Mother's Day Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

Everybody knew her and she knew everybody. If a girl isn’t safe in Shiloh, she isn’t safe anywhere.”
    Nobody had seen anything out of the ordinary. One moment Corinne was there, sitting on the bandstand, reading a book, and the next time anybody noticed, she was gone. Nobody had thought anything of it. Maybe she’d gone to get a cup of coffee or a bottle of sunscreen; maybe she’d gone inside the supply shed to get balls and bats for a planned baseball game. But when everybody assembled for the morning exercises, when they raised the flag and sang “This Land Is Your Land,” she wasn’t there. The recreation director had noted her absence and assigned someone else to take her place. He’d meant to call and see if she was sick, but nine-year-old Tommy Branson tripped on a rock and fell, breaking a tooth, and what with calling his mother and getting him off to the dentist, the director had forgot all about Corinne until her mother called sometime after noon, wondering why she hadn’t shown up at the bank, as she always did, so her mother could give her a ride home on her lunch break. By then she’d been missing for nearly four hours, time for an abductor to have taken her more than two hundred miles away.
    The story hit a nerve; it was all people in the region talked about for months. Many volunteered for search parties and spent long, hot hours trudging through the buggy woods; others put up posters on trees and utility poles. The Shiloh selectmen debated discontinuing the recreation program, fearful it was putting the town’s children in jeopardy. In the end, a police officer was assigned to patrol the park while the program was in session. The summer ended without further incident. No further abductions were attempted, and Corinne remained missing. Some people even speculated that perhaps the Appletons weren’t as nice as everybody thought, and perhaps Corinne had run away because of problems at home.
    “Now,” wrote Lucy, “ten months after her disappearance last July, the longstanding mystery of Corinne Appleton’s fate appears to have been solved.” She typed slowly, weighing her words, trying to chart a course between a cold, factual account and a maudlin appeal to readers’ emotions. When she finally finished, she was exhausted.
    “I think I’ll take a little walk before I tackle the listings,” she told Phyllis, but she hadn’t got out the door before Ted returned.
    “What did they say?” demanded Phyllis. “Is it really Corinne?”
    Ted nodded, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the coatrack. “Her mother identified the bra. It was pink with flowers. She said she’d washed it many times.”
    Lucy thought of the many times she’d handled her own girls’ clothing, taking the clean bras and underpants and shirts and jeans out of the dryer and folding them, making neat piles topped with their rolled-up socks, which she placed on their beds for them to put away in their dresser drawers.
    “There wasn’t actually much of her body left,” said Ted. “Just a few bones. They think the body might actually be elsewhere, maybe even buried, and animals dispersed the bones, but there’s enough that they can do DNA testing.”
    “What’s that mean? That animals dispersed the bones? Did they eat her?” asked Phyllis, never one to mince words.
    Ted sighed, reluctant to answer. “There are tooth marks on the bones.”
    “Is there anything that indicates how she died?” asked Lucy.
    “Not so far,” said Ted, “but forensic teams are going to comb the area where the bones were found. They’re confident that they’ll find more evidence.”
    He left it there; he didn’t say the obvious. It now seemed clear that Corinne had not voluntarily run away; someone had abducted her and killed her. And the evil predator who had done it was still at large.
     
    That night, Lucy and Bill sat down with Sara and Zoe for a little talk about safety.
    “We don’t want you to end up like poor