Her Mother’s Grave_Absolutely gripping crime fiction with unputdownable mystery and suspense

by Lisa Regan

  “What were you guys doing in there?” Noah asked.

  “Playing,” Kyle answered. His eyes were still wide and wary.

  Troy jumped away from his mom and mimicked holding a rifle, spinning around and squinting one eye as though he were looking through the sights. “We were playing war!”

  “War?” Gretchen asked.

  Maureen rolled her eyes and tried to gather Troy back to her side. “They’ve been watching the military channel. They’re obsessed.”

  Noah raised a brow. “The military channel?”

  Troy said, “We wanted to make foxholes. Like in the World Wars.”

  Josie glanced at his older brother, but he said nothing. “Where did you get the shovels?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Rhodes,” Troy said.

  Finally, Kyle spoke. “We borrowed her gardening shovels. She said it was okay.”

  Maureen chewed her bottom lip. “Boys, really. You shouldn’t be bothering Mrs. Rhodes with stuff like that. Why can’t you just play video games till I get home?”

  Josie said, “How many foxholes did you dig?”

  “Three,” answered Troy. “We stopped when we found the, you know, bones.”

  “How far down?” Josie asked, looking directly at Kyle.

  The older boy shrugged. “When we stand in them, they come up to about here.” He pointed to his solar plexus. So, a few feet down.

  “Which one of you decided to bring one of the bones home?” Noah asked.

  From the flush of young Troy’s face, Josie knew it had been him. Neither boy answered. Maureen gave them each a stern look. “Boys, you answer the policeman.”

  “You’re not in any trouble,” Gretchen told them. “We’re just trying to put together exactly what happened.”

  Troy looked to his brother, but Kyle’s gaze had dropped to the asphalt. With a sigh, he said, “It was my idea. I didn’t think Mrs. Rhodes would believe us. But as soon as I showed her, she called 911 and told us to stay away from the woods.”

  “Did one of you show Detective Palmer where the body was when she got here?” Josie asked.

  Both boys nodded, and haltingly, Kyle raised a hand.

  “Lieutenant Fraley tells me the piece of the skeleton you brought back was a jaw bone,” Josie said. “Tell me, was it loose already? Separated from the skull? Or did you break it off?”

  The two boys looked at one another. The older brother chewed on the nail of one of his index fingers.

  “It’s okay either way,” Josie told them. “Even if you broke it off, you won’t be in trouble. We just need to know so that we can tell what happened to these bones before, and after, you uncovered them. You understand?”

  Young Troy nodded. “You want to make sure the killer didn’t do it!” he exclaimed.

  His mother swatted his shoulder. “Troy!”

  “It’s okay,” Josie said. “We don’t actually know what happened, but it helps us to figure it out if we know all the details.”

  “We snapped it off,” Kyle said, his tone flat. He looked at his feet. “Sorry.”

  Gretchen smiled at them. “It’s fine,” she assured them. “Thank you for telling the truth.”

  She pulled a business card out and gave it to Maureen. Addressing the boys, she said, “If you think of anything else that might be important, you can give me a call. You will have to stay out of those woods though, at least until we’re finished gathering evidence, okay?”

  “That means no more foxholes,” Maureen told her children pointedly. She grabbed Troy by his collar and pushed him along, toward their trailer. Josie guessed it was the one next to Mrs. Rhodes’s trailer with two bicycles propped against its side.

  Once the three of them were inside the trailer, Gretchen clapped her hands together and looked at Noah and Josie. “Let’s go see what Dr. Feist has unearthed.”

  Chapter Six

  Josie hoisted herself over the gate and walked into the woods. Behind her, Gretchen and Noah followed, twigs snapping beneath their feet. The path was exactly as Josie remembered it, leading them deep into the trees before disappearing where the forest grew too dense. Josie stopped and turned back to Gretchen. “Which way?”

  Gretchen pointed to the left and Josie felt goosebumps erupt all over her body; the woods were nearly three miles long and yet she knew, almost instinctively, that they were heading toward the one section she dreaded revisiting the most. Wordlessly, Josie gestured for Gretchen to take the lead, and Noah fell in behind her. They picked their way through brush, weaving through the thick trunks of red maples and northern oaks to a giant Norway maple tree encircled with a strip of yellow crime-scene tape.

