A boot’s imprints were pressed into the soil where someone had stood, peering into the house.
Into her bedroom.
ELEVEN
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, a Fox Harbor police cruiser came bouncing down her dirt road. It pulled up in front of the cottage, and a cop climbed out. He was in his fifties, bull-necked, his blond hair going bald on top.
“Dr. Isles?” he said, offering her a meaty handshake. “Roger Gresham, chief of police.”
“I didn’t know I’d get the chief himself.”
“Yeah, well, we were planning to drive up here anyway when your call came in.”
“We?” She frowned as another vehicle, a Ford Explorer, came up the driveway and pulled up next to Gresham’s cruiser. The driver stepped out and waved at her.
“Hello, Maura,” said Rick Ballard.
For a moment she just looked at him, startled by his unexpected arrival. “I had no idea you were here,” she finally said.
“I drove up last night. When did you get in?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“You spent the night in this house?”
“The motel was full. Miss Clausen—the rental agent—offered to let me sleep here.” She paused. Added on a defensive note, “She did say the police were finished with it.”
Gresham gave a snort. “Bet she charged you for the night, too. Didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“That Britta, she’s something else. She’d charge ya for air if she could.” Turning toward the house, he said: “So where did you see those footprints?”
Maura led the men past the front porch and around the corner of the house. They stayed to the side of the path, scanning the ground as they moved. The bulldozer had fallen silent, and now the only sounds were their footfalls on the carpet of leaves.
“Fresh deer tracks here,” said Gresham, pointing.
“Yes, there were a pair of deer that came through here this morning,” said Maura.
“That could explain those tracks you saw.”
“Chief Gresham,” said Maura, and sighed. “I can tell a boot print from a deer track.”
“No, I mean some guy might’ve been out here hunting. Out of season, you understand. Followed those deer outta the woods.”
Ballard suddenly halted, his gaze fixed on the ground.
“Do you see them?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. His voice was strangely quiet.
Gresham squatted down beside Ballard. A moment passed. Why didn’t they say something? A wind stirred the trees. Shivering, she looked up at the swaying branches. Last night, someone had come out of those woods. He had stood outside her room. Had stared in her window while she slept.
Ballard glanced up at the house. “Is that a bedroom window?”
“Yes.”
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
“Did you close your curtains last night?” He looked over his shoulder at her, and she knew what he was thinking: Did you treat them to an inadvertent peep show last night?
She flushed. “There aren’t any curtains in that room.”
“Those are too big to be Britta’s boots,” said Gresham. “She’s the only person who’d be tramping around up here, checking on the house.”
“Looks like a Vibram sole,” said Ballard. “Size eight, maybe nine.” His gaze followed the prints back toward the woods. “Deer tracks overlie them.”
“Which means he came through here first,” said Maura. “Before the deer did. Before I woke up.”
“Yes, but how long before?” Ballard straightened and stood peering through the window into her bedroom. For a long time he did not say anything, and once again she grew impatient with their silence, anxious to hear a reaction—any reaction—from these men.
“You know, it hasn’t rained here in close to a week,” said Gresham. “Those boot prints may not be all that fresh.”
“But who’d be walking around here, looking in windows?” she asked.
“I can call Britta. Maybe she had a man up to work on the place. Or someone peeked in there ’cause they were curious.”
“Curious?” asked Maura.
“Everyone up here’s heard about what happened to your sister, down in Boston. Some folks might want to peek into her house.”
“I don’t understand that kind of morbid curiosity. I never have.”
“Rick here tells me you’re a medical examiner, right? Well, you must have to deal with the same thing I do. Everyone wanting to know the details. You won’t believe how many folks have asked me about the shooting. Don’t you think some of these busybodies might want to take a peek inside her house?”
She stared at him in disbelief. The silence was suddenly broken by the crackle of Gresham’s car radio.
“Excuse me,” he said, and headed back to his cruiser.
“Well,” she said. “I guess that pretty much dispenses with my concerns, doesn’t it?”
“I happen to take your concerns very seriously.”
“Do you?” She looked at him. “Come inside, Rick. I want to show you something.”
He followed her back up the steps to the front porch, and into the house. She swung the door shut and pointed to the array of brass locks.
“That’s what I wanted you to see,” she said.
He frowned at the locks. “Wow.”
“There’s more. Come with me.”
She led him into the kitchen. Pointed to more gleaming chains and bolts barring the back door. “These are all new. Anna must have had them installed. Something scared her.”
“She had reason to be afraid. All the death threats. She didn’t know when Cassell might turn up here.”
She looked at him. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find out if he did?”
“I’ve been showing his photograph around town.”
“And?”
“So far, no one remembers seeing him. But it doesn’t mean he wasn’t here.” He pointed to the locks. “Those make perfect sense to me.”
Sighing, she sank into a chair at the kitchen table. “How could our lives have turned out so differently? There I was, getting off a plane from Paris while she …” She swallowed. “What if I’d been raised in Anna’s place? Would it all have turned out the same? Maybe she’d be the one sitting here now, talking to you.”
