The Truth About Comfort Cove

If ever he’d been amazed at another human being, it was in that moment. And if ever he’d fallen in love, it was then, too.

H er foot started to tap. In tandem with the finger still strumming a beat on the passenger door handle.

They turned a corner. “Stop!” She shouted the word. Ramsey slowly pulled over to the side of the quiet street.

He put the car in Park, but left it running. “You recognize something?” “I’ve been here before,” she said, her stomach roiling, her breath coming in spurts. “I’ve been here before, Ramsey. I don’t know where I am, but I’ve been here.” She was babbling. Looking around frantically. Crying.

“Where am I?” Her gaze landed on him and she sounded like a lost little girl.

“You’re around the corner from Rose Sanderson’s house.”

She sniffed. Gathered her composure. “I don’t like this corner.”

He knew the statement mattered. Knew, too, that he’d have to call Bill and get him to start checking out Jack’s route, Frank’s route on the way to the school, against the corner he was parked at. He’d already made arrangements for the other man to take over the Sanderson case. Ramsey could no longer be impartial enough, removed enough, to bring this one home in a way that would convince the D.A. and secure the conviction they all needed.

“You want to head to the ocean now?”

She shook her head. “No. I want to see Rose Sanderson’s home.”

Dr. Zimmerman had told him that Lucy was the boss. With trepidation, he put the car in Drive and rounded the corner.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

S he’d never seen the house on the corner before. She’d swear it. “Are you sure this is the street?” Lucy asked Ramsey as he turned the car onto the street he’d indicated as Rose Sanderson’s.

“I’m sure.” It looked…old. Her earliest recollections were of the house she and Sandy had lived in before they’d bought their bungalows across the street from each other when Lucy graduated from the academy. It was old, too. But not in a neighborhood as run-down as this one.

“You said Rose Sanderson is a principal in a high school.” “That’s right.”

“And she was a teacher before that?” The woman was a

name to her. A job. Lucy had never met her.

“Yes.”

“And she can’t afford anything nicer than this?” “She won’t leave this neighborhood.”

Understanding dawned instantly to the cop Lucy was. The

mother of a missing child was still living with the hope that the child would come home. And she had to be there if she did. And then she remembered that she might have already known that about Rose. She couldn’t remember for sure.

“She has the same kitchen table in her kitchen, too,” Ramsey said. “It’s where the family had their last breakfast together, the morning Claire disappeared.”

Her back itched. And her arms, too. She looked at Ramsey. “You mean, me, right? Before I disappeared?” The words rang so loudly in the car, they made her ears hurt.

She stared at Ramsey.

Slowing the car, he stared back at her.

“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

He’d stopped. They were at a curb in front of a house. She

didn’t feel anything at all. They could have been in front of any house in any neighborhood she’d ever been in. “This is it?” “No. I didn’t want to take a chance on Rose being home from school so I didn’t park out front. That one’s it.”

She followed the direction of his finger to a white house across the street and kitty-corner from the one in front of which they sat. With newish paint, nicely done landscaping and front steps that weren’t crumbling, the house was inarguably the most attractive one on the block.

Lucy studied it. As a cop. Looking for clues. She went inside the case, just as she always did. Thought of the reports she’d read. The interviews.