Adoption

  ADOPTION

  ChrisTopher Stone

  AuthorHouse™

  1663 Liberty Drive

  Bloomington, IN 47403

  www.authorhouse.com

  Phone: 1 (800) 839-8640

  © 2015 ChrisTopher Stone. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

  Published by AuthorHouse 06/17/2015

  ISBN: 978-1-5049-1390-4 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5049-1391-1 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5049-1392-8 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015908249

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  Epilogue

  To my wife Peggy, for putting up with me and the many hours she spent reading and finding things to do while I wrote this story.

  To Dr. Catharine Wingate Levine who passed just prior to this story’s printing. Her beautiful spirit will be missed.

  PROLOGUE

  Dave Johnson and Rick McKinna were enjoying an unscheduled day off from their junior high school in Sutton, Massachusetts. A Nor’easter had dropped eleven inches of white, powdery snow the night before, and they were going to take full advantage of every minute of their snow day. They pulled their toboggans through dense brush and small trees at the edge of Meadow Pond. They needed to cross the pond to go sliding down Dead Man’s Hill at Vandanaker’s dairy farm on the opposite shore. Dead Man’s Hill sloped down at almost 6o degrees and was considered the prime sledding spot in the neighborhood. It would only take fifteen minutes to cross the pond, but first they had to jump down the embankment after pushing through the leafless, gray brush standing guard at the pond’s edge. Rick was first to come out through the last of the branches that scraped his cheeks and poked at his bright, red, knitted, wool hat. The scrapes from those icy, wooden fingers burned his skin as he reached up to wipe away particles of bark and ice left behind.

  “Crap,” he said out loud. His hat had gotten snarled and pulled from his head, now hanging from a branch in the air about three inches out of reach.

  “Freakin son of a toad’s ass!” he yelled as he lost his footing reaching for it.

  Dave reached out to grab him before he fell onto the ice, but lost his footing, too. Rick took the brunt of the fall, air rushing out of his lungs loudly as his back hit the ice.

  “Jesus, Rick, you tryin’ to kill us both? I almost busted my friggin’ head open on the toboggan!” Dave said, rolling onto his side in an attempt to get up.

  Rolling toward the shoreline his eyes caught sight of a shadowed figure sticking out from a dark undercut in the pond’s embankment. At first he wasn’t sure his eyes could possibly be looking at what was registering in his brain. Although wrapped up tightly in a heavy, insulated, snowsuit, he felt a coldness running through his body from the inside out not the outside in. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t turn his head. It was frozen in place like the winter ice he was lying on.

  “Rick! Rick!” He heard himself say, but the words were not coming out of his mouth.

  He could hear them in his head, but in his head they remained. His brain became electrified as uncontrolled fear took over his conscious thoughts. He wasn’t old enough to comprehend what he was looking at. In one part of his mind he knew it was a woman’s head and arm sticking out of the dirt, snow and brush. He also knew the woman was dead. But, in another part of his mind, he was screaming uncontrollably while focusing on her eyes and lips, or rather, where her eyes and lips should have been.

  Pushing himself away, wildly flailing his arms and legs, Dave moved further and further away from the shoreline. He looked like a beetle stuck on its back as he let out a low pitched moan moving past Rick who stood brushing snow off his suit while looking across to the other side of the pond. It wasn’t until Dave moved past him on the ice that Rick realized something had gone drastically wrong with their sledding adventure.

  “What the hell are ya doin’?” Rick yelled. “What the hell’s gotten into you?” he asked turning to pick up the rope of the toboggan. That was when Rick saw the woman’s face staring at him through two, black, blood-dried holes - dirt-stained teeth smiling, lipless, in dead, cold silence.

  1

  The smell of bacon frying in the old, iron skillet caught my attention. Peggy always used the iron skillet saying it added a generational flavor to whatever she was cooking at the time. Her grandmother scrambled many farm-fresh eggs and fried butter-soaked pirogues for Peggy when she was growing up. She would not think of parting with the old relic. I pictured her standing in the kitchen wearing her loose, grey, pajama bottoms and Becker Jr. College sweatshirt. I was somewhere between waking up and wanting to roll over and ignore my taste buds, which had already sounded the alarm in my stomach, when the all too familiar buzz of my cell phone went off on the night stand next to our bed. I opened my eyes just enough to watch the phone vibrate across the top of the night stand, reaching out to grab it just before it dove off onto the floor. I hate cell phones because you can never get away from them, and when you are the chief of police in a small New England town, you might as well have one sewn onto your ear.

