Family Ties (Flesh & Blood Trilogy Book 2) Page 8

  I wasn’t so sure it was really that simple. Here was a man who had been accused of—and confessed to—killing nine women, and now I was learning that a girl he was intimate with in high school just up and disappeared mysteriously. It was either a very strange coincidence, or this showed a pattern of behavior, and I had been played for a fool.

  “Mom, I need to see that yearbook of yours.”

  “All right, all right.” Mom stood up from the couch and disappeared into her bedroom.

  As I waited, I tried to process this latest development. True, none of this had anything to do with Randy’s current case, but if there was any chance my father was responsible for the disappearance of a high school classmate, it would show me that he really was capable of violence and not the innocent, God-fearing, honest man he claimed to be. I decided I would have to figure out what happened to this Amy girl first. I was not going to waste any more of my time or energy on Randy’s case if he was a violent predator, as the police and prosecutors had claimed back in 1996. It stood to reason that if he could kill once, he could kill nine more times.

  Mom reappeared with a yearbook in her hands. “This is the only one I have. It’s my freshman year, 1972. This would have been your father’s junior year.”

  “Junior year? But this incident with Amy supposedly happened his senior year.”

  “Well, I don’t have that year. I only have my freshman year because I scrimped and saved to buy it. My parents never could afford to buy the other years, so this is the only one I have.”

  “All right,” I said with a defeated sigh. “Show me Randy.”

  Mom opened the maroon leather-bound yearbook with 1972 embossed in white and began flipping through the glossy black-and-white pages.

  “Oh, there’s me,” she said as she pointed a perfectly manicured red fingernail at a tiny square on a page marked Freshman Class. I looked down at the page and saw my mother. Her shoulder-length hair was curled and was so blonde it appeared white in the colorless page. She was wearing a light-colored top and a genuine smile which displayed her perfect white teeth. “Boy, was I pretty.”

  “You still are,” I said, smiling up at her.

  “Let’s see…” she said as she flipped through the pages until she reached the Juniors section. Finally, she pointed her red fingernail at the photograph of a very handsome teenage boy. To the right of the picture was his name, Randall “Randy” McLanahan. His hair was dark brown and wavy and longer than boys of my generation would ever consider wearing it, but on him, it worked. “He was so handsome. Still is. You know I had a crush on him, even then.”

  “Really? Did you ever date in high school?”

  “Oh, no, he didn’t even know I existed. I was a band geek. Head baton twirler in the color guard. Even though I performed at every football game he ever played in, he never noticed me. Not until many years later, anyway.”

  Mom looked so wistful I hated to dampen her mood, but I had a job to do. “Mom, do you remember anything else about this girl, Amy? Anything that might help me find her?”

  “Libby! You are not going to go chasing old ghosts! Leave the past in the past. Do you hear me?”

  Loud and clear, Ma, I thought. I had learned over the years the best way to deal with my mother was to placate her. Arguing was pointless. She was a proud and stubborn Southern woman. I let it go. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. I had Jo’s number and she had already said she would bring me her yearbooks the next day. But it was ten o’clock at night and I didn’t relish the idea of driving all the way back to Nicholasville and then driving back to Richmond in the morning.

  “Mom, can I stay here tonight?”

  Her face softened. “Of course, baby. You can always stay here. Your room is always waiting. But I have a phone conference with my publisher early in the morning, so I’m off to bed.” Mom’s most recent children’s book, about a hyena who couldn’t get rid of its hiccups, was due to be released the next week.

  “Goodnight, Mommy,” I said as she bent down and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Goodnight, baby girl.”

  After Mom closed her bedroom door behind her, I climbed the stairs to my old room and flung myself on the bed. Then I remembered Harper would be expecting me home. I picked up my cell and called her number, which was now on speed dial.

  “Libby, where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m in Richmond. At Mom’s.”

  I filled her in on everything and told her of my intentions for the next day.

  “Once I find this girl’s last name, I’m going to need you to track her down for me. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Of course I can,” she said without hesitation. “Alive or dead, I’ll find her. You just get some rest now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Call me when you have a name.”

  I disconnected the line and laid there staring at the ceiling. Perhaps it was the half a beer I had consumed or the excitement of recent events, but it took me over an hour to finally fall asleep.

  Chapter 9

  Despite my measly four hours of sleep, I dragged myself out of bed and forced myself into the shower, hoping it would wake me. It didn’t work. Time for Plan B, Mom’s coffee. I didn’t used to drink coffee often, but that was another thing about me which had changed over the past several months. Now, I could barely begin my days without it.

  I ambled down the stairs, rubbing my eyes, until I reached the kitchen, where Mom stood staring out the picture window above the sink, coffee cup in hand. When she realized I was there, she turned and smiled.

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Just what I need. Yes, please.”

  Mom poured me a cup and then nudged the organic sugar and creamer in my direction. I had always hated my mother’s penchant for whole and organic foods, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I heaped as much of the stuff as I could into my coffee and stirred until it was a creamy tan color.

  “So,” Mom said lightly. “What are your plans for today?”