  Josie felt her stomach sink as she stopped abruptly, and Noah’s chest bumped into her back. “Boss?” he said.

  It was hard to say how she knew, how her body remembered, but it did. She had only been six when her father had shot himself beneath this tree. She wouldn’t have known which tree it was had her mother not insisted on marching her through the woods to look at it whenever she was feeling particularly cruel.

  Josie heard her mother’s voice like a whisper soughing through the leaves over her head. “This is where your precious daddy came to die.”

  Noah’s hand slid under Josie’s elbow, a gentle nudge. His voice was softer this time, meant only for her to hear. “Boss, you okay?”

  Josie gave her head a shake. “Fine,” she mumbled.

  Tearing her eyes from the tree, she counted up the three foxholes the Price boys had dug in a half circle around the base of the tree. The evidence response team moved around in white Tyvek suits with clipboards, cameras, and evidence flags, documenting everything.

  “Those don’t look like foxholes,” Josie said.

  “They were dug by kids, Boss,” Gretchen pointed out.

  The holes were sloppily dug, and the larger of the three, more of a rectangular shape, had been cordoned off with string and evidence flags. The voice of the county medical examiner, Dr. Anya Feist, floated out from inside the hole. “Chief? That you?”

  “I’m here,” Josie called. “What’ve you got down there?”

  Dr. Feist’s head shot up, a white evidence cap holding her silver-gold hair away from her face. A camera hung round her neck. “I’ll let you know. You just stay over there. I don’t need any more people traipsing around this hole. With all the rain we’ve had, the soil is pretty soft as is. I’ve just got to excavate without this damn thing collapsing on me.” She held up her gloved hands—in one was what looked like a paint brush, and in the other was a small trowel. “My assistant is on his way. He’s done this kind of work before. He’ll help. What I need you folks to do is keep everyone away from here. And to answer your question, Chief, there’s not much I can tell you until I get these bones back to the lab.”

  “You won’t even hazard a guess as to how long the body has been there?” Josie asked.

  Dr. Feist rolled her eyes but said, “Nothing but bones, a body buried this deep, unembalmed? My best guess is it’s been here at least eight years, probably longer. Could even be thirty or forty years. All I can tell you is the skull has a hell of a fracture.”

  Josie felt Noah’s eyes on her. She could practically hear his thoughts. Two years ago, Denton’s famous missing girls case had unearthed dozens of remains buried in a wooded area on a mountaintop and led to the discovery of two serial killers who had been operating in the area for decades. This scene felt like déjà vu. “It’s not related to the missing girls case,” she said. “We don’t even know it’s a woman.”

  He gave her a weak half-smile. “You can read my mind now?”

  Josie managed her own wan smile. “I’m getting better at it.” She motioned around them. “We’re at least fifteen miles away from the mountain where those girls’ bodies were found. This is something else.”

  Noah frowned. “We have no matching open missing persons files, Boss. None that would be old enough to be this decomposed.”

  “I know that,” Josie said
. She knew exactly how many missing persons cases there were in her city at that exact moment—and in the county. She even knew their names. Noah was right. The oldest open missing persons case they had was from three years ago, and that young man was a habitual drug user and had been deemed a runaway. She took a careful step forward, her shirt brushing the crime-scene tape, and peered over the edge of the hole where Dr. Feist was painstakingly carving dirt away from a skull. “Then it’s someone who hasn’t been reported missing. One way or another, we’ll find out.”

  Chapter Seven

  JOSIE – SIX YEARS OLD

  Josie’s heart skipped several beats until she realized it was just her daddy standing in the doorway. She ran to him, but he didn’t scoop her up and spin her around like he normally did. Instead, he placed a hand on top of her head and stared past her toward where her mother lay on the sofa. Josie turned to see a smile curve across her mother’s lips as her eyes fluttered open and closed. “Shit,” her mother said. “I thought you had to work.”

