Last Seen in Silver Creek
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Delores Fossen
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19
Chapter One
Kim Ryland fought to get out of the nightmare. It came at her in pieces that were as brittle and sharp as razors.
“Hide,” he told her. “Hide now.”
And that’s what she’d done. What she was doing in one of those brittle dream pieces that stabbed and sliced its way through her. In the dream, she clutched the stuffed dog against her and dropped down onto the floor, scuttling under the bed and clamping her teeth over her bottom lip so the killer couldn’t hear any of the sounds she might make.
Like that night when the nightmare had been real, Kim didn’t hear much going on in the house. Couldn’t. Not with her heartbeat crashing in her ears. But she could feel. Mercy, could she. Both then and now. And what she felt was something no eight-year-old child should ever have to experience.
Terror.
On a hard gasp, Kim finally woke, struggling to get to a sitting position while she fought for breath. Fought to get her throat unclamped. She was in her bedroom. Alone and safe. She was no longer a child.
And no killer was coming for her tonight.
Kim glanced at the clock and groaned. It was barely four in the morning. Considering the late night she’d put in preparing a case she’d be prosecuting, she needed at least a couple more hours of sleep. Sleep she clearly wouldn’t get, not with her body still revving from the nightmare.
Apparently, nightmares didn’t have an expiration date since she’d been having this particular one for twenty-one years now. Since she’d been eight and had cowered under her best friend’s pink bed during a sleepover.
Those images of what had happened back then had now gotten mixed up with her current case. Well, one of them anyway. As the assistant district attorney in her hometown of Silver Creek, Texas, she always had several cases on her proverbial plate, rarely one as serious, though, as the domestic aggravated assault trial that was coming up in four days. There’d been plenty of violence in that crime, too, which was probably why the dream had come at her so hard tonight.
Cursing her memories and the dull headache that was now throbbing nonstop, Kim threw back the covers, dragged on the silky blue robe her mom had given her for Christmas, grabbed her phone to check her emails, and made her way to the kitchen. Just walking through her house soothed her.
Some.
This was home, filled with the things that reminded her that she’d come from a loving, protective family. Heirloom furniture. Framed pictures of those family members on the mantel. The patchwork quilt throw that her great-grandmother had made. All pieces that canceled out that nightmare. Well, mostly they did. The nightmare and memories were always there, lurking just beneath the surface.
Kim programmed some strong coffee, planning to drink the entire pot herself. She wasn’t sure she could focus yet on her laptop screen so, after she glanced at her emails and didn’t see anything pressing, she picked up the stack of mail from the kitchen counter. Obviously, one of her parents had picked it up at the post office for her, a reminder that it had been a while since she’d checked the box herself. Not her folks though. They checked often and brought over hers since they had keys to both the post office box and her house.
With the coffee maker sputtering and pumping out the much-needed caffeine, she dragged the trash can from under the sink and started going through the mail, automatically tossing the sales papers and the junk. Then she froze and stared at the letter that’d been in the middle of the pile.
And she knew exactly what it was.
Oh, God.
Kim didn’t open it, didn’t touch it. Instead, she pulled out her phone and, without hesitating, called Sheriff Theo Sheldon. Despite the early hour, he answered on the second ring.
“Kim?” he said, sounding plenty groggy. Not so groggy, though, since he hadn’t missed seeing her name on his phone screen. “What’s wrong?”
“I got another letter,” she managed to say, though her hands and voice were now trembling a little.
“I’m on my way,” Theo assured her, and in that instant, the grogginess had vanished.
Kim murmured a thanks and the moment she ended the call, she used her phone to snap a picture of the envelope. Something she’d done for the other eight letters she’d received over the years. She copied the image to the online storage file where she had photos of the others, and she pulled those up now to verify that this one was indeed the same. Not that she needed verification, but it gave her something to do while she waited for Theo.
Yes, this one was the same.
A plain white envelope. No return address. Kim’s name and post office address had been typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. Or rather “Kimmie” had been typed.
Her childhood nickname.
Also like the other letters, the stamp was affixed sideways in the upper right-hand corner. Maybe the position was some kind of message or clue, but if that was the case, Kim and the Silver Creek Sheriff’s Office hadn’t been able to figure out what it meant. It was possible the sender had positioned it that way just to play mind games with her since the figures on the stamps weren’t upright but rather on their sides.
Like a dead person might be.
All the other letters had been analyzed, of course, and the lab had identified plenty of smudged prints and even some trace DNA, but not enough to attempt to find a match in any of the databases. Maybe this one would be different, though she had to imagine it’d been handled by plenty of people just to have made it into her post office box.
