Page 62 of You'll Be Sorry

He shrugged. “The DNA test results were conclusive. Three different gene pools present, though the lab could match only one out of the three samples.”

She got it then, felt the full import in her bones. To give him credit, he’d warned her. To give her credit, she’d almost understood.

“It came back to Ian Grady, police chief, Shereford, New Hampshire,” Adams finished quietly.

“Cross-contamination,” she stated immediately.

“I had multiple samples tested—plenty of blood evidence, remember? And his shoe size…”

Mandy knew her father’s measurements; as a little girl, she used to stick her much smaller feet inside his boots and stomp all over the house. Still:

“Why would my father be running around the Dixons’ house in his bare feet? You’d have shoeprints, not footprints.”

“It was a dark and stormy night, remember. Yet no dirt or debris was tracked into the home. Most logically, because the intruders were smart enough to take off their muddy boots before entering.”

“Nope. Just nope, nope, and nope.” Her father involved in some possible way? Never in a million years.

She stared at Adams. He didn’t back down.

“No way in fucking hell,” she tried again.

He spread his hands, clearly inviting her to provide another explanation.

If only she had one.

21

Shereford’s historical society occupied the second floor of the white-steepled community church, located in the middle of the village green. A rainbow flag flapped in the crisp morning air as Raquel mounted the front steps. The wooden door, dark-stained and creaky with age, was unlocked, but took several determined tugs to budge.

She walked into the shadowed interior, thinking about old journals, family trees, and early-American records. Then drew up short.

Raquel didn’t believe in God. As far as she could tell, institutions were man-made vanity projects designed to hide people’s sins while allowing them to judge others. From the holier-than-thou church ladies who delivered the occasional hot meal while tut-tutting about the squalid state of their home, to the teachers who took in her and her siblings’ bruised arms before turning away, to the county sheriff’s deputies still zipping up their pants as they unloaded her mother from the back of their cruisers.

To Raquel, the afterlife sounded like just another fairy tale, designed to lull the gullible to sleep at night. As far as she was concerned, you lived, then one day you died, and you did your best to limit the damage in between. Or not.

But now, standing in the middle of this hushed and shadowed space…The rows of dark oiled pews. The walls of stained-glasswindows. The classic oil paintings depicting pastoral splendor. Lambs, cherubs, saints. The Virgin Mary holding her infant son.

A first tremble rippling through her body, followed quickly by another.

Did babies have souls? Even the ones who never took a breath, but kicked their precious tiny feet and turned funny little somersaults inside the safety of their mothers’ wombs? Did they pass over to some kind of golden hereafter where they snuggled with puppies and danced with angels? Did they gaze down benevolently upon the parents who’d loved them, even if they’d never met on the physical plane?

Or were they just fragile wisps of what might have been, an idea never fully formed, a possibility never wholly rendered?

Another shudder. There were times she truly wanted to believe. It would be so much easier to picture her baby daughter, giggling forever on a bed of fluffy white clouds, safe and protected in some higher power’s embrace.

And yet, and yet…

“Why an axe,”they’d asked her.

“Because it was all I had.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT!”

Staring them straight in the eyes with her own unflinching gaze. “Yes.”