  Man, I hated lying to Mom, but she had made it clear the night before she did not approve of my looking into my father’s past, so I had no choice. I lied.

  “Just gonna head home and get back to work on Randy’s case.”

  “Libby,” Mom said as she laid her hand on top of mine. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me, and your father, that you have agreed to help him. I’ve always known he was innocent. Now maybe you can help get him out of jail.”

  “Mom,” I said cautiously. “Please don’t get your hopes up. I’m doing the best I can, but for one, I’m new at this. And for two, there’s not much I can do with what I’ve got to work with.”

  “I know, honey, but I have faith in you. I know you can do it. After all, he’s innocent. Innocent people shouldn’t be in prison. God must have a plan for him.”

  I wasn’t as sure as Mom was, but I couldn’t tell her that, so I just smiled and told her again I’d do my best.

  “Well, I’d better get going,” I told her as I pushed myself up from the tall chair at the kitchen counter. “Lots to do.”

  Mom just smiled, but when I reached the front door, she called out. “Libby?”

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  “Remember, leave the past in the past.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  Crap, I thought as I walked to my car. Now on top of everything else, I’m going to carry the guilt of blatantly defying my mother’s wishes and lying to her about it. But I had to follow my instincts and look into the Amy story…if for no other reason than to know the truth about my father’s past. Still, I had a nagging feeling that somehow, the answer to Randy’s guilt or innocence lay with what happened to Amy.

  I picked up my cell phone and called Jo. I explained that I hadn’t been able to find the right yearbook at Mom’s. She excitedly told me she had the yearbook from my father’s senior year—her junior year—and that I could meet her at the bar in ten minutes to look at it.

  I arrived at the bar in less tha
n five minutes, so I sat in my car listening to the radio while I waited for Jo to arrive. Taylor Swift’s voice came through the speakers. She had never been one of my favorite artists, but there was something to be said for her commercial appeal and continued success in the industry. Credit where credit is due.

  Finally, Jo pulled up in a green Jeep covered in dried mud. She waved at me as she unbuckled and got out. I met up with her on the sidewalk in front of the bar. She was carrying another maroon leather yearbook. This one had a glossy marble finish. She handed it to me as we walked through the front door. A bell jingled overhead.

  We sat at a table in the sunlight near one of the all-glass front walls of the bar.

  “So I take it your mom didn’t have what you were looking for?”

  “Nope. Only her freshman year, so this Amy girl wouldn’t be in it.”

  “Well,” she said, pointing her ring-clad finger at the yearbook between us. “I think what you’re looking for is in this one.”

  “May I?” I gestured at the book.

  “Of course.”

  I opened the slick leather maroon book and began flipping errantly through the pages, not sure exactly what I was looking for. There was no way I could look through every single freshman picture for “Amy.” After all, Jo wasn’t even one-hundred-percent sure her name was Amy. Instead, I flipped to the Seniors section and found my father’s picture. He looked exactly the same as his junior picture, just a different shirt. Still very handsome.

  “No matter what he is now, Randy sure was a looker in high school.”

  I almost slipped and told Jo that Randy was my father, but caught myself. “Yeah, it looks like it.”

  I was brainstorming how I could find maybe-Amy when a thought crossed my mind. I flipped to the back of the book, where the sports team pictures usually were. Sure enough, there was the football team and there, in the first row, was my father, number twenty-two.

  “Was this girl a cheerleader or in any sports that you know of?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. She was sort of a shy girl. A hermit, really.”

  I continued leafing through the pages until I came to some candid shots. To my astonishment, there was a photo of my father, sitting on the bleachers at what appeared to be a pep rally. Sitting behind him and to the right was a young girl with long dark hair. She wasn’t looking at the camera. Instead, she was looking directly at Randy. Swooning, I would call it. That had to be her! I pointed her out to Jo, who nodded her head profusely.

  “Yep. That’s the girl, all right. Man, I never noticed that picture before. Good eyes.”

  Armed now with at least a physical representation of Amy, I flipped back to the Freshman section and started skimming the pages of photographs. Finally, on the third page, I found her. I ran my finger over to the side and found the corresponding name for the very demure-looking, not-so-attractive girl. Her name was Annie Larson.

  “That’s her,” I said, pointing at the tiny picture.

  Jo turned the book to where it was facing her and looked down to where I was pointing. “Yep. That’s her. Annie. That sounds right. Sorry. I thought it was Amy.”

  “Close enough. Now we have a name.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  I didn’t really want to involve Jo any more than I already had, so I lied. “Nothing. I just wanted to see who this girl was. I don’t see how it can help my case.”

  “Well, glad I could help. And for what it’s worth, if Randy is innocent, I hope you can clear his name. But I’ll be honest…I’m pretty sure he’s guilty.”

  “You’re not the only one, so don’t feel bad.”

  “Well, I’ve got to start my shift. Do you want a drink?”

  I looked at my cell phone. “It’s only eleven a.m.!”

  “Hey, you gotta start sometime. Plus, it’s always five o’clock somewhere.”

  “True enough, but I think I’ll pass. It’s time I got home.”

  Jo held out her thick hand. “Nice to meet you. Call me if I can help in any other way.”

