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“Yeah, some. Holly, mainly. She was one year younger in school, but we hung out a bit. Usually with Andrea. You know her, right? Andrea Bennett, no, she got married. What was the guy’s name? He wasn’t from around here, someone she met while going to school . . . oh, God. Wait! Clancy. His name’s John or Josh or something like that, but Clancy, that’s her last name. Andrea and Holly and Brit—that’s Brittany Sully, I don’t know if she’s married or not, but they were all real tight.” Maxie smiled, proud of herself for coming up with it. “I haven’t thought of Andrea in years.” She took another sip, then checked her watch. “Oops! My break’s about over and I have to run. My boss—a real stickler about clocking in and out, he’s got an OCD thing about it. That’s right, isn’t it? OCD? Obsessive-compulsive whatever.”
“Disorder.”
“Right. That’s it. Anyway, he’s beyond anal and I don’t want to lose my job.” She started walking toward the florist shop.
“But your mom—is she around?” Nikki asked.
“Oh, she’s always at the arena. If you want, y
ou can probably catch her there.” And then she was off, hurrying back to the shop, where a short man in his own green apron stood in the door scowling at Maxie as she scurried past the rows of cut carnations and roses to disappear into the store behind him.
Nikki thought about it.
She needed to begin digging deeper into the people who knew the Duval sisters. She’d look up Andrea Clancy and Brit Sully, as well as any other friend of the victims, but for now, Nikki decided to start with Maxie’s mother, Chandra “the psychic horsewoman” Johnson.
* * *
“So it’s true, then,” Harvey Duval said over the wireless connection, when Reed, sitting in his office at the station, finally reached the victims’ father. “My daughters are really gone. An officer came by the other day, but I still held out a little bit of hope. Silly, I know, but . . . it’s funny what you can tell yourself. The lies. The platitudes.” There was a soft, resigned sadness to his voice, and he let out an audible sigh. “I’d expected it, of course, after all this time. At least I’d convinced myself that I would be ready for any kind of news, but it’s still a punch to the gut. They . . . they were so beautiful. So innocent. Dear God.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Reed offered. He was recording the conversation but still wrote notes to himself.
“Me too.” Harvey cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea who did this?”
“Not yet.”
“Margaret’s devastated, of course. I called her after the deputy who gave me the news left. I thought it was the right thing to do even though it’s no secret that ours wasn’t the happiest of marriages.” There was still a bite to his words, even years later.
“You didn’t get along?”
He snorted. “She expected me to claim a child as my own, and then when we lost the girls . . . Well, it was too much. We were already about to split up. When we were house hunting, we were really looking for an apartment. She needed me to sign on the lease, and I thought it was the decent thing to do.” He cleared his throat. “But then decency’s pretty hard to come by. Anyway, then we lost the girls and so we tried to put it back together, the marriage. Of course it didn’t work. Too much water under the bridge. The girls disappearing was the final straw.” Another sigh, then, “There’s some finality to this, I suppose.”
“Except that Rose is still missing.”
A beat. “Right. But it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?” he said defeatedly. “And then, no doubt, you’ll locate her, too. Look, I’ve got to go. I told the police everything I know over and over again. Nothing’s changed.”
Except that two bodies were located.
Harvey ended the call.
In Reed’s estimation, quite a bit had changed. He pulled up Harvey Duval’s statement and reread it, but it was almost word for word what Margaret’s had been; basically, the kids were at the movies, Owen was in charge of the girls, while Margaret and Harvey had looked at some open houses, then went out to dinner, and when they got back all three of the girls had disappeared. He hadn’t even been that concerned to begin with as the oldest daughter, Holly, was on the threshold of becoming a teenager, had been feeling her “wild oats” and been rebelling. They’d caught her smoking and sneaking out, but until the day they’d gone missing had never involved her sisters, other than insisting Poppy “cover” for her, which meant lying, and according to Harvey, Poppy had done it on several occasions. Rose, too young, hadn’t really been aware of her older sister’s open defiance.
Reed shuffled backward, through all of Margaret’s statements over the years. She’d never mentioned that her eldest daughter had been any kind of trouble. When asked about it, she’d dismissed Holly’s disobedience as nothing but a teenager pushing her limits, testing her parents, and had indicated that Harvey, ever the dictator, had overreacted to his daughter’s “antics.”
He read her direct quote: “It’s all just a part of growing up, you know, but Harvey didn’t have a normal childhood, didn’t understand that kids push boundaries. His own parents were of the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ mentality. But then I knew he didn’t care that much, not really. The fact that he left me, in all of my grief and despair, when our daughters were missing, for the love of God. Who does that and remarries and starts another family? It’s like he just didn’t care.”
Or couldn’t face the horror of the truth.
Delacroix appeared as he was still going over the statements. “What did you find out from the father?” she asked.
“Not a lot. He seems to be devastated, but then who wouldn’t be?”
“Right.”
“Catch me up,” he suggested, as in the interest of speeding the investigation along, they’d split up and interviewed different people during the past day and a half.
“Okay.” She sat on the corner of Morrisette’s desk and scrolled through her phone. “First up, Tyson and Baxter Beaumont, the father and son, came in and gave statements about the property where the victims were found. I typed them up, they signed, and I sent you a copy just this morning.” She glanced up from her screen. “Nothing of importance that I could find. Nothing we didn’t really know. I asked them why they thought Bronco was on the property, and they agreed he was probably there to steal whatever he could find since his grandfather had a key and was now dead so he couldn’t keep an eye on the estate or Bronco.”
“Did they say anyone else was ever on the property?”
