“Yes, Brendan Giles,” he snapped, then visibly calmed himself. “Sorry…It’s just that I hate to bring this up in case I’m wrong. But I think I saw him, well, or someone who looked a lot like him, standing behind the last pew in the back of the church.” He shook his head. “I could be mistaken, of course. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him—what?—thirteen or closer to fourteen years? But…I think…Oh, who knows…?” Oliver swallowed hard, looked up at the sky, worry wrinkling his face. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, of course you should have,” she insisted, still bowled over.
His gaze came back to hers. “I just thought you should know.”
“Did you try to speak with him?”
“Yes, after the service, I hurried to the back of the church, greeting everyone of course, but…” Oliver lifted his shoulders as if the weight of the world had settled upon them. “He was gone. Vanished.” He snapped his fingers. “It was almost as if he hadn’t been there at all…like maybe I’d imagined him there.”
“You mean hallucinated,” she said slowly.
“Crazy, huh?”
Shannon didn’t respond.
The passenger door of the Buick opened. “Oliver?” their mother called. “Are you coming? It’s awful hot in here.”
“Right there, Mom.” He looked back at his sister, his blue eyes tormented. “Gotta go.”
“I know.”
He gave Shannon a quick kiss on the temple, then left her standing beneath the branches of the oak. Brendan was back? Just when she’d found out her baby had been kidnapped—their—baby?
Or had Oliver been mistaken?
Or conjured up Brendan’s image?
She stared after the bronze sedan as it rolled down the lane, kicking up dust in the hot afternoon.
If Brendan was back in Santa Lucia, he certainly would have contacted his parents. Right? They would know if he was here on the West Coast, now, when, coincidentally the child they’d conceived together was in grave danger.
The nightmare she was living was becoming stranger by the moment.
Her guts churning, she hurried into the house and flipped through the pages of the local phone book. With trembling fingers she placed a call she didn’t want to make.
Of course voice mail picked up. Feeling important minutes slipping away, she left her name, number and a plea that someone call her back.
She hoped to God someone would bother.
Chapter 20
“It’s Dani’s,” Travis declared, his throat tight, fear and rage running through his blood as he stared at the backpack. “She had it with her when she went to school that day.” Stunned, afraid, he turned his eyes to the detective. “Where did you get it?”
“It was left at the Flannery house, the murder scene.”
“She was there?” he whispered, horror-struck.
“I don’t think so. I think the killer left it, just as he left her burned birth certificate on Shannon Flannery’s porch.”
“Why?” Travis asked.
“I don’t know. But he wanted us to find it.”
“You found no other trace of her, right?” Travis asked, forcing out the words. “She wasn’t…”
“She wasn’t there,” Paterno quickly assured him. “No evidence that she’d been anywhere near the house.”
Travis let out his breath. Maybe Dani was still safe…Oh, God, he prayed so.