The victim, seventeen-year-old Kari Sutter, had moved to Ohio from Vermont six months before. She immediately took the local kids by storm. She was pretty and popular, and everyone wanted to impress her.
Ashley and her buddies began telling her about Mary Jane’s Grave, and the more she heard about it, the more she begged to see it for herself. Finally, they agreed to take Kari out there for Halloween.
“Kari loved a good scare,” Ashley recalled, twisting her tissue into a wet ball. “She and I were always first in line for the latest horror movie.”
“Since to night was a full moon, we thought it would be perfect for our visit to the grave.”
Apparently, the kids stopped for drinks at one of the boys’ homes (his parents were conveniently out). They all rode in one car to Tucker Road, stopping where the asphalt ended and the dirt road began.
“It was Nate O’Malley’s idea to dare Kari to walk to the grave alone. He said if she walked to the grave, pissed on it, and took a piece of bark from the tree, he’d let her drive his car for a week.”
Again, tears rolled down Ashley’s cheeks, and I handed her another tissue. “Kari was really brave. She took the bet without even thinking twice. I offered to go with her, but Nate said if I did, the bet would be off. He did let her take a flashlight, though, so she could find the tree.” She blew her nose into the tissue and took a few deep breaths.
“Ashley, I know this is difficult, but did you see any cars around there? Not just on Tucker Road, but anywhere in the area?”
“No! I don’t even remember passing a car on the way down there after we left Mansfield!”
I waited until she composed herself. “Want some water?” I asked, hoping to keep her talking.
“Please,” she said, and I went out to the hall and got her a bottle from the vending machine. When I came back, she was a bit calmer.
“I’m sorry, Sergeant. I’m jus—I’ve never seen a dead body before.” I thought she was going to lose it again, but she didn’t. “We watched Kari walk down the road. I remember the light from the flashlight getting smaller and smaller. When she finally turned into the cemetery, it disappeared completely. I expected to see it again in a couple of minutes, but I didn’t. After a few minutes, when she didn’t come back, we stopped laughing and started waiting. Nate kept saying she was hiding back there, trying to scare us, but after a while nobody was laughing anymore.” She took another drink from her water bottle and whispered, “It was so quiet.”
They waited, according to Ashley, for at least twenty minutes before driving Nate’s car to the grave to pick up Kari. Nate pointed the car toward the entrance, which illuminated the entire cemetery. That was when they saw Kari propped up against the tree.
“At first, I thought I was hallucinating. We all did, because no one said anything. But then Nate started to laugh, saying, ‘Okay, you’ve got us,’ to her. He thought she was playing a trick. It was Nate who got out and walked over to the tree. When he turned around and I saw his face, I knew it was no joke.”
Ashley began to tremble, and I took her hand to steady her. “I started screaming for him to get back into the car. I was afraid we’d be next. Brittany was screaming and Kyle had his hands over his face.” She paused, reliving the entire ordeal. “Nate ran to the car. He kept looking over his shoulder as if someone was following him. He was shaking and trying to get the car turned around, but he was so upset he couldn’t! Kyle yelled at him to switch places and he did, and Kyle peeled out of there. We pulled into the first driveway at the end of Tucker Road, almost to Pleasant Valley and had the people there call nine-one-one.”
I let her story sink in for a few minutes. I knew without a doubt that she was telling the truth. “Ashley, when Kari was back at the grave alone, did you hear her scream or make any noise at all?”
“Nothing! We heard nothing!”
I could only imagine how scared she was, especially at her age. If I’d been there, I’d have been scared, too. “Is there anything else you can remember?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, honey,” I said. I gently touched her shoulder, then went back into the waiting area to get her father. Before he retrieved his daughter, I gave him the name and number of a local therapist, which she was unquestionably going to need. He could find an attorney for her on his own. I was going to have a tough time explaining to the prosecutor why the only persons present at a murder scene weren’t immediately charged and booked. I’d try to put him off as long as possible until I had further information.
Kyle Latham and Brittany Moore, both sixteen years old, told me almost verbatim the same story. It was sixteen- year- old Nate whose story deviated, just slightly. It was when Nate was running back to the car after seeing the body. He told me something the others hadn’t—the reason he kept looking over his shoulder.
“I couldn’t believe it. She was really dead. I was so scared I started running back to the car. I could hear everyone in the car yelling, but then I heard…”
“You heard what, Nathan?”
“You’re not gonna believe me. It’s crazy!” His face was pale, but he was managing to keep it together.
“Try me,” I told him firmly.
“When I was running back to the car, I swear I heard a baby crying behind me.”
I just looked at him. He seemed to be telling the truth, but it was ridiculous. The only explanation I could come up with was that he’d heard the echoes of the others yelling in the car. Sometimes people mistake the location of sounds when they’re in an intense situation. In fact, I’ve heard officers involved in shootings claim that when they fired their guns, they heard nothing at all.
When I was finished with Nate, I found Coop and Naomi in Coop’s office and filled them in on my interviews.