She considered calling her uncle Grayson, who up until the past two months had been the sheriff of Silver Creek for more than three decades. This was his case, too. Always would be. But a call could wait until a more decent hour. Ditto for the one she’d need to make to her folks.
Kim knew full well that she wouldn’t be able to delay either of those particular calls much more than an hour or two since it wouldn’t take long for word to get out that she’d gotten another letter. And she’d need to do some soothing there. Some reassuring. Of course, any reassurance she could give her parents and her uncle would be a lie, but she didn’t want any of them to know that these letters and the memories they stirred up were still eating away at her.
But they were.
They always would.
Still, her parents didn’t need to add any more layers to the guilt they no doubt felt at not being able to prevent their little girl from being caught up in the events of that tragic night. A night where two people had been murdered and Kim’s best friend, Faith, had disappeared. The killer had taken her, and Kim was well aware that it could have been her instead of Faith.
Kim got herself that much-needed mug of coffee and went back to her bedroom to pull on a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt and shoes. It was best for her to be fully dressed when dealing with Theo. Mentally dressed, too. There was always that stir of heat between them. A forbidden fruit kind of thing, and it just wasn’t a good idea for her to test that forbiddance or the heat tonight. Not when she was already feeling a little dinged and jittery.
With her clothing “armor” in place, Kim walked to the front window to keep watch for Theo. It was still dark, but there was a fingernail moon so she could see the cold January wind battering the now bare trees around her property. And just like that, she got another whiplash of memories.
It’d been cold that other night, too, and when her father had carried her out of the house, Kim had heard the frost crunch beneath his boots. He’d cradled her against him just as Grayson had done the same to Theo. Except Grayson hadn’t actually picked up Theo, who’d been twelve at the time. Instead, Grayson had put a protective arm around him, leading Theo to the waiting cruiser. That protection had continued when Grayson and his wife, Eve, had taken Theo to live with them rather than put him into the foster care system.
The people who hadn’t gotten led out of the Sheldon house by the Ryland family that night were Theo’s parents and his sister, Faith. No escape for them. Kim hadn’t actually seen Faith being kidnapped or the bodies of Theo’s parents. Only the blood smeared on the floor.
So much blood.
She’d only glimpsed it, peeking out even after her father had told her to keep her eyes shut as he’d carried her from the house. Kim wished she’d obeyed. Wished the image of all those blood smears wasn’t in her head.
Yes, she was definitely feeling dinged and jittery.
Because Kim had read all the reports of the murders and the kidnapping, she knew plenty had been done to try to find the killer and what happened to Faith. There’d been an extensive search, and Faith’s photo had been added in every available missing persons database. With no results. Faith had simply disappeared.
The sudden slash of headlights caused her attention to snap to the road where she saw Theo’s truck pull into her driveway. She’d figured it wouldn’t take him long to get there since he lived only a half mile away and was her closest neighbor. Then again, if his two-year-old son Jack, had been staying the night, Theo would have needed to let the boy’s nanny know he was heading out. That could have tacked on a minute or two to his travel time.
She watched Theo park and step out of his truck, his gaze automatically going to the window to meet hers. If he was feeling any dings or signs of needing hits of caffeine, he wasn’t showing them.
Just the opposite.
Even though he likely would have dressed in a hurry, nothing about him was askew. He was wearing his usual jeans, a gray work shirt and a black Stetson that she knew had once belonged to his father. It was well worn and fit as if it’d been custom made for him.
The moonlight flickered on the badge he had clipped to his belt. A shiny silver star that was only two months old and had come with his new job title of sheriff of Silver Creek. It occurred to her that even without the badge, he looked like the cowboy cop that he was. Always had. Some people were born old. Theo had been born to be a Silver Creek lawman.
He flipped up the collar of his buckskin coat and made his way across the yard and to her porch. The relentless wind whipped against the ends of his dark blond hair, and he had to press his hand to his Stetson to stop it from flying. Kim set her coffee aside so she could disengage the security system and unlock the door for him.
“Thanks for coming so fast,” she greeted. “I wasn’t sure if you had Jack tonight or not.”
“No. He’s with Nadia.”
Nadia, Theo’s ex and Jack’s mom. Nadia also had other “labels,” such as Kim’s former best friend. Emphasis on the former. But that wasn’t something Kim intended to give any more thought to right now.
Theo stepped in, bringing with him the cold and fresh scent of the frost. It blended with the leather from his coat and his body heat. Yes, even now there was heat.
