“I guess not,” Stride said. He glanced at Maggie, who frowned.
“And not long after, they were married,” Tenby continued. “It was a whirlwind romance.”
Maggie shook her head. “And a few years later, there’s no passion left?”
“It happens,” Tenby said. “I see it all too often.”
Stride nodded. “Forgive me, Reverend, but I’m still having trouble here. Even if Graeme asked Emily out, I find it hard to believe they found so much in common that he was ready to dive into marriage. This may sound callous, but did Emily lay a trap for him?”
Tenby bit his lip and looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Maggie smiled. “A trap. You know, women are awfully good at manipulating men to make them do whatever they want. Why, Stride here will do anything I tell him to do. It’s an art.”
Tenby smiled nervously. “Well, I don’t think Emily had any kind of strategy. She was too dazzled. As I say, the money may have caused her to overlook the fact that she really didn’t feel much passion, but I don’t believe she intentionally deceived him.”
“Reverend, we really need to know the truth,” Stride told him. “There’s obviously something more.”
Tenby nodded. “Yes, I know. It doesn’t have anything to do with Rachel, though, so I don’t see why anyone needs to bring up this kind of dirty laundry.”
“If we don’t have all the pieces, we can’t solve the puzzle,” Maggie said. “It’s that simple.”
“I suppose so.” Tenby wiped his face, which was moist. “Well, you see, after they had been dating a few weeks, Emily found out she was pregnant. That was what really led to the marriage.”
“I’m sure Graeme was thrilled,” Stride murmured.
“Hardly,” Tenby said. “He wanted her to have an abortion. She refused. I think he would have liked the whole thing to go away, but in a town like Duluth, in a position like his, you can’t have a scandal coming out in public. So he married her.”
“And the baby?” Maggie asked.
“Miscarriage at six months. Emily nearly died.”
“Graeme didn’t try to work out an amicable divorce?” Stride asked.
“No, he didn’t,” Tenby said. “He seemed to have resigned himself to the marriage. And I suppose he thought a divorce would have been extremely expensive. So he held up his end. But make no mistake, he didn’t pretend to have his heart in it. It was simply a convenience to be married. For a while, that was okay for Emily, too. Love doesn’t seem so important when you’ve struggled for years just to get by.”
“For a while?” Maggie asked.
“Well, money is no cure for loneliness,” Tenby said.
“So how do they deal with it now?” Stride asked.
“I think you’d better talk to each of them about that, Detective.”
“Meanwhile, Rachel was in the middle of this happy scene?” Maggie asked.
Tenby sighed. “All three of them in that house,” he said. “And not very much happiness among them. It’s a terrible thing. That’s why I was so convinced that Rachel ran away. She had a lot to run away from.”
“Did she ever talk to you about running away?” Stride asked.
“No, she never confided in me. I think she saw me as being on Emily’s side, so that made me the enemy.”
“And there’s nothing else you can think of that might shed light on her disappearance? Anything you observed or overheard?”
“I’m afraid not,” Tenby said. “I wish there was.”
They all stood up. They shook hands awkwardly, and Stride felt that the minister was now anxious for them to be gone. He guided them back down the corridor into the cold lobby of the church. When the door closed behind them, Stride and Maggie paused on the porch, buttoning their coats and swinging scarves across their faces. The wind had blown away their footprints in the snow.
“What do you think?” Maggie said.
Stride squinted at the cold sun. “I think we could use a break.”
12
Heather took a sip of tea from a chipped china cup and replaced it on the end table at a safe distance, where a spill would not be disastrous. Then she gingerly picked up the prints she had developed in the cold basement a few hours earlier.
First snowfall always made for beautiful work. She had found a giant, perfect spiderweb stretched between two trees in the woods behind the cottage. The snow crystals coated each diaphanous strand, just enough to make a patchwork, like lace. She had caught the image quickly, and even as she snapped the pictures, a puff of wind splintered the ice and sent the web fluttering away. One of the prints showed the web just as it separated, the snow gently tearing it apart.
Heather took off her half-glasses and laid them beside her. A Brahms concerto was in its final notes on the stereo. She closed her eyes, enjoying the lilt of the piano. As it faded away into silence, she realized how tired she was. She had spent most of the day tramping about in the cold and snow with her camera, until her feet were wet and her fingers were numb. Lissa had been with her the whole time, but the cold didn’t bother the girl at all. Heather kept telling her to wrap her face up in her scarf, and Lissa kept pulling it off when Heather wasn’t looking. They had taken a hot bath together when they got home, but Heather could still feel some of the coldness of the day inside her. She was ready to tuck her body into a long flannel nightgown and bury herself in a mound of blankets.
She clicked the lamp off and eased out of the recliner. She turned the overhead light off, and the house was dark, but the living room kept a reflected glow from the moon shining on a fresh white bed of snow outside. Heather tiptoed down the hallway, not wanting to awaken Lissa. As was her custom, she edged the girl’s door open and peeked inside. Lissa always slept with a night-light. The room was filled with shadows. Her daughter was sleeping soundly on her stomach, her face lost in the pillow. She had thrashed out of the blankets, leaving half her body exposed.