  “Chief Kosciak. What can I do for you?” I said, rolling onto my back, looking up at the round, brownish stain on the ceiling overhead. Peggy and I don’t know what the stain is. It just appeared one night and was about the diameter of a baseball, just big enough to bother us when we opened our eyes every morning. I joked with Peggy the morning it appeared, telling her I would fix it as soon as I had the time, knowing that I w
as actually telling her the stain would be there for a couple of years, or longer. She promptly called me an ass, rolling over with a chuckle at my blatant honesty.

  “Chief, you better get over to Steve Johnson’s house right away,” Derek Larson said.

  Derek was a five year veteran on our eight member police force. He worked third shift all the time, which the other officers greatly appreciated. During the day, he worked part-time doing carpentry and was known for his amazing finish work. He did mostly restoration jobs on some of the oldest Colonial homes found in our area of New England.

  “What’s up, Derek? You sound like an alien spaceship just landed on the town common.”

  I heard him take a deep breath and exhale into the phone. I knew whatever he was calling me about was a lot more serious than the usual weekend bar fight at our local tavern. Derek was never without words and didn’t rattle easily, so I could tell he was leading up to something very important.

  “Chief, I think we may have found Christine Sawyer.”

  “What do you mean THINK we may have found Christine?” I asked.

  I knew by his choice of words that whomever they found and wherever they found her, it would not be good news. Christine Sawyer went missing eight weeks ago. She was a sophomore attending a local college who disappeared while on her way home from a campus party. She left the party in her father’s car around 1 AM on a Saturday morning. She never made it the three miles to her home from the college. The car was discovered a few days later in Purgatory State Park. The car, found by a couple of hikers, was driven off the road into the woods a quarter of a mile. There was no sign of a struggle, and it looked as though the car was completely detailed inside and out before being abandoned. Whoever had abandoned the car did not leave a trace of evidence for us to follow. The state crime lab did not find as much as a carpet fiber out of place. Search parties and blood hounds combed every inch of the park for two weeks, coming up empty-handed.

  I assigned two of my full-time officers to investigate any leads or hunches that might help us locate Christine, but so far, we were at a dead end. The Massachusetts, State Police, also investigating her disappearance, were as frustrated as we were with the lack of evidence. I talked with her parents on the phone daily, promising them that I would not give up looking for their daughter until she was found. Now, it seemed, we may have found Christine, and I hoped if it was her, we would find some clue to start unraveling the mystery of her disappearance.

  Derek continued, “Steve’s son, Dave, and the McKinna kid found a woman’s body half buried in an embankment over at Meadow Pond this morning. Steve said on the phone that the boys are very shaken up and scared to death. The woman may have been tortured and mutilated. The boys said the woman’s eyes and lips were missing.”

  I was already sitting up on the edge of our four-poster bed by the time Derek mentioned the mutilation. Christine Sawyer, no one for that matter, deserved to suffer this type of death. I knew I would have to call in outside help in order to process the area where the body was found. Our police force was not equipped to run a full forensic study with the level of detail this type of investigation would require. We would do an initial overview of the crime scene, but the Staties would have to pick it apart snow flake by snow flake. My mind was already full of priorities: things I needed to do in the next few hours to increase our chances of finding clues, clues essential to our determining what happened to this girl and to the apprehension of her killer.

  “Derek. Call Dr. Cavanagh and have him meet me at Steve’s house in 30 minutes. Tell him what happened, and please tell him the boys may need some medical attention. Tell him I’ll need him to go with me to Meadow Pond after we question the boys, to see if we are able to confirm that the dead woman is, in fact, Christine Sawyer. I’ll call you when I’m on my way to Steve’s. Have Todd and Kim go out and secure the crime scene until I arrive.”

  I thought about the bacon and eggs I would not have time to eat, and then felt guilty that the thought even crossed my mind. The sound of footsteps in the hallway outside the bedroom door made me turn to look. Peggy walked in a few seconds later and immediately knew by the look on my face, that she would be eating breakfast alone.

  Peggy and I met eight years ago when I stopped at her yard sale on a cool, October morning. We didn’t know each other before that day, even though we grew up within a couple of miles of one another. I can still see her sitting in a green and white, fold-up lawn chair in her driveway. She sat watching as I drove up in my Ford Explorer, while her daughter Libby collected money for the families of the 911 attack. We chatted while I ruffled through the boxes scattered around the driveway. After our initial “how-do-you-do” and some “break-the-ice” conversation, I ended up going to the local doughnut shop to get us coffee and plain doughnuts. The rest was history. Never did buy anything, but Peggy wrapped up some of the obviously junkier items from the sale and gave them to me on our first Christmas together. This was definitely a sign of things to come!

