A Grave Search

by Wendy Roberts

  I muttered under my breath, “Lord, when it’s my time to go, let it be at a ripe old age but peacefully in my sleep and—”

  The sentence stopped in my throat when I heard a sound and whirled around. Through the steamed shower doors I saw a figure standing there and began to scream.

  The shower door was ripped open.

  “It’s me. It’s just me,” Garrett assured me. “I’m sorry. I was calling to you through the bathroom door and thought you heard me.”

  I put a hand to my pounding heart and forced a silly and relieved smile back at my FBI agent lover. The grin on my face could not strip away the terror that had gripped me only seconds before. I was shaking all over and my lower lip began to tremble.

  “It’s okay,” Garrett said, stepping fully clothed into the shower. “It’s okay.”

  He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me tight under the spray until I stopped shaking in fear and, instead, shook with laughter at the sight of him in dress pants, shirt and tie soaked completely through. Still, he didn’t let me go until the water began to run cold.

  “This isn’t a wet T-shirt contest,” I guffawed and slapped his chest as I pushed him away. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I thought you’d like to see me dripping wet.” He turned off the water and pulled my hair playfully as he bent to nibble my neck. “Hmm-m.”

  My body always responded to his no matter what my mind had to say about it, and within seconds we had stripped off his soaking clothes. His mouth devoured mine and my hands eagerly reached for him. I begged him to enter me, and our lovemaking was an intense and passionate meeting of need, leaving me ever so grateful for the size of my shower stall.

  Afterward, we lay in my bed toweled off and content in each other’s arms. I cuddled into the crook of his arm and breathed against his bare chest.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  I could almost feel him holding his tongue. He wanted to remind me that I was the one who moved out. That I bought this house without even telling him and then moved an hour away from his Seattle condo with hardly any notice. I would argue back that my psychiatrist encouraged me to get out on my own and I couldn’t breathe with him protecting me to the point of suffocation. The words had already been said countless times both heatedly and tearfully. He’d stopped short of begging me to stay and I’d stopped just shy of breaking up with him.

  “I’ve missed you too.”

  He kissed the top of my head and I released a contented sigh because we weren’t going to have that argument today. We dozed wrapped in each other’s arms until Wookie tried to join us and hogged the majority of the bed.

  Garrett slipped into sweatpants and a Seahawks T-shirt he’d left behind from another visit and I pulled on clean shorts and a T-shirt. Together we gathered his wet clothes from the shower and wrung them out and draped them over the railing of my back patio to dry in the sun. I made tomato soup and he fried us grilled cheese sandwiches.

  “I’m using the last of your bread and the last of your cheese. You need to go shopping.” He rubbed the top of Wookie’s head and said in a singsong voice, “Doesn’t she, Wookie? Your momma needs to buy some food.”

  I smiled at the silly tone he only ever used for the dog. Then a thought entered my head. He’d probably used the same fun voice when talking to his five-year-old son before a drunk driver erased his wife and boy from the planet a few years ago. My heart hurt knowing how much grief he must still endure.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, with a tilt of his head as he watched me.

  I walked over carrying our soup bowls.

  “I’m great.” I mussed his damp hair that was showing more gray at the temples these days.

  I fetched our sandwiches and cutlery and we sat at my small oak table to eat our simple meal with Wookie on the floor at our feet. I couldn’t help but enjoy the domesticity of it.

  “First time I met you at your trailer you were eating tomato soup,” he remarked.

  I brought a spoon to my mouth and slurped. The memory of him standing in the doorway of my trailer looking so serious filled my head. “I don’t remember you screwing me in the shower though.”

  He threw back his head and howled with laughter.

  God, how I’d missed that sound.

  He leaned over and kissed me and then we ate the rest of our meal in silence. Garrett was doing the dishes afterward when he offhandedly asked, “When did you see Denny?”

