Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [6]
She stood at the window and looked outside. “When I was little, I used to stand at my bedroom window at night and think about what it was like to be slipping through those dark, narrow waterways at midnight, holding your breath, your life in the hands of so many strangers.”
“You must have had quite an imagination as a child.” He smiled at the thought of her in an upstairs window, staring into the night.
“It was well-fueled by my grandparents, I assure you,” she said, laughing. “And once my little brother found the tunnel, he’d sneak in there and make all kinds of spooky noises to make us think there were ghosts in the house. So any imagination I had was cultivated by my family.”
“There’s a tunnel?”
“From the barn into the basement of the house, where there’s a hidden room with dirt walls and floor. It’s tiny and windowless, as I recall. I never went into the tunnel, myself. Too dark and creepy. Really creepy”—she hunched her shoulders—“spiders and mousies and bugs. Yuck.”
Kendra poured tea into both glasses, then handed one to Adam. “Other buildings in the area weren’t always as lucky as we were. But you can still see remnants of the town proper about a mile or so into the woods on the other side of the lake.”
“Only remnants? You make it sound like a ghost town.”
“As I said, we get a lot of fires in this area.” She leaned back against the counter, sipped at her tea, and tried to decide how she felt about seeing Adam again.
He was leaning against the opposite end of the counter, his long legs stretched out in front of him. She hadn’t for a minute forgotten the set of his jaw or the lines that ran along the sides of his mouth, though those, it appeared, had deepened since she’d last seen him. The tiny lines that were just beginning to settle in around his eyes four years ago were deeper now, too, a testimony, perhaps, to the nature of things he’d done and seen since they’d last seen each other.
She raised a hand self-consciously to her own face, wondering how the stresses and strains of the past several years might now be playing out. Was he looking at her and seeing a different woman from the one he’d known back then? How much, she wondered, had they both changed?
Baggage best dealt with at another time, she cautioned herself, and tucked that bit of business aside.
“All right, then.” Kendra gestured for him to take a chair at the square enamel-top kitchen table that sat in the middle of the room. “Let’s see what you brought me. . . .”
Chapter
Two
Adam placed his open briefcase on the table and thumbed through his files, looking for the envelope that contained the photographs of the victims.
“Before or after?” He asked when he found what he’d been looking for.
“Before, for now.”
He slid a photograph of Kathleen Garvey across the table.
“She was so pretty.” Kendra leaned over the back of a chair and touched the photograph with her right index finger. “How old?”
“Twenty-seven. Engaged to be married next spring to Tom Alspacher. Age thirty-two. Both Tom and Kathleen had been married once before, two children each.” Adam didn’t need to refer to the file. The facts had stayed with him.
“Where was he on the night his fiancée disappeared?”
“At his aunt’s funeral in Rome, New York, hundreds of miles away. His children were with him, his parents were both in attendance as were numerous family members. Arrived in New York the day before Kathleen disappeared. Got back to Deal four hours after her body had been discovered.”
“Maybe it was somebody local,” Kendra offered. “Maybe someone who knew he was out of town for a few days and thought she wasn’t likely to be missed . . .”
“She was missed right away.