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“Yes. They were sweet girls.”
“And it didn’t bother you that Jack wasn’t faithful to them? That he had more than one of them?”
“Oh, my, Detective, I’m sorry if I misled you. He didn’t have them at the same time! There was one girl he dated for a bit, but it didn’t last long. I remember seeing her a time or two. She had red hair, I think. And then there was the girl who moved in with him. I never met her. I was filling in for a dorm mother at school and was only home on Sundays the semester she was here. She broke up with him. I know about her because I heard him crying one night and I asked him about it. I knew, you see, that Jack wasn’t close to his family. He was the only child of an older couple who never quite made room for him in their lives. He learned how to fend for himself quite young. But a man that young shouldn’t have to fend for himself all the time. Growing up is hard. Being an adult is hard. If I could give him some advice, then that’s what I had to do. He was embarrassed that I knew he’d been crying, but I told him that all men cry now and then. It was nothing to be ashamed about. Don’t you agree, Detective Miller?”
Hell, no, he didn’t agree. Not all men cry. Ramsey needed information. He nodded.
“So then, after this girl broke his heart, did he live alone?”
“For a while. And then another girl moved in. Melanie was her name. I liked her. But I don’t think it worked out, either. I asked him once if he was going to marry Melanie and he told me that he wasn’t in love with her like a guy should be in love with a girl he was going to marry. I’m not sure what ended up happening, though. Jack moved out and I lost track of him.”
“He never came back to see you?”
“I’m not even sure he was in state. He’d said he wanted to travel. And to make more money.”
Ramsey, with all his senses tuned in and alert, relaxed farther back in his chair. “These girls he was friends with, did any of them have kids?”
Say, two-year-old blonde girls?
“No. I’m absolutely certain about that. Hank and I planned to have a house full of children, and anytime there was a little one living here, I made certain I was first on the list for babysitting duty.”
“So you’d have noticed if there were ever little children here, even just for visits?”
“Absolutely. Except that semester I was gone.”
“Were you here on October 13, 1987, in the morning?”
It was a long shot. There was no way anyone could be expected to remember a specific day more than two decades before.
Unless it stood out in their minds for some reason.
Like maybe Frank showing up in a vehicle—his delivery truck—with a precocious toddler in tow?
Amelia didn’t immediately shake her head as he’d expected she would.
With her magnifying spectacles in hand, the older woman stood. She went over to the bookshelf—a couple of shelves filled with black leather bindings. Putting on her glasses, she pulled out one black binder, and then another. Thumbed through that one until she found what she’d obviously been looking for.
“Yes, I was here.” She shocked him with her answer.
Amelia was old. And obviously spent a lot of time alone. Wouldn’t be at all unusual for the woman to get confused.
Or to want to please him just to keep him there.
Ramsey watched her closely and said, “You sound sure about that.”
Making her way slowly toward Ramsey she gave him the book. “I have a calendar for every year of my life here,” she said. “Originally I kept them as part of an agreement between Hank and me, a plan we had to
keep close to each other. The three years he was overseas, I cataloged my days so that I could share them with him. After…well, I was so used to keeping the books that I continued to do so. I thought about quitting a number of times, but I like having them there. I never married, never had children. There’s no one to help me remember the things an old lady might forget. I’ve got my books to remind me.”
Ramsey looked at the entry for October 13, 1987. Amelia had been home that day waiting on a delivery of fabric she was using to make dresses for the church disaster-relief closet. The fabric had arrived at two and she’d had the first dress done by six.
And she’d watched the news.
“You wrote about the little girl who was kidnapped.”
“Claire Sanderson, yes,” Amelia said. “She was from right here in Comfort Cove and close to home, you know? I felt her disappearance personally, like it happened to me. Followed the case for years. Her mama and sister lived here and I could just imagine how it would feel, always waiting…?.
“I used to think I might run into them someday, but then I heard they were speaking locally and I didn’t go. I just hurt too much for them. I couldn’t go see them hurt.”
