Tessa Stark: Desert Heat

Chapter Thirty Three

Her first thought, as that realization had struck her, was that it was her mom...or perhaps her sister...because who else would her father be burying? And that was as far as her thoughts could go because she simply went numb and...blank.

There was a lapse in her memory that she'd never been able to recover...she had no recollection of getting back out of the woods, no recollection of making it back home. Her memory didn't pick up again until she was standing in the kitchen, still clutching Peyton's books and holding the telephone receiver in her hand...the voice on the other end telling her to lock the doors and hang on because the police were on their way.

Robert Stark, thankfully, hadn't been burying her mother or her sister. But, he had been burying a young woman named Francis Moore. He'd also buried Nancy Barnes...Mary Hoover...Jocelyn Frank...Heidi Smith...Anna Cardwell...Paige Housewright... And those were just the young women the police had been able to identify.  There were others that hadn't been named...and probably never would.

As it turned out, Robert Stark had been plying his trade for years, all over the country, using his job as a truck driver to evade suspicion and capture. And she had been the one to bring his sickness to light. She had been the one to sit in a closed courtroom and testify to what she had seen. She had been the one to help lock him away until the day of his execution.

And she was the one who'd helped reunite all those young women with their families, most of whom had been waiting years for answers.

Her own family hadn't made it through the ordeal, though. Her mother had very quickly decided that the offspring of a man who was pure evil likely had that same evil running through their veins, so they were dumped on the doorstep of their paternal grandmother and were promptly forgotten, having neither seen nor heard from the woman since.

And the rest...was history.

"My god, Tessa," Cole whispered, reaching for her hand and lacing his fingers through hers in a gesture that was meant to offer comfort. "I don't even know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything," she told him, allowing herself to feel the warmth of his flesh and the strength of his large hand.

There was a drawn out silence between them, during which nothing could be heard but the night winds playing through the tall grasses and the lonesome chorus of the crickets, calling for some company for the evening.

After a while, Cole pulled in a long breath, giving her hand a little squeeze. "I'm in no position to psycho-analyze anyone...and I know how futile this is probably going to sound...but you know that you're not him?"

"I know that," she said.

"So, why punish yourself?" wondered Cole. "Why keep yourself so...tightly bound?"

She didn't bother with pretending not to understand his statement. And now that she'd told him about that part of her life, she saw no reason to be coy or shy going forward.

"I know that I'm not him. I've spent nearly two decades making sure that I don't become him," she admitted. "But, I can't be sure that he meant to become him. So, I have to be careful."

"You're afraid that...what? You might slip and wind up following in his footsteps?"

"That's a possibility, isn't it?" she posed.

She could feel Cole turn to look at her. "Tessa, do you really think that? You seem to barely allow yourself to take an easy breath. I don't believe you could wake up one day and suddenly allow yourself to become a..."

His voice trailed off, so she finished for him. "A serial killer?"

"Yes. That.  I don't believe for a split second that you could become that," he asserted.