“The letter’s on the counter,” Kim said, shutting the door. “I’ll get you some coffee.”
He muttered a thanks and made a beeline to the counter. The sigh he made when he saw the envelope was long and laced with weariness.
“I’m not sure when the letter arrived,” Kim went on. She handed him his coffee. “According to the postmark, it was mailed from Dallas five days ago.” A six-hour drive from Silver Creek. That didn’t mean that’s where the sender lived though. In fact, Kim was betting the person had no connection to Dallas that could be traced back to whoever had sent it.
Theo made a sound to acknowledge that he’d heard her, and he sipped his coffee while he studied the envelope. “You’re either staying up late or getting up early,” he remarked.
“Getting up early. Dreams,” she tacked onto that.
He turned his intense blue eyes toward her and she saw that he knew what she meant. Not dreams but rather the nightmare.
“Yeah,” he said. Theo repeated that yeah under his breath. “Sometimes, I save them in the dreams. Sometimes,” he added in a murmur that let her know that didn’t happen nearly often enough.
It wouldn’t do any good for her to remind him that he’d been just twelve years old. A kid. And that if he’d tried to rescue his parents from that unidentified intruder/killer, he would likely also have been murdered.
That’s what had come darn close to happening, too.
When the cops and CSIs had pieced together the crime scene, they’d surmised that the killer had managed to get out of the house mere seconds before Theo had come running down the stairs with a baseball bat. Since the killer had obviously had a weapon, one that he’d used on Theo’s parents, he likely wouldn’t have hesitated to use it on Theo as well.
“You saved me,” Kim reminded him instead. His hide now order had worked. Kim had hidden, and the killer hadn’t found her.
The next sound Theo made definitely wasn’t one of agreement. This conversation was picking at the old wounds, bringing everything back to the surface, and in Theo’s mind, the surface didn’t paint him in a good light. He’d been too late to save his parents or to stop the killer from kidnapping his sister when she’d apparently been coming out of the hall bathroom. Too late to try to stop the killer-kidnapper from fleeing the scene.
Because Kim had obeyed Theo’s shouted order of hide now, Kim hadn’t seen the killer, and because of the thudding in her ears, she hadn’t heard the chaos of that night. Hadn’t heard Faith scream for help. But apparently Theo had. Kim had read the reports, and he’d heard his kid sister calling out for him.
Help me, Theo. Help me.
A therapist would probably pretty it up a little, but Kim knew something like that could mess you up for the rest of your life. It’d certainly done a number on Theo, and he was carrying a lot of guilt because of it.
Theo drank a long gulp of coffee, put aside the cup and took out a pair of gloves and an evidence bag from his coat pocket. “Dallas,” he said, obviously looking at the postmark again. “The first two came from there.”
Yes, and the others had been postmarked from other Texas cities. Emphasis on cities. Not from small towns like Silver Creek where someone might have noticed a stranger or someone suspicious mailing a letter.
Like the other envelopes, this one hadn’t actually been sealed the traditional way. The flap had instead been taped down, ensuring that no one had licked it and therefore no one had left behind any DNA from saliva. There’d been no DNA, prints or fibers previously left on the tape either.
Theo carefully slid out the single folded sheet of white paper that was the textbook definition of plain and nondescript. The message, however, was anything but. Even though Kim steeled herself up, it felt like the gut punch that it was.
“‘Help me. Please help me,’” Theo read aloud.
A variation of the words that Faith had shouted the night she’d been taken twenty-one years ago when both Faith and Kim had been eight. Like the other letters Kim had received, this particular plea had been typed, and there was no signature. No explanation as to why the letter had been sent to Kim and not Theo.
Kim gave a resigned sigh, knowing that even though the letters hadn’t been sent to him, the gut punch was there for Theo, too. But Theo wasn’t sighing. He unfolded the bottom third of the letter and leaned in to examine the right corner. Kim leaned in, as well, until her head was against Theo’s, and she saw what he was looking at.
The tiny rust-colored dot.
It was about half the size of a grain of rice. So small that Kim might have missed it had it not caught Theo’s attention.
“That could be blood,” he murmured.
That got her heart revving because it certainly looked like dried blood to her. There’d been nothing like that on the others, but maybe this meant Faith—or whoever was doing this—had left a little piece of herself or himself behind.
“I’ll get it to the lab ASAP,” Theo said, refolding the letter and putting it in the evidence bag. He took out a pen, no doubt to label the bag, but a sound stopped him cold.
Somewhere, outside the house, a woman screamed.
