There was no hesitation, like there often is when reality is thrown in a victim’s face. Instead, just the confidence of a young woman with the burden of stopping evil.
“That’s the police officer who stopped me,” she said.
Witnesses in Colorado made additional positive IDs of Ted as the stranger who’d been lurking around the high school where Candy Detrick was last seen alive.
Ted, it seemed, was charged with kidnapping Mandy and attempted criminal assault and, as they would always do throughout his life, his parents stood by him. Johnnie and Louise came up with the fifteen thousand dollars sought by the court and he was released to await trial in Washington.
Grace was a girl then, but she could never forget how her mother had reacted to the news that Ted had been freed on bond. That was the day they needed a new TV.
Sissy stood up from the sofa and yelled at the TV.
“Can you believe it?” she asked, her voice nearly a scream.
She picked up her husband’s trophy and slammed it down on top of the walnut console. She was so angry. So hurt. She didn’t shatter the glass, but the tube flickered and the picture faded to that measly pattern that came on the channels for which there was no reception.
It was the first time Grace had seen her mother be aggressive like that.
“Mommy, are you okay?”
“How could I be okay? How could any of us be okay? He’s out. He’s going to kill another girl. Mark my words.”
Grace unplugged the TV. Just in case.
Sissy went for her coat and an umbrella. The weather had been nasty for two weeks, sending a cold rain over the faded fall foliage.
“Mommy, where are you going?”
“Come with me. We’re going over to the Bundys’. I’m going to put them on notice. I don’t care what they say. I don’t even care if they call the police. In fact, I hope they do.”
Grace followed her mother to the car and climbed into the passenger seat. Sissy didn’t even wait for her to buckle up; instead she just put the car in gear and drove.
“I’m sorry about the TV,” she said.
“I don’t care, Mommy. Daddy might not be happy about it.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But you know what? He gets to go to work every day, away from the news, away from Tricia’s empty room. He doesn’t have to face the reminders twenty-four hours a day.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were at the Skyline Drive address where Ted had lived in his last year of high school. Police cars and a TV crew from KVOS were outside the Bundy home, a nice wood-clad house with small, almost eyehole, windows in front.
Sissy parked behind the news van.
“Looks like I’m not the only one with the need to talk to the Bundys,” she said.
Grace followed her mom.
A police officer stopped them.
“Are you friends of the family?” he asked.
Sissy shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t say friends.”
“What’s your business here?”
“I want to talk to Louise and Johnnie,” she said.
“So you do know them?”
“No. I think Ted murdered my daughter- her older sister.” She pointed to Grace, who just stood there saying nothing, taking in all the drama around her.
“I understand, ma’am,” he said, “But you don’t need to be here.”
“Is it against the law?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just that there’s no point in it. Ted’s not here. The Bundys aren’t coming out. We just want everyone to go away, leave them alone.”
“Leave them alone?” Sissy asked, he eyes popping. “They helped to make him into whatever it is that you want to call him. I think they should come out. They should face everyone and tell us why it is they want to support a murderer.”
“He’s their son. It just is the way it is. Please go home.”
Sissy stood there, her pant legs wicking up water from a mud puddle.
“How is it that I have to go home to an empty house, a room without my baby anymore because of him?”
The officer looked over at Grace, who stood next to her mother, shivering in the cold October air.
“Because you have her to think about,” he said, indicating Grace standing quietly next to her mom.
Sissy looked down at Grace, and their eyes locked. She noticed for the first time that Grace was freezing. She didn’t have a jacket or a sweater. She was shaking and her face was streaked with rain.
“Tell Louise I hope her son rots in hell, but before he does that, I want you-any of you-to make him tell me what he did with my Tricia! Do you understand? Do you copy?”
The officer seemed to.
“We’re together on this,” he said. “I promise.” He looked around the Skyline Drive house, the cars, the people, the media. The buzzing of people all there for a reason, but none greater than the woman and her daughter. If anyone deserved answers, he was all but certain, it was that mother.
CHAPTER 26
A memory that could never ever be erased from Sissy O’Hare’s brain, no matter how much she would have preferred, came ten days after the ordeal began. It started with a phone call.
It was Harold Masters from the Tacoma Police Department on the line. Detective Masters had been handling Tricia’s case since the first real full day of her vanishing.
“Mrs. O’Hare?” the detective asked. It was immediately apparent that his voice was devoid of any hopefulness.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said.
The detective cleared his throat. “Mrs. O’Hare, can you and Conner meet me at the station?”
“This doesn’t sound good,” Sissy said, sliding backward into a chair, the air emptying from her lungs.
“We don’t know for sure,” he said, again as flatly as possible, without hope.
Sissy looked over at her husband, who had set down the News Tribune and was watching her face fall. “We can be there in twenty minutes,” she said.
Detective Masters’s sympathetic eyes were no longer as penetrating as they had been in all of his encounters with Conner and Sissy O’Hare. Indeed, when he met them by the front desk at the police department they barely landed on either of the missing girl’s parents. It was obvious before a single word was uttered that the detective was about to say something that he didn’t want to say and that the O’Hares most certainly didn’t want to hear.
From the outset, Conner was shaking. He put his arm around Sissy, more for his benefit than hers. She was oddly quiet, stoic.
“You found her?” he asked.
Sissy stood there mute.
“Let’s go in here,” Det. Masters said, gesturing for them to follow into the open doorway of an interview room they had visited two days after Tricia’s vanishing from campus. Tricia’s best friend, Carrie, had joined them in that interview, one that yielded very little new information and plenty more tears. Carrie kept saying over and over that it was her fault for wanting to have some alone time with the guy she had set her sights on.
“Tricia went to get something to eat or something… I never saw her again,” she said. “It was my fault. All my fault.”
