“He never said that was what happened,” Cindy said.
“Maybe not. But how do you think he would have felt if that was what had happened? How would he have reacted to such a shocking, illogical thing? Would he have called the police about it?”
“Or would he have filled in the blanks,” Cindy finished softly. “Would he have just explained it away by saying she had gone to visit someone or to run an errand, and she’d be back soon?”
“It could have happened that way,” Erin said. “This might be exactly the same thing that happened to your mother.”
Cindy shook her head. “People don’t just disappear into thin air.”
“No, they don’t,” Vic agreed. “So let’s start making lists of how she could have disappeared. If this farm swallowed up two people, where did they go?”
Cindy turned her head to look out the window, across the lawn of weeds and drying, hardy grasses, toward the driveway.
“All she had to do is walk across the yard. She couldn’t have just fallen into a hole.”
“A hole,” Vic repeated. “Is there… an old well on the property? A bore hole? A sink hole? A crevasse?”
“There have been several wells,” Cindy said, her brow knitting. “One will stop producing, so another is dug…”
“Where are the old wells?” Vic asked. “Are they covered? Filled in?”
“Yes. Of course. It would be too dangerous to leave them open.”
“What if the dirt that filled them in has settled or washed away again? What if the hole opened back up?”
“That couldn’t happen,” Cindy scoffed. “We would have known. We would have seen it.”
“But what if you didn’t see it. What if someone stepped into it without seeing?”
Cindy shook her head. “They would be hollering for help when we went out looking for them. If a well needed to be filled in twenty years ago… someone would have noticed it.”
“You get around here on the roads, mostly. What if it wasn’t near a road?”
Cindy continued to shake her head, but Erin thought that Vic had a good point. She pulled out a notebook and wrote down the idea. Well hole.
“What about other kinds of holes?” Vic asked. “Anyone digging for oil or mineral deposits? Even just a couple of core samples?” Vic held up her hands, forming a six-inch circle for reference. “Over the years, the rain and erosion could widen it into something much bigger.”
“Not on our land.”
Erin heard the emphasis on our. Maybe Vic was onto something.
“Someone else’s land? The Wares or some other neighbor?”
“Robert Ware… his daddy was sure there was riches in the land. Not in growing on it or raising animals on it. But in mineral deposits… underground mines.”
“Are there any mines near here?” Vic asked excitedly. “Near the house?”
“No, no. Robert Ware. His daddy wanted to drill holes. What did he call them? Sample holes?”
“Test holes.”
Cindy nodded. “Yes. Test holes. On his property.”
“Did they find anything?”
Cindy wrinkled her nose. “The Wares are as poor as dirt. Do you think they’d still be living like that if they had found minerals? There’s nothing out here but limestone and shale.”
“Were there any natural caves?” Erin tried. “Where people go exploring or mining?”
“Spelunking,” Vic corrected.
“There’s all kinds of caves and tunnels through the mountain,” Cindy said. “It’s like Swiss cheese. But we fill in any entrances that appear.”
At Erin’s baffled look, she explained further.
“We fill them in to keep the goats out. Goats are very curious creatures. You don’t want a goat falling down into some cave and getting killed or climbing down and getting stuck. Especially not if he calls all of the other goats and they go to see what’s happened to him too. When you make a living off of your livestock, you can’t take chances. If there are caves or wells or bore holes, we fill them in.” Vic and Erin followed Cindy’s gaze back out the window. “There are no holes between the driveway and the house.”
“But what if something attracted Bella’s attention,” Vic suggested. “What if she saw a cat, or a wounded animal, or some predator, and she chased after it into the woods?” Vic gestured to the thick trees on the other side of the parking pad. “If she ran into the woods and didn’t look down in time to see a hole that had opened up…”
“The men have been searching the perimeter of the house all day. What do you think they’ve been doing?”
A fair question, Erin supposed. She wrote these other options down in her notebook. What if two decades before, the ground had opened up and swallowed Martha Prost? Traumatized, her husband had made up a story to explain her disappearance. No one had ever looked for the hole she had fallen down. Then twenty years later, Bella had walked into the same hole, chasing after the silver-gray cat or something else. It had a certain sense to it.
“A hole like that doesn’t need to be very big,” Erin said. “You read about young children falling down wells, and they’re not talking about big holes two feet across. They’re talking about four or six-inch pipes. For an adult Bella’s size, that might translate to…?” She looked at Vic for help.
“I have no idea,” Vic said apologetically. “But it wouldn’t have to look that big. With grass and weeds growing over it, you might not see anything more than a depression in the ground, and not realize that there was a hole.”
“We need to do a grid search like on TV,” Erin determined, “where they poke sticks into the ground. Like when they’re looking for an avalanche victim.”
“You think my mother fell into a hole and no one ever found her?” Cindy demanded.
