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“Was she a good stepmother? I’m assuming she was, or you wouldn’t have driven all this way.”
“She was probably the best possible. We gave her another granddaughter this week, Sheriff Lake. Kemberly Kaye Coleson, named after her grandmama. Seven pounds, twelve ounces, an even twenty-one inches long. And so beautiful. Our Mama Kem would have adored the baby. My father was broken after we lost my mother. My mother was murdered when I was four. No one ever knew who or why. He married again almost five years later. She was sixteen years younger than he was, and the nurse who helped him start the clinic in Garrity. He was just fascinated by that woman. Until the day they died. They died two years before Angela, in a car accident. A driver ran them off the road and never even stopped. I had their daughters with me, after. And Angela’s, too, once she passed. Angela’s girls’ father didn’t want them. I’ve raised ten children. Every last one of them girls.”
“Wow. Busy, busy lady. Very brave, too.” Ten girls would have driven him utterly insane. And he doubted it had ever been easy. She’d taken a lot on those rather narrow shoulders.
She just nodded. “I’ll be fifty soon. In a little under a year. I’m getting a bit weepy, my girls tell me. I’ve been remembering the lost a bit more lately. And seeing the hope for the future, in the eyes of the children who now call me grandma.”
“Sometimes, memories are sharp swords.” He had his own. No denying that. The moment they’d realized Celia was missing all those years ago topped the list. Right there tied for the moment he’d realized how he felt for another dark-eyed girl—the very instant he’d learned she’d been barely clinging to life in her own brother’s damned hospital. “They put what matters into perspective, don’t they?”
“That they do. This is my father, right here. Andrew Iagan Coleson. My mother is buried here on the left. Maria Dolores Estrada Coleson. She was a movie actress, you know. Very, very beautiful. My stepmother on the right—Kemberly Ann Murphy Coleson. She was so…bubbly and happy but so shy, too. Angela—and Nick, a brother-in-law who died as well, are in Wichita Falls. That was where their lives were, that was where we wanted them buried. You remind me of him, our Nick, Sheriff Lake.”
“I have a niece in St. Louis named Kimberly. We call her Kimber. She’s a total hellion like her mother.” He just walked with her. She was sad today. That broke his heart a little. “How do I remind you of this brother-in-law?”
He just wasn’t ready to let her go yet. She was a gorgeous woman, no denying that. But it was more intangible than that. She reminded him of the governor’s sweetheart of a wife. That same ethereal grace and quiet dignity.
Poise, maybe that was what it used to be called.
It was more of a haunting elegance that even a simple man like him could see. Didn’t necessarily understand, but he could see it for himself when it was right in front of him.
“He was big and strong and a bit on the wild side, too. With that roguish look in his eyes that would make any woman blush. You have that, most certainly. My sister adored that man. He was a TSP detective there in Wichita Falls. So young when he died three years ago. Thirty-eight. Just thirty-eight. He and his wife—my sister Joy, she’s a doctor, too—were walking through the park. Just walking through the park on a sunny day, while I had their children with me, playing grandma. They were attacked by a madman with a scalpel. Nick died protecting Joy that day, and their unborn baby. Joy gave birth the next day to a baby girl—Nalla Nicole. Six weeks early. Nalla is going to be three very soon. November first. Tiny and wicked like her mother, but so very precious. Nalla was the youngest of the Coleson clan until this week.”
“Did they ever catch the guy?” Damn. That sucked. He remembered hearing about that case, but he’d been clear across the state at the time. A cop and his pregnant wife attacked in broad daylight in a damned park—every TSP detective and officer knew about that case. It was high on the TSP unsolved list right now. And would be. Until they had those answers.
“No. They didn’t. He was just some middle-aged madman yelling about proven breeders and needing eggs and wanting the baby. The TSP think he just wanted Joy’s baby, and that was all. High on something, witnesses said. The man saw my sister and how small she is, how pregnant she was, and just…decided to take what he wanted. Nick just got in the way. Nick was my sister Heather’s former partner there. Her best friend. He married her twin. Heather’s with the TSP in Wichita Falls, still. She’s on maternity leave, now, of course. My youngest sister works forensics there. We all changed after that. But change is inevitable, isn’t it?”
Nightmares and memories warred in the eyes that still reminded him of Zoey. Even more that he had seen her again. Her eyes and Zoey’s—powerful. No denying that.