  I shook her hand. “Will do. And thanks again.”

  I left the bar and walked out to my car to call Harper. She answered on the third ring.

  “Thoroughbred Investigations,” she sang on the other end.

  “Harper, it’s me. Listen, I got the name. I need you to do some research. See if you can find an Annie Larson. Date of birth would be around, let’s see…around 1958, give or take a year. Probably born in or around Irvine. Start local then move out nationwide. Get back to me as soon as you can.”

  Harper promised to work her magic and call me back. While I waited, I decided to find a place to eat lunch. I had been to Jackson’s with Mom on several occasions and they made the best Southern food in the area. So I drove over to Third Street, parked along the curb, and walked into the locally-owned restaurant. The very polite young hostess seated me at a table in the back. I had brought my legal pad with me so I could go over the notes I had taken so far, and I welcomed the private space away from the rest of the diners.

  I sat there, after ordering a blue cheese burger with bacon—my ultimate favorite kind of burger—and fries, and looked over my notes. So far, I had learned about the scarf in Randy’s truck, the fact that the sole witness was blind as midnight, and that my father was supposedly involved with the mysterious disappearance of his high school admirer. All contradictory evidence, in my opinion. Nothing concrete to sway me one way or the other.

  With the scarf, there seemed to be no logical explanation as to why a woman’s red silk scarf was found in the cab of my father’s truck. But that had not deterred the police. They saw it as the obvious murder weapon. Case closed. But did no one ever think to ask why my father would be in possession of a woman’s scarf? Or why he would choose that as his murder weapon? Surely there were other more convenient items he could have used to kill all those women.

  As to the blind witness, all it proved was that she possibly made an incorrect identification of my father during the lineup. He had sworn to me he wasn’t the one arguing with Shiloh Blackwater the night she went missing, so either one of two things was true. Either he was lying, and even though she was blind, Alma Jean Glover was correct in her identification…or, he was telling the truth and she mistakenly identified him. Which meant it was someone else arguing with Shiloh that night. Someone who looked at least a little bit like Randy. So then who?

  Finally, there was the whole situation with Annie Larson. If the speculation and rumors were correct, it meant Randy had done something to cause her sudden disappearance. Which in turn made him entirely capable of violence. Which in turn made him entirely capable of the nine murders he swore he was innocent of committing. But if he was innocent in Annie’s disappearance, he might still very well be innocent of the other murders too. The only way to know for sure was to find Annie Larson, if that was possible, and get to the bottom of it once and for all.

  As if on cue, my phone rang. I looked at the screen and Harper’s name appeared.

  “Hello?”

  “Libby, it’s me. Okay, I’ve done some digging. I’m not sure you’re going to like what I’ve found, but it’s the best I could do on short notice.”

  The waitress appeared with my burger and I signaled for her to leave it on the table. I gave her a thumbs up to thank her. She smiled and disappeared.

  “Okay, what have you found?”

  “Well, I looked on every skip-trace software I could access…Accurint, TLO, Tracers and LocatePlus. I can’t find anything at all on Annie Larson, or at least, where she is now. I found her birth certificate, like you said, in Irvine. She was born at Marcum and Wallace Hospital on January 1, 1958. She and her parents lived on Sand Hill, which was way out in the county, near the Kentucky River. But all records of her stop in 1973, right when she would have been fifteen, which coincides with her freshman year.”

  “Nothing at all since then? No DMV records? No census records? Nothing?”

  “No, noth
ing at all. She literally just…disappeared, like your friend said.”

  “What about a death certificate? Was one ever filed?”

  I took a bite of my burger, but realized I had suddenly lost my appetite.

  “No death certificate, either. Libby, it’s like this girl just…poof…vanished. It’s kinda creepy.”

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just I was really hoping to find out what happened to her. I guess I have no choice but to drop it.”

  “Not necessarily,” Harper said with a hint of mischief in her voice.

  “Harper…what are you talking about? I thought you said it was a dead end.”

  “No, what I said was, I couldn’t find Annie Larson. But…I did find her parents.”

  “You what?”

  “I told you I was good, didn’t I?”

  “You are very good. Now, tell me what you know about the parents.”

  I pushed my abandoned burger aside and started jotting down notes on my legal pad.

  “Okay, her parents’ names are Betty Sue and Harold Larson. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t that hard to find them. They still live in the same house Annie grew up in. It’s on Sand Hill, all the way down by the river. Number 3315.”

  “And you’re sure they’re still there?”

  “According to the land records at the Estill County Clerk’s office. I talked a nice clerk into pulling the land deed for me. According to the deed, they bought the house in 1955, three years before Annie was born, and they’ve taken out two mortgages since then. One was the original, like I said, in 1955. The second mortgage was taken out in…get this…1973.”

  I could tell Harper was getting at something, but I wasn’t following her logic. When I paused, she sighed good-humoredly.

  “Okay, that’s the year Annie went missing. And it was a large mortgage. Fifty thousand dollars. Don’t you think that’s odd? That they took out such a large mortgage the same year, in fact, only months after their only daughter vanished?”