Mariah Stewart - Last Look

“Reverend Randall?” Andrew asked.

“Yes.” She opened the door. “And you’re Agent Shields.”

He raised an eyebrow and she smiled as she reached for the bundle of mail. “I know you’re not the mailman.”

“And you know I’m with the FBI because your mother called.” He returned the smile.

“Just hung up the phone.” She beckoned them inside. “Come on in out of that heat. It’s just been terrible these past few weeks, hasn’t it?” She turned to address Dorsey. “And you’re the lady agent whose name Momma couldn’t remember. Starts with a C. ”

“Collins,” Dorsey said as she stepped into the foyer behind Andrew.

“Agent Collins. I will remember,” Paula Rose told her. “Now, shall we sit for a few minutes in the parlor? It’s nice and cool in there, relatively speaking. These old houses can sure hold the heat, but all these trees give a bit of shade. I’ll get us a cold drink-I just made iced tea and was about to pour myself a glass when Momma called to tell me you were on your way. You just have a seat and I’ll be back in a minute.”

Dorsey stood near the window facing the church and said, “I would have thought ‘Momma’ would tell her not to talk to us.”

“I suspect she probably did.” Andrew sat on a wing chair on one side of a round table holding a large, ugly lamp. “Either Reverend Paula Rose is going to ignore Momma, or she’s got a point of her own to make.”

“I just turned the air conditioning up a notch; it’s still a bit warmer than I like.” Paula Rose returned with a tray holding three tall glasses, frosty with condensation. She held the tray out for her visitors to help themselves, then set it on the coffee table. She took the last glass, seated herself on the sofa, and gestured for Dorsey to sit as well.

“Now. You wanted to talk about Shannon.” She looked from one agent to the other. “What exactly is it that you want to know?”

“We’re trying to go back over the night your sister disappeared-” Andrew began.

Paula Rose cut him off. “I know all that. Momma told me. I’m asking, what do you want from me?”

“Just what you remember from that night, the following day,” Andrew told her as he took his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket.

“I don’t remember much at all. I was only eleven years old. My bedtime was 9:30, and my parents were pretty strict about it.”

“Who else was home when you went to bed that night?”

“My daddy was there, in his study. He was working on his sermon for Sunday. He came in from choir practice and went straight to work.”

“I thought your grandfather was still the pastor then,” Andrew said.

“Well, he was, but Daddy was his assistant. He didn’t take over full-time preaching until Granddaddy retired. He founded this church, you know. Helped raise every dime that went to building it.”

“You’re very proud of that,” Dorsey remarked.

“I surely am,” Paula Rose assured them. “Proud of the legacy he left behind, proud of all the good works he did for the people in this community. Whether they followed him to the church’s door or not, he did what he could for anyone who asked for his help. It’s a privilege and an honor to be carrying on in their footsteps.”

“None of your sisters had an interest in the church?” Andrew asked.

“Good heavens, no. Now, Natalie, I must say, does her best to do what’s right for others. She’s one of those mythical creatures that you sometimes hear about but never see?” Paula Rose smiled. “An honest politician. Yes, she really is. Aubrey, on the other hand, well, let’s just say she’s more worldly than we’d like her to be. All that time spent on TV, showing people how to make wreaths and dry flowers and bake meringues.”

Paula Rose laughed indulgently. “Well, she isn’t harming anyone, but she’s not exactly doing God’s work, either. I can’t say she ever had much of a calling, though.”

“And Shannon? Did she ever have a calling?” Dorsey found herself asking.

“Well, apparently not.” Paula Rose all but sniffed indignantly. “Look at how she ended up.”

“If Shannon had been out after you’d gone to bed, wouldn’t you have heard her come in?” Andrew jotted down some notes and changed the subject.

“Not necessarily. Most nights, I’d read for a while in bed, then Momma would call upstairs to tell me to turn the light out and go to sleep. Momma wasn’t home that night, and I don’t remember if Daddy was still at the church when I turned out the light. I think I may have heard Aubrey come in after I’d turned off my light, but I was falling asleep right about that time. I don’t know if I thought it was Aubrey or Shannon, but if Shannon had been out late, I’d have been sleeping soundly by the time she got home.”

“So you didn’t realize she hadn’t come home until…” Andrew continued.

“Until the next morning. When Shannon didn’t come down for breakfast, I went up to get her and she wasn’t there.” Her face darkened. “She wasn’t anywhere. Not in her room, not in Aubrey’s. Not in the bathroom.”

“And Aubrey was where?”

“Aubrey had to be at school really early that day. She left the house before I woke up. There was a class trip down to Savannah, some cultural thing for a class she was in.”

“What did you do after you realized Shannon was gone?” Andrew asked.

“I went downstairs and told Momma that Shannon must have gone to school early with Aubrey, ’cause she wasn’t there. Momma went upstairs and looked for herself. She looked everywhere in that house-outside, down in the basement, up in the attic.” Paula Rose shook her head. “She was just calling all over the place.”

“And your father?”

“He was already over to the church. He and my granddaddy had breakfast with the church’s senior-citizen group on Wednesday mornings. He didn’t know Shannon was missing till Momma ran over there and asked him where she was. Well, he didn’t know, either.” Paula Rose’s fingers tapped on the side of her glass. “So they started calling everyone-all of Shannon ’s friends, the girls she’d been with after school the day before, but none of them knew where she was. Turned out nobody’d seen her since she left the church the day before. Nobody, apparently, except for Eric Beale.”

“Whom we now know did not murder your sister,” Dorsey reminded her.

“He did something to her, didn’t he? Even though they found her dead just a few weeks ago, that was still her blood they found on his shirt, right? And that was her notebook they found there in his car, wasn’t it? And didn’t he admit he picked her up after she left the church?” Paula Rose set her glass on the tray and folded her arms across her chest. “He may not have killed her back then, but he did something to her. Maybe something that made her feel she needed to run away.”

“What do you think happened, Reverend Randall?” Dorsey casually sipped at her tea.

“I think-and please call me Paula Rose, I’m not in the pulpit right now-I think he took her to the park, like he said he did, and then I think he raped her. I think she was so upset about what he did to her, she ran away.”

“Why would she run away?”

“It would have been very hard for her to come home and face Momma and Daddy and tell them what he’d done to her. I think she was too ashamed.”

“So she ran away and stayed away for twenty-four years?” Dorsey raised an eyebrow.

Paula Rose shrugged her shoulders. “That’s how I see it. Makes sense.”

“But once she found out that Eric had been arrested for her murder, once the papers carried the story that he’d been tried and was going to be executed, wouldn’t she have come home? Wouldn’t she let someone know she was still alive?”