Wednesday morning, Mae Richmond bent over her potter’s wheel, putting pressure to the wet clay until it became smooth under her hands. Once the porcelain was centered, she opened it up and pressed her fingers on the bottom of the spinning pot, compressing the clay.
At seventy-eight, she was proud of the fact that she could still throw the large pitchers, but handling more than five pounds of clay was mostly a thing of the past. That didn’t seem to matter to the customers who came to her shop in Russell County, Tennessee, many of them from Pearl Springs, the small town just down the mountain from her home on Eagle Ridge.
An hour later, Mae trimmed the bottom of the fourth pitcher she’d thrown and lifted it from the wheel. She set it on the table beside the others. Once the clay dried to leather hard, she would attach the handles.
A text message chimed. Mae dried her hands and pulled her iPhone from her pocket. Mail was here already? The gizmo she’d installed on the lid of her mailbox had saved her a lot of steps by alerting her when the rural carrier delivered her mail.
She covered the pitchers with plastic so they would dry evenly and walked the quarter mile down the hill to her mailbox, enjoying the perfect weather of the late April day—not too hot and not too cold. In the distance, the Cumberland Plateau Mountains in East Tennessee that rose above Eagle Ridge almost took her breath.
The carrier was waiting for her in his small SUV when she reached the box. “Mornin’, Randy. Is there something I need to sign for?”
“No.” The fiftysomething man smiled. “I waited around because I haven’t seen you in a day or two.”
“Thank you,” she said warmly. “I’ve been busy glazing and firing—lots of Mother’s Day orders to fill.”
“Good to know you weren’t sick.”
Mae nodded her appreciation. Russell County was a tight-knit community where everyone looked out for each other, even people like her who kept to themselves. While she didn’t know every person in the small Tennessee county, she figured she knew someone connected to each family.
Mae was fond of telling newcomers to be careful who they insulted, since just about everyone in Russell County was related, either by marriage or blood. Like the mail carrier, Randy Hart. His daughter, Jenna, was a new deputy with the Russell County Sheriff’s Department.
Randy nodded toward the magazines as he handed her the mail. “You still playing detective?”
Mae glanced at the periodicals. He wasn’t talking about Pottery Making Illustrated. No, he was referring to Unsolved Crimes. “Just trying to find my granddaughter.” And Keith Bennett, her son-in-law’s brother. She believed where she found one, she’d find the other.
“It’s been twenty-five years—maybe it’s time to let it go,” he said gently.
Mae shook her head. “God hasn’t told me to give up yet. With his help, I believe I’ll find her.”
Randy didn’t understand what it meant to lose a child. Mae knew she’d see her daughter again one day, but she wanted something tangible now. She wanted her granddaughter.
Except for a great-nephew and great-niece Mae rarely saw, Danielle was all she had left, and as much as it was in her power, Mae would keep looking until she found her. But Randy meant well, and she managed a smile. “Got time for a brownie and a cup of tea or coffee?” she asked.
“Thanks, but not today. People have been ordering online like crazy—I have more than a hundred packages yet to deliver.”
“Next time, maybe.”
Mae’s was the last house on the road, and she waited as he turned around in her drive and headed back down the gravel road toward Pearl Springs. Then she turned and climbed the hill to her small house, wishing she’d brought her cane or at least the staff she used when she went up on the ridge looking for mushrooms or some of the herbs for her “remedies.”
Her stomach growled, and she checked the time. No wonder. It was noon. Mae entered the house through the back door and laid the mail on the counter, noting an article on the cover of the ceramics magazine about combining painting and clay. Right up her alley, and she’d look at it first—Mae often painted the hazy mountains around the ridge on her pieces, even her pitchers.
She made a ham and cheese sandwich, grabbed the pottery magazine, and headed for her picnic table—it was an ideal day to eat outside.
Mae had never liked eating alone, and today Pottery Making Illustrated would keep her company. She leafed through the magazine, enjoying the warm sunshine on her face as she turned the pages, seeking the feature spotlighted on the cover about combining painting and clay.
There it was.
She blinked. And stared closer at the photo of the potter with her golden red hair pulled back in a ponytail. Freckles dotted the area across her nose, and it looked like she had blue eyes . . .
Mae’s heart pounded in her chest as she looked for the name of the artist. Dani Collins. She stilled. Dani could be short for Danielle . . . Was it possible?
Mae grabbed the magazine and hurried inside the house to the spare bedroom she’d made into a command center of sorts and switched on her computer. While waiting for it to boot up, she turned to the crime board she’d created after Neva and Robert were murdered and Danielle disappeared.
Most of her friends thought she was obsessed with what happened that night, especially after she created a “crime board” with all the key players on it and how they were connected. Mae didn’t deny it, and she didn’t care what they thought—her friends hadn’t lost their whole family. There wasn’t a day that she didn’t spend at least a few minutes studying the board—it was a way to keep Neva and Danielle alive in her memory.
