“And you just keep your mouth shut. A couple of words from me and you’ll get thrown right out of office!” Reese shouted.

“It could happen to the best of us up for election next month,” Gabe countered. “I know you’ve been rubber-stamped as mayor for years, but I’ll bet I can find someone to oppose you, especially if you run on your record—your real record.”

He didn’t open the door for Reese this time as the man stormed out of the room. Gabe kept thinking about how those pit bulls at Jonas’s place had rattled their cages. He was like a pit bull now. And he was going to sink his teeth into whoever had hurt those little girls.

* * *

The town turned out in droves for the church service that evening. Sitting in the second row, Tess stared at the big, hand-painted banner with the words Sandy Kenton: Bring Her Home hanging below the screen with projected photos of the girl. She had now been missing for five days. Tess studied the images, memorizing Sandy’s face, but it almost blended with her own early photos, despite their slightly different coloring. Sandy had blond hair and brown eyes. A wide space between her two front teeth made them look even larger in her small mouth. A shy smile, pert nose. There were pictures of her with her family, at a picnic, at a wedding, at a petting zoo with a fawn, being read to by her mother, playing in a princess costume with a magic wand.

Jill Stillwell’s family sat in the front row along with Pastor Snell and his wife, Jeanie. Tess had spoken with them briefly. And she’d spent a lot of time on the phone with Lindell Kenton, Sandy’s mother. Lindell had asked Tess to say a few words this evening, but they’d compromised that she would do a Bible reading instead. She had to admit she was a bit nervous about it, but she wanted to help—anything to help!

She’d read in one of Miss Etta’s library books that Freud, no less, had defined mental health as the ability “to love and to work.” Tess figured she was doing both, not just in longing to have her own preschool where she could care for kids, but in working on the investigation. She was going to help Gabe by answering his dispatch and office phone during the day for a while. And as fast as everything had happened here in Cold Creek, she was very sure she was falling in love with him.

She sat between Deputy Miller’s wife, Carolyn, and Miss Etta. Mayor Owens and his wife sat with the families of the kidnapped girls. Although Vic was to be her bodyguard this evening, he and Gabe sat at the back to keep an eye on everything.

Lindell Kenton had given Tess a Bible with the short passage to be read clearly marked. Tess held it in her lap, stroking the pebbled leather cover.

“That’s a book people don’t read enough anymore,” Miss Etta whispered to her, reaching over to tap the Bible. Her hand smelled of that sanitizer she always used. “They think the Good Book is in an old, hard language, but there are plenty of modern versions.”

“I thought you might bring your mother tonight,” Tess said.

Miss Etta looked surprised at first, then said with a smile, “Speaking of old versions, you mean? No, I used to bring her to church but not anymore. It’s too hard to get her around. By the way, Sheriff McCord said he wanted to talk to me tomorrow about my antique gun collection. I’m going to look up the very gun that Dane must have used to do himself in. Also, I have a library book for Gabe to read.”

“He’s pretty busy.”

“Yes, of course he is, and should be. But a book about stress on the job, that’s what I’ll recommend to him.”

The muted buzz in the church quieted as Pastor Snell rose and went to the podium. He spoke a few opening words, said a lovely prayer, and then the organ led them, standing, through the hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

How well Tess recalled going to Sunday school downstairs and sometimes coming up to “big church” with Mom and Dad. How had everything gone so bad?

“O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Be thou our guard while troubles last,

And our eternal home.”

Tess knew Sandy Kenton must be thinking about home, longing for home, feeling frightened and abandoned right now. Thank God the child had not been hidden where Tess had been kept, which she was convinced had burned to the ground last night. The firemen and a BCI arson consultant were still sifting through the debris for bones, but Tess was sure there was some other place Dane and Marva—or someone—had been keeping Sandy.

During the next prayer, she thanked God for letting her escape her captor or captors and asked for more memories, however terrible, to help Gabe arrest the monster.

When her turn came, Pastor Snell introduced her as “our ray of hope for both Sandy and Jill.” He explained that Amanda Bell had been found alive in South America and that was an answer to prayer. “And now the greatest gift in all this grief,” he announced from the pulpit, “our own Teresa Lockwood, who now goes by Tess, who came home to us years ago and is back with us again. Though she still bears the mental scars of her captivity, she is here with us today to read words to encourage our hearts. Tess.”

As she walked up the three steps to the elevated platform, she was amazed that the audience broke into applause. It was too much. She teared up and sniffed hard. Even Vic was clapping. Gabe too, standing by the back door—her Gabe, who had been there at the time and was now her guard while these troubles lasted. She was surprised to see Sam Jeffers and John Hillman sitting together in the back left corner. It was wrong of her to judge them, of course, but she hadn’t expected them to be in church.

She put the open Bible down on the podium and held up a hand to still the applause. When it quieted, though she’d meant to say nothing personal, she shared her thoughts. “It means a lot to me to be home. We have to face and recall the past to face the present and the future. And I’m trying, getting better and stronger. Now, Mrs. Kenton has asked me to read to you from Luke 15:4 about a lost sheep who was found.”

Her voice caught several times as she read the passage. “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he comes home, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.’”

As soon as she sat down, Win Kenton got up behind the podium and explained that tomorrow at noon they were going to have another search for Sandy, through bare fields and even those still filled with corn. He explained that Aaron Kurtz needed prayers while bedridden with a dangerous blood clot and that others would soon be cutting his cornfields for him, but that they wanted to search them now.

“Also,” he said, his voice breaking, “we need to search the cornfields now so that when the big reapers come through, no one is in the way, no evidence Sheriff McCord or his assistants need to trace—to find Sandy...”

He meant, of course, her body could be out there. He choked up, just standing mute for a moment. “We need to find traces of her, not have them destroyed. Our family thanks you for your help and prayers.” He hurried back to his seat beside his wife.

Again, Tess visualized the cornfield, the big reaper. Then someone had leaped at her, put a needle right in her neck—she was sure of it. She jerked at the memory, and Miss Etta put a steadying hand on her arm. At least, Tess thought, she was remembering more and more, like the waterfall of memories. And, strangely, she kept seeing a mounted deer head—a stag—with its glassy eyes looking down at her, as if to say, “Bad things can happen to you if you don’t behave.” She would have Gabe ask Marva if her house had once had a deer head on the wall. But she might lie. And what if Tess was just recalling how creepy John Hillman’s taxidermy shop had been?