The Truth About Comfort Cove Read Online Free PDF Page A

the progressed photo more accurate.
“I don’t know her.”
“Evidence says you do.”
“It’s wrong.”
Detective 101. Evidence didn’t lie.
“Her DNA was on a hair ribbon found in your home.”
“I had a drawer full of ribbons. Most of them from my nieces when they were younger.”
“Did you have a niece that looked like Claire?”
“No. They were dark haired. They grew up in Florida and still live there. Kasey and Kylie. They’re my younger brother’s girls. You can verify the truth. Ask the girls to give you DNA samples and check them against the ribbons you found and I’m sure you’ll find that they match. And before you ask, the girls are in their late thirties—thirty-seven and thirtynine—so they don’t fit your girl here.”
Gladys shook her head softly, her lips pursed in confusion. “I turned over all of my records,” she said. “I handled hundreds of babies. Not a single toddler. I’d remember a two-yearold. You can come visit me once a month for the next twenty years if you’d like, hon. I don’t mind the socializing. But I don’t know this child you keep insisting I know.”
Lucy didn’t trust the woman. But Ramsey’s words from two nights before held the truth that drove Lucy back to see her again and again. One piece of information inevitably leads to another. Emma Sanderson’s invitation had spurred on this visit.
Lucy had promised Emma she wouldn’t stop looking for Claire.
And while Lucy was certain that Gladys Buckley had associated with Sandy Hayes but had never seen Allie Hayes, she was equally certain that Gladys had some connection to Ramsey’s missing Claire Sanderson….
Claire Sanderson. A two-year-old blonde sprite who’d disappeared from her home twenty-five years before and never been seen or heard from again. Emma Sanderson was four when Claire went missing. And her life had been irrevocably changed. Much like Lucy, Emma had grown up with a mother so stricken with grief that the daughter left behind had never had the chance to be a kid.
Or to be innocently happy.
Lucy had recognized a kindred spirit the moment she’d met Emma the previous month.
Folding her hands on the table, Lucy leaned forward. “I don’t doubt that you have nieces who live in Florida and that their hair ribbons were among those taken from your home. What I need to know is how a hair ribbon worn by Claire Sanderson happened to be among them.”
“I have no idea,” Gladys said. “And no reason not to tell you if I did know.”
Unless there was some as-yet undetected crime that Gladys had committed. Her plea agreement stood only for the charges already made.
And Lucy had done what she could for the moment. At least as far as the Claire Sanderson case was concerned. So she should go. But she had a more personal matter… . One that, ethically, she couldn’t discuss. One she hadn’t discussed with Gladys Buckley in all the years she’d been aware of the woman’s association with her mother.
“I was going through names and numbers in your business address book yesterday,” she said. “I came across a name with no corresponding records attached. And no notes designating that the contact had failed to produce…anything.”
There’d been coding for every aspect of the baby business. Including those for referrals or leads that did not result in a baby to sell.
“There were a lot of names in that book. I can’t possibly remember them all.”
“The name was Sandy.” No last name. Years before, while examining her mother’s papers, Lucy had found a peculiar scrap of paper with Gladys’s number written on it. That had been the beginning of the end for Gladys’s operation. Later, when Lucy had access to Gladys’s private information, she’d come across a record of her mother having called the older woman.
Not that Gladys had any idea who Lucy was, apart from being the cop who’d helped bust her.
Gladys didn’t know how Lucy had stumbled upon her operation in the first place. For her