Maggie shrugged. “It’s good to get out of the house, honestly. I am really grateful to you, for helping my mother that day. I know you probably didn’t expect to get roped into babysitting a dog outside the hospital when you woke up that morning.”
“Life does have a way of surprising us,” I said. “But don’t even mention it. I was happy to help. Other than a little bit of poison ivy, I was no worse for wear.” I casually reached into my computer bag, feeling past loose change and hair ties until I landed on something pen-shaped. “So tell me what’s on your mind.”
Maggie rubbed her forehead. “Well, I don’t know how to say it, so I’ll just say it. I don’t think my mother fell into that ravine. I know she didn’t.”
“How do you know?” I said gently.
“My mother loved the outdoors. She’d hiked the Grand Canyon rim to rim, Bryce, the PCT. All just in the last few years. She was an experienced hiker.”
I tried to write that on my notebook, but the pen scratched inklessly across the yellow paper.
“And Highbanks is not, how do I say it.”
“It’s not Bryce Canyon.”
She smiled faintly. “No. It’s not. I mean, she took the dog with her on the trail. It was hardly a real hike.”
“How’s the dog?”
Maggie shook her head. “He was always sort of weird around people other than my mom. Skittish, but also aggressive. But after that, he started going after people constantly. He ripped a sweater of mine, trying to bite me, and he actually drew blood from James. I wanted to keep him but with the baby, I was just afraid something worse would happen eventually. So I found him a new home.”
“Do you think there’s a chance she tripped over him at the park? You mentioned something like that at the hospital.”
Maggie sighed. “I don’t know. I know I’ve certainly tripped on the little dummy. Apparently dogs aren’t even allowed on that trail, maybe for that very reason. But she took him with her on little walks all the time.”
“Okay, so you don’t buy the tripping theory. Not over the dog, and not over her own feet due to being an experienced hiker.”
“No,” Maggie said, her nostrils flaring a little. “Plus, she wasn’t a careless person. She was a nurse. I never even knew her to cut herself accidentally while chopping onions.”
I tapped the impotent pen on my notebook. “Where did she work as a nurse?”
“A private school, Horizons Academy. Part-time. But listen, it’s not just that I don’t believe she tripped. There are a few other things. Weird things.”
“Okay.”
“Her phone is missing.”
“What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t with her things, the things she had with her that day. And not in the car, either. So what happened to it?”
“Maybe she dropped it, when she fell?”
“Oh. Maybe.”
“Sometimes the answer really is that obvious, but sometimes it isn’t. What else?”
“The police—well, listen. She didn’t live down here. She was down here to help me finish the nursery—she lives up in Toledo.”
I tried to scratch in Toledo, waiting to hear the part about the police. “Okay.”
“I told all of this to the Delaware County officer but he didn’t seem to think much of it. His name was Monterrey, or Montero something like that. I’m sure I’d remember his name if he’d actually cared, you know?”
I nodded.
“Anyway, apparently, the day it happened, the police were at her house up there. That afternoon. Mom’s neighbor told me. Her name is Arlene French.” She reached into her own bag and handed me a pen without pausing. “I have no idea what they were doing at the house, and they won’t tell me.”
Functioning pen in hand, I quickly jotted down a few notes. “They won’t tell you?”
She shook her head. “That brings me to the last thing. Her ex-husband, Keir Metcalf. They’ve been separated for years but just finalized the divorce in January.”
“So she changed her last name back after the divorce?”
Maggie shook her head. “Newsome is my maiden name, my father’s last name. My mother kept it, even after she married Keir. Yet another thing they fought about. Their relationship got a little ugly. So that’s why I think he might know something. Of course, he’s like this with the police department up there.” She held up two crossed fingers. “He’s a former cop. And an asshole.”
“A current asshole, I take it.”
Maggie gave me half of a smile. “Yes.”
“Is your father still in the picture?”
She shook her head. “My father abandoned us when I was a baby. I’ve had like three conversations with him in my life. He’s long out of the picture.”
“And you think, what, your former stepdad might have been involved in what happened to your mom?”
“Stepdad,” she muttered. “Yeah, I do.”
“Anything concrete behind that? Threats, an ongoing dispute?”
“All I know is that there was a lot of bad blood between him and my mom, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I think about it all day, every day. Wondering. My husband says he’s afraid the baby is going to pick up on it, my anxiety. And anger. He walked in on me talking on the phone to someone in the Delaware County coroner’s office the other day while I was—” She stopped, blushing faintly. “I was breastfeeding her. I wasn’t thinking. But I need to not be doing that anymore. The anger I carry can’t be good for my child.”
I nodded. I knew exactly what she was after. “You want to give custody of that anger to somebody else. Outsource the worrying about it.”
“I have this whole giant Dropbox folder of stuff that I can share with you. Like the autopsy report. And the hospital stuff. I keep looking through it, over and over.” Her baby began to squirm in the carrier beside her. “I just need to stop. For her.” She lifted the baby—swaddled in pink and brown polka dots—into her arms and peeled back the outermost layer of blanket, revealing a pruny, round face.
