Page 206 of The Woman Left Behind

What couldn’t be disturbed was the bullet hole in her skull.

She was identified as Cheryl Ballard.

Now…

Karl Abernathy.

Not that there was any doubt, considering both the senior Dietrichs pointed the finger at him, along with his subsequent spree, but even so, the motel owner in Idaho was shown a picture of him, and he said he was “relatively certain” it was the same man he saw in his parking lot that night long ago.

Karl’s stolen SUV was found in the alley behind my house, and a bottle of sedatives with a few little blue pills left in it was found in that SUV.

And the gun Karl had was absolutely the gun used to kill Cheryl.

However, even if Cheryl Ballard could no longer talk, nor could Clifford Ballard, or Roy Farrell, it was without a doubt he was my parents’ killer, along with it seeming pretty obvious he was Ballard’s and Farell’s.

There were so many things we’d never know.

But I could guess.

Karl told my dad he had me.

Karl told him he and my mom had to go to the side of that mountain to get me.

That was the only reason why they would leave that motel room.

How he managed to convince them of this, and further kill them both, I had no idea, but I suspected Dad went first. He would never stand there no matter what and watch Mom die.

Then again, she wouldn’t either.

Again, I’d never know.

After he took their lives, he’d taken anything that could identify them easily, like Dad’s wallet and Mom’s purse, and tossed them. Those items were probably disintegrating in some landfill.

This didn’t upset me, thinking it was me used to lure them out.

It was just them. It was who they were. What they’d do.

If I was in danger, they’d put themselves in danger to free me.

And that was simply that.

In the end, Karl Abernathy was a forty-two-year-old man who never married and never had any children.

He hadn’t been tall, but he’d been fit, and some might’ve found him good-looking.

Why he came after me was also anyone’s guess. Maybe he had a thing against Harry and heard we were together. Maybe he thought, after all these years, I knew what he did.

Or maybe he knew his time was up, considering Jason and Jesse Bohannan had found the abandoned hunting cabin several counties south he was holed up in, doing this chasing down reports on stolen vehicles, and they were ten minutes behind him as he made his way back to Misted Pines. And because of that, he got it twisted in his mind that my parents were to blame for his predicament, and he wanted to go out doing something to make them pay.

He was very dead, so that was another question that would go unanswered.

This one I didn’t mind not knowing.

This one, it was a matter of all’s well that ends well.

Just in case you were wondering…

Kimmy did shoot Karl Abernathy when he came into her store.

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