Page 34 of Engaging the Deputy

Jaden had to ask. “Did you kill her?”

Rusk seemed to freeze, his gaze foggy with tears and memories. “Too pretty. Tried to warn her mother.” He coughed and fell silent. Jaden thought that was all the man was going to say.

He rose to leave when Rusk said, “Criminal— Did what had to be done… Destroyed everything.” He began to cry in chest-heaving gulps, the noise bringing a different nurse into the room.

“I gave him some sad news,” the deputy said. “About his daughter. It’s part of a murder investigation.”

“Evangeline,” the nurse said as she put an arm around the man to try to soothe him. “I heard on the news that her body had been found. Broke my heart.”

“Did he ever tell you what happened?” Jaden asked.

She hesitated a moment. “She was murdered?” He nodded. Sighing, she said, “When he was first brought here, he talked about her. He didn’t say it in so many words, but it seems she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen but refused to tell him who the father of her unborn baby was. Apparently, some man in the community where they lived.”

The other body in the root-cellar grave, Jaden thought.

“I think what’s haunted him all these years was that he never knew who the man was. When she disappeared… Well, he seemed to think they’d run away together, and he never saw her again.”

“You know he started a community called Starling up in northeastern Montana. When Evangeline disappeared at sixteen, he walked away from it and the community died,” Jaden said. “He’d started Starling to escape the outside world. He’d built his utopia, only to have what happened to his daughter and some man in the community destroy his dream. Has he ever mentioned his wife?”

“No. I got the impression she’s been out of his life for a long time. A neighbor was the one who brought him in here.”

The deputy stared at the old man in the wheelchair.

He didn’t look much like a murderer. Nor a boogeyman anymore. He looked like a broken man haunted by his past and what he’d done as he quit sobbing and stared out the window, his blue eyes glazed over.

Jaden stopped in a small café after he left Elden Rusk’s assisted-living facility. Seeing Rusk like that had unsettled him. It was the man’s eyes. No matter what the nurse had said, Jaden couldn’t shake the feeling that Rusk had recognized him.

He was leaving the café when he got the call. Dean Marsh had been found wandering down a road, miles from Starling. He was being treated for his injuries at the Kalispell hospital.

“Keep him there,” he said. “I’m in town. I’ll be right over.”

* * *

When he walkedinto the hospital room, he found Dean sitting up, wolfing down lunch with a fork clutched in his left hand. His right arm was in a cast. Like the other Starling tornado survivors, he had cuts and bruises. But unlike them, he’d been missing since Halloween night.

Jaden pulled up a chair next to the bed and dragged out his notebook and pen. “Glad to see you’ve turned up,” he said as Dean finished his lunch and pushed the tray away.

“I haven’t eaten in days,” he said, his voice gravelly. He took a sip of water from the glass on the table next to his bed.

“Where have you been since Halloween?”

Dean stared at him for a moment, as if considering the question. “When was Halloween?”

“A few days ago.”

“Really? I don’t know. I remember waking up in a ditch. I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there. My arm was broken, I knew that. I found a piece of wood and ripped off part of my shirt to make a splint. Then I just started walking.”

“What do you remember before waking up in the ditch?”

Dean frowned and reached up to touch the bandage on his head. “Not much.”

Memory loss. There seemed to be a lot of that going around, Jaden considered, questioning Dean’s story. He recalled what Dean’s wife, Angie, had said about her husband reappearing soon with some fantastic story about where he’d been. “You remember Halloween night?”

His frown deepened. “Halloween.”

“You’d gone to Starling with some friends.”

“Starling?”He sounded surprised by that.

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