Protector - Laurel Dewey [166]
“Don’t know. Daddy just wanted to be his friend. But Mommy said he was hurting us.”
“How was he hurting you?”
Emily’s eyes drifted into the distance, as fragments of conversation filtered through her mind. “That’s what my daddy said to Mommy that night.” The memory gradually unfolded. “I was standing at the top of the stairs. They couldn’t see me. ‘You’re hurting us,’ Mommy said . . . She kept shoving the letter in his face.”
Jane abruptly came to attention. “What letter?” Emily was faraway. “The letter in her hand. It made her real angry and scared—”
“What was in the letter?”
“I don’t know . . . she put it away . . .”
“Where?” Jane asked emphatically.
“She hid it in that secret compartment at the back of the desk in the hallway.”
Jane nearly fell off her chair. She thought back to the crime scene photo and that “white scratch” coming from the back of the desk. “You have no idea what was in that letter?” Jane said urgently.
“No,” Emily replied coming back into herself. “She just told Daddy that we should never have come back from our camping trip.”
“The camping trip,” Jane said, feeling a puzzle piece falling into place. “You were gone for nine days?” Emily nodded. Jane did the math and figured out an approximate scenario. Counting back nine days from May 22—the date that Emily and her mother returned from Moab—was May 14, the day after the late night SUV explosion that killed the Stover family. Jane reasoned that Patricia was terrified by the event, felt a need to protect Emily from the tragedy and made a quick decision to pull her out of school and flee to Moab, Utah. There she and Emily would be far away from the fallout and nowhere near a newspaper or TV. Jane surmised it was Patricia’s MO to always hide the truth from Emily. Tucked away in the middle of the Utah desert, Patricia made sure that Emily heard and saw nothing about the graphic murder. Jane surmised that Patricia returned to their home on May 22, hoping that nine days was enough time for things to shake out. But instead, it all hit the fan when David disclosed the secret letter to his wife. Whatever was in that letter was pure dynamite and enough to put the fear of God into Patricia. Jane turned to Emily. “What happened next?”
“Mommy said we were going to leave and move to my aunt and uncle’s house in Cheyenne. Then they saw me at the top of the stairs and stopped fighting. Mommy told me to go back to my room and that she was gonna talk to me later. I told Mommy I loved her and I told Daddy, too. And he said, ‘I love you, sweat pea.’ I went back into my room. A few minutes after that, I thought I heard A.J.’s daddy yelling downstairs.”
Jane knew that Emily did not hear A.J.’s daddy—Bill Stover—because he was killed ten days prior to that night. “Describe the voice you heard.”
“It sounded like A.J.’s daddy.” Emily mimicked the sound as best she could. “ ‘How you doin’, Emily?’ ” she said in a semi-gruff, punctuated cadence.
“That’s the exact sound you heard?” Jane said. “You sure?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Jane knew that was nowhere near the sound of Weyler’s smooth and more articulate voice. “Do you remember anything specific he said that night?”
“Just something about an accident,” Emily’s memory kicked in again. “It’s ten o’ clock . . . I can’t hear what they’re saying . . . Then he goes into the kitchen and everything’s quiet until he comes back out . . . Then my daddy’s voice . . . he’s the first to yell . . . then my mommy yells out . . . I don’t want to hear it so I grab my pillows off my bed and go to the closet . . . The clock says 10:04 when I go back to get the last pillow . . .”
Jane constructed