The same table sat in what would probably be called a breakfast nook now. I walked out of the kitchen and to the stairway.
Upstairs there were four bedrooms. Sybil and I had had our own in this house. We’d had to share when we moved in with our grandfather. My room looked exactly the same as it had the day we left. It had the same blue toile wallpaper and the white hobnail cotton bedspread. It was dusty, of course, but otherwise, it was just as I remembered.
“Was this your room?” Decker asked from the doorway.
“It was.” I pointed to the chair that sat next to the dormer window. “I used to sit there and read.”
“I can see you there.”
I ran my hand over the old-fashioned dresser and looked into the mirror that hung above it. The last time I’d seen my reflection in it, I was seven years old. I’d been barely tall enough to see myself.
“Why did he make us leave?”
“I wish I knew,” Decker answered, coming to stand behind me.
“You’re a handsome man,” I said, looking at his reflection next to mine. I shuddered as I watched him lean down and kiss beneath my ear, my neck, up to my cheek. It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
“You belong here,” he murmured. “This house suits you.”
I turned in his arms. “Texas isn’t my home anymore, Decker. I don’t think it has been since the day we left this house.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but closed it when the phone in his pocket rang.
“It’s the medical examiner,” he told me before he accepted the call.
“Hey, Doc. What can I do for you?”
I was close enough that I could hear the man’s response.
“I’ve completed the autopsy, Decker, and I found something you should see. How soon can you be here?”
Something we should see? Oh, God. What did that mean?
“I don’t know, maybe an hour?”
“Sooner the better, Deck.”
“We can leave now,” I told him when the call ended.
“Do you want to look at any of the other bedrooms first?”
“No. They weren’t mine.”
He nodded as if he understood. “There isn’t much to see in the barn.”
“I don’t remember ever being in there.”
Decker put his hands on my shoulders. “While the house doesn’t appear like
anyone’s been in it. I can’t say the same about the barn.”
“No?”
“There are three different sets of footprints that all look recent.”
I didn’t like the look on Decker’s face. “Does one set look like they belong to a woman?”
“They do.”