Free 12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 by Kathryn Casey

from the next room, scooping her oldest up in her arms. Once she was sure Kensi wasn’t hurt, Kari made a joke and started laughing, until Kensi forgot about her tumble and laughed along. “She had a relaxed mothering style,” Janelle remembers. “Nothing frazzled her.”
    As taken as she was with Kari and Matt, when Janelle brought her father to meet the Bakers, he said something strange afterward: “Be careful, Janelle. Matt Baker isn’t what he seems. He’s one of those pastors who is full of the devil.”
    Janelle brushed it off, but at times she did have a strange feeling about Matt. She’d hear him complain about church members, bitterly mocking them, in a way that didn’t seem consistent with a man of God.
    Yet there was that other side to Matt. “Matt was a preacher not a pastor. He wasn’t warm and welcoming, but he was great up on the stage, giving sermons. He and my husband became friends. He laughed and joked with us,” says Janelle. “And he really was a good dad. I kept thinking that my dad had to be wrong. That Matt couldn’t be a bad person.”
    That summer, a strange thing happened: Pornography popped up on Matt and Kari’s home computer. “Why would that happen?” Kari asked Linda, who had no answer.
    Kari had the hard drive cleaned, but the computer was slow, and she worried that Kensi would see the images. Rather than take the risk, Kari bought a new computer and gave the infected laptop to her brother, Adam, who was in graduate school. But after a few months, Adam complained that the laptop was so slow, it was nearly worthless. On his next trip home, he gave the computer to their father. Deployed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio that summer, Jim took the laptop with him. Once on base, he asked a computer guru friend if he could increase its speed.
    “This thing is packed with porn,” the friend told him, after inspecting it. “It’s so bad, it’s embedded in the hard drive. Porn like you wouldn’t believe.”
    When Matt heard, he shrugged, and said, “Well, Adam’s a college kid.”
    Yet, when Linda asked her son, Adam pointed out that he hadn’t used it on the Net, only to do word processing. “I’m smarter than that,” he said. “I didn’t do it.”
    Not knowing what to think but never considering that their Baptist minister son-in-law could be viewing pornography, Jim simply discarded the laptop.

Chapter 10
    A round, soft, bundle with soft wisps of blond hair and big blue eyes, Kassidy continued to be an easy baby, one who wore a perpetual smile and who didn’t balk when Kari passed her around to the other women in church. Kensi was so taken with her baby sister, she called her “My Kassidy.”
    Based on outward appearances, the second of the Baker girls was thriving. So much so that she’d never even required an aspirin during that first year of life. In mid-November 1998, Barbara and Oscar drove in from Kerrville, and Kari’s family gathered to celebrate Kassidy’s first birthday. It was after presents and birthday candles that Kassidy threw up. That didn’t seem too startling. “We wrote it off as too much cake,” Barbara would say.
    The next morning at the parsonage, Barbara took a photo of Kassidy before she and Oscar drove home. “Afterward, I looked at it and thought that she didn’t look right, just kind of sick. In her eyes, it was like things weren’t all right.”
    That Sunday afternoon, Kassidy vomited again, and it continued throughout the day. The following morning, Kari and Matt bundled up their daughters and went to the pediatrician, who diagnosed the infant with a “stomach bug.” Telling them to give her lots of fluids, the pediatrician sent Matt and Kari home. But Kassidy didn’t improve.
    On that Wednesday, Matt called his mother. “There’s something not right with Kassidy,” he said. “We’ve been up all night trying to get fluids in her with a dropper and she’s still throwing up. She can’t sit up.”
    Later that day,