My Sister's Grave

by Robert Dugoni

  She felt the flicker of hope but tamped it down. “What did that asshole want this time?”

  “He says he has a witness.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what he says. He says he has a witness who will say he saw you and me on the county road together. I don’t remember anyone. Do you?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I remember.”

  He pushed away from the table, approaching, his voice becoming angry. “He’s lying. I know he’s lying, but he says he has one and that his testimony is going to be enough to get a search warrant. What do you think he’s going to find?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing. You said you were careful.”

  He reached out and touched the side of her face with his fingertips. She fought the impulse to flinch and pull away. It only made him angry. “You know what I think?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think I’m being set up.” He dropped his hand and walked away. “If they made up the witness, they’ll likely make up some evidence to try me. Do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “It means this could be the last time we see each other.”

  She felt a wave of anxiety. “They won’t catch you. You’re too smart. You outsmarted them.”

  “Not if they cheat.” He sighed and shook his head. “I told Calloway he could go fuck himself. I told him that I’d already raped and killed you and buried you in the mountains.”

  “Why would you tell him that?”

  “Fuck him,” he said, now pacing, voice rising. “He can’t prove it, so let him live with that on his conscience the rest of his life. I told him I’d never tell him where I buried your body.” He started laughing. “You want to know the best part?”

  “What?” she said, feeling more and more anxious.

  “He wasn’t recording the conversation. It was just the two of us. He has no proof that I said anything.”

  “We could leave,” she said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “We could go someplace together, disappear.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that,” he said. He pulled clothes from the plastic bag. She recognized her shirt and jeans. She thought he’d burned them.

  “I washed them for you,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t I get a thank you?”

  “Thank you,” she said, though uncertain of his intent.

  He tossed them at her feet. When she didn’t move, he said, “Go ahead and put them on. You can’t leave dressed like that.”

  “Are you letting me go?”

  “I can’t keep you here anymore. Not with Calloway on my ass.”

  She slid the frock he’d given her from her shoulders and stepped out of it, naked before him. He watched as she picked up her jeans and slid them on. They hung from her hips. “Guess I’ve lost some weight,” she said, her rib cage and collarbones prominent.

  “You had a few to spare,” he said. “I like you skinny.”

  She held up her arms. “My wrists,” she said.

  He took the key from his pocket and unlocked the left manacle. She slid her arm through the sleeve of her Scully shirt and expected him to reattach the manacle. Instead, he unlocked her right wrist and let the manacles and chains fall at her feet. It was the first time in seven weeks that both her arms had been free. She slid the shirt on, snapping the buttons, fighting to remain calm.

  “Where are we going to go?” she said. “We could go to California. It’s big. It would be impossible to find us.”

  House walked to the shelving and shook her jade earrings and necklace from a can on the shelf. He picked up Tracy’s black Stetson, seemed to consider it a moment, and then put it back on the shelf. He handed her the jewelry. “You might as well put these back on too. No reason for me to keep them.”

  She bit back tears. “You’re letting me go?”

  “I knew it would always come to this.”

  Tears flowed down her cheeks.

  “Don’t start crying about it.”

  But she couldn’t stop. She was going home. “When are we leaving?” she asked.

  “Right now,” he said. “We can go now.”

  “I won’t say anything,” she said. “I promise.”

  “I know you won’t.” He nodded to the door. When she hesitated, he said, “Well, go ahead.”

  It was all she could do to keep from running, anxious to get away, to breathe fresh air again, to see the sky, hear birds, and smell the scent of the evergreens. She took a tentative step toward the door, and looked back at him. His face was a blank mask.

  Sarah took another step and thought of seeing Tracy again, and her mother and father, of waking up in her own bed, in her home. She’d tell herself that it had all been just a nightmare, a horrible nightmare. But she wouldn’t dwell on what Edmund House had done to her. She was going to get on with her life. She was going to go to school and graduate and then she’d come back to live again in Cedar Grove, just as she and Tracy had always planned. In her excitement, she did not hear him pick up the chain from the floor.

  She’d reached the door when the chain wrapped tightly around her throat, strangling her. She tried to dig her fingers beneath the links, then tried to scratch his arms, but he yanked her backward with the chain, flinging her with such force he lifted her off her feet. The light through the door grew distant, as if she were falling down a darkened well. She reached for it, arms straining, and thought she saw Tracy just before the back of her head hit hard against the concrete wall.

  CHAPTER 64

  I hated to kill her.” Edmund House had resumed his seat atop the generator box, forearms resting on his thighs as if he were tending to a campfire and telling a ghost story. “But I knew I wasn’t going to get an opportunity to get rid of her body like that again. And I wasn’t going back to prison.”

