“It’s sad. Haven’t you ever had anyone in your life—”
“We’re not talking about me. But, no, I haven’t. Your problem is that you think your experience around here was the norm. Maybe back in 1953…”
“You, Agent-Doctor Knight, have the problem that you think your experience is the norm. Maybe we’re both wrong, and it lies somewhere in the middle.”
He just snorted and shook his head. His hair fell in his eyes, rich mahogany. He wore it slightly longer than he used to—he used to have militarily short hair. Now it partially covered the jagged scar that started next to his eye and disappeared into his hairline. It gave him a rakish—and if she was honest with herself—a very sexy, almost dangerous, appeal.
She really needed to get out more. He might be fine to look at, but he had the personality of a grizzly bear. Miranda didn’t need a grizzly bear. A teddy bear was more her speed.
“So where do we find Monica Beise?”
Miranda shook her head. “We don’t. That’s the job of our computer crew. Carrie Lorcan and Jac together are very, very, very good. We just have to wait.”
“So what do you think happened?”
Miranda studied the board with photos and reports pinned to it everywhere. “I… a crime of passion. Not anything meditated. He, she, or they hit her. She went down. They thought she was dead, and they buried her in the quilt she was probably working on that very day. Then they took off. The whole family took off. Which is odd. If more than one person knows a secret, it doesn’t stay a secret. At least, not this long. Of course, the younger children probably had no clue what had happened, but the four oldest might have seen or heard something through the years…”
Knight nodded, crossing those arms over his hard, broad chest. “That makes the most sense.”
“Our biggest question is who?” Miranda closed her eyes and thought back to that time. “It was simpler then, but also more complicated.”
“How so? Keep going.”
“My father had just been assigned to somewhere in the Middle East. Meyra needed more help than he could get her over there. I’m the oldest of the granddaughters, so I was given more freedom—but a lot more responsibility, too. I never took that lightly.”
“Where was your mother?”
“She’d passed away when I was eleven. So we were going to live with my grandmother full time, instead of the summers. She already had custody of Dixie, Daisy, Darcey, and Dusty. Their parents had both gotten into trouble when Dusty was not even a year, I think. They took off, leaving my cousins with my grandmother. We spent every summer here in Masterson, with our family, and we loved it. Our cousin Charlotte, too. Her mother died when she was a junior in high school, and she came here and stayed with the rest of us. She just transferred to a small town in Texas with the TSP. Her father’s family was from Texas, and she moved there a few months after Christmas last year so that she could get to know them.” She smiled, remembering the freedoms they’d experienced in Masterson that they hadn’t been able to on a variety of military bases. Masterson…Masterson just had that quaint, small-town feel that she would always appreciate. “We moved here when I was eleven, full time. At least, my sisters and I did. My father…well, he would visit every chance he could.”
“So you’d been here four years when the Beises disappeared. What was going on that week, Miranda?”
“It was close to spring break. We had maybe a day or two to go, I think.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. He stepped away from the desk and closer to her, his warm hands going to her shoulders.
Before she could protest, he’d guided her to the chair nearby. “Close your eyes, Talley. Let’s do a cognitive.”
It was the first time he’d voluntarily put his hands on her. Miranda didn’t want to make a mental note of that—but she did. Knight had very nice, masculine hands. Strong hands. “It can’t hurt. At least, not for background information. It’s just been so long, I’m not sure what I can bring to the surface.”
“Who knows? You might know more than you think.”
Putting his hands on her had been a very, very bad idea.
Knight had to get a hold of himself here. Needed to focus on the job. Nothing else. “Lean back. Take a breath. Close your eyes.” She did as he instructed. He waited until she was relaxed and ready. “Ok, take me back to April, fourteen years ago. What were you doing?”
She smiled again, a wicked expression. “Chasing Levi Masterson.”
“Oh?”
“Levi was two years older. The biggest stud in the entire school. Everyone had a crush on him. Including me. Even before he was my knight-in-red-Ford-armor.”
Levi Masterson, the first boy she’d ever kissed. He could picture her as a fifteen-year-old girl. Easy to do. Her grandmother had dozens of photos of each of her granddaughters littered throughout her home. He’d studied them, drawn to the cinnamon-haired girl in so many of the photos. She’d been a tall, awkward, skinny, redheaded, freckle-faced geek in most of the photos. An ugly duckling who had turned into a swan right there in photos, immortalized forever. Knight didn’t have a single photo of himself from about the age of nine to seventeen. No one had ever bothered; if photos had been taken of him, no one had cared enough to pass them on. He hadn’t cared much in the last few years, but an envy he hadn’t realized was there was just under the surface. “Go on.”
“I didn’t have my license. Not for another thirteen months. That was always difficult here. With everyone so spread out everywhere.”
“So how did