Heather approached her, wanting to pull the blankets up around her again. The night was going to get even colder. She lingered at Lissa’s bedside, studying the girl’s tranquil face and smiling at the occasional murmurs she made in her sleep. Heather bent over and brushed her lips against her daughter’s forehead.
She tugged the blanket up and fitted it around Lissa’s shoulders. As she did, something tumbled out of bed and landed softly on the carpet. Heather looked down, seeing something glint in the shadows. She bent over, confused, and picked it up. It was a gold bracelet.
Heather hadn’t purchased it for Lissa and didn’t remember seeing it before. She wrinkled her brow, wondering where Lissa had found it and surprised that her daughter hadn’t mentioned it. Knowing Lissa, that probably meant it had come from some illicit source.
She left the girl’s room, taking the bracelet with her.
Heather continued to her own bedroom. She put the bracelet on top of a rickety five-drawer bureau and studied it thoughtfully for a moment. Then she shrugged and turned away. She unbuttoned her red plaid shirt and tossed it in the laundry basket. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She yanked off her jeans, left her panties and socks on, and quickly pulled a nightgown over her head.
She tugged her six blankets down and crawled under them. She clicked on the radio, looking for music. Instead, the hourly headlines were winding down. She paid little attention to the stories, which were too depressing. A farmhouse south of town had burned, killing an elderly woman. The girl from Duluth, Rachel, was still missing. The Trojans had lost a big game.
Heather reviewed the wall of framed photographs beside her bed. She had just added one of the prints from her photo shoot at the barn. The waning sun that had lingered behind her on the edge of the treetops cast shadows in the barn’s sagging crevices. Dead leaves scattered over the earth like a carpet. The sky on the horizon was steel gray. She had been aiming for an image filled with decay, and she had achieved it.
As Heather stared at the photograph, she finally remembered.
>
In her mind, she saw Lissa running around the corner of the barn toward her, shouting about something she had found. Heather had been distracted, concentrating on her camera, but she remembered Lissa showing her a gold bracelet, and she remembered telling the girl to put it right back where she found it. Now a few weeks later, here was Lissa with a secret gold bracelet hidden in her bed.
“That little sneak,” Heather said aloud, peeved.
She got out of bed with a sigh and retrieved the bracelet from the bureau. It was not particularly heavy or expensive. She guessed that a high school girl had lost it in the middle of a tryst behind the barn.
Heather looked at the bracelet and saw letters inside.
T loves R, she thought to herself. Right. She suspected R was a pretty sophomore, and T was a football player who figured jewelry was a great way to get into the girl’s jeans. Heather laughed. She put the bracelet on her nightstand and clicked off the light.
In the darkness, she tried to sleep, but instead she tossed and turned. A few minutes ago, she had barely been able to keep her eyes open. Now she was awake. A jumble of thoughts flitted idly through her brain. High school. Pretty girls making out behind the barn. An old woman dying in a fire. Football games. Gifts of gold bracelets. Young love. Young lust.
Initials.
She saw them in her head again.
That was when Heather’s eyes flew open, and she stared sightless into the black room. Under the blankets, a chill rippled through her flesh. She scratched blindly for the light, then blinked as it flooded the room.
She looked at the bracelet but didn’t dare touch it.
T loves R, she thought again.
R.
13
Stride stood on the dirt road outside the search area near the barn. The snow had been matted down into a slippery gray streak by the coming and going of police cars throughout the day. He dug in his boots, stiffening his body against the swirling wind. The cold felt like knives on the sliver of his face where the wool scarf left his skin exposed. He had a red cap pulled low on his forehead and the hood of his parka pulled over his head and tied closed at his neck. His hands were buried inside leather gloves. The wind chill was ten degrees below zero.
Nature wasn’t cooperating. Neither was Stride’s luck.
They had been searching since noon, and five hours later, it was almost night. All they had to show so far for the painstaking, backbreaking work in the bitter cold was dozens of overlapping tire tracks, broken glass, used needles, and a dizzying range of common trash. All of it went into plastic bags, carefully labeled to reflect the exact square yard within the grid where each item had been found.
If the tip from Heather Hubble had come two days earlier, they would have been able to search the field surrounding the barn with relative ease. Instead, the evidence, if there was any, lay hidden beneath three inches of snow. As his men searched each square in the checkerboard, they had to carefully brush away the powdery snow into a section of the grid that had already been searched. With each gust of wind, the snow drifted back. It was slow, cold work, but they had no choice but to proceed inch by inch, looking for details as small as a hair trapped beneath the white blanket, somewhere in the dirt and brush.
That wasn’t what really bothered Stride, though. The worse stuff lay ahead. More snow was predicted by morning, a storm that could dump another ten inches all over the northern woods. If that happened, they wouldn’t see the ground again until April, when there would be little evidence left to find. They had to work quickly. He had ordered in portable overhead lights, which were being set up now, so they could sift through the search area throughout the night. Even so, it wasn’t much time to do a thorough job.
