Piercing the Darkness (40 page)

Santinelli barked, “
I
will see
you
to the
door
!”

ALICE BUCKMEIER WAS
a marvelous hostess, of course, and loved to have company. So what Kate had planned as a short interview turned out to be a delightful visit over tea and pastries in the widow’s dining room, surrounded by knick-knacks, doilies, crystal, and pictures of sons, daughters, and grandchildren.

“You must be everybody’s grandma,” Kate said.

Alice laughed. “A title I wear proudly. I don’t just have my own grandchildren, you know, but I’m Grandma Alice to all the kids at church, too!”

“That’s wonderful.”

“I love children, I really do. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how people treat their children. I know it breaks the Lord’s heart.” She warmed up Kate’s cup of tea and continued, “I’ve wondered about that little Amber ever since I saw what I saw at the Post Office. What must she be going through at home?”

Kate got her notebook ready. “Bev Cole says you have quite a story.”

“Oh, yes. It was very disturbing. I was mailing a package off to my son—well, actually, to my grandson, Jeff. I knitted a sweater for him, and I was trying to get it there in time for his birthday. Well, I was just
standing there at the counter, and that other young lady, Debbie, was weighing my package and stamping it and all that . . .”

JUDY BALCOM STUCK
her head into Don’s Wayside and called, “Mr. Hogan! Al Lemley’s on the phone!”

Marshall got up from the counter, paid for his coffee, and hurried next door.

Judy Balcom ran a tight little secretarial service, typing letters, making and answering calls, making copies, doing word processing, and relaying messages—to name just a few tasks—for many of the local businesses around the town. For a reasonable fee, she let Marshall call Al Lemley in New York, and now Lemley, true to his style, had wasted no time in finding what Marshall needed.

“Hello from New York,” came that same East Coast voice.

“Al, are you going to make me happy?”

“No, buddy. I’m going to make you sick. Got the fax ready?”

Judy was ready.

Marshall gave Al the go-ahead.

ALICE CONTINUED HER
story. “Now, I didn’t even notice who was over in the lobby where all the mailboxes are. I never pay attention to that unless it’s someone I know. But all of a sudden I heard this commotion out there like some child was getting rowdy—you know, misbehaving, and I remember thinking, Now where are that child’s parents? They shouldn’t let her carry on so!

“Well, Debbie was all finished with my package, so I went out into the lobby, and then I could see the whole thing. Here was this woman, just standing there in the middle of the lobby . . . She had some mail in her hand, so I guess she’d come to get her mail . . . And then, here was this little girl, this Amber, just screaming and shouting and . . . and prancing like she was a little horse, and that poor woman was just terrified!”

THE FAX MACHINE
started to hum and roll out some documents. Marshall picked each page up as it dropped into the bin. There were
police reports similar to what he already had, and then there were some news articles from the local newspapers. One article carried another photo of Sally Roe, this time in handcuffs, in the custody of two uniformed officers.

“AND WHAT THAT
child said!” Alice exclaimed.

“What did she say?” asked Kate.

“She pranced, then she hit the woman, and she screamed, and just kept hitting the woman, and she was saying, ‘I know who you are! You killed your baby! You killed your baby!’ The poor woman was just terrified; you’d think she was being attacked by a vicious dog or something.

“Well, finally the woman broke free and ran out the door like a scared rabbit. Amber ran after her as far as the door, still shouting at her, ‘You killed your baby! I know you! You killed your baby!’ Then Mrs. Brandon came out of the back room and grabbed her daughter and tried to pull her back inside, but she wouldn’t go with her mother, she wouldn’t go at all, and so they had a big tugging match right there in the lobby, right in front of me, and Mrs. Brandon was shouting, ‘Stop it, Amber! Stop that right now! No more of this!’”

Kate asked, “Did Mrs. Brandon ever use the name Amethyst?”

A light bulb went on in Alice’s head. “Why, yes! I do remember that! She was calling Amber Amber one minute, and Amethyst the next. She was saying, ‘Amethyst, Amethyst, you stop that now! You stop screaming and calm down!’ I didn’t understand what she meant; I thought it was just a nickname or something.”

Another news article dropped out of the fax machine. Marshall skimmed it. Sally Roe had been arrested after police broke down the door of her motel room in Fairwood. Inside, they found Roe in the bathroom in a seemingly drugged stupor, and her infant daughter, less than two months old, drowned in the bathtub. Roe was subsequently charged with first-degree murder in the drowning death of her child.

KATE COULD HARDLY
wait to ask her next question. The incident in the Post Office could have been coincidence, but in a small town like
this, that was unlikely. She dug in her briefcase and brought out the mug shots of Sally Roe, placing them before Alice. “Is this the woman you saw that day?”

Alice’s eyes grew wide, and then she gave a slow, awestruck nod. “She looks so awful in this picture . . . but this is her. Sally Roe, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Is she a criminal?”

“Yes.”

“What did she do?”

“Well . . . she did kill someone.”

MARSHALL WALKED SLOWLY
to his car, got behind the wheel, and then just sat there for a long while, reading through the news articles and police reports Al Lemley had sent. It was fascinating stuff, full of potential leads, but also very, very tragic.

“Tramp,” the prosecutors had called her. “Diabolical witch, self-centered, self-seeking, contemptible, child-killer.”

The police report said that Sally Roe was soaking wet when she was found on the floor in the bathroom. The tub was overflowing. The child was in the tub, dead. She’d told the police at the time that she’d killed her baby, but when questioned later, claimed she had no recollection of what had happened.

During the trial—and Marshall found this interesting—Sally seemed detached and unremorseful. “It was meant to be,” she said. “My higher self ordained this should happen. Rachel’s higher self wished to die at this time, and Jonas was there to carry it out. We all determine our own fates, our lot in life, when we are to die, and what destiny we are born into the next time. There is no death; there is only change.”

Jonas. A spirit-guide, according to Sally. She admitted drowning the child at first, but later seemed to change her testimony by blaming her spirit-guide. “He took control,” she said, “and he did the drowning.”

The jury didn’t buy it. They found her guilty, and Sally was later sentenced to thirty years in prison.

As for the father of the child, he never came forward and was never found. Sally never identified him. She was simply portrayed as a tramp and her child as illegitimate.