“Thank you,” Kay replied, trying not to grind her teeth as she spoke, her curt voice betraying her anger. “We’ll take it from here.” She waited for the nurse to leave the room. For sure, the woman would’ve loved to listen in and get some juicy gossip on her patient; it wasn’t every day that a nursing home tenant received visits from the police.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse replied coldly. “I can’t leave her alone with you. She could have medical needs—”
“And I’m a medical doctor,” Kay replied. “We’ll call you when we need you.”
Her lips pursed and her chin thrust forward, the nurse left the room, closing the door behind her a little louder than she needed to.
As soon as the door slammed shut, Kay crouched by Shelley Harrelson’s chair and touched her right hand. “Mrs. Harrelson?”
The woman’s lost gaze focused on her for a brief moment, then her attention floated away.
“Mrs. Harrelson, I’m Detective Kay Sharp, and this is my colleague, Detective Elliot Young. We’re here to talk to you about Rose.”
As soon as she heard her daughter’s name, Shelley’s eyelids fluttered quickly, blinking a few times, then focused on Kay, meeting her gaze.
“What… about my daughter?” she asked. “Have you found her?” The woman grabbed Kay’s hand with thin, trembling fingers in an unexpectedly strong grip.
Kay closed her eyes for a moment and filled her lungs with air, getting ready to deliver what could very well be a fatal blow to the woman. Should she just walk away instead? But it would be immensely worse if Shelley heard the news of her daughter’s demise in the dimly lit hallways of that dreadful place, from people like that awful nurse.
When she looked at the lady again, a tear was rolling down the woman’s prematurely aged face. Before Kay could reply, Shelley started speaking, her words faltering at first, choked by the sorrow that was to come.
“I know why you’re here,” Shelley said. As she spoke, she kept her eyes riveted on Kay’s. “I dreamed of the day the cops would come to my door.” She paused for a moment, lowering her gaze. “But not like that… not like you, afraid to say what you came here to say.” She swallowed hard, struggling to speak. Her words were barely intelligible, her paralysis making it difficult for her to articulate.
“I’m so sorry,” Kay whispered. “I can’t begin to understand how it must feel. I just wish there was something I could—”
“This was the nightmare that kept me awake at night, every night after she was taken,” Shelley whispered. “This, cops like you, telling me my baby’s gone.” Tears stained her gown, falling one after another from her closed eyes. “I’ll join her soon, and we’ll be together again.”
“Mrs. Harrelson,” Kay asked gently, “can you tell us what happened that night?”
The right side of the woman’s mouth flickered into the beginning of a smile. “She used to have nightmares, my sweet little Rose. She kept saying monsters were banging on her window, trying to get in. She said she’d seen their faces, but she was only three years old—” Her voice trailed off, swallowed by sorrow. “We didn’t believe her.”
Kay and Elliot exchanged a quick glance. She wondered if that piece of information had any relevance. Had the little girl noticed anything out of the ordinary going on outside her window? Or had she been sleeping soundly, unaware her life was about to take a wrong turn?
“Maybe she was right. I should’ve listened to my baby. Now I’ll never know,” Shelley continued. Her voice was breaking up, her words spoken out slowly, loaded with pain. “Elroy thought it was just branches from the maples, hitting the windowpanes when it was windy. He took a chainsaw to them, I hung drapes, but we still checked on her at least twice during the night, to make sure she was all right.” She stopped talking, and took her hand off Kay’s and raised it to her throat, as if to loosen the knot tightening in there. “That night, when I went to check on her, she was gone. The window was open just an inch, like I’d left it; it was summer. The bug screen was in place, there were no holes in it, the wind moving the sheers a little.” She paused for a beat, her head hung low. “That was everything I saw. It was as if she’d just vanished. Then… that cop accused Elroy and stopped looking for my baby.”
Shelley raised her head, but her eyes were staring into emptiness again, through a vale of tears.
Kay stood, gently touching her shoulder. “Thank you, Mrs. Harrelson. If there’s anything—”
“How did my baby die?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Kay hesitated for a moment. “Quickly and painlessly, I promise you that.” She crouched in front of Shelley’s wheelchair, looking her straight in the eye. “And I promise you we’ll catch your daughter’s killer. We’ll make him pay.”
11Mistake
The drive back from Redding started with a prolonged, heavy silence in the car. Kay’s knuckles were white, as she was gripping the steering wheel tightly and flooring it all the way. She kept her eyes on the road, but her mind was on Rose Harrelson’s case file, and the notes she’d read in there. How was she taken? How did the kidnapper gain access to the child? Most of all, why didn’t the original detective on the case answer that question first? Or was it that he couldn’t come up with any answers, and took the easy way out and accused the girl’s father?
She glanced at Elliot for a split second, registering the frown on his face, the tension in his jaws. Seemed like a whirl of thoughts kept