  “Do you have time for a cup of coffee before you leave or should I make you a cup to go?” she asked.

  I surmised she already knew the answer.

  “You only slept a few hours. Good thing it was only a raccoon that broke into the hardware store last night. If it was some drug crazed felon, you might still be chasing him around the streets of town yelling, “Stop! This is the chief of police! Stop; or I’ll throw my jelly doughnut at you!” She started to chuckle, but saw that I was not smiling at her joke. “What is it baby? What’s wrong?” she said putting her hand on my shoulder.

  “They think they may have found Christine Sawyer’s body over at Meadow pond. I have to get over to Steve Johnson’s house and talk to his son and Ricky McKinna. They found the body this morning.”

  “Oh! My God! How are they doing?”

  “I don’t have the particulars yet, but Todd said they are pretty shaken up, and by the boy’s description of the body, she may have been tortured. I’m meeting Doc Cavanagh over there in a few minutes. We’ll go over to the pond right after we check on the boys. I’ll take that coffee to go.”

  2

  The drive over to the Johnson’s house only took about 15 minutes. They lived in a pre-Civil War Cape dating back to the late seventeen hundreds. Steve and his wife Kelly kept the property looking as it did when it was first built. The front step was a square piece of granite with an iron foot scraper embedded into the stone. Flower boxes hung below the tall, front windows and were filled with evergreens and red berries the birds would eat during the winter months. The roof line overhung the house by a foot and a half and the snow in the gutters stood out like a neon sign against the barn-red paint on the clapboards. The house was pleasing to look at and was probably warm and cozy inside next to the pellet stove you could see burning at night as you drove by.

  I spotted Doc Cavanaugh’s Jeep-Cherokee parked out in front of the house as I pulled onto Prentice Road. Doc opened the door and stood beside the Jeep as I pulled up, stopping behind him. Doc was in his late sixties, very rotund and sported a full head of white hair - the consummate country doctor. One look in my rear view mirror reminded me that I did not suffer from an overabundance of hair like he did and that is why I always kept it cropped very short. Peggy wants me to shave it bald, but I keep telling her I am not Yul Brenner or Bruce Willis. They were born with the right looks for being completely bald. I tell her I am more a cross between a Rottweiler and a hairless Mexican, Chihuahua. I’m cute and cuddly, just don’t piss me off.

  “Chief Kosciak. Haven’t seen you since you pulled me over for driving erratically the day I spilled my morning coffee onto my lap. Bet you thought you’d caught yourself a real felon.” he chuckled as he shook my hand.

  “Doc, I’ve told you a hundred times to call me Ron. You brought Libby into this world, so I figure we should be on a first name basis.”

  “Well, Ron. Tell me what we have here. D
erek told me you may have found Christine Sawyer and that the Johnson boy and one of his friends found the body buried over at Meadow Pond.”

  “We’re not sure yet who the woman is at the pond, but the boys are hysterical and I thought it would be best to check on them first, then ask some questions if they are able to tell us what happened. I sent two officers over to the crime scene to hold down the fort until we can get there. We can go over to the pond when we finish up here.”

  The front door opened as we reached the granite step. Kelly Johnson stood holding the doorknob looking as though the knob was the only thing holding her up. She was in her mid-thirties with long, light-brown hair touching her shoulders. In high school, she was one of the prettiest and most sought after girls in the entire school. But, as she stood at the door this morning, she looked like she was 65 - her hair was not combed and she had obviously been crying just a few minutes before our arrival. I knew she was more than worried about her son, who we could now hear crying and moaning inside the house. The cries were not the cries you hear when your child has a cut or a bruise from falling off of a bike. Instead, these cries and moans sounded like someone who was possessed or who suffered long agonizing torture. Davey Johnson sounded almost inhuman as we entered the house following Kelly into the living room.

  Steve Johnson sat on the floor of the living room with his legs spread open on the oval braided rug, holding his son against his chest. His face was ashen, his eyes pleading, as he rocked Davey back and forth in a protective, nurturing way. Even though Davey’s face was buried deep in his father’s sweatshirt, his moaning and crying cut through everyone in the room like sound-system speakers turned up to their highest volume. Doc tried to calm the boy with his usual country doctor charm, but in this case, his words were not getting through. It only took doc a few moments to determine Davey’s need for immediate psychiatric care. Having seen the tortured, distorted face at the pond disconnected Davey’s mind from the reality of his surroundings. Doc explained to Davey’s parents that, in cases of intense shock like this, the rebound could be quick or might take a very long time. He prepared them as best he could for what might be a long haul. Doc opened his cell phone to call the ambulance while I turned to Steve and Kelly.