  He sat up straighter. Anger crept into his voice. “I should have been in the clear. I’d planned it perfectly, bringing her here. But then Calloway made up all that bullshit evidence and got everyone on board—Finn, Vance Clark, your father. Even my uncle turned against me. So I decided, if I was going to hell for the rest of my life, I was taking Calloway with me, and I told him exactly what I’d done to her.”

  House grinned. “One big problem. He wasn’t recording it. Man, I knew that would piss him off, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be used to hoist him by his own petard. How’s that for irony? When they closed the door to my cell at Walla Walla that first day, I thought that was where I’d spend the rest of my life.”

  He paused, taking her in with his eyes in the way that made her sick. “And then you came to talk to me.” He started to laugh. “And the more we talked, the more I realized they’d never told you what they’d done. You told me about the jewelry, how you knew your sister hadn’t been wearing it that day, how she couldn’t wear it, but that no one would listen to you. I got to admit, you got my hopes up, but then I realized that, with her body at the bottom of a lake, I’d screwed myself. So I settled in to do my time. I guess fate took over.”

  Tracy slid down the concrete wall, her legs suddenly weak. She knew who’d made the decision not to tell her. It was what DeAngelo Finn wouldn’t say, that day she had gone to visit him. It was what Roy Calloway had nearly said outside the veterinary clinic. It had been her father’s decision, and he’d made them swear to never tell her. Tracy was the one Finn was referring to, the one still left, the one her father had loved so very much.

  Her father and Calloway had figured out that it was Tracy that House had wanted, that it should have been Tracy shackled in this hellhole, abused by the psychopath standing before her. James Crosswhite had forbidden them to say a word, knowing that the guilt would have been too much for Tracy to bear, that it would have killed her.

  “I’m afraid I have to leave now.” House stood. “I have unfinished business.”

  “You’re never going to get away with this, House. Calloway knows. He’s going to come for you.”

/>   House smiled. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Calloway stopped at the edge of what Dan surmised to be Parker House’s property, both men breathing hard, the wind howling. “Harley found the break in the gas line. House must have done it in Olympia while they were at the competition. Maybe it was supposed to be a trial run to see what would happen, how far the car would go.”

  “That didn’t come out at his trial,” Dan said, bracing against a gust of wind. His hands and feet had gone numb.

  “It was Tracy’s truck and Tracy had given Sarah her black Stetson. She wore it that night to protect her from the rain. They looked so much alike. In the dark, House couldn’t tell the difference. When he told me what he did to Sarah, how he’d repeatedly raped her before he killed her, he laughed and said, ‘and she wasn’t even the one I wanted.’ That also never came out at trial. James didn’t want Tracy living with that.”

  “It would have killed her,” Dan agreed. “But Roy, why not stop Tracy before we got to this point? Why not tell her before it came to this?”

  “Because I never thought it would come to this,” Calloway said. “I forgot about the Polaroid and that Sarah couldn’t wear the pistol earrings. Tracy held all that back, convinced it was a conspiracy. I also didn’t know the strands of hair had come from a brush they both used. Didn’t think about it back then. Besides, anything I said to try and convince her, she would have thought a lie, and her father was dead and her mother never knew. There was no one to convince Tracy to let it go.”

  Calloway looked to a faint glow of light coming from a building at the back of the property. “I never thought I’d be here again.” He locked eyes with Dan. “I’m not sure what we’re about to find in there. If anything happens, you just shoot. Don’t even aim. You just pull the trigger.”

  They moved forward from one snow mound to the next, until they’d reached the ramshackle house. When Calloway removed his gloves, Dan did the same, shoving the gloves in his pocket. The stock of the shotgun was freezing cold. It hurt when he flexed his fingers, balling them into fists. He tried blowing into them, but his mouth was bone-dry, and he felt like he couldn’t catch his breath.

  Calloway held the .357’s barrel up and reached for the door. The knob turned. He gave Dan the same knowing look he’d given him when he uncovered the tree stump. He knows we’re coming.

  He stepped in. Dan caught the door to keep the wind from slamming it open, followed Calloway, and quietly closed the door behind them. Inside the house, he heard the hum of a generator. He followed Calloway into an adjoining room, Calloway moving deliberately, his gaze darting left and right. Halfway in, he stopped abruptly, then moved swiftly to an armchair.

  Parker House sat in the chair, spikes driven through the back of each hand into the armrests, which were covered in blood. Two more were driven through his boots into the floor, where blood had pooled. “Oh, God,” Dan said.

  Calloway put a finger to his lips. He stepped down a hall and turned on his flashlight, directing it into two rooms, along with the barrel of his gun. Then he returned and put two fingers to Parker’s throat. The man was ashen, his lips blue. “He’s alive,” Calloway whispered, though it didn’t seem possible. Parker opened his eyes and the tiny movement