Read In the Dark for Free Online Page B

never told anyone?”
     
“In the old days, I didn’t think it mattered,” Tish said. “Then I put it away and forgot all about it. I was clearing out old boxes in Atlanta a few months ago when I moved out of my partner’s apartment, and that’s whenI found it again. Don’t you see? This changes everything. That’s when I started thinking about the book again, because I knew I had something that could reopen the case.”
     
Stride did see.
     
The letter to Laura wasn’t a note that had been pushed through a school locker. Whoever sent it to her had put it in the mail, using a stamp and licking an envelope. Even thirty years later, that meant one thing.
     
DNA.
     
     
     
 
     
 
     
 
     
 
     
     
    4
___________
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
 
     
Clark Biggs watched his daughter squirm on the living room floor with her legs tucked underneath her. Mary picked up her colored blocks and carefully stacked ten of them one on top of the other, until she had built a rainbow tower. When she was finished, she beamed at Clark with the biggest, most beautiful smile he had ever seen, the kind that made his heart ache every time he saw it. Then she toppled the tower by blowing on it like the big bad wolf, giggled at him, and began setting up the blocks again. She could do it over and over and never tire of the game. She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world.
     
Except Mary was sixteen.
     
To anyone looking at her, she was a typical teenager. She had a curly mop of blond hair and eyes that Clark thought of as Caribbean blue. Her face was round and bright. She was almost six feet tall, with a stocky frame. A big girl. She could have been a runner or a wrestler. It seemed so wrong and unfair that she kept growing into a pretty young woman while remaining trapped in the mind of a child. Clark lay awake nights blaming himself and God for the accident in the water. He consoled himself with the belief that Mary would be perpetually happy, perpetually innocent,without the awkwardness, pain, doubt, and self-consciousness of becoming a real teenager. It was little comfort.
     
“It’s bedtime, Mary,” he murmured.
     
She pretended not to hear him. She kept playing with her blocks and humming a tune to herself. Clark realized it was the theme song to a television show they had watched earlier in the evening. He was always amazed at the things that made it inside her brain, when so many other things did not.
     
“Bedtime, Mary,” he repeated without enthusiasm.
     
Mary stopped and frowned. Her lips turned downward like a clown’s. He laughed, and she laughed, too.
     
“Five more minutes,” he said.
     
Clark hated Sunday nights. At ten o’clock, Mary would go to bed, and he would be alone in the small house for another hour while he watched TV and poured himself a last beer. In the morning, his ex-wife, Donna, would come by the house, and they would silently make the exchange. Mary would cry and go with her, and Clark would cry and watch her go. Then he would pour coffee into a Thermos, silently wrap up a turkey sandwich for his lunch, and head off to his construction site on the Duluth harbor, knowing that the house would be empty when he returned home. Five long, lonely days awaited him. During the week, it was as if he were in a trance, waiting for that moment on Friday evening when Donna’s SUV pulled up in front of his door, and Mary ran up the sidewalk to get folded up in his arms. His beautiful girl. His baby. He lived for the weekends with her, but they were over almost as soon as they began, leaving him right back here, dreading her bedtime, feeling his soul grow cloudy at the thought of a week alone.
     
“Come on, honey,” he told her, his voice cracking.
     
Clark got off the sofa. Mary got her big bones from him. He was burly and strong. He had worked construction since he was eighteen, and after twenty years laboring outside through bitter cold and ninety-degree summers, he woke