“It’s possible. No one combed the woods when she went missing. And in the twenty years since, have you ever done a thorough search of the whole property? There are other options too. A hole is just one possibility. She might have chased after an animal and had a heart attack, and nobody found her body in the thick undergrowth. Scavengers might have—” Vic cut herself off. There was no benefit to filling Cindy’s mind with gruesome images. There were large predators in the woods. There were smaller scavengers. Animals that would make short work of a body if allowed to work undisturbed. In a few days, there would be little left but bones, which would quickly be overgrown with foliage.
“Bella didn’t have a heart attack,” Cindy said. “Bella is as healthy as a horse. She’s only seventeen, and she’s strong and capable. She wouldn’t have gone off chasing something in the woods when it was almost time to go into work. She’s always very concerned about getting to the bakery in time.”
Erin nodded and gave Cindy a warm smile. “She’s a very responsible girl. Very hard worker. You should be proud of that.”
Cindy didn’t respond with a smile of her own. Erin shouldn’t have expected her to. The woman had just lost her daughter. Expecting her to act like a proud, doting parent in the midst of her loss was ridiculous.
“Does anyone trap in these woods?” Vic asked. “Have there been any animal sightings that anyone has been concerned about? She could have gotten caught in a trap someone had put out for a bear or cougar.”
“No.” Cindy shook her head as if this were just too much. “No one would put traps on our property.”
“And Bella wouldn’t have gone onto someone else’s property?”
Cindy shrugged. “We’re not like that with our neighbors. When I was little, Robert Ware would yell at me and threaten me if he thought I’d been on his land. Believe me, I was always careful not to trespass. But he’s mellowed out and he’s kind to Bella, and nowadays there isn’t anyone around here who would give us a lick of trouble for going on a stroll and crossing a property line.”
“They’re all pretty clearly marked anyway, aren’t they?” Erin said, remembering the white fence out past the cemetery. “There are fences.”
“My fath
er was always very particular about fences,” Cindy agreed, nodding. “He always made sure that they were in good repair, every year, making sure that nothing was broken or cut. If he thought a fence had been moved, even a couple of inches, he would be on the phone and making threats.” Cindy gave a little shudder. Not being melodramatic, Erin didn’t think. The memory actually did make her cringe.
“Ezekiel had a temper, didn’t he?” she asked.
“I thought you believed he didn’t know what happened to my mother.”
“I do believe it. Or I’m willing to consider it, since there’s no real way to know one way or the other. I was just… observing.” Erin hesitated to share anything more personal, especially in front of the other women, but decided to chance it. “I was a foster kid,” she said. “I’ve been in more than one home where… the dad was real mean. Sometimes physically abusive, sometimes not. But even the ones who didn’t hit still scared the heck out of me.”
“We breed them tougher than that out here,” Lottie sneered. “It’s not like the city where everyone is so sensitive. You can’t raise your voice at a child these days without being accused of being abusive.”
Erin had been watching Cindy for her reaction. Cindy looked toward her friend, but didn’t agree with her comments. Her face remained a mask. She looked at Erin.
“He had a temper,” she agreed, ignoring the rest of the conversation. “That doesn’t mean he would have done anything to my mother, I could never picture him killing in a fit of rage. He’d never struck her in front of me. But he was very… opinionated, and very protective of the family’s property and rights. He wasn’t about to let anything interfere with the running of the farm and our ability to make a living. He and the neighbors were often getting into fights over boundary lines, water rights, timber, deadfall… In the time that it’s been just me and Bella here, it’s been much quieter. We have a much better relationship with the neighbors now, more cooperative instead of competitive.” She shrugged. “With men, it’s all about who’s the bigger dog. Women do things differently. Daddy might not have approved of how I’ve handled negotiations, but I think he’d be happy with the farm and the way that it’s running.”
Erin tried to picture Ezekiel and how he had related to his family, neighbors, and the townspeople. The tall, spare man she had seen in the pictures had not been a self-effacing, soft-spoken farmer. He’d been an alpha male, standing guard over his territory, making sure his family and property were protected. How would he have reacted if Martha had said she was leaving him? The children were gone, and it was just the two of them; maybe he had decided the situation had become intractable. She had no more reason to stay with him.
But that didn’t fit the facts. Not if Bella’s disappearance was related to the disappearance of her grandmother. It was an accident or mishap. A fall, an unexpected injury. Or maybe something darker—was it possible there had been something more malevolent at work? Blackmail, jealousy, an affair. Some secret that was still important to keep even twenty years later. She’d seen it play out several times in Bald Eagle Falls. What made them think that Martha Prost’s disappearance was any different?
“When you went through your parents’ things after your dad died, was there any hint that either of them had had an affair? Or had been hiding some other secret?”
Cindy rolled her eyes. “Now the smear campaign starts. I thought you were going to be different because you said he might not have done it, but you’re just going right back to it all being his fault.”
“No, I’m not,” Erin protested. “I’m just looking at the facts, trying to figure out what might have happened.”
