Roadside Crosses (Kathryn Dance 2)

The blog post that told Schaeffer where to find a sweatshirt to steal to help him frame Travis.

Dance climbed out of her own vehicle.

Sammy looked at her with a probing expression. The curiosity of their first meeting was gone; now he was uneasy. His eyes were eerily adult.

"You know something about Travis?" he asked, and didn't sound as odd as he had earlier.

But before Dance could say anything, his mother shooed him off to play in the backyard.

He hesitated, still staring at Dance, then wandered off, uncomfortable, fishing in his pockets.

"Don't go far, Sammy."

Dance took the bottle of detergent from under Sonja's pale arm and followed her toward the house. Sonia's jaw was firm, eyes straight forward.

"Mrs.--"

"I have to put this away," Sonia Brigham said in a clipped tone.

Dance opened the unlocked door for her. She followed Sonia inside. The woman moved straight into the kitchen and separated the baskets. "If you let them sit . . . the wrinkles, you know what it's like." She smoothed a T-shirt.

Woman to woman.

"I washed it thinking I could give it to him."

"Mrs. Brigham, there are some things you should know. Travis wasn't driving the car on June 9. He took the blame."

"What?" She stopped fussing with her laundry.

"He had a crush on the girl who was driving. She'd been drinking. He tried to get her to pull over and let him drive. She crashed before that happened."

"Oh, heavens!" Sonia lifted the shirt to her face, as if it could ward off the impending tears.

"And he wasn't the killer, leaving the crosses. Someone set it up to make it seem like he'd left them and caused those deaths. A man with a grudge against James Chilton. We stopped him."

"And Travis?" Sonia asked desperately, fingers white as they gripped the shirt.

"We don't know where he is. We're looking everywhere, but we haven't found any leads yet." Dance explained briefly about Greg Schaeffer and his plan for revenge.

Sonia wiped her round cheeks. There was prettiness still in her face, though obscured. The remnants of the prettiness evident in the picture of her in the state fair stall taken years earlier. Sonia whispered, "I knew Travis wouldn't hurt those people. I told you that."

Yes, you did, Dance thought. And your body language told me that you were telling the truth. I didn't listen to you. I listened to logic when I should have listened to intuition. Long ago Dance had done a Myers-Briggs analysis of herself. She got into trouble when she strayed too far from her nature.

She replaced the shirt, smoothed the cotton again. "He's dead, isn't he?"

"We have no evidence he is. Absolutely none."

"But you think so."

"It'd be logical for Schaeffer to keep him alive. I'm doing everything we can to save him. That's one of the reasons I'm here." She displayed a picture of Greg Schaeffer, a copy from his DMV picture. "Have you ever seen him? Maybe following you? Talking to neighbors?"

Sonia pulled on battered glasses and looked at the face for a long time. "No. I can't say I have. So he's him. The one done it, took my boy?"

"Yes."

"I told you no good would come of that blog."

Her eyes slipped toward the side yard, where Sammy was disappearing into the ramshackle shed. She sighed. "If Travis is gone, telling Sammy . . . oh, that'll destroy him. I'll be losing two sons at once. Now, I've got to put the laundry away. Please go now."