Today she ignored the left side of the board where she’d pinned photos of Bobby’s friends, all possible suspects. Even now, Mae didn’t understand what her daughter had seen in him. The boy had been bad news from the get-go. Nothing like his brother, Keith.
She found it so hard to believe Keith had anything to do with the burglaries that Neva said Bobby was involved in, but when he disappeared the same night as the murders, most people painted him with the same brush as his brother. Some even believed he was their killer. But not Mae.
She was pretty certain Keith had taken Danielle with him that night when he ran. What she didn’t understand was why he didn’t leave the girl with her. Danielle was her granddaughter. They were blood kin.
That first year, she’d hired a private investigator to find Keith, but it was like he’d fallen off the face of the earth. There were no signs of him—no credit card transactions, and she wasn’t sure how the PI knew, but his Social Security card didn’t show up anywhere either.
From everything Mae learned as she searched for him and her granddaughter, obtaining a new Social Security card was difficult but not impossible if you knew the right people. That’s when Mae went from looking for Keith to trying to find Danielle. Myspace, Facebook, Instagram—over the years, she’d scoured their pages looking for images that might be her granddaughter.
She shifted her gaze to photos of Danielle on the right side of the board. The top one had been taken just before she disappeared. It had been her ninth birthday, and she was standing on the front porch of the house Bobby had built.
Comparing the two photos, Danielle’s hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was lighter, and her freckles were more prominent than those of Dani Collins. Mae could easily see that the adult shape of her granddaughter’s mouth would be similar to the potter’s. She shifted her gaze to two other photos the PI had aged to show how Danielle might look at twenty-one, then at thirty.
Mae compared Dani Collins’s photo in the magazine to the two aged photos of her granddaughter. Iffy. Then she compared it to the photo in the middle, the one of her daughter that had been taken when Neva would’ve been about the age of the potter in the magazine.
Dani Collins looked more like Neva than the images in the aged photos.
Her computer alerted that it had finished booting up. Mae settled behind it and googled the website listed in the article for Dani Collins. Maybe she would find more photos of the ceramic artist.
There were plenty of photos and how-to videos and tutorials on the site, but not one that showed Dani Collins’s face. That seemed a little odd. She tried the phone number listed on the website for the pottery studio, but it went straight to voicemail. “Sorry I missed you. Leave a message and your number, and I’ll get back to you.”
Mae hung up without leaving a message. She knew how she’d feel if someone left a message on her voicemail saying the caller might be a long-lost relative. No, she needed to talk to her either in person or in a phone conversation. Except there was no address on the website. She scanned the photos on the site, stopping at one that had what looked like the Badlands in the background. Could Dani Collins live in the Dakotas or Montana? But how would she find out?
Social media. That’s where her experience from years ago and all the true-crime shows she watched told her to look next. Mae started with Facebook. Half an hour later, she hadn’t found a Dani Collins that fit the profile she was looking for. Another thirty minutes and no results on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok. She tried Pinterest. Nothing.
She braced her chin on her hand. Mae was proud of her computer skills, especially since she was mostly self-taught, but just as her searches years ago never found a Danielle Bennett on social media sites, her searches for Dani Collins netted a zero as well. Maybe it was time to bring in help. But who?
Not Sheriff Carson Stone. Even though Mae and Carson’s wife, Judith, had been friends for over seventy years, the sheriff thought Mae had gone off the deep end after Neva’s death. Especially after she showed him her crime board.
Carson didn’t take her seriously, and it rankled every time he reminded her that she wasn’t living in Cabot Cove and she wasn’t Jessica Fletcher. Besides, after his heart attack last fall, he’d hired his granddaughter as his chief deputy, and Alexis was running the sheriff’s office. She corrected herself. It was Alex now. She glanced at the article. Maybe like this Dani was really a Danielle?
Before Danielle had disappeared, she and Alexis Stone and Morgan Tennyson were best friends. Mae smiled. She’d dubbed the girls the Three Musketeers because where you saw one, you saw the other two. Until everything changed.
Should she start with Alex? Alex once thought Mae hung the moon, but she was all grown up now. Would she be like her grandfather and think Mae was a foolish old woman?
But if not Alex, who? A smile pulled at her lips. Of course. Mark Lassiter. She should have thought of him first.
She picked up her phone and dialed Mark’s number. When it went straight to voicemail, she frowned. He must be out of range.
Since Russell County was in the mountains of the Cumberland Plateau, there were a lot of areas that didn’t have good cell reception, her own property included. It’s why she had an outdoor Wi-Fi extender on the roof.
She punched in another number. Maybe Alex would know where Mark was.