walking toward where the Blazer had been parked. No sign of where you might have been taken from there. None of the neighbors had seen a thing.

“Somebody took Jacob home. He was really upset; blamed himself. To be truthful, I wasn’t holding together too well by then myself. It was after dawn when we finished in the field.

“Jacob had told me about the message at the hotel. Pete tracked down the guy who had been on the switchboard at the Lafayette that night and woke him up to ask him about the call. Fortunately, they don’t get many messages that late, and this one was unusual, so he remembered it. He said the caller seemed to be a young man. Of course, he didn’t question a young man being named “Sammy.” Found out the same message had been left at the Cliffside. There was no doubt that the girl was dead long before the calls were made. So you had obviously been set up.”

“It was her heart on my doorstep, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said.

I motioned for him to stop for a while. I felt tears welling up and tried to keep them from falling, but once again, my emotions refused to be reined in.

“I suppose there’s nothing that can be done about her father?” I said.

Frank shook his head.

I wiped my tears away and asked him to go on.

“Whoever made the call had to know about your co

Jack looked away from us when Paul’s name came up. I felt damned awkward and I guess Frank did, too, because he hesitated.

“Maybe we could finish talking about this some other time,” he said.

“No,” Jack said tightly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late. He wasn’t who I thought he was, that’s all. Go on, Frank.”

Frank waited, then hearing Jack sigh with impatience, continued with his story. “I went home and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. Jacob called me, and asked if I wanted to get your car – in all the excitement, he had gone home with your car keys. I drove over to the Hendersons’ and picked him up. We went back to your car and he followed me home. I invited him to come in, and Jack stopped by while he was there.”

“I was being a nosy neighbor,” Jack said. “I had just moved into my mom’s place and saw somebody else pulling up in your car, Irene. I wondered what was up.”

“Well, I for one am damn glad you were curious,” Frank said. “I don’t know how much longer it would have taken if both of you hadn’t been there at the same time.” He looked at me. “As far as I could tell, there were only four things that had gone on at the shelter that could have made you a target for someone: you had talked to Sammy, you had talked to Sarah, you had taken Sammy’s journal, and you had asked around about members of the coven, particularly this ‘Goat.’

“So I started asking Jacob if he knew the names of the people whose initials had been in the journal. I left out the ones for Romeo and Juliet.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up at this, but he didn’t get anything for the effort.

“When I got to the initials DM and RA, Jacob said, ‘Devon Morris and Raney Adams.’ And suddenly Jack looked like someone had slapped him.”

“I asked Jacob to repeat the names,” Jack said. “They were Paul’s cousins. Remember I told you he had lived with Cindy’s sister for a while? Well, Devon and Raney were two of her five kids.”

“Devon told me he and Raney were half-brothers,” I said quietly.

“They’re all half-brothers. I just didn’t know Paul still had anything to do with them. I didn’t know they were hanging out at the shelter. I doubt they were ever around at the same time my mother was there. She couldn’t abide any of that bunch.”

“You’re right – at least, on the day I was there with your mother, Devon and Raney weren’t around.”

Frank went on. “Things started to look a little different once we knew they were related to Paul. You had seen Paul order them around; Sammy’s journal mentions a co

“We asked Mrs. Riley about it and she said Paul had kicked Devon and Raney out the day before the funeral. But she also said she was convinced that Paul had received a phone call from Raney very early Wednesday morning – she answered the phone, thought she recognized the voice – and Paul had taken off not long after he got the call. He hadn’t returned until late that afternoon.

“So we put a tail on Paul, hoping he’d lead us to wherever Devon and Raney were. I figured he had to be the Goat. He was co

“She knew Paul was the Goat. She saw the scars on his arms,” I said. “I saw them when – I saw them,” I finished weakly, trying to not feel the memory in my shoulder and thumb.

Frank waited, probably wondering if I was going to burst into tears again, and went on when I didn’t.

“I checked vehicle registrations for Devon and Raney. Devon had a registration for a Blazer. So now it was a matter of waiting and praying to God that Paul got back in touch with them before – well, before it was too late. Jack knew them by sight and I didn’t; I only had a DMV photo. So he came with me to watch Paul and on Friday it paid off. We followed Paul to a place where he met Raney. Then we followed them up into the mountains. By then, we knew where they were headed.