When she left the meeting she thought of Rose, actually she thought of Evie Lindsay, her daughter. The daughter who had taken a DNA test. She had learned all she could about Evie and her bookstore. They looked almost identical, and the resemblance to Kayla was uncanny.

She prayed and prayed that Evie/Rose would answer the message she wrote to her.

“Please, Rose, please,” she whispered, her voice sounding raw and desperate even to her. “Evie, please.”

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

On Halloween night Gavin killed my best friend’s mother, Miss Patsy.

Two neighbors out walking their dogs heard Patsy screaming and came running. They heard Gavin yelling, “Wake up, Patsy! Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Patsy!”

The neighbors ran to the house. One of them was a retired police officer, and one was a retired firefighter and paramedic.

They rushed to the kitchen as Gavin was rushing out, grabbing his keys and wallet, his face red, stained with tears. The retired police officer stood his ground and yelled at Gavin not to move, but he did not have a gun, and Gavin was panicked so he shoved him aside and took off in his truck. The police officer and the firefighter bent over Patsy, who was bleeding profusely, and tried to help.

They called 911 and said they needed a helicopter to take Patsy to the hospital. They did CPR in Patsy’s home, and they continued until the life flight crew took over.

Patsy was wearing her brown sweater, the scarf with pumpkins on it, and her beige slacks. She died.

Gavin sped off in his boat, out of his mind, but was immediately plucked up out in the ocean by the coast guard. He would get a sentence of life in prison. He had two other convictions for assaults against a former wife and former girlfriend and a multitude of antistalking orders.

My sweet friend Emily was so shocked that her mother had been killed, she stopped crying altogether the next day, her eyes vacant, her face gray.

Emily and her grandma, Patsy’s mother, who sobbed through the memorial service, packed up with help from all of us, and they moved to Texas, where her grandma was a teacher. We wrote letters for years. Emily later became involved in drugs and alcohol. It was obvious why—she was numbing the pain of her loss. No father—he had abandoned her before she was even born—and her mother murdered. Her grandma died, I knew that, when she was twenty-one, and Emily was on her own. I haven’t heard from her in years.

Patsy’s death was my fault.

All my fault.