Owen continued recounting his conversation at the Olmstead residence, painting a picture of a very unhappy household. He told them how Maggie faulted her husband for not going outside with Charlie. Ken said he couldn’t go because, since Maggie was asleep upstairs, that meant an infant, Eric, would have been left unattended. When Maggie said he should have just roused her from sleep to watch the baby, Ken countered by saying they both knew that wasn’t an option.
“I don’t know what he was referring to,” Owen said. “When his wife disagreed with him, Ken responded with only one word—bathtub.”
Nick had no idea why that innocuous word would have been significant, but it must have meant something to Maggie and Ken Olmstead. He tossed it into his mental file, just in case it popped up later.
“Did you mention the lack of bike tracks to the Olmsteads?”
“We told Mr. Olmstead about it the next day,” Owen said. “He decided it was best not to tell Maggie, knowing she’d get worked up over it.”
“Did he have any ideas as to why there weren’t any leading to the water?”
“He wondered if the reason there were no tracks was because the rain washed them away. Chief Campbell agreed that it made sense. And since the bike had already been found at the bottom of the falls, all of us started to suspect the obvious had happened. So when Ken asked us to focus more on trying to find his son’s body, that pretty much ended the investigation. I wrote up my report. The search party went on for a few more days. And Charlie Olmstead’s body might still be out there somewhere.”
However misguided they were, Nick understood the actions of Kat’s father and Deputy Peale. Other than the lack of tracks, there was no real reason to suspect foul play was involved. Nor did he think the request by the Olmsteads was out of the ordinary. They were sad. They were grieving. They were trying to make sense of a senseless situation.
He and his parents had gone through the same thing after his sister vanished. Waiting for months. Riding a stomach-churning tide of hope and despair. Having an official police declaration that Sarah Donnelly had died in a tragic accident would have allowed them to stop questioning and start recovering. Nick suspected the Olmsteads just wanted to do the same.
Only one of them never stopped questioning.
“Maggie Olmstead,” Nick said to Owen. “You told her about the lack of tracks, didn’t you?”
Owen hedged slightly. “I did. Years later. Long after her son’s case had been closed.”
“How much later?” Kat asked.
“Early seventies. Maybe 1973. I was through with police work by that time. She came to my house late one night. She had her son with her. Eric. He was asleep and Mrs. Olmstead was carrying him. Other than the boy’s size, it was just like the night Charlie vanished. She asked me if I thought Charlie really went over the falls or if he might have been kidnapped.”
“But how would she even know to ask you that?”
“Beats me,” Owen said with a shrug. “But something gave her that idea.”
“And you told her what you just told us?” Nick asked.
“For the most part.”
“How did she react?”
“Stoic,” Owen said. “I got the feeling she had been expecting that answer. And disappointed, like I had let her down. Which I did, I guess. Every time I see a missing child on the news, I can’t help thinking about that Olmstead boy and if I had failed him.”
Nick didn’t need to ask him any more questions. Even though Owen Peale hadn’t told him exactly what he wanted to hear, it was enough. Nick knew the Charlie Olmstead case was anything but closed. Standing and stretching his bum leg, he thanked Owen for his time.
“Now, wait a minute,” the former deputy said. “You can’t just walk away in the middle of a hand.”
“The game is over, Mr. Peale. Keep the money.”
“I don’t want to keep it if I haven’t earned it.”
“Fine.” Nick huffed as he returned to the table and revealed the straight that had been hiding in his hand.
Owen turned over his cards—a three of hearts, followed by four aces. Raking the winnings toward him, he gave Nick a shit-eating grin that let Nick know he had just been played.
“Guess I earned it after all,” he said.
The drive back to Perry Hollow was unusually quiet as both of them processed the information they had gleaned from Owen Peale. For Nick, that meant flipping through his mental notes, focusing on words that didn’t make much sense on the surface. Falls. Bike. Bathtub. But he knew they were related somehow, just as he knew that Charlie Olmstead’s disappearance wasn’t what it seemed.
Kat knew it, too. Nick could tell by the way she gripped the steering wheel and worked her jaw, lost in thought.
“I don’t understand,” she eventually said, “why my father …”
Although her voice drifted off into silence, Nick knew what she was trying to say. She wanted to know why her father would just drop the issue of the missing tire tracks.
If Nick had been working the case, there’s no way he would have stopped investigating. Family request or not, there was no reason to ignore even the slightest bit of evidence in a missing child case. But he also understood the actions of Kat’s father. More important, he understood his mind-set.
“You shouldn’t think less of him,” Nick said. “Your father probably truly believed Charlie went over the falls, most likely because the alternative was unthinkable to him.”
He remembered how dazed Kat had seemed following the first Grim Reaper murder. She was still tough, of course, and impressively smart for a local chief, but Nick had also registered the shock in her eyes and disbelief in her voice. She couldn’t fathom something so terrible happening in her tiny town.
“Cops don’t ignore the facts just because they don’t like them,” Kat said. “And the fact was, there should have been tire tracks leading into the water.”
“But there weren’t,” Nick countered. “There was no boy, either. Just a bike at the base of a waterfall. So, given two choices and knowing your town’s crime statistics, which one would you believe? That the boy was abducted or that he somehow rode his bike into the water and went over the falls?”
Kat’s face was expressionless as she stared out the windshield. “I hate when you’re right.”
“Then you must hate me a lot.”
“Don’t push it, Donnelly.”
They were in Perry Hollow by that point, gliding down the Main Street of the place Kat had called home her entire life. Nick hadn’t been back to his hometown in Ohio in ages. He suspected that if he ever did venture there again, he’d be haunted by his past. He wondered, not for the first time, how Kat dealt with the daily onslaught of memories.
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