  “I do,” he said. “But I wanted to see—” he broke off. His hand moved to Josie’s shoulder, and he pushed her back toward the hallway, his eyes never leaving the sofa. Josie watched her parents stare at one another for a tense moment, and a strange shaky feeling started in her legs. The room felt full of something—something bad, but Josie didn’t know what.

  “Go to your room, JoJo,” her daddy said. “Now.”

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning, Josie, Noah, and Gretchen stood around a sheet-covered metal examination table in the Denton City Morgue. The drab, windowless room was situated in the basement of Denton Memorial Hospital, an ancient brick building on top of a hill that overlooked most of the city. Josie could never get used to the smell—a putrid combination of chemicals and decay. Beside her, Noah looked pale, almost green, while Gretchen, completely unaffected, looked almost bored. Josie remembered that Gretchen had seen a lifetime of autopsies during her tenure as a homicide detective with the Philadelphia Police Department before coming to Denton.

  Josie elbowed Noah lightly.

  “I’m fine,” he mumbled from the side of his mouth.

  Dr. Feist breezed in from the small office she shared with her assistant just off the main autopsy room. Her hair was tied back in a loose ponytail, and she now wore dark-blue scrubs. “I’ve already recorded my initial findings,” she told them with a smile. “So, I’ll allow questions.”

  Carefully, she removed the sheet. The bones seemed small and insubstantial lined up in a perfect body shape across the examination table. The dirt had all been brushed away from the bones, which now looked off-white. The four of them stood around the table sharing a moment of silence for the stranger who had been murdered and forgotten for so long that only the thin, yellowing framework remained.

  Josie knew before Dr. Feist even spoke that they were looking at the remains of a young woman; she had seen more than her share of female skeletons while concluding the case that had made her chief.

  “I believe we are looking at female remains,” Dr. Feist announced. “I’d estimate the height to be about five foot two, five foot three.” She pointed to the mandible, which had been separated from the skull. “The chin is rounded, where men tend to have more squared-off chins.” She pointed to the forehead. “The frontal bone is smooth and vertical. The mastoid process,” Dr. Feist’s finger moved to a small, conical bone behind the jaw, where the girl’s ear would have been, “which is this bone here that kind of protrudes where certain neck muscles attach to it. As you can see, it’s small. In men, it is very pronounced.”

  Gretchen scribbled on her notepad. Josie stepped forward and pointed to the pelvic bone. “The pelvis gives it away.”

  Dr. Feist smiled, her eyes alight, looking at Josie as though she were a prized pupil. “Yes, it does. Why is that, Chief?”

  Josie pointed to the pelvic girdle. “This opening here is broader and rounder—so women can give birth. Also, here, this angle—” she pointed to the bottom center of the pelvic bone.

  “The pubic arch,” Dr. Feist put in.

  “Right. This angle where the two sides meet is more obtuse in females. Greater than ninety degrees.”

  Noah said, “For childbirth as well?”

  Both Josie and the doctor nodded.

  “How old was she?” Gretchen asked, pen poised over her notepad.

  “Between sixteen and nineteen years old,” Dr. Feist replied.

  “That’s quite specific,” Noah remarked.

  “Well, the growth plates—or lack thereof—make it pretty easy to determine,” Dr. Feist said. “The long bones in the body have three parts: the diaphysis—that’s the shaft—the metaphysis, which is the part where it widens and flares at the end, and then the epiphysis, which is basically the end cap of the bone or the growth plate. In children, there is a gap between the epiphysis and the metaphysis.”

  Gretchen, busy sketching on her notepad, said, “You mean there’s a space between the growth plate and the knobby end of the bone.”

  Dr. Feist’s head bobbed from side to side. “Basically, yeah. As you get older, your growth plates and the ‘knobby end,’ as you call it, fuse together. The growth plates fuse at pretty predictable ages. For example, the epiphysis of the femur at the proximal end—that’s where the femur goes into the hip socket—fuses between ages fifteen and nineteen, give or take six months on each end.”