“Aw,” I said, sensing that it was expected. “What’s her name?”
“Beatrix,” Maggie said. “Bea for short.”
“Hi, baby Bea.”
“Do you want to hold her?”
I put the borrowed pen down. “If you need a break, I am happy to hold your baby. My ovaries do not ache to do so, however.”
Maggie laughed. “I think that’s the most honest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I try.”
She stood up and plopped the baby into my arms. “I’m like that about other people’s kids. I always was. And then when she was born, when I first saw her—it was like a switch flipped in my brain, it turned on this animal instinct. You always hear about maternal instincts, a mother’s love and all. Love isn’t even the right word. It’s so much fiercer than that. It’s like I immediately knew that I would kill for her. Isn’t that effed up?”
I jostled baby Bea, hoping she wouldn’t start screaming. “No, I think that’s honest too.”
“I’ll never get the chance to ask my mother if that was how she felt, too.”
“I’m so sorry.”
We looked at each other for a long time.
“Do you think you can help?”
“I can’t promise I’ll find anything,” I said, “but I can promise to take care of looking.”
Maggie nodded. “That will be a huge relief.”
* * *
I knew I had saved the business card the sheriff’s deputy gave me that afternoon at the hospital. I knew because I hadn’t done laundry for a minute, so it had to be in a pair of jeans in my apartment somewhere. The problem was, I had a lot of somewheres in my apartment. I spent a while digging through a basket in my dining room, checking pockets without success. Then I spotted the plum-colored coat at the bottom of the basket. I hadn’t worn it since that day—tainted—but now I figured it was safe to wear it again, even if the business card wasn’t in its pockets either.
&n
bsp; I heard voices in the backyard, followed by the telltale rattle of a spray paint can. I pulled the coat on and dashed outside, but it was just Shelby, my upstairs neighbor and surrogate niece, and her friend Miriam, at work on a patchwork of pink and white poster boards in the rough grass.
“Craft hour?” I said.
Shelby grinned at me and peeled up a heavily duct-taped stencil to show me her handiwork: WOMEN’S BODIES ARE MORE REGULATED THAN GUNS. “There’s a gathering at the statehouse tomorrow, so we’re making signs.”
The current round of attacks on women’s health clinics were indeed disturbing. I nodded to Miriam. “What does yours say?”
“It’s not as good.” Shelby’s friend held up her sign, a more modest PROTECT REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS in black paint. “I wanted to make uterus cookies but I guess those aren’t going to be very impactful.”
“I told her she should make some anyway. In case Constance is there.”
“Constance Can is not going to eat cookies that some random girl made. Even if they’re delicious and perfectly shaped. Right, Roxane?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think she’s going to have a Royal Taster or anything like that, so you’re probably right.”
Constance Archer-Nash was a homegrown lightning rod, a thirtysomething tech entrepreneur who’d gotten fed up with the way politics in Ohio were going and decided to challenge Rob Portman for the Senate seat he’d held for nearly a decade. Overnight she became a household name, with videos of her speeches going viral and thousands of people in line to hear her speak at events. Her campaign materials all said “Constance CAN”—her initials—in bold pink letters.
“I think both signs are instant classics,” I said. “But what about the rest?”
Shelby looked down at the unpainted cards at her feet. “Extras in case there are people who don’t have signs.”
Miriam gestured at the small village of spray paint cans standing at attention in the yard. “You know our Shel. Pathologically generous.”
“That’s a good thing to be. Well, have fun, don’t inhale.”
“Love you, mean it,” Shelby said.
I went back inside and sat down at my desk. It was emptier than it used to be, given that I’d moved my printer and a lot of random paperwork into the office. Now the front room of my apartment felt like a space recently vacated by someone. Me, I supposed. I’d thought that creating some separation between home and work would allow me to focus better while working and relax more at home. Specifically, that I could stop reliving the blurry memory of Elise Hazlett drowning in front of me earlier in the year, her icy blue skin and white teeth and pink puffer coat sinking into darkness.
It was more than just that memory, though. Everything about winter felt wrong and bad. Only bad things happened when it was cold out, as it was becoming now. Elise Hazlett. Catherine’s decision to move to the East Coast with or without me—or, rather, definitely without me, since she hadn’t even broached the subject before deciding. And my father’s death, of course, the thing that split my life into two halves and divided time now into the months leading up to the anniversary and the months looking back at it.
Like a change of scenery could come close to touching any of that.
It seemed stupid, but I’d signed a yearlong lease. So it would continue to be stupid at least until April.
Maybe until then, I would convert my front room into a home gym.
The thought made me laugh out loud.
CHAPTER 3
“I gave you the password for this.” Kez rolled her eyes at me when she came by the office after her exam. “Did you even try?”
I looked over her shoulder at the website she had built for me. “You know I can’t keep track of passwords. I mean, obviously.” Despite my very irregular use of the office, I had still managed to make an impressive pile of papers.
Kez rolled her eyes harder. “I didn’t write it on paper, Jesus, I emailed it to you.”
“Email is even worse.”
“Are you ninety years old?” Kez said, even though I knew her to be a year older than me.
