“The one who scared me.”
Harley was looking from Jamie to Emma and back again.
Now Jamie asked carefully, “The one who hurt you?”
Emma opened her eyes. Jamie hadn’t turned on the lights, and in the semidarkness from the hall illumination, Emma’s eyes looked huge and black. “I see . . . his eyes. . . .”
“Mom,” Harley whispered, alarmed.
“Whose eyes?” Jamie asked. Jamie could feel Harley’s tension and her own stretching between them, tight as a guide wire. When her sister didn’t immediately answer, she asked again, “Whose eyes, Emma?”
“He came to the front door to scare me.”
“Race? Race Stillwell?”
“He didn’t scare me, though.”
“Was it Race’s eyes you saw?”
She regarded Jamie soberly. “Race Stillwell doesn’t scare me.” She then pointed at Harley and warned, “Don’t babysit them. They are scary.”
“The . . . Ryerson twins?” Harley asked.
“I’m glad Dummy’s here. I want Theo to give him to me.”
With that she got up, walked through the bedroom door, and headed downstairs, the dog at her heels.
* * *
Corliss had corralled one of the few booths that ran alongside the rough board wall opposite the bar. Cooper took a look around, his gaze catching on Dug Douglas, who was warming a barstool. Corliss made eye contact and Cooper headed his way.
The retired detective was silver-haired, with a bushy mustache and dark eyes beneath thick, gray eyebrows. He had a glass of dark beer in front of him, untouched as yet. He gave Cooper the once-over as he slid into the seat across from him.
“I remember you,” he said. “You wouldn’t give up.”
“I still haven’t.”
“All my notes are in the file. I don’t know what you think I can help you with, but go ahead. Ask what you want.”
“After you ruled out any of us kids, how did the investigation into the attack on Emma Whelan go?”
“Like I said, it’s all in my notes.”
“I’ve read the notes. I’d like to hear it from you.”
He shrugged and gave up arguing about it. A barmaid whose weathered face said she’d seen it all looked at Cooper. He pointed to Corliss’s glass and asked for the same. Once she was out of earshot, Corliss said, “I’ll be honest. Even though we decided it wasn’t any of you, we didn’t completely, if you know what I mean. We moved on, but there was always the suspicion that one of you, one that maybe she rejected, had come back at her with the knife.”
“The knife that was never found.”
He nodded. “Nothing was taken from the house other than the knife, as far as we could determine. Whelan’s purse was on the counter, untouched. None of the Ryersons’ belongings were missing, nothing lost to sticky fingers. That was per both Dr. Ryerson and his wife, Nadine. They were horrified about what had happened to Emma. They’d been at a charity event at the Hotel Lovejoy in Northwest Portland, which is now the Lovejoy Apartments, and the meeting room is a restaurant. Nadine was the first to find Emma on the living room floor, unconscious. Dr. Ryerson came in after her. They were both shaken to the core. You probably know their marriage didn’t survive the stress. They split up and moved away. I believe they’re both remarried and are living in California or Nevada.... I heard Ryerson retired to Palm Desert at one time. She stayed in River Glen for the kids and then left after they graduated.”
Cooper knew most of the facts about the Ryersons, but he made a mental note to check up on them, see what they remembered about that night. “Anything else about the case? Something that caught your attention at the time?”
Corliss slowly shook his head. “Like I said, I always thought it was one of you boys.”
Cooper finished his beer, whereas Corliss had barely touched his. There was a distant light in his eye, as if he were thinking hard about something else.
“You had in your notes about Emma having a possible ‘secret life’,” Cooper said.
“You all kept trying to blame the attack on an older boyfriend,” Corliss said with a snort. “The Stillwell kid said she stopped in to his party late and wouldn’t say why. His assumption was that she’d been to see this boyfriend and it hadn’t gone well. She was in a bad mood, barely spoke to him before going to her babysitting gig. Maybe she just didn’t want to see Stillwell.”
This was close in line to Cooper’s own thoughts. He pressed Corliss for any further information, but the man drank his beer down nearly in one long draught, then shook his head and scooted back his chair. Cooper threw down enough money to pay for them both. He thanked Corliss for his time as they both got up to leave. He hadn’t learned anything he didn’t already know, but it was worth the effort. If he was lucky, maybe something would shake loose that was buried in the man’s mind. If it didn’t, no harm, no foul.
“Hey, man.”
Cooper was in the Whistestop’s parking lot, heading for his Explorer. The voice came from a dark corner that immediately put Cooper on alert.
Dug Douglas materialized from the shadows into the cold light from the riot light on the top of a pole that lit up most of the lot. He was finishing a cigarette, and it was the red glow from its tip that Cooper saw before Dug showed himself.
“What are you doing lurking back there?” Cooper asked the insurance man.
“Saw you come in and decided to wait for you.” He ground out the butt against the cracked tarmac. “You’re becoming quite a regular here, huh?”
“Same could be said of you.”
Doug smiled. He’d put on a few pounds over the intervening years and his hair, though he’d hung on to most of it,