  One of her gloved fingers ran up the length of the girl’s right femur, stopping at the hip socket and pointing to the very top where the bone inserted into the pelvis. “It’s fused, which means she could have been as young as fifteen, fifteen and a half, and as old as nineteen or nineteen and a half.”

  “But you said sixteen,” Josie pointed out.

  “I’m estimating, of course,” Dr. Feist responded. “But the distal radius fuses at around sixteen, and hers are fused.” Her gloved finger found the long bone of the arm on the thumb side of the girl’s right hand. Touching the flared part where the radius met the intricate bones of the hand, Dr. Feist said, “No space. The epiphysis has fused to the metaphysis.”

  “When does the last growth plate fuse?” Gretchen asked.

  “The medial aspect of the clavicle fuses by age thirty at the latest,” Dr. Feist answered. “However, we don’t see epiphyseal fusion of either the medial or lateral aspect of the clavicle until age nineteen, and this young lady doesn’t have it.”

  Josie leaned in and peered at the girl’s collarbones.

  Noah ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “I’m trying to remember my college anatomy class.”

  “The lateral is the part that goes into the shoulder,” Gretchen said. “The medial attaches to the sternum.”

  “Show-off,” Noah muttered.

  Gretchen kept her head down, her pen sketching the skeleton at a furious pace.

  “That’s correct,” Dr. Feist said. “More or less.” She pointed to the gap between the epiphysis and the metaphysis on each end of the collarbones. “If she were nineteen or older, these growth plates would be fused.”

  “So, this is a teenage girl,” Josie said, acid in her stomach fizzing.

  “Yes,” Dr. Feist agreed. “It’s possible to estimate a year on either side of the range—perhaps fifteen to twenty—but I believe you’re looking at a sixteen- to nineteen-year-old female. Oh, and this teenage girl gave birth at least once.”

  Josie could see by Dr. Feist’s raised brow and amused smile that she enjoyed tossing out that little surprise. Hands on her hips, Josie matched the doctor’s expression and said, “Just how can you tell that this girl gave birth?”

  Dr. Feist beckoned them all closer to the table. They gathered round, and she pointed to one of the flat planes of pelvic bone, where Josie could make out a smattering of small holes roughly the size of shotgun pellets. “It’s called parturition scarring, or pitting,” Dr. Feist said.

  “Par-nutrition?” Noah said.

  “Parturition,” Dr. Feist co
rrected slowly. “Childbirth. When a woman gives birth, her pubic bones separate to allow the baby to fit through, and sometimes the ligaments attached to the bones tear and leave these small scars. It’s not always one hundred percent accurate, but in a girl this young, I’d say these are from her having given birth.”

  Josie frowned. “No way to tell how old she was when she had her baby—or anything about the baby?”

  “I’m sorry, Chief, but no. All I can tell you is that she had a baby before she died.”

  “Maybe someone killed her and took her baby,” Gretchen suggested.

  Dr. Feist shrugged. “I can’t speculate on why she was murdered or what happened to her child—but she was definitely murdered. You can see the fracture better now that she’s cleaned up.”

  She moved around to the head of the table and reached up, adjusting the large, circular lamp that hung from the ceiling so that its beams shone directly onto the girl’s skull. Josie shuffled closer to Dr. Feist, and Noah and Gretchen followed, craning their necks to see the top of the skull. “See these,” Dr. Feist said, pointing to faint squiggly lines running down the center of the skull from front to back and then across the front from temple to temple. “These are called sutures. They’re openings where the skull plates fit together. These are normal, and you can see they’re still partially open, which is also normal for a teenager. Most of the skull’s sutures close well into adulthood.” She pointed out other sutures in the back of the skull and above where the ears would be. Then she pointed to a large depression on the top of the skull, on what would have been the girl’s left side, about midway from the front of her head to the back. Jagged cracks extended from where the bone had caved slightly. “This is not normal,” Dr. Feist said.

  Noah gave a low whistle. “What could have caused that?” he asked.

  Dr. Feist shrugged. She used her thumb and index finger to frame the size of the fracture. “A hammer maybe? The blunt side, not the sharp edge. It’s big enough that whatever she was hit with would have been blunt, but we’re still talking about something relatively small.”