“I know how the darkness hurts. The cries never stop, do they? I hear them myself. I was sixteen and supposed to go home right after school. To watch my sister. She was twelve. My uncle gave me twenty bucks for helping him with some chores—and told me he’d swing by and watch my sister so I could go hang out with my friends. Twenty dollars. For years…we’d just believed him when he’d said she was gone when he got there. He was my father’s brother. We trusted him.” Murdoch stopped walking, right there by Zoey’s mother’s headstone. As he remembered. “He’d taken her—he was treasure hunting in the mines in Value. And she was small enough to fit. That was his reason—she was small enough tofit. My uncle just took her, for greed. All the pain, the agony he caused my family, I’ll never forget. Kept her for twenty years before we got her back. Hid her away in Oklahoma, raised her as her own. Watched his own brother suffer that agony. I’ll never understand that. There isnothingI wouldn’t do for my brothers and sisters and their families.”
And that was the honest truth.
“That…that bastard. That poor little girl.” Bonnie’s shock was in her Zoey eyes. Her horror. “How could he do that to her? To all of you?”
“I never will understand that.” Hell, this woman was the first stranger he had ever spoken with about his sister. Maybe there was something about the ghosts in Coleson Hollow. “If in this job, I can stop justonefamily from feeling that hurt, from going twenty years like we did—then I will have left my mark on this world. One of the best days of my life was my baby sister’s wedding, Nurse Bonnie. I stood in for the groom on that first dance. He’s paralyzed, and he told me that was all she wanted from me at her wedding. She wantedmeto dance with her—so that Celia knew she and I were ok. That she didn’t want me to keep blaming myself for what had happened. I was doing just that. How could I not? If I had made a different choice that day—we wouldn’t have lost her for two decades. I wasn’t about to let her down ever again. It changed us all when we lost her. Especially me.” His parents had just stopped living that day. Abandoning the teenagers they’d had left. Him, Cam, Anthony, Veronica, Becky. Becky had only been thirteen when they’d lost Celia. His parents had given up—they’d been present, but…not.
If Murdoch had only gone home like he’d been told, things would have been different. He’d never forget how he’d failed the ones who’d mattered most like that. “I could barely look at her when we first got her back. I was so angry—with myself. For a while after we got her back I’d believed I’d traded my baby sister for a measly twenty bucks. For that, and for not seeing right through him. The lies. Truth, how can you hold on to it when everything you know is a lie? If I had gone home like I’d been told—we wouldn’t have gone through that hell. I never forget that.”
“You blamed yourself for trusting someone you loved. I can understand how that hurts. I’ve done something similar myself.” Her phone beeped. She checked it quickly, laughed lightly. She had a pretty laugh, this lady who reminded him a great deal of the governor’s sweet wife. “My daughters, reminding me I promised to be there to pick up my youngest when she gets out of class. She’s at FCU now. Math and physics, of all things. But not always so great with time. She gets a bit lost in her own head working equations. I need to be going, Sheriff Lake. I have a strange feeling we’re going to meet again someday.”
“Who knows? Maybe we will. I have a habit of turning up like a bad penny. I’ve been told that many times before. Be careful driving out. There are some big potholes out here. Just remember: hang to the right as much as you can.”
“You leaving now?”
Murdoch shook his head and pointed to the waiting gravestones that surrounded them. “I’m here to find answers of my own buried in these stones. For the woman who stole my heart long ago. She’s looking for a few names for some family research.”
“I hope you find them then. And I hope she appreciates what she has in you.”
“That’s the funny part. She doesn’t have a clue that she has me heart and soul. I am still debating whether I will ever tell her someday. She’ll probably run screaming for the hills, but…if I ever get the courage…” He probably wouldn’t. The last person on the planet he’d ever want to fail was that dark-eyed woman he adored.
“Don’t wait too long. The darkness costs more than anyone wants to ever know. The loneliness. Time is too fleeting sometimes. Love matters, Sheriff Lake, remember that. When nothing else is there to hold on to, to drown out the cries of the past, love matters most.”
A wise woman, his pretty nurse Bonnie with the Zoey eyes.
Murdoch waved once as he watched her drive away.
28
There her mom was!She had started to get worried. Crispin Maria Coleson pulled her jacket up against the wind and shivered. She hated the feel of wind against her skin. Occupational therapy for the sensory issues as a kid had only helped her to a point. Still, she liked to think that as an adult now she had strategies in place to cope with the sensory overload.
