Callie can’t help herself, incredulous. “You don’t… You don’t know?”
“She only ever called him…” Annabelle looks to the ceiling, swallows. “She called him the Coyote.”
It takes her a moment to understand what she’s feeling. Crestfallen, and strangely relieved. “Do you know why?”
“No. Only that… no. I don’t.”
Callie’s mind teems with questions. Why didn’t Annabelle go to the police when Sabrina didn’t come back? When did she stop looking and leave the Pines? Slow down, she wills herself. Don’t scare her off. “Okay. Can you tell me more about that? What were the circumstances around this conversation? Did she say he seemed angry or upset with her—I’m assuming we are talking about the man she was seeing, yes?”
“Someone she had been sleeping with.”
Callie takes a sip of her tea. It scalds the back of her throat. “I heard a rumor that Sabrina had been with an older man. Was he older?”
“Yes. Probably in his midtwenties.”
“Did she ever mention his job? Or where he lived?”
“No. She became very private once she started up with him. We used to share everything, and then… she wouldn’t tell me anything.” Again, that closed-off look on Annabelle’s face.
“He drove a silver sedan. He would pick her up sometimes.”
“Did you ever see him? Could you describe him for me?”
“He had brown hair, brown eyes. Medium height, maybe five eight, five nine. He smoked cigarettes.”
“Did this man have any tattoos or birthmarks, any scars or piercings that would stand out?” She thinks of Fauver. She can’t be sure when he got the snake tattoo but the ink is pretty faded, the image weathered with his skin.
“I don’t think so. I only saw him twice. Once in his car and once at the Cranberry Festival. He was there with the chief of the police department, a bunch of other men. He was from the area, I think. He knew the roads.”
Callie sits up. Frank was named chief in 1989. “But you don’t know if he was a cop?”
Annabelle shakes her head. Callie thinks of Jane’s warning. Frank would never turn on one of his guys. Did Frankknowwho the father of Baby Doe is? Is he protecting someone?
“Was he with anyone else you recognized?”
“No, I didn’t know them.”
She ticks through the roster in her head. Could be Keegan. Maybe that’s why he pretended to forget Sabrina’s name when she asked him, that day they sprung the muskrats. It gives her a pang to think of him as this Coyote, but she’s been doing this long enough to know. Takes all kinds. And Keegan had been so awkward when Callie asked if he knew Jenna. Keegan, who had been easier on her than everyone else.
“I have to ask you a sensitive question. Had Sabrina been pregnant? I heard some rumors to that effect as well… Her name came up in connection with another case from around the same time and as far as motives for her disappearance go—”
Annabelle shakes her head quickly, cuts Callie off. “She wasn’t.”
The atmosphere in the room has changed, become stifled and charged. She knows the answer, but still, she has to ask.
Callie leans forward, tries to make her voice as gentle as she can. “Annabelle. Were you pregnant?”
“Please!” Annabelle bangs a fist on the coffee table, then covers her face with her hands. Callie’s undrunk tea sloshes over the rim of the pretty little cup. Annabelle’s sleeve has ridden up and she can see a part of the scar Trent Brentwood described. Messy. Something that came back together all wrong. Annabelle swallows, her eyes watering, her chin trembling so hard Callie wonders how she’s going to get the words out. “Please. Do not call me that name.”
Callie waits a beat. Stares at the splotch of spilled tea on the table.“You tapped on my car window. I was going to go home. Leave you to your knitting. You invited me here. Why?”
“She was supposed to help me! She promised. Said she would be there for all of it. She would find a doctor and be by my side and help me. And after… after we would raise the baby together. I wouldn’t have to do any of it alone. It was going to bring us back together. Things were going to be all right again.”
Tears leak down Annabelle’s face. She wipes them away with the heels of her hand. Callie watches Annabelle—Iris, whoever she wants to call herself—cry. She turns to the portraits on the wall again. The boys with their salt-tousled hair and athletic shoulders. Blair with her bright-blue eyes and easy grin.
When Annabelle speaks again, her voice is a hoarse whisper. “They don’t know. No one knows.”
It makes sense now. Why she couldn’t have gone to the police when Sabrina didn’t come home. Why she ran. She must have been terrified.