“Bella’s disappearance has nothing to do with my father. He died almost twenty years ago. I don’t know why Bell was so obsessed with the two of them lately. It’s a dark part of my life I would like to just forget. I don’t understand why she needed to bring it all up and make a big deal of it. Some things are better just forgotten”
Chapter Nineteen
I
t was a long day, especially since Vic and Erin had started so early and had been working extra hours lately getting the freezer stocked. They met with Terry and Willie and the others who were in the police department or had been asked to help with the search, coming in from the forests surrounding the farm house as night fell and they couldn’t continue their search. Their faces were grim, voices low. They obviously had not found Bella nor any clear sign of what had happened to her. K9 nosed at Erin and whined when he saw her, not something he usually did. He was obviously just as tired and footsore as the men. Erin rubbed his head and fetched a water bottle out of the car for him to drink. Terry looked down at K9 as Erin fussed over him, obviously too exhausted to do anything.
“You didn’t find anything?” Erin asked, even though it was clear in their faces. “No sign of what happened?”
Terry slid the backpack he wore off his shoulder and dug out a bag. “Was this Bella’s?”
Erin looked down at the locket in the evidence bag. “That was her grandma’s.”
Terry’s shoulders sagged. “Her grandma’s? It hasn’t been out in the elements for twenty years. It’s not weathered.”
“No. It was in Cindy’s bedroom before. Bella got it out for Reg, when she wanted something to… help her connect with Grandma Prost’s ghost.” Erin gave an uncomfortable shrug, an attempt to apologize for Reg’s actions.
“When was this?”
“The day that Reg and I came out here. Last Friday.”
“Did she drop it that day? Lose it somewhere?”
“No, not that she mentioned. I remember her taking it back from Reg in the barn, but after that… she must have put it in her pocket.”
“Did you see her with it any time after that? Did she wear it?”
Erin closed her eyes, trying to envision it. Ask her about smells and tastes, and she could recollect perfectly. Visual input was harder for her. Bella hadn’t talked about the locket again after that, Erin was pretty sure of that. But had she worn it?
“I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t wear jewelry while we’re baking. Anything we wear has to be taken off, so Vic and I don’t generally bother to wear anything in. Bella comes here after school, so sometimes she has jewelry that needs to be removed. She’s pretty good about remembering to do it before she starts to work.” Erin tried to picture Bella taking the locket off and putting it into the pencil box she used to corral such odds and ends. She could see rings and bracelets in her mind’s eye, but not the locket. “No… I don’t remember her wearing it.”
“How about when you were out here with Vic. You guys toured all the main points of interest?”
“Yes. We started at the house, and then she gave us a tour around the property. The pastures, the goat barn, all that. Where did you find the locket?”
“Was she wearing it that day?”
“I don’t think so. She didn’t want her mom to know that she had taken it the day that Reg was here, so I would have expected her just to put it back in the jewelry box. I don’t remember ever seeing her wearing it.”
“But she could have had it under her shirt instead of over.”
“Yes, sure. No one would know it was anything other than a chain.”
“Or Cindy could have been wearing it,” Vic suggested. “It was hers.”
Terry nodded slowly. “It’s a possibility,” he agreed. “How much did she tell you about her mother’s disappearance?”
“The basics,” Erin told him. “I didn’t feel like she was telling us everything. Maybe that’s not fair, but I thought there was more to it than she would say… especially about her dad. Not necessarily that he knew what had happened to her mother or had been involved, just that… there was a lot of family history that she didn’t want to talk about. Things about her dad. Maybe about both of them.”
“History of domestic violence?”
“She said he had never hit Martha in front of Cindy. But she’s ambivalent on whether she tho
ught he was violent with her in private. He was a disciplinarian when Cindy was a child. Physically punished her.”
“Are you going to organize a bigger search in the morning?” Vic asked. “Get volunteers from town and do a grid search? I wondered if she could have had an accident, fallen down an old well or a crevasse…”
“Maybe.” Terry wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, looking utterly exhausted. “We’ll have to decide that in the next few hours.”
“Where did you find the necklace?” Erin asked. “Was it near the house?”
“No.”
“I’m amazed you found it. With all of the thick underbrush, it could have disappeared forever. Cindy will be very glad you found it.”
Terry said nothing.
“It was…” Erin tried to pin down further details. “Was it dropped along a pathway? Or did it get caught on something? Is it broken?” Erin hadn’t even thought to look when Terry had shown it to her.
“It isn’t broken,” Terry advised. “It wasn’t caught or torn off.”
Erin felt her body loosen a little, relieved that there was no indication of violence.
“So it just fell out of her pocket while she was working. Do you think she lost it today? Or sometime in the last few days?”
Terry hesitated, seriously considering his answer. Erin looked over at Vic to see if she thought this was odd behavior.
“It wasn’t dropped,” Terry said finally. “It appeared to be deliberately placed.”
“Deliberately…?”
“It was looped around the corner of Ezekiel’s gravestone.”
Erin blinked, surprised by this. Eventually, she shrugged. “I guess that’s a logical place to put it. Sort of a memorial for Martha, reuniting her and Ezekiel. Reg told Bella they should be together, but no one knows what happened to Martha, so she couldn’t be interred there…”
Something tickled at the back of Erin’s brain, but she couldn’t quite grasp it. She shook her head.
Coup de Glace Page 14