Chapter Eighty-Four
Quinn watches as Jules navigates the microfiche machine at the Ashwell library like a master pianist at the keys.
He starts to speak but she shushes him. She’s spent the past several years at Find Them tracking missing-person cases across the country. She knows how to research. And she scrolls with intensity, so he lets her do her thing.
He’s amped up on adrenaline at the thought of finally identifying John Smith.
The man the old sheriff had a gut feeling was involved with Megan Tucker’s murder.
The loose end that had consumed Quinn’s thoughts for so long.
Quinn spent a long time searching for Smith himself.
But it was on-and-off work. He’d once checked if there was a John Smith buried at the cemetery, but there wasn’t. All his leads had been dead ends.
Pat made the stunning claim that Quinn’s father killed Smith to cover up what they’d all done to Megan and maybe other girls.
But maybe Jules is right. Pat was lying.
Trying to save himself, to convince Quinn to bury what he knew.
Maybe it wasn’t Pat and Dad and John, but only Pat and John Smith.
Or maybe Smith had nothing to do with any of it.
“Found her,” Jules says. It was shocking how fast she found Smith’s mother in public records.
“An obituary?”
“No. A newspaper story about a prostitute murdered at a motel in 1967.”
Quinn reads over her shoulder. “The story quotes her sister, Beth Buckley,” he says.
“Already on it,” Jules says, handing him a scrap of paper with an address written on it.
Thirty minutes later, Jules and Quinn park in front of the tidy, if modest, home in Ashwell. They open the front gate and stride past garden gnomes lining the walkway.
Jules takes a deep breath at the front door. She doesn’t say so, but Quinn knows what she’s thinking: She planned this day to help Quinn move forward but now it has them getting dragged into the past.
A friendly-looking woman, everybody’s grandma, answers the door. She wears an apron and the house actually smells of cookies.
“Can I help you?”
Jules takes the lead. One benefit of having Jules anywhere is that people are always swayed by the beautiful. It’s not just Quinn’s imagination; it’s been proven by science. Even babies respond better to a pretty face.
“Mrs. Buckley, my name is Jules Delaney. This is my boyfriend, Quinn. This may sound odd but are you Tanya’s sister?”
The woman offers a sad look. “Is this about Johnny?”
Quinn feels an electric charge race across his skin.
“I thought someone would come knock on my door about Johnny someday.” She gestures for them to come inside.
Mrs. Buckley offers them coffee, a chocolate chip cookie. It takes everything Quinn has not to rush the woman to tell them what she knows, inform her they don’t want a damn cookie.
Before Quinn presses forward, Mrs. Buckley says, “My sister, she was a sweet soul. But the drugs got a grip on her.” She stops, sighs. “She was pregnant with John at sixteen when our mother passed away and we were on our own. Tanya survived the only way she could. Started with dancing but soon…”
She doesn’t need to say the rest. It’s a common tragic tale.
“She abused Johnny, emotionally. I think physically too.” She lets out a breath. “Then, one of the men…” Mrs. Buckley pauses. “He didn’t have the money to pay her, and when Tanya confronted him, he beat her to death.”
“Did they catch him?” Jules asks.
“Oh yeah, he’s still in prison.” Mrs. Buckley shakes her head. “It was Johnny who identified him. He was only twelve. They lived in a motel, and it didn’t have a lot of space, so he would go in the closet when his mother had, um, guests.”
Quinn’s mind jumps to the retired sheriff he’d visited at the nursing home all those years ago.
His discovery of a chair in the closet of the abandoned house where Megan Tucker had been brutally murdered.
Pat’s sickening words to Quinn about his father: If it makes you feel better, he never touched the girls—he just liked to watch.
Mrs. Buckley says, “Johnny saw the man brutally beat his mother to death. The man who killed her was disturbed. Johnny told the police that the man flipped a coin, asked his mom to call heads or tails before he strangled her.”
Quinn’s feeling disoriented, unable to speak at the revelation. Thankfully Jules is undeterred.
“What happened to John after?” Jules asks.
“We took him in.” She offers another sad expression. “But it didn’t work out.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not proud of it, but we had to send him to foster care.”
“Why? If you don’t mind me asking,” Jules says.
Mrs. Buckley sips her coffee, has a contemplative look. “He was very bright, Johnny. The school said he tested off the charts. And he seemed to recover from what happened to his mom.”
Quinn is waiting for the but.
“But we caught Johnny spying on my daughter while she bathed. He would ball himself up in the linen closet and … Well, and then there was an incident at school with the girls’ locker room. We didn’t think it was safe to have him in our home with our daughter.”
“What happened after he went into the system?” Jules seems unfazed, or she’s faking it well.
Mrs. Buckley shakes her head. “I never heard from him, for years. Then, when he would’ve been about seventeen, I thought I saw him at the co-op, our grocery store.”
Quinn recalls from his own research that John Smith started at Ashwell High his senior year, having transferred from a school in a neighboring county. A new foster family, maybe. Or maybe he was on his own by then.
“Did you talk to him?”
“I tried to. I went up to him—he was with friends and I pulled him aside. He said, and excuse my language, but he said, ‘You ever talk to me again, I’ll come to your house and kill you all.’”
Quinn is feeling slightly disoriented. Jules beats him to the most important question: “Do you have a photo of Johnny—and Tanya?”
Mrs. Buckley thinks about this. “I certainly have pictures of my sister, might have one of Johnny, though he’d be much younger in it, from back when he stayed with us.” She stands and heads to a chest at the far end of the living room, excavates some photo albums.
“Ah, this is from 1970.” She opens it. Quinn and Jules are already by her side as she flips the pages.
Quinn knows they’ve found it when he hears Jules’s gasp at the sight of the photo of Johnny.
But the real shock comes from the photo of John’s mother, Tanya. Her hair has dark roots, her skin is blemished, her clothes tattered. But there’s no escaping the resemblance. She has the same bone structure, the same high cheekbones, the same big eyes—she looks like Jules.