Doreen got up and slowly wandered back to Nan’s place. She found Nan talking with somebody else.
Nan caught sight of her and waved. I’ll talk to you later, Nan mouthed.
And, with that, Doreen headed out to the parking lot, hopped into her vehicle, and drove home. As soon as she got home, she reset the security, walked into the kitchen, and propped open the back door for her animals. Then she headed to her little scanner. There, she very carefully, page by page, scanned each in, making sure she had a clear image of every individual one. And then she phoned Mack. “I’m sending you something,” she said, her voice quiet.
He asked, “Are you okay? You sound off.”
“Yeah, I’m off,” she confirmed. “I was called back to Nelly’s place. She thinks Bob Small may have killed her sister, and she gave me the item she’s held over Ella’s head all this time.”
“What do you mean?”
“She said that Ella knew about Bob Small, and I’ve got Ella’s journal that Nelly kept and used as blackmail to keep herself in Rosemoor, when her sister kept threatening to take her out.”
“Oh, good God,” Mack replied, his voice rising. “You have that journal?”
“I do. I’ve scanned it. I haven’t read anything yet,” she shared, “but I’ve scanned every page, and I’m sending you the digital copies right now.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Yeah, because Nelly is pretty sure she saw Bob Small not very long ago here in town. I don’t know whether it’s connected to Ella’s case or something else.”
“But bottom line, Nelly saw Bob Small, and Ella Hickman is dead.” Mack’s words had a hard tone to it, and Doreen knew they were both thinking the same thing.
Bob Small killed Ella Hickman.
Chapter 6
Midafternoon …
Doreen made herself a cup of tea, and, with Ella’s journal in hand, she sat down in the living room and started to read. She couldn’t explain the need to be inside, where she and the journal were locked up and safe. The journal told a tale of emotions, love, betrayal, acceptance, and then almost seeing the pathway to Ella trying to sort through how to make this okay in her world and to keep Bob Small in her life. Apparently they’d known each other for years and years, and she’d had a secret crush on him for a long time.
Bob was older, and yet it never changed anything for Ella over all these decades; Ella even knew about Hinja. And that had been a sour point between the two of them, when Ella had found out. Bob promised that he would take care of it and that he would break up with her, and sure enough he had. Doreen had to go back through her notes to see whether it had been during the same time frame that he’d declared he would do so or he had chosen to tell Ella that and then hadn’t followed through. She suspected that the Hinja relationship was not a case of on again, off again but a case of whenever he was in town.
Doreen thought about Ella—the woman she had met at Rosemoor—and it didn’t seem to fit that a successful professional woman would sit around and wait for her man to show up. But that also didn’t mean that Ella had waited nor that she didn’t play around on her own. After all, Ella had Pullin and his love for her. There was talk back then about her marrying, but she hadn’t. She’d waited for Bob Small to return to town and had realized very quickly that only one man was meant for her, and that was it.
Again, something that Doreen found very difficult to imagine. This was a smart, intelligent woman, who had held a powerful position in town, and yet she had continued to hold the candle for a man who she refused to admit was a serial killer.
Doreen sat back, studying that whole theory, and couldn’t make any sense of it. She suspected, when all this came out, it would be one for the case books for a long time. Something that would be held up as an example of unexplained behaviors and misplaced affections and God-only-knows what other words would be attributed to Ella’s attraction to Bob Small. But what was it that prompted Nelly’s behavior?
If Nelly knew her sister was dating a serial killer, why didn’t Nelly do something more about it herself? And, of course, Ella’s actions paled in comparison to everybody else’s. In Ella’s case, she got to keep this man in her life. Somebody she obviously cared very deeply for. Whether that affection was misplaced or not, surely there was some way to understand a woman who had obviously been immersed in an emotional life with this man to the point that she willingly overlooked everything.
Yet both sisters had made interesting decisions. Doreen was trying hard not to judge the sisters herself. An awful lot of family history existed, likely starting with their own father, that would help to explain this.
Doreen pondered that for a long time, making notes for herself, questions to ask Nelly down the road but preferably not too far down the road, so they could get this solved and the case permanently put away. Although, with so many cases attributed to Bob Small, it would be a massive manhunt, and Doreen wasn’t sure what it would entail.
That thought brought her back to the fact that Nelly thought she had seen Bob locally, recently too. With so much information to go by and such stunning bits and pieces, Doreen was quite vexed with herself for not having asked Nelly more about her Bob Small sighting—where, when, and what did he look like?
She picked up the phone and managed to connect to Nelly. When she identified herself, Nelly said, “I suppose now you’ll be bothering me all the time.”
“Until we can get to the bottom of this, quite likely,” she admitted calmly. “I am sorry about that in advance.”
“I’m already regretting having given it to you. Call it momentary guilt.”
“It doesn’t matter what we call it. This needed to happen.”
“Maybe, and now everybody will look at my sister and hate her.”
“I don’t know about that either,” Doreen replied. “This journal is sad in a way.”
“Is it?” Nelly asked in disgust. “And I think that’s partly one of the reasons I hung on to them. They say so much that I just couldn’t understand about my sister. She obviously loved him, loved him deeply. Have you read it all?”
“I’m more than halfway through. I haven’t finished it though.”
“You should finish it,” she stated bluntly, “and then call me back.” And, with that, Nelly hung up.
Worried about what she would still find, Doreen kept reading. When she got to the end, there were several blank pages, and she thought it was such a weird place to end it because Ella had basically written that he was gone from her life and that she didn’t know what she would do. Yet obviously Ella had gone on for many years, had picked up the pieces, and had found some purpose in her life.
But, as Doreen flipped through to the end, she came to another few pages with no date, where the woman was practically screaming with joy, writing, He’s back. He’s back. Oh, my God, he’s back. My life is so full. My heart is so full. He’s back. And then there was nothing.
Doreen stared at that in shock. “Oh, good God,” she whispered. “If he was back …” That was incredibly bad news, for everybody, for every woman in this world, particularly ones with curly hair. Doreen remembered that little detail. It jumped at her. She phoned Mack back.