“You’re two different people, Maura. You may have her face, her voice. But you’re not Anna.”
She looked up at him. “Tell me more about my sister.”
“I’m not sure where to start.”
“Anything. Everything. You just said I sound like her.”
He nodded. “You do. The same inflections. The same pitch.”
“You remember her that well?”
“Anna wasn’t a woman you’d easily forget,” he said. His gaze held hers. They stared at each other, even as footsteps came thumping into the house. Only when Gresham had walked into the kitchen did she finally break off eye contact and turn to look at the police chief.
“Dr. Isles,” said Gresham. “I wonder if you could do me a little favor. Come up the road with me a ways. There’s something I need you to look at.”
“What sort of thing?”
“That was dispatch on the radio. They got a call from the construction crew right up the road. Their bulldozer turned up some—well, some bones.”
She frowned. “Human?”
“That’s what they’re wondering.”
Maura rode with Gresham in the cruiser, with Ballard following right behind them in his Explorer. The trip was barely worth climbing into the car for, just a short curve up the road, and there the bulldozer was, sitting in a freshly cleared lot. Four men in hard hats stood in the shade next to their pickup trucks. One of them came forward to meet them as Maura, Gresham, and Ballard climbed out of the vehicles.
“Hey, Chief.”
“Hey, Mitch. Where is it?”
“Out near the bulldozer. I spotted that bone, and I just shut my
engine right down. There used to be an old farmhouse here, on this lot. Last thing I want to do is dig up some family graveyard.”
“We’ll just have Dr. Isles here take a look before I make any calls. I’d hate to have the M.E. drive all the way over from Augusta for a bunch of bear bones.”
Mitch led the way across the clearing. The newly churned-up soil was an obstacle course of ankle-snagging roots and overturned rocks. Maura’s pumps were not designed for hiking, and no matter how carefully she picked her way across the terrain, she could not avoid soiling the black suede.
Gresham slapped his cheek. “Goddamn blackflies. They sure found us.”
The clearing was surrounded by thick stands of trees; the air was close here and windless. By now, insects had caught their scent and were swarming, greedy for blood. Maura was grateful she’d chosen to wear long pants that morning; her unprotected face and arms were already turning into blackfly feeding stations.
By the time they reached the bulldozer, the cuffs of her trousers were soiled. The sun shone down, sparkling on bits of broken glass. The canes of an old rosebush lay uprooted and dying in the heat.
“There,” said Mitch, pointing.
Even before she bent down to look more closely at it, Maura already knew what it was, lodged there in the soil. She didn’t touch it, but just crouched there, her shoes sunk deep in freshly overturned earth. Newly exposed to the elements, the paleness of bone peeked through the crust of dried dirt. She heard cawing among the trees and glanced up to see crows flitting like dark specters among the branches. They know what it is, too.
“What do you think?” asked Gresham.
“It’s an ilium.”
“What’s that?”
“This bone.” She touched her own, where the pelvis flared against her slacks. She was reminded, suddenly, of the grim fact that beneath skin, beneath muscle, she too was merely skeleton. A structural frame of honeycombed calcium and phosphorus that would endure long after her flesh had rotted. “It’s human,” she said.
They were silent for a moment. The only sound on that bright June day came from the crows, a gathering flock of them, perched in the trees above, like black fruit among the branches. They stared down with eerie intelligence at the humans, and their caws built to a deafening chorus. Then, as though on cue, their screeches abruptly stopped.
“What do you know about this place?” Maura asked the bulldozer operator. “What used to be here?”
Mitch said, “There were some old stone walls here. Foundation of a house. We moved all the stones over there, figured someone could use the rocks for something else.” He pointed to a pile of boulders near the edge of the lot. “Old walls, that’s really nothing unusual. You go walking in the woods, you find a lot of old foundations like this one. Used to be sheep farms all up and down the coast. Gone, now.”
“So this could be an old grave,” said Ballard.
“But that bone’s right up where one of the old walls was standing,” said Mitch. “I don’t think you’d want to bury dear old Ma so close to the house. Bad luck, I’d think.”
“Some people believed it was good luck,” said Maura.
“What?”
“In ancient times, an infant buried alive under the cornerstone was supposed to protect the house.”
Mitch stared at her. A look of Who the heck are you, lady?
“I’m just saying that burial practices change over the centuries,” said Maura. “This could very well be an old grave.”
From overhead came a noisy flapping. The crows simultaneously rose from the tree, feathers beating the sky. Maura watched them, unnerved by the sight of so many black wings lifting at once, as though by command.
“Weird,” said Gresham.
Maura rose to her feet and looked at the trees. Remembered the noise of the bulldozer that morning, and how close it had seemed. “Which direction is the house from here? The one I stayed in last night?” she asked.
