One Last Scream

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?”

Chapter Eighteen

“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 cliche. 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.