“Any day now.”
She grinned at me and clicked a few keys. “There. Done. Office hours are a thing of the past. Is that all you called me over here for?”
“Actually,” I said, pulling myself into a sitting position on the ugly love seat, “no. We have a case.”
Kez leaned back in my desk chair and put her Doc Martens up on the paperwork mountain. “Tell me.”
Kezia Denniere wasn’t interested in investigative work long-term—her real interest was in bail-bonds enforcement—but she had a record, something that made it hard for her to line up a criminal-justice practicum as required for her degree from Columbus State. A felony-weight drug-possession bust will do that to a person, even if the only thing she’d been guilty of was terrible taste in boyfriends given that he left her high and dry to serve a one-year prison sentence. But that had been a long time ago, and I could tell Kez was scrappy and smart when I met her on a case at the beginning of the year. So I was willing to sign off on her hours in exchange for some tech help and the occasional backup.
I explained about Maggie and her mother and the very full Dropbox folder.
“You want me to read an autopsy report?”
I was paying her twenty bucks an hour but felt weird about asking her to actually do things. “Or you can pull some background on Keir Metcalf.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna do that one instead.”
She turned back to my laptop. I watched the screen as my own website was replaced by that of AA Security and Investigations in Perrysburg, Ohio. “Ew. Somebody else needs a web designer, I see.”
“Is there no such thing as loyalty anymore?”
Kez clicked on the About tab and pulled up a photo of Rebecca’s ex-husband. He was a standard-issue ex-law-enforcement type: salt-and-pepper buzz cut, sharp jawline, the sort of bulk that could be fat or menacingly muscular depending on his mood. He wore a neutral expression and a polo shirt embroidered with his own name.
“Trust me,” Kez said, “I have no desire whatsoever to work for someone like this. And I am sure the feeling is mutual.”
“Find out what you can about him,” I said, “and I’ll take the autopsy report.”
“Do I get paid extra for this?”
“No.”
She shrugged. When I met her back in January, she was working at the desk of a shitty hotel in Whitehall and selling stuff left behind in the rooms on eBay. “Worth a shot. I gotta go, but I can come in tomorrow morning. Cute coat, love the useless zippers.”
“They’re not useless,” I said as she left, demonstrating by unzipping the breast pocket. And there it was—the business card I’d been looking for.
Deputy Carter Montoya. I left him yet another voice mail, imagining my three messages as the only ones he’d ever received. Maybe it wasn’t anything personal; maybe he didn’t know his passwords either.
Modern life was hard.
* * *
Autopsy reports aren’t especially gross—just boring. The first line contained a succinct summary of what I would find if I pored over the entire forty-page document: From the anatomic findings and pertinent history I ascribe the death to: intracranial hemorrhage due to traumatic brain injury. The mode of death was listed as Accidental.
I skimmed through a physical description of Rebecca’s body—laceration at right temple, abrasions on palms and knees, bruised hip, fractured wrist, fractured clavicle, allergic contact dermatitis on hands, ankle, and neck, old scars on abdomen (cesarean) and lumbar (laminectomy and spinal fusion). I was obviously no forensic pathologist, but all of that seemed consistent with a fall over a steep embankment.
Especially the allergic contact dermatitis—the fancy name for the poison ivy that had plagued me for three solid weeks after the incident.
I stood up and closed my eyes, trying to picture myself on the trail. Would Rebecca have been holding the dog’s leash in her right
hand, or her left? I opened my eyes and flipped through the autopsy report; the coroner had noted more developed musculature in her right arm. So she was right-handed, but I wasn’t sure what that meant in terms of holding a leash. I looked out my window onto Gay Street and spotted a man with a leashed pit mix in the crosswalk at Third Street. He had the leash in his left hand. Statistically speaking, he was probably a righty. So I held the imaginary leash in my left hand and closed my eyes again, picturing the golden-orange forest and the sloped hiking trail. If Rebecca had been going down the path, the area to which she fell was to her left.
But the majority of the injury had occurred on the right side of her body.
I turned around, eyes still closed, and imagined walking up the hill instead. This put the ravine on her right, which made more sense. But why would she have been going up the hill already, given that she’d just set out on the path a few minutes before?
I sat back down at my desk and flipped through the autopsy report again. If Rebecca had stumbled on the path—with enough force to cause her to fall and become unable to stop herself—wouldn’t there be an ankle or knee injury? She had the skinned knee and bruised hip, but no swelling or ligament damage to indicate a twisted ankle or blown ACL. I reread the description of her broken wrist: fractured distal radius with volar displacement.
I had no idea what that meant.
A quick Google search told me this was also known as a Smith’s fracture, an injury that specifically occurs in a fall on a flexed wrist. I held up a hand and bent my palm toward my body, then away. Which was flexion and which was extension? I was clearly out of my element here, and not just in terms of the pathology report. Trying to solve a mystery that I myself had more or less witnessed when it happened was going to be difficult, if not impossible. If I hadn’t noticed anything suspicious all those weeks earlier, I didn’t know how I was going to find anything at this point.
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