Plus, of all places, it had to be the barn.
Anyplace else in the wilderness, they would have found nothing but birch bark and dead leaves. Here, they might as well have been in the parking lot behind the high school. He could only guess how many teenage couples had left behind irrelevant evidence that would have to be meticulously analyzed, researched, typed, and ultimately excluded. On the walkie-talkie, Guppo kept up a litany of the bizarre items they had already found. They had started near where the little girl, Lissa, thought she had found the bracelet and begun working their way outward. Along the way, they had already found a pair of panties (four sizes too large for Rachel), an orthodontic retainer, a cherry Life Saver, a king of spades with a naked blonde woman wearing a crown, and nine condoms.
He knew the odds of tying anything directly to Rachel were slim. Even so, Stride felt a sense of excitement. The Stoners had definitively identified the bracelet as belonging to Rachel. The initials cinched it: “Tommy loves Rachel.” The bracelet had been a gift from her father years earlier.
Kevin Lowry had already reported in his original statement that Rachel was wearing the bracelet when he last saw her in Canal Park. Now it had been found here, near the barn, their first solid evidence of where Rachel had been after her disappearance. But he tempered his professional satisfaction with the grim reality of what the discovery meant.
Emily Stoner’s face had gone white when she saw it. Stride understood. All along, she had still been harboring the hope that Rachel had gone off by herself, a runaway, part of a cruel practical joke. As Emily held the bracelet in her hand, that hope vanished.
“She would never have left it behind,” Emily said simply. “Never. Tommy gave it to her. She wore it everywhere. She wore it in the shower. She never took it off.” Then, with her husband looking on, she disintegrated into sobs. “Oh my God, she’s dead,” Emily murmured. “She’s really dead.”
Stride didn’t try to fill the moment with empty hope. He could easily have told her that finding the bracelet meant nothing in and of itself, but the truth was clear to all of them. For weeks, they had been searching for a live girl, trying to unravel the mystery of her life, hunting for answers to a riddle.
Now, they would begin a different search. For Rachel’s body.
Stride heard the slam of the van door and the shuffling of footsteps in the snow behind him. He glanced back. Maggie wore a black winter bowler cap over a pair of furry earmuffs. A red wool coat draped to her ankles. She trudged through the snow in her leather boots with square two-inch heels. She didn’t wear a scarf, but her golden skin seemed unaffected by the bitter assault of the wind.
Maggie stood next to Stride, reviewing the work of a dozen policemen hunched over with brooms, walkie-talkies, and evidence bags.
“You must be freezing your balls off out here,” Maggie said. “Why don’t you come back to the van?”
“Guppo’s in the van, right? I’m safer out here.”
Maggie wrinkled her nose. “I made sure he didn’t have any raw vegetables, and I cracked the window so we’ve got fresh air when we need it.”
“No, thanks. I’ve got to do the media circus soon anyway. It’s almost evening news time.”
Stride glanced down the dirt road. The police cars blocked travel about fifty yards away, sealing off the area. Beyond the roadblock, he could see the glow of media lights, where at least two dozen reporters waited for him, shivering, complaining, and shouting for attention. He couldn’t hear much above the wind.
He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes before five o’clock. He had promised them a live interview to kick off the news.
“So, you ever come out here when you were a kid?” Maggie asked.
“What do you mean?”
Maggie grinned. “Well, the woman who found the bracelet, she said this has been a hot make-out spot for years.”
Stride shrugged. “I took my girls to nice, safe dirt roads near the lake, thank you very much.”
“Then who came out here?” Maggie asked.
“The easy ones.”
“Is that a sexist remark I should be reporting as harassment?” she teased him.
“If you could convince a girl to take a romantic drive with you along the lake, well, maybe you stood a chance of getting to seco
nd base.”
“Tell me again what second base means,” Maggie said. She playfully caressed her teeth with her tongue. “We didn’t play baseball in China. Is that breasts, nipples, what?”
Stride ignored her. “But if you suggested going to the barn, and the girl agreed, you knew exactly what you were going to get. On the other hand, you didn’t suggest it unless you knew what kind of girl you were dealing with. Otherwise, you got your face slapped.”
“And you?”
“I recall mentioning the barn in passing to Lori Peterson,” Stride said. “She threw a Coke in my face.”
“Good for her,” Maggie said. “Does this mean Rachel was easy?”
Stride bit his lower lip. “That’s what everyone tells us.”
“Except we still haven’t found a boy who admits sleeping with her,” Maggie said.
“Yes, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Although who wants to step up to the plate and declare himself a suspect when the girl disappears?”
“So you think it was a date?” Maggie asked.
“Maybe,” Stride said. “She left Kevin just before ten o’clock and told him she was tired. Rachel doesn’t strike me as a girl who gets tired early on a Friday night.”
“So maybe she was meeting someone else. Someone who picked her up at her house.”
Stride nodded. “They go for a little romp at the barn. But something goes wrong. Something gets out of hand. And suddenly the boyfriend has a body on his hands.”
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