  He had his back to the fridge but he’d no doubt seen the sketch. The question had layers. The underlying questions were when did I see my ex-boyfriend, why hadn’t I mentioned it, and how would this affect “us.”

  I took a tea towel from the drawer and bumped his hip good-naturedly with mine. “I didn’t see him.”

  Part of me didn’t want to tell him about Ebba Johansson’s visit and how she tracked me down using Wookie. Telling him would unravel all those worries and old arguments about keeping me safe and how if I’d stayed living with him in his Seattle condo he would’ve been able to protect me.

  Keep an eye on me.

  Keep his thumb on me.

  “Ebba Johansson popped in for a visit,” I said coolly, putting the last of our few dishes in the cupboard.

  “Ava Johansson’s mother?” He was taken aback by that. With his arms folded he leaned against the counter.

  “Yes.”

  “As in the Ava Johansson who was kidnapped and murdered by her ex-boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Ava Johansson whose name and face was in all the papers the last couple months and whose body was never found?”

  The look on his face showed his mind was flipping through every single detail he knew about the case.

  I swatted him with the dish towel. “Are you going to let me finish?”

  He grabbed the towel and used it to pull me close for a kiss that ended with him tickling my ribs and me pinching him hard until he let me go.

  “Finish your story,” he said.

  So I gave him the CliffsNotes version of Ebba’s visit and her desire to have me search for Ava’s body. His face was impassive until I got to the part where the woman brought the sketch from Denny because, apparently, she runs the spa in the casino and my name came up.

  “And just like that when the topic of conversation becomes you, Denny immediately gives up where you live?” He blew an angry puff of breath through his lips and pressed his palm to his forehead. “Wait a second; you never told anyone up there your new location, right?”

  “Up there” being the small town that cozied up to the Canadian border. “Up there” being where I’d been raised in savage and cruel circumstances. Abandoned by my mother. Abused by my grandmother. And then... Gramps.

  “Who would I tell?” I shrugged. “I don’t talk to anyone there.”

  “So if Denny didn’t know where you live then how—?”

  “People talk. There were, I guess, rumors about the general location and Ebba Johansson, well, she got creative.”

  He wasn’t going to let me get away with being vague. It was one of the biggest drawbacks to talking to someone in his line of work. He wasn’t just nosy by personality; it was the exact trait that fed his motivation and drove him to excel as a federal agent.

  After a pause, during which he drilled holes into me with those questioning eyes and I tried to find a way to soften it, I finally just gave in and filled in the blanks about how Ebba Johansson had found me through Wookie’s vet.

  “I’m going to kill your vet,” he growled. “Have they never heard of patient confidentiality?”

  “Isn’t that more of a human doctor thing?” I joked.

  He drained the dishwater, strangled the life out of the wet dishrag and tossed the cloth angrily into the corner of the sink. “If she can find you, anyone can.”

  The anger vi
brated off him in waves. He kept it under control because FBI agents specialized in control and because he always coddled, softened and cushioned his words when he talked to me as if any rise in anger would cause me to freak out and get so crazy I’d need to be zipped off to the loony bin. I should appreciate the fact that he was so kind and gentle with me but the truth was that it was a form of Bubble Wrap that made me want to explode.

  He pulled me into a tight hug and Wookie immediately joined us, nudging his large Rotty head between our thighs to either pull us apart or somehow join in.

  “I’m not blaming you.” Garrett breathed the words onto the top of my head but the truth was that was exactly what he was doing.

  “Look, what’s done is done.” I untangled myself from his hug and went to the cupboard to get a chew bone for Wookie. “I’ll have a word with the vet.”

  “And obviously you’re not going to take on this job of finding Ava Johansson, right? I mean, if law enforcement agencies all over Washington State couldn’t find her body...”

  “Then I couldn’t either?” I raised my eyebrows at him in feigned amusement.

  It was a ridiculous thought considering he had recruited me himself to find the dead when the FBI and local law failed.

