Page 32 of Little Stolen Memories

Given Danny’s current anxiousness, I asked Giovanni to step outside with Santino. He was reluctant, but he agreed. Once he was out the door, Dorothy leaned forward, her voice soft and low as she addressed her brother. “If you didn’t do anything wrong, and you are keeping something to yourself, there’s no reason not to tell the truth now. If there’s anything you can say to help the detectives on this case, help them put it to rest at long last … Please, Danny, won’t you?—”

“There isn’t.”

I reached into my bag, pulled out an envelope, and walked over to the table. One by one, I pulled photos out, lining them up side by side on the table in front of him. “Brynn Wilson, Aubree Roberts, Aidan Williams, Jackson Nichols, Owen Sherwood, and Cora Callahan, the only one to survive. This is what they looked like before they were attacked. Care to see what they looked like after? I have those photos with me too.”

Danny shook his head, his confession unraveling at long last. “I did see … I saw … her.”

CHAPTER 15

Danny stabbed a finger over Cora’s picture and then swiped his hand across all six photos. They flew off the table, fluttering to the floor. I bent down to scoop them up, placed them back inside my bag, and I sat down next to him.

“What did you mean when you said you saw her?” I asked.

“The day those kids died, I was working on the chair, just like I said,” Danny began. “I was planning to sell it the next weekend at the farmers’ market. All of that is true.”

It just wasn’t the entire truth.

“What did you leave out of your story?” I asked.

He pressed his hands together. “I used to make furniture out of the wood I found in the area around the cabin. It’s the reason I rented the cabin in the first place. It was isolated and quiet, which I also liked. Anyway, I was finishing up the chair, and I realized I didn’t have the right size twig to finish the last part along the back.”

“Did you leave the cabin to get what you needed?”

“Not at first. It was getting dark out, and I’ve never liked being outside after dusk. Too easy to get yourself turned around in those woods. But as I stood there, staring at the chair, knowing it was so close to being finished, I just wanted to get it done. I decided if I hurried, I might be able to find what I needed. I grabbed a flashlight, and I headed out.”

In his previous statement, Danny had said he’d never left the cabin on the day of the murders, which seemed like an odd thing to lie about. If he was being honest with me now, there was no reason not to tell the police what he’d just told me. It didn’t implicate him in anything.

Which meant … there was something else—something that might implicate him.

“What happened after you left the cabin?” I asked.

“I’d gathered up three good pieces of wood. I figured one of them would get the job done. Problem was, it took me a lot longer to find them than I thought it would. So there was that. Then, when I was headed back to the cabin, I tripped. Thought it was a log at first. The three pieces of wood went flying out of my hands. It wasn’t until I stood back up and shined my flashlight that I noticed I hadn’t tripped over a log at all. I’d tripped over a woman.”

“What did you do next?”

“I bent down and tried shaking her. She didn’t stir. Seemed like she’d injured herself, like she’d tripped and maybe hit her head on something and then passed out.”

Dorothy joined us at the table and placed her hand on her brother’s arm. “Please don’t tell me you left the poor girl there.”

Danny’s breathing began to change.

“Listen, we’re not here to judge,” I assured him. “You were in a confusing situation. I’m sure it was difficult for you to decide what to do. I just want to know what happened.”

He nodded and said, “I shined the flashlight around the area, but there was nothing there, nothing to explain how she ended up on the ground. I turned the light back on her, looking over her body, and I saw blood. She was bleeding from the back of her head, but then I realized, if she’d tripped over something, she would have hit something falling forward. There had to be another explanation.”

I was glad he was talking, although he was unnerved about what he’d said so far. If I was going to keep him talking, I needed to be gentle, ease the truth out of him.

“You said she didn’t respond,” I said.

“Correct.”

“Did you know whether she was alive?”

“I tried to … you know, check her pulse. She didn’t have one as far as I could tell. I had no idea who she was or where she’d come from. And I didn’t have a phone back then, so there was no one I could even call for help.”

“You could have driven into town,” Dorothy said.

I wasn’t sure what Dorothy hoped to accomplish with her not-so-well-thought-out comments, but all she was doing was pushing Danny to stop talking.

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