No One But You

You are a glutton for punishment, she wrote back.

When she didn’t get a response, she guessed he was already asleep.

* * *

By the time Sadie bathed Jayden, she was too exhausted to read to him. Promising she’d make it up to him tomorrow, she slid him over so she could climb into bed, kissed his forehead and turned out the light. But long after he went to sleep she couldn’t drop off herself, couldn’t get her mind to shut down. One question after another bombarded her. Why had Dawson Reed agreed to keep her on? Why would he risk his own well-being? He’d been through so much, and yet he was the one willing to take her side over Sly’s—when so many others had decided to protect their own interests.

She understood he was in a hurry to get a caregiver so his sister could come home, and that there wouldn’t be a lot of people in Silver Springs who’d trust him enough to take the job, but there were other places he could draw from. His sister had been in that institution for over a year. Why not take one or two more weeks to expand the search so that he wouldn’t have to deal with Sly?

Was it because he was a nice guy, as she thought? Or something else?

When Sly brought Jayden home, she’d told him she believed Dawson could never have hurt his parents, and he, in turn, had tried to convince her that Dawson was merely “grooming her,” setting her up to trust him and believe in him so that he’d be able to manipulate her. Sly said narcissists and psychopaths were experts at creating positive experiences designed to make their victims feel connected to them. Before he left, he even tried to persuade her to visit the police station in the next day or two so that he and the homicide detective who’d investigated the case could go over the details with her.

She wasn’t sure that would convince her of anything, though. If the facts of the investigation clearly indicated Dawson was guilty, why hadn’t he been convicted? There had to be some question, didn’t there?

Finally giving up on sleep, she slipped out of bed and went to the living room, where she’d left her laptop. She’d paid a fair amount of attention to the Reed murders, had listened to and read the various media reports as they came out. Like most everyone else in Silver Springs, she couldn’t believe something so terrible could happen in their little town.

But after going to work for Dawson, she had the desire to look at what’d transpired from a more objective vantage point—and not while she had several police officers at her elbow, trying to sway her opinion. She also hoped to see if she could determine whether the media, in their quest for shocking headlines, had helped create a bias that shouldn’t have existed, as Dawson’s defense lawyers claimed.

Putting her computer in her lap, she propped a couch pillow behind her back and logged onto the internet.

A search for “Dawson Reed” called up several links. She clicked one after the other and read, with fresh eyes, what she’d given only a cursory glance before.

Silver Springs Man Denies Killing Couple Who Adopted Him featured several quotes attributed to Dawson. “I would never hurt my parents. I loved them,” he said, and, “I didn’t need to kill anyone in order to inherit the farm. Time would’ve taken care of that whether I wanted it to or not.”

That made sense to her. Murder did seem like a drastic approach for a son who was set to inherit anyway. But the police claimed he wasn’t willing to wait. They said that after Dawson achieved a master’s in environmental science and management at UC Santa Barbara—quite an accomplishment, considering he’d spent his high school years at a boys ranch—he started working for a lighting conservation company, also in Santa Barbara, until he got into a disagreement with the owner and was fired after only eight months. Discouraged, since he couldn’t make a go of life even with a degree, he returned to Silver Springs to work for his parents.

Although that sounded plausible to Sadie, Dawson painted his personal history in a different light. From what she could piece together, he said that he argued with the owner of the lighting company because the guy was bilking the local utility out of thousands of dollars on various state-mandated rebate programs. And it wasn’t because he couldn’t get a job that he came back to Silver Springs. He’d barely started to apply when he realized that his parents could no longer manage the farm on their own. So he gave up the life he was going to pursue to come help them.

Devil...or saint?

With a frown, Sadie opened a Word document and began to write down the various points so that she could keep them straight. On the night in question, the police said Dawson went to The Blue Suede Shoe, a local bar that offered live entertainment on the weekends, where he watched a Lakers game on the big screen and played pool with Aiyana’s oldest two sons, Elijah and Gavin Turner. He left at eleven-thirty and stopped by the gas station to fill up before going home. The police admitted they couldn’t figure out if he planned the murders in advance, or if he decided to kill his parents on the spur of the moment, but while everyone was sleeping, he took the hatchet from the woodpile in back, attacked his parents in their bed and then called 9-1-1 to report that there’d been a break-in and he needed an ambulance.

Both Lonnie and Larry were dead by the time police arrived to find Dawson cradling his mother in his arms. “Although that might sound like a touching act, there were no tears in his eyes,” Detective John Garbo, whom Sadie had once met at a picnic, said. “His emotion felt fake to me.”

Had Dawson been insincere? Or was it the police who had it wrong? Everyone reacted differently to grief. Maybe he’d been in shock after seeing such a horrifying thing.

Dawson agreed with everything they claimed about the night of the murders up until he left the gas station. At that point, he said he was approached by a tall, wiry man with brown eyes, dark hair and a scraggly beard, who asked for a lift to Santa Barbara. Dawson told him he wasn’t going that far. The guy indicated a friend lived much closer and climbed in, but as Dawson drove, his passenger began to act more and more irrationally and wouldn’t name a place, other than Santa Barbara. Dawson said the hitchhiker kept showing him the map of where he wanted to go on his phone, saying he had to get to a friend’s place, so Dawson told him to call that friend and ask him to come, but the hitchhiker wouldn’t. They were at the edge of town when Dawson finally insisted he get out. The man refused and an argument ensued, followed by a scuffle, during which Dawson managed to pull the guy out of his truck so that he could take off.

Because of the difficulty of dragging a grown man from the passenger seat through the driver’s-side door, the police found that part of Dawson’s story highly suspect, but Dawson looked plenty strong to Sadie. She thought the police actually made a better point when they argued that it was too much of a coincidence that some hitchhiker would be able to find Dawson’s house. Dawson had an answer for that, too, though. He said he had various documents in his truck—a couple of work orders, even a bid for solar on the house—and one must’ve fallen out during the scuffle. His guess was that after he drove off, the hitchhiker simply used the address on that lost work order to find his house.

Sadie supposed that could’ve happened. Dawson drove a work truck, likely kept various things he thought he was going to need on the dash or seat, and loose papers could easily blow out or get dragged out amid a tussle.

Either way, he never changed his story. She felt that was important, even if the police didn’t give him much credit for that. As for the rest of Dawson’s explanation of the night’s events, he said he wasn’t far from home when that disagreement occurred. Once he got the guy out, to avoid leading him right to the farm—and because he didn’t realize something with his address had already fallen out—he went back to town, where he drove around listening to music while waiting for the stranger to get wherever he was going. He even stopped at Gavin’s house, but Gavin wasn’t back from the bar.

When Dawson drove home, he didn’t see the hitchhiker along the way, and he quit worrying—until he walked into the house and noticed the back door standing open. Once he saw that and his mother’s purse dumped out on the kitchen floor, he rushed upstairs to find Angela asleep in her bed, his parents bleeding in theirs. Although he felt as if his father was already dead, his mother was making a gurgling sound. He was cradling her in his arms, trying to comfort and encourage her, when she died.

“Heartbreaking either way,” Sadie mumbled, rubbing her eyes. She wanted to continue her research. There was so much left to read. But it was one o’clock and she’d had a long day, with another one to follow.

After saving her document, she set her computer on the coffee table and slipped back into her room but still didn’t rest well. Frightening images of opening that locked door at the top of the stairs at the farmhouse and finding two mangled bodies filled her dreams—along with the sound of Sly laughing at her.

Just before her alarm went off, she startled awake on her own. She’d been having a different nightmare by then, one in which Dawson was standing over her while she slept—lifting a hatchet.

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