  Wookie snagged the bone from my hand and jogged over to his bed to begin the serious task of gnawing it to a nub.

  “If anyone could find her body, you could. Obviously.” He backed down. “I just don’t think—”

  “You don’t think it would be safe for me to be out looking for the body of a girl in such a high-profile case when her killer is still on the loose? I know and I get that.” I fingered my damp hair in exasperation. “I haven’t decided yet if I’ll take the job. I told her I’d think about it. It’s not like I need the work. Emails keep pouring in. Hey, if you’d like, there’s a body that needs finding just outside of Portland. We could make a weekend of it.”

  He wordlessly went to the fridge and poured us each a glass of iced tea and we sat back down at the table.

  “Look, I know you’d love it if all I did was cemetery dowsing for the graves of people who’ve been gone a hundred years or more.” I put my hand on his. “But I don’t ask you to not go looking for bad guys, right?”

  I took a drink from the cold tea, and as the taste hit the back of my throat my recipe for a Long Island Iced Tea immediately sprang to mind. A perfect concoction of gin, rum, tequila, vodka triple sec and Coke.

  “You were thirsty.” Garrett stared at the glass in my hand. It was completely empty.

  Three hundred twenty-nine.

  “So I had that gig this morning behind the old church. The one I mentioned before?” I washed out my iced tea glass and put it on the rack to air-dry. “And it didn’t exactly go as planned.”

  “Really?”

  I told him about Abel and his love of Candy Crush and we shared a laugh at me finding the old grave marker and Wes having to admit his grandfather and I were right. Then I shared about poor old Corny Dooley in the dried-up creek wearing nothing but boxers and knee socks.

  “Who did you say the officer was at the scene?”

  “I didn’t say.” I frowned because he was no longer interested in our conversation. He was staring hard at his phone. “Officer O’Keefe.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “Her.”

  He nodded and got to his feet. “Sorry. I have to go.”

  There was no use in asking why because it was FBI work and he wasn’t about to share those details with me.

  Garrett gathered his damp clothes from the back deck, snagged a bag for them from under my sink and then kissed me goodbye.

  “I wish you could stay.”

  Wookie and I walked him to his car.

  “I wish I could too.” He pulled me close and gave me the kind of kiss that made me wish we still lived together so that when he got home I’d feel his body spooning mine in the middle of the night.

  He opened his door and climbed behind the wheel. “You’re going to tell Ebba Johansson that you’re not going to search for her daughter’s body, right? At least tell her you’ll help only once Ronald Low is found and locked up. I don’t want you to get in the middle of an active investigation.”

  “You are not the boss of me, Mr. FBI.” I gave his shoulder a shove but he didn’t look amused. “Look, I told her I’d think about it.” I shrugged. “So that’s what I’m going to do.”

  His face was pinched in a frown of disapproval as he started the car, and I watched as he reversed down my long drive and then pulled away. Wookie was sniffing intently at a sun-browned shrub at the corner.

  “He loves to hunt rabbits. We’d go out in the back forty and he’d follow their scent and—”

  To stop Gramps’s voice in my head I called for Wookie and the dog followed me inside. After I got myself a Coke, I popped open my laptop and went to work researching the case of Ava Johansson. Before I decided whether or not to get involved I wanted to get up to speed. I read everything I could find on her case and that was a ton. A pretty young woman presumably held for ransom then murdered by an ex-boyfriend was big news.

  Ron Low dated Ava Johansson for a year. By all accounts they’d called it quits amicably enough. She’d told her mother they were still friends. He’d told his buddies there was no one else but he wanted to be free to see other people. Everyone interviewed said there was no big blowup that caused the break and they’d continued to hang with the same group of friends on occasion even after they were no longer together. Even remained friends on social media. From all outward appearances there’d been no drama involved until weeks later when Ava went missing.