“A baby crying? Are you shitting me?” Coop was never at a loss for comments.
“Nope. I’m chalking it up to adrenaline. If the dirt samples show that Nate wasn’t the only one outside the car, I’m going to polygraph them all. Anybody know the last time we had a call down in that area?”
“There was that robbery about eight years ago,” Coop offered.
“I forgot about that. I think I was still in uniform when that happened.” I tried to remember. Sometimes I felt like a senior citizen on the cusp of the century mark, rather than a young woman in her midthirties.
Eight years earlier, a carload of twenty-somethings went down to Mary Jane’s Grave. Unfortunately, they had passed two carloads of thugs that were leaving the spot, having finished two cases of beer out there. When they saw the newcomers, the bad guys turned around and blocked the car in at the grave. Then, grabbing their handy ski masks, they pulled open the victims’ car doors, robbed them and pulverized the car with a baseball bat. We caught them, of course, but the case had been a high profile one in the rolling hills of southern Richland County. Had this happened in the city, it wouldn’t have even made the front page.
Which brought me to my next thought. “Damn, the media’s going to have a field day with this, it being Mary Jane’s Grave and Halloween.” I knew that media attention could be a disaster in any investigation. Information in the public record could open the door to false confessions by local quacks and add long hours interviewing the wrong people. I’d found that it didn’t even pay to ask the media not to print unsubstantiated theories. Some journalists had ethics that mirrored those of the criminals themselves.
“Well,” Coop added, “at least no one’s been going up into that house.”
“What house?” I hadn’t remembered seeing one.
“There’s an old abandoned house up on the hill right above the cemetery. It’s all boarded up and falling apart. A couple of uniforms and I checked it out, but it didn’t look like anyone had messed with it.”
I knew a local children’s camp, Hidden Hollow, sat on the highest ridge away from the cemetery. In fact, I’d gone there as a child, but right now I couldn’t even visualize where the house was. I made a mental
note to go back to the cemetery in daylight to take a closer look.
“So,” Naomi asked, “now what?”
“We do what we always do,” I answered. “We wait.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Wait? For what?” Naomi asked, wondering what I had up my sleeve.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m still trying to sort this one out. Meanwhile, we wait for lab reports, final and preliminary. We wait for officer reports and for someone to start talking or bragging. We also wait for any anonymous tips. You know this, Naomi. We’re in a holding zone right now.”
“I guess you’re right,” she sighed. “Has someone run record checks on those teens?”
“Of course,” I said, mildly annoyed. “I had Jerry run them.”
Coop, sensing my mood, started talking about his own high school experiences at Mary Jane’s Grave. They sounded the same as the rest of ours, mildly scary but ultimately uneventful. It was when he spoke of another incident that he got my undivided attention.
“I remember about fifteen years ago that a carload of kids from Madison High School got killed after leaving there.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said, perking up.
“It was a highway patrol case, all over the news. Weren’t you here in town?”
“Just get to the point and tell me what happened,” I snapped.
“Grrrr!” he said with a grin. “I guess someone needs her beauty sleep. Well, supposedly four teenage boys were down at the grave drinking, smokin’ dope, you know, what we all used to do. Anyway, according to the only survivor, they all pissed on the grave. On their way back, they hadn’t gone a mile when they wrapped their car around a telephone pole. The kid who survived claimed that an old woman in white was standing in the middle of the road and the driver swerved to miss her. He claimed he was the only one who hadn’t pissed on the grave.”
“You said that was a highway patrol case?”
“Yup.”
“Well, stories like that have been all over the Internet for years, Coop.”
“Not fifteen years ago, they weren’t.”
I thought about it for a minute and realized he was right. I loved Coop to death, but hated it when he got one over on me.
I decided to look at the file, even though I couldn’t imagine that the highway patrol kept fatal crash cases that far back, given how many there were each year. If all else failed, I could always get the name of the survivor from Coop and go talk to him myself.
After I finished my paperwork, which included the interviews, I saw it was getting late. However, I still had time to take care of something I’d been meaning to do for a long time. For some reason, I felt like doing it today.
Michael had been pressuring me to set a date for our wedding. I thought I would surprise him by getting the marriage license and bringing it home. I only had half an hour or so, since the courthouse closed at five.
I was whistling when I walked up the steps to the courthouse, thinking how good my life was and how happy I was. But these thoughts quickly faded when I told the clerk my name and Social Security number to obtain the license. She looked confused when she pulled my information up on the computer screen.
“Ms. Gallagher,” she said, looking at me with an odd expression on her face, “our computer is showing you’re still married to one Eric Schroeder.”
“That can’t be,” I protested. “We’ve been divorced for six months.” My heart pounded in my chest as I struggled to breathe.
She gave me another look before walking away. I saw her go into an office and speak to a woman seated behind a desk, probably a supervisor. Good, I thought. Let’s get this straightened out. Dumb civil servants, couldn’t they keep track of recent records?