Gresham looked up at the sun to orient himself, then pointed. “That way. Where you’re facing now.”
“How far is it?”
“It’s right through those trees. You could walk it.”
The Maine state medical examiner arrived from Augusta an hour and a half later. As he stepped out of his car, carrying his kit, Maura immediately recognized the man with the white turban and neatly trimmed beard. Maura had first met Dr. Daljeet Singh at a pathology conference the year before, and they had dined together in February, when he’d attended a regional forensics meeting in Boston. Though not a tall man, his dignified bearing and traditional Sikh headdress made him seem more formidable than he really was. Maura had always been impressed by his air of quiet competence. And by his eyes; Daljeet had liquid brown eyes and the longest lashes she’d ever seen on a man.
They shook hands, a warm greeting between two colleagues who genuinely liked each other. “So what are you doing here, Maura? Not enough work for you in Boston? You have to come poach my cases?”
“My weekend’s turned into a busman’s holiday.”
“You’ve seen the remains?”
She nodded, her smile fading. “There’s a left iliac crest, partially buried. We haven’t touched it yet. I knew you’d want to see it in situ first.”
“No other bones?”
“Not so far.”
“Well, then.” He looked at the cleared field, as though steeling himself for the tramp through the dirt. She noticed that he’d come prepared with the right footwear: L.L. Bean boots that looked as if they were brand-new and about to get their first test on muddy terrain. “Let’s see what the bulldozer turned up.”
By now it was early afternoon, the heat so thick with humidity that Daljeet’s face was quickly glazed with sweat. As they started across the clearing, insects swarmed in, taking bloody advantage of fresh meat. Detectives Corso and Yates from the Maine State Police had arrived twenty minutes earlier, and were pacing the field along with Ballard and Gresham.
Corso waved and called out: “Not the way to spend a beautiful Sunday, hey, Dr. Singh?”
Daljeet waved back, then squatted down to look at the ilium.
“This was an old homesite,” said Maura. “There was a stone foundation here, according to the crew.”
“But no coffin remains?”
“We didn’t see any.”
He looked across the landscape of muddy stones and uprooted weeds and tree stumps. “That bulldozer could have scattered bones everywhere.”
There was a shout from Detective Yates: “I found something else!”
“Way over there?” said Daljeet, as he and Maura crossed the field to join Yates.
“I was walking by here, got my foot caught in that knot of blackberry roots,” said Yates. “I tripped over it, and this kind of popped up from the dirt.” As Maura crouched beside him, Yates gingerly eased apart a thorny tangle of uprooted canes. A cloud of mosquitoes rose from the damp soil, lighting on Maura’s face as she stared at what was partially buried there. It was a skull. One hollow orbit stared up at her, pierced by tendrils of blackberry roots that had forced their way through openings that had once held eyes.
She looked at Daljeet. “You have a pruner?”
He opened his kit. Out came gloves, a rose pruner, and a garden trowel. Together they knelt in the dirt, working to free the skull. Maura clipped roots as Daljeet gently scooped away earth. The sun beat down, and the soil itself seemed to radiate heat. Maura had to pause several times to wipe away sweat. The insect repellant she had applied an hour ago was long gone, and blackflies were once again swarming around her face.
She and Daljeet set aside their tools and began to dig with their gloved hands, kneeling so close together that their heads bumped. Her fingers tunneled deeper into cooler soil, loosening its hold. More and more cranium emerged and she paused, staring down at the temporal bone. At the massive fracture now revealed.
She and Daljeet glanced at each other, both registering the same thought: This was not a natural dea
th.
“I think it’s loose now,” said Daljeet. “Let’s lift it out.”
He laid out a plastic sheet, then reached deep into the hole. His hands emerged cradling the skull, the mandible partly anchored to it by helpful spirals of blackberry roots. He laid his treasure on the sheet.
For a moment, no one said anything. They were all staring at the shattered temporal bone.
Detective Yates pointed to the metallic glint of one of the molars. “Isn’t that a filling?” he said. “In that tooth?”
“Yes. But dentists were using amalgam fillings a hundred years ago,” said Daljeet.
“So it could still be an old burial.”
“But where are the coffin fragments? If this was a formal burial, there should be a coffin. And there’s this little detail.” Daljeet pointed to the crush fracture. He looked up at the two detectives bending over his shoulder. “Whatever the age of these remains, I think you have a crime scene here.”
The other men had crowded in around them, and suddenly the air felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of it. The buzz of mosquitoes seemed to grow to a pulsing roar. It’s so warm, she thought. She rose to her feet and walked on unsteady legs toward the edge of the woods, where the canopy of oak and maple cast a welcome shade. Sinking onto a rock, she dropped her head in her hands, thinking: This is what I get for not eating breakfast.
“Maura?” called Ballard. “Are you okay?”
“It’s just this heat. I need to cool down for a moment.”
“Would you like some water? I have some in my truck, if you don’t mind drinking from the same bottle.”
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