Erica Spindler by In Silence Page A

preparing anything.”
    Avery acquiesced, grateful. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”
    â€œI see I’m not the first.”
    â€œPardon?”
    The woman pointed. Avery glanced in that direction. A basket sat on the stoop by the door.
    Avery retrieved it. It contained homemade raisin bread and a note of condolence. She read the brief, warmly worded note, tears stinging her eyes.
    â€œLaura Jenkins, I’ll bet,” Mary Dupre said, referring to the woman who lived next door. “She makes the best raisin bread in the parish.”
    Avery nodded and returned the note to its envelope.
    â€œYou’re planning a service?”
    â€œI’m meeting with Danny Gallagher this afternoon.”
    â€œHe does good work. You need help with anything, anything at all, you call me.”
    Avery promised she would, knowing that the woman meant it. Finding comfort in her generosity. And the kindness she seemed to encounter at every turn.
    She watched the woman scurry down the driveway, a bright bird in her purple and orange warm-up suit, waved goodbye, then collected Laura Jenkins’s basket and carried it to the kitchen.
    The last thing she needed was more food, but she sliced off a piece of the bread anyway, set it on a napkin and placed it on the kitchen table. While she reheated the last of the coffee, she retrieved the cardboard box from the foyer.
    She had figured the box would contain photos, cards or other family mementos. Instead, she found it filled with newspaper clippings.
    Curious, Avery began sifting through them. They all concerned the same event, one that had occurred the summer of 1988, her fifteenth summer.
    She vaguely remembered the story: a Cypress Springs woman named Sallie Waguespack had been stabbed to death in her apartment. The perpetrators had turned out to be a couple of local teenagers, high on drugs. The crime had caused a citizen uproar and sent the town on a crusade to clean up its act.
    Avery drew her eyebrows together, confused. Why had her father collected these? she wondered. She picked up one of the clippings and gazed at the grainy, yellowed image of Sallie Waguespack. She’d been a pretty woman. And young. Only twenty-two when she died.
    So, why had her father collected the clippings, keeping them all these years? Had he been friends with the woman? She didn’t recall having ever met her or heard her name, before the murder anyway. Perhaps he had been her physician?
    Perhaps, she thought, the articles themselves would provide the answer.
    Avery dug all the clippings out of the box, arranging them by date, oldest to most recent. They spanned, she saw, four months—June through September 1988.
    Bread and coffee forgotten, she began to read.
    As she did, fuzzy memories became sharp. On June 18, 1988, Sallie Waguespack, a twenty-two-year-old waitress, had been brutally murdered in her apartment. Stabbed to death by a couple of doped-up teenagers.
    The Pruitt brothers, she remembered. They had been older, but she had seen them around the high school, before they’d dropped out to work at the canning factory.
    They’d been killed that same night in a shoot-out with the police.
    How could she have forgotten? It had been the talk of the school for months after. She remembered being shocked, horrified. Then…saddened. The Pruitt brothers had come from the wrong side of the tracks—actually the wrong side of what the locals called The Creek. Truth was, The Creek was nothing more than a two-mile-long drainage ditch that had been created to keep low areas along the stretch from flooding but ultimately had served as the dividing line between the good side of town and the bad.
    They’d been wild boys. They’d gone with fast girls.They’d drunk beer and smoked pot. She’d stayed as far away from them as possible.
    Even so, the tragedy of it all hadn’t been lost on her, a sheltered fifteen-year-old. All involved had been so young.