  It wasn’t unusual for Ava to go out with friends and not come home so Ebba didn’t report her missing for a few days. Then she became frantic when it appeared her daughter had just vanished into thin air. When Ron also couldn’t be found, police felt there was a good possibility the two were just hanging out together. Ron’s roommate, Joon Kim, had left the country and when police contacted him in Korea where he was visiting a sick relative, he said Ron had planned a hiking trip.

  By the time Joon Kim got back in town, everything had changed. Ebba had received a ransom letter in the mail and, as instructed, she didn’t contact police. Instead, she scrambled together a hundred grand and then, following the instructions in the letter, she’d set out to a state park. She dropped off the cash on a path off of an isolated campground and waited for the return of her daughter. When Ava didn’t appear, Ebba went back to the path only to find the money gone and a lot of blood in the area so she called the police. It wasn’t long before investigators found that there was enough blood in the woods to declare a crime scene and state that Ava would not be coming home.

  Ronald Low was also missing and his roommate insisted Ron would never hurt Ava and that he was probably just hiking and would show up any day. Joon explained to all who’d listen that Ron, an avid hiker and outdoorsman, often went off the grid when he hiked. But when police discovered the ransom note had been typed on Ronald Low’s laptop he, of course, became the prime suspect.

  Despite Joon Kim’s insistence, good ol’ Ron never did return from his hike.

  “If the motive was money,” I wondered aloud, “why did he have to kill her once he got what he wanted?”

  Wookie rested his hefty noggin on my thigh. I continued to read articles and click pictures and videos posted on news sources and personal pages. I sat at the laptop so long the sun had set and my mouth was dry but I couldn’t take my eyes off the latest picture I’d opened of Ronald Low. In every previous picture and video he’d had a scruffy beard but in this picture taken a couple years ago he was clean shaven and looked vaguely familiar. Maybe Ron was a local. Maybe he’d even been a regular when I worked at the gas station.

  Getting up from the table I went about the business of refilling Wookie’s bowl and then decide
d on a snack of a bowl of cereal for myself only to realize I had no milk. The biggest problem of being an adult on your own was that keeping cupboards stocked was all on you.

  Staring into the abyss that were my cupboards I found a package of ramen noodles. I made the ramen and brought the bowl back to the table to resume my research. The first slurp of noodles took me back to simpler times. Not that my grandmother would ever buy them. Her refusal to buy the stuff had nothing to do with her care for my health and everything to do with making me unhappy. If she even suspected I wanted something, she’d go out of her way to make sure it never happened.

  “How do you feel when you think about your grandmother?” Dr. Chen asked time and time again.

  “I don’t think about her.”

  I blew into the steamy bowl of noodles. Katie, my best and only friend for many years, would buy us each a cup of the noodles at our high school cafeteria. It had been a real treat for me. I rolled that recollection around in my head as the too-hot salty broth scalded my tongue.

  “Ron Low,” I murmured the guy’s name while staring at his face on my screen.

  Rock’n Ron.

  The nickname sprang into my head. Startled, I nearly sloshed hot soup on my lap. I put my bowl down on the coffee table and brought my face closer to the laptop screen. I hadn’t thought of Rock’n Ron in many years. He’d been a year younger than me in high school and was one of the cool kids who’d hold court in the cafeteria at lunch with the other jocks and the beauty queens.

  “No wa-a-y. It couldn’t be!” I squinted at the picture where he had short hair and no beard. I tried to imagine the guy on the screen younger and with shoulder-length hair instead of the brush cut.

  “Jesus. It’s him!”

  I punched a few questions into Google and discovered that yes, indeed, we’d attended the same high school. I tried not to think about my school years. Not because school was awful. Quite the opposite. It had been the one place where I’d felt safe. I’d been quiet, on the plain side of pretty and got a tiny bit of secondhand popularity that bounced off my flamboyant friend Katie. Popularity might be too strong a word. It was more like the bullies recognized me as awkward but, thanks to Katie, left me alone.