The woman behind the desk turned to her computer and typed something in, then spoke to the clerk, who finally came back out to talk to me. By this time, I had chewed my fingernails to the quick and almost lit a cigarette right then and there, wondering what the hell was going on.
“Ms. Gallagher, our records show where the request for the final hearing was entered, but no final divorce decree was ever filed. Did you attend a final hearing?”
“Of course I did!” I cried, my voice rising an octave. “I heard the judge say ‘divorce granted’ loud and clear.” I was now on the verge of panic.
“Ms. Gallagher, that very well may be, but apparently someone dropped the ball. The final divorce decree was never filed with the courts. That was your attorney’s responsibility. Therefore, you are still legally married and can’t apply for a marriage license.”
I was numb, sick and confused, my stomach now in knots, my happiness a distant memory.
“How could this happen?” I shouted. People stopped their chatter and looked at me, but I couldn’t have cared less.
“Ms. Gallagher, I assure you that my supervisor checked to make sure it wasn’t our mistake. I suggest you contact your attorney and inform him what happened. He should take it from there.”
I didn’t even answer. Instead I walked away, dazed. How on earth could I explain this to Michael, let alone tell Eric we were still married? I prayed it was all a mistake and tried to tell myself this wasn’t really happening. Too bad Eric hadn’t stepped up to the plate and married Jordan yet. We could have resolved this much sooner.
Michael and I had been through more rough patches than any two people deserved in a lifetime. It just wasn’t fair!
On my way home I called Bill Warren, my attorney. His secretary began to tell me he was in a meeting, but I cut her off and demanded that she put him on the phone, or else. She could tell by my voice I wasn’t in the mood for games, and a minute later Bill was on the phone.
“Hey, Cee,” he began, but I had no time for idle chitchat. “What the hell happened, Bill? I thought you filed my divorce papers! But I just came from the courthouse, and they never received them!”
He was quiet a minute and then assured me he would find out what happened and call me back, swearing up and down that he’d filed the final decree.
I dragged myself home, dreading what would come next. I found Michael in his study researching information on my bloody M. Thankfully, we had the house to ourselves since Selina and Isabelle were with Eric and Jordan for one more day.
Michael looked at my pale face as I stood in the doorway and immediately knew there was trouble.
“Cee, what’s the matter?” he asked, alarmed.
I walked over and sat down next to him. I knew no other way to tell him other than to just blurt it out. I inhaled deeply, and said, “Apparently, Eric and I are still legally married.”
He was so stunned he couldn’t even speak. “Devastated” didn’t even begin to describe the look on his face. You’d have thought I just told him I had a fatal illness. I did my best to comfort him, taking his hand and caressing his face, but all the while my heart was breaking for both of us.
I explained to him what had occurred at the courthouse, and after that, it didn’t take long for his anger to rise.
“Damn! This will take another sixty to ninety days, CeeCee! Jesus Christ, why do I have the feeling that son-of- a-bitch Eric had something to do with this?” He began pacing across the room.
Michael rarely swore, but when he did I usually remained silent and just let him vent. Frankly, I didn’t believe Eric had anything to do with this, but I didn’t say so right then. Eric and Michael had a volatile past and usually blamed each other for their personal disasters when possible. It was the only juvenile aspect of Michael’s personality, so I had learned to live with it.
“Please, sit down,” I finally said, patting the space beside me. “Bill promised me he’d find out what happened. Chances are, some dipshit clerk put the paperwork on her desk and forgot to file it. If that’s the case, he’ll refile the final paperwork and it’ll be done. Let’s not make too much out of it, okay? You could at least be happy that I went to get our license today.” I flashed a brilliant smile at him, hoping that would do the tr
ick.
It did, and I knew the tantrum was over. I couldn’t blame him. I probably felt even worse. We decided to go out and grab a light dinner before turning in early. I was exhausted, and with the impending press release in the paper tomorrow, I expected another busy day. However, there was nothing that could have prepared me for what I was about to learn.
CHAPTER FOUR
As I predicted, the local newspaper’s front page headlined the murder. And to add a bit of flair to the story, the paper ran a section of excerpts from people who claimed to have had some pretty unusual experiences while they were at the grave.
I read through them and laughed. So many of these “oddities” had rational explanations, such as the sudden loss of cell- phone service while in the area. Hey, I haven’t been able to get cell- phone service in the southern part of this county for five years. That’s because there’s no nearby cell tower.
As I was reading the reports, I realized that the reporter who’d written the story had attributed the excerpts he was quoting to a website. For example, a girl named Tracy wrote that three years ago she and two friends had been down at the grave and stabbed the tree with a knife. She claimed it began bleeding real blood. Evidently, this was not to be confused with the dark sap from the pine tree.
I saw nothing else in the article that grabbed my attention except the last account. Someone named Brian had claimed that when he and some friends were there four years before, they heard a baby crying. I found it interesting that this report matched the story that Nathan O’Malley had told us.
I picked up the phone and called the reporter, Max Cline. The two of us went way back, and I knew he’d give me the information I needed. He answered on the first ring.
“Cline here.”
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