Her legs worked like pistons as she sprinted across the cemetery, heart throbbing inside her chest, her ears, her skull. She skidded to a stop beside Kiersten.
“What’s wrong?” she puffed. “Are you okay?”
Kiersten looked up, tears streaming down her face. “I found Dottie.”
Chapter Eighty-Three
Kiersten
She reached out and touched the moss-covered indentations on the large white stone.
In Loving Memory
of
Dorothy Marie Davis
September 5, 1946–October 8, 1965
Piper laid a hand on her shoulder. “Look.” She pointed at the two stones flanking Dottie’s. Marie Anderson and Gerald Anderson, Dottie’s parents.
“Her dad died two years later,” Piper said, kneeling beside her. Rosamund joined them, sitting cross-legged on the other side of Kiersten.
Kiersten scrubbed her hands across her cheeks. All the things she didn’t want to believe about human nature, about greed and desperation and selfishness, settled over her like a shroud. “Look at the death date.”
Piper ran her fingers over the engraving. “October 8, 1965.”
Kiersten’s eyes burned as a fresh round of tears trickled down her cheeks. “Same date as the last diary entry.”
Rosamund’s shoulders slumped. “He really did it. He killed her.”
“So what do we do now?” Kiersten asked, voice raw. Once, as a child, she’d become briefly separated from her family in the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota, surrounded by trees, with no idea which direction led to safety. She felt that way again now. Lost. Surrounded by dangers she couldn’t see.
Piper rubbed her hands over her face, exhaustion etched into the lines around her mouth, across her forehead. “It’s a sixty-year-old cold case, except it’s not even a case, because everyone assumed she died in childbirth. We could go to the police, but it’s not enough. We need more.”
“More what?” Rosamund spit the words into the air, each syllable laced with anger.
Kiersten put her arm around Rosamund’s shoulder, and Rosamund clutched her hand, blinking back tears. She suddenly realized how much they all loved Dottie, in different ways and for different reasons.
“Moreinformation,” Piper said with a frustrated shrug. “From someone in that family. Aspen, Trey, Chip. Someone other than Margaret and Richard must know what happened back in 1965. We just need to figure out who.”
Kiersten was silent for a moment. “Dottie knows.”
“Yes, but we can’t just summon the Ghost of Dottie to come forward and tell us what happened,” Piper said, angrily plucking at a blade of grass.
“We need to read her last entry again.” Kiersten rose abruptly, brushing the dirt from her knees. “Dottie left us a clue. And we need to go to that party and find it.”
Chapter Eighty-Four
Piper
The moms sat in Piper’s dining room, preparing to leave for the Influencer’s party while the kids made themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the kitchen. They’d temporarily relocated the cafeteria to Piper’s house so the kids could keep Travis company while he slept in his crate.
Piper removed her feet from the uncomfortable taupe-colored heels she planned to wear to the party and wiggled her toes.
There was a reason law enforcement officers didn’t wear heels. What if they managed to get into Richard and Margaret’s basement and Chip pulled a gun and demanded the diaries? What if she needed to tackle someone?
Kiersten picked up the diary sitting on the table while Piper applied a Band-Aid to her heel. These damn shoes always produced blisters.
