A Cloud of Suspicion. Patricia Davids
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once more.
Outside, Loomis, Louisiana, slumbered in a cold dense January mist that rose from the swamps south of town. The streetlight at the corner was only a faint white orb that did little to penetrate the darkness. Tiny pellets of sleet occasionally hit the window, melting into drizzle.
It had been years since Loomis had seen such freak winter weather. She shivered at the thought of her friend out in it. Where was Leah?
Unanswered questions crowded Shelby’s mind. What if she’d been overcome with grief and done something foolish? Leah and Earl had been having problems before his death. Could there be another man? Was she with someone else?
No! Shelby dismissed the ideas as soon as they formed. Leah knew right from wrong. The love of her family and her faith were keeping her strong.
After slipping into her pale-green cotton robe, Shelby sat in the bentwood rocker in the corner of her room and turned on her reading lamp. The burst of light did nothing to dispel her worry.
Rocking back and forth, she let the creaking of the chair keep her company as she waited for Clint’s call and watched the numbers on the clock tick past. Silently, she prayed for her friend.
Hours later, when the early-morning sunlight spilling through her window finally overpowered the lamp, she turned it off.
The storm had passed, but Clint hadn’t called. That meant only one thing.
Leah hadn’t come home.
ONE
“It’s been nearly three months since Leah vanished. How can the FBI still be clueless? What’s the matter with you people?” Wendy Goodwin demanded.
“Hush, Wendy.” Shelby grabbed her cousin’s arm. Throwing an apologetic look at FBI agent Jodie Gilmore, Shelby asked, “Nothing new at all? I thought when I saw you back in town there might be a new lead.”
Jodie’s eyes held sympathy and understanding. “I’m only here because the home office received a phone tip we thought worth checking into. It didn’t pan out. We haven’t had a solid new lead since the discovery of Leah’s shoe in February at that abandoned house in the swamp.”
The slipper hadn’t led them to Leah. Instead, it led investigators to uncover and solve a twenty-five-year-old triple murder. One of the victims had been Jodie’s mother. Another Loomis woman who had vanished without a trace.
If anyone in the bureau would keep looking for answers, it would be Jodie.
Shelby nodded her thanks. She came by the sheriff’s office at least three times a week to check on her friend’s case. As the months passed with no new information, the FBI’s Missing Persons task force had gone back to New Orleans.
When Shelby saw Jodie today, her hopes had risen, but once again she faced bitter disappointment.
Soon they would call off the search and give Leah up for dead.
“I think it’s just criminal you people aren’t doing more.” Wendy raised her voice in a parting shot.
Shelby dragged her cousin out the door. Her sentiments might be the same as Wendy’s, but she could never voice them the way her outspoken cousin did.
Once outside the sheriff’s office, Shelby released Wendy. “I want Leah to be found as much as you do, but insulting the people looking for her isn’t going to help.”
Wendy crossed her arms and shivered, although the morning was warm with late March sunshine and rising humidity. “It’s just so frightening. How does someone we know vanish? This kind of thing happens only in movies.”
“It happens in real life, too, Wendy.”
“It doesn’t happen to your friend. To someone who attends the same church. To someone who brings her daughter to our library for Story Hour.”
Shelby drew Wendy close in a comforting hug. “I know. I’m frustrated, too, but the sheriff’s office insists they are doing all they can.”
“Do you think she’s dead?” Wendy whispered.
Pulling back, Shelby gazed into her cousin’s worry-filled blue eyes. With one hand she smoothed back a lock of Wendy’s blond hair. “I can’t think that way. I have to believe she’s alive.”
Please, Lord, let it be true for little Sarah’s sake.
Wendy rubbed the back of her neck as she admitted, “After the other murders, it’s hard to hold on to hope.”
“That’s why we have to put our faith in God. He’s watching over Leah.”
Wendy cast a glance around. “I know you’re right, but you can’t deny this is a scary time. I get up a dozen times at night to make sure the doors and windows are locked. I don’t go out after dark. I don’t let the kids play outside alone. I look twice at everyone I know and I think, could it be them?”
Depression dragged at Shelby’s spirits. “I know. I feel the same way.”
“The whole town is on edge. I thought for sure when Vera Peel was arrested two weeks ago for the old murders that she was the killer. Some people are still insisting she is. Dylan Renault and Angelina Loring were both struck over the head and shot in the back, just like the skeletons that were found in that old cellar.”
“Vera Peel confessed to killing her husband, Jodie’s mother and that poor woman in the gazebo twenty-five years ago, but she has an alibi for the time of Dylan’s murder. Besides, Leah’s husband wasn’t shot in the back.”
“But Earl was shot, and it wasn’t suicide. Some people are saying—”
“I know they’re saying Leah killed Earl for the insurance money, that she panicked and skipped town, that she ran off with some unknown lover. None of it is true.”
None of it makes sense. Lord, we need Your help. Please keep Leah safe and bring her home to us.
Releasing her cousin, Shelby started toward the crosswalk at the corner of Church Street and Main. Their destination was the restaurant inside the Loomis Hotel. Coffee made with chicory and scalded milk and the mouth-watering beignets at the posh Café Au Lait were a Monday-morning custom the women had enjoyed for the past two years.
Shelby, Wendy and Leah had first chosen the high-class setting to celebrate Shelby’s appointment as head librarian at the Loomis Public Library. The women had been starting their work week in the same way ever since.
When Shelby and Leah’s high-school friend, Jocelyn Gold, returned to Loomis to open up a practice as a child psychologist, they were quick to include her in their tradition. They’d shared some great times and plenty of laughter together.
Knowing Leah wouldn’t be joining them put a damper on what used to be a lighthearted gathering, but sticking to the ritual had become a means of keeping each other’s spirits up.
“How can y’all be so sure Leah isn’t guilty?” Wendy asked. “We never know what another person is capable of doing.”
Shelby didn’t hesitate. “Leah wouldn’t abandon Sarah. That little girl is everything to her.”
“You’re right. I’m going crazy with all the uncertainty. Leah couldn’t ask for a better friend than you, Shelby.”
“I wish that were true. If I’d been a better friend, she might have confided in me. I knew something was bothering her, I just didn’t think it was any of my business.”
They were almost at their destination when Shelby noticed a motorcycle occupying a parking space in front of the hotel. The custom chrome-and-black machine crouched in the line of sedans and SUVs, looking like a panther among a herd of milk cows.
The leather studded saddlebags over the rear tire conjured up images of life on the road, escape, excitement, daring. All the things Shelby read about in the books at the city library where she worked but had never