The Truth About Comfort Cove

“Was this young man still living here when St. Francis burned down?” he asked.

Frowning again, Amelia shook her head. “No, you know, I don’t think he was. I’m sure he wasn’t. Because we were all gathered out on the stoop that night. We could see the flames from here. And the nice young woman who married that teacher from the high school in town was talking to me. She moved into Jack’s apartment not long after he left. Cheryl, her name was. I can’t remember her last name. Doesn’t matter, though, since she’s married now. I don’t remember her husband’s name, either. Dirk, I think.”

“Do you remember Jack’s last name?” Ramsey asked. Had Colton been living under an assumed name?

“No,” Amelia frowned, shaking her head. And then her brow cleared. “It started with a C, though. Jack C. I know that because of his mailbox. Our mailboxes are all lined up together in the laundry room. He was the only person who put just their last initial instead of their whole last name on the box. He’d written his first name too large and couldn’t fit the whole last name on the little tab. Funny the things that stick with you, huh?”

And not funny at all the things that you couldn’t get rid of. Claire Sanderson’s case was one that was haunting Ramsey. He’d been on it for months and couldn’t get a break.

Or get rid of it, either, physically or mentally.

It stuck with him day and night. And it wasn’t funny at all.

CHAPTER SIX

J ack Colton had been a delivery truck driver twenty-five years earlier. A house on his regular weekly route was two doors down from the home where two-year-old Claire Sanderson had been abducted. Jack’s truck had been seen on Claire’s street the morning she went missing—a piece of information Ramsey had only just uncovered, when he’d reopened the cold case over the summer, to find out if Claire Sanderson was one of Walters’s victims.

“What else do you remember about Jack?” he asked now, his voice as kind as it got.

“Nice young man,” Amelia said. “Polite. Hard worker. He drove a truck. He was always so punctual, and when I asked him about it he said because time meant money. He delivered meat, which couldn’t just be left at someone’s door. The customer had to be present to take delivery. He had a set route with regular customers and he got paid per stop. The more timely he was, the more customers h

e’d be given. He had his schedule down almost to the minute.”

Jack hadn’t told Ramsey about being compensated per job, or about the schedule he’d kept, when the now forty-eightyear-old semitruck driver came in for an interview over the summer. But what Amelia said made sense.

“Did you ever see the truck?”

Shaking her head, Amelia said, “He never brought it home. It was against policy. He caught the bus down at the corner and rode it to the warehouse where he picked up his truck.”

Colton had been delivering meat to a home two doors down from Claire’s every Wednesday morning, at the very same time, which was partially what had helped him pinpoint more accurately the window of time in which Claire disappeared. Amelia’s insight into the driver’s schedule fit squarely with what Ramsey already knew.

Colton’s presence near the scene had never come up in the initial investigation and Ramsey was the first and only officer to question Colton on the matter. So far, there was no reason to suspect the guy, except that he’d been in the area. A normal occurrence for him and not a crime.

“Do you know if Jack ever lost a stop for being off schedule?” Ramsey asked.

“I have no idea. If he did, he never said so.” She glanced toward the photo on the table closest to her. “My Hank was a hard worker, too. He was in college, in Boston, when he was called up. That’s how we met. In college. And in the evening and on weekends, he stocked shelves at his daddy’s hardware store. Jack kind of reminded me of Hank the way he was so good at fixing things.”

“Your Hank had you.” Ramsey took the lead she’d offered. “Did Jack have a girl in his life?”

Was the man as upstanding as he’d seemed? Or had Jack and Frank Whittier—the live-in fiancé of Claire’s mother, Rose Sanderson, and the only suspect in the case—somehow been partners in the most hideous of crimes? There was a lot of money to be made at selling children on the black market and Frank Whittier had been taking on the responsibility of a new wife and two children, in addition to his own son. Three more mouths to feed. Two more college tuitions. By all accounts little Claire had been a handful. And a charmer. Rose had been completely devoted to her. Frank could have been resentful of all the attention the woman gave to the toddler. Or jealous of the fact that he hadn’t fathered the little girl.

It wouldn’t be the first time Ramsey had seen something like that.

A couple of months ago, Jack had cleared Frank’s name in the case, releasing the sixty-two-year-old from twentyfive years of suspicion. Frank was back in school, taking the continuing-education classes that would allow him to get his high-school teaching certification again. Before his initial arrest, he’d been the principal of a well-known boy’s school, and a winning basketball coach at a public school, as well.

When Ramsey had finally located Jack Colton, based on private writings that Cal Whittier, Frank’s son, had turned over to him, Jack had testified that he’d seen Claire Sanderson alone in her front yard, watching as then seven-year-old Cal walked down the driveway, on his way to school. He said that Claire had gone back to the house. Because she’d only been two, he’d swung back by after making his delivery to make certain that she’d made it inside, and he’d seen Frank Whittier, alone, open the back door of his car—exposing its emptiness—to drop his briefcase on the backseat. The man had then gotten in the front of his car and driven off to work.

His testimony and timeline followed Frank’s own testimony from twenty-five years before regarding his actions that morning. He’d come out of the house at 7:20 a.m., five minutes later than usual, dropped his briefcase on the backseat of his car, climbed in the front and driven away. He’d never seen Claire outside of the house.

He hadn’t seen her inside the house just before he left, either, but that wasn’t unusual as she’d have been back in the bedroom with her four-year-old sister, Emma, waiting for their mother to brush their hair and put it in ponytails.

The only unusual thing in their routine that morning had been the babysitter’s call saying she was sick, which meant that Rose was on the phone trying to make other arrangements for Claire and Emma, and for Cal, for when he got home from school. She’d been on the phone when Frank left.

“Jack didn’t just have one girl, like my Hank did,” Amelia was saying. “He had a few of them.”

New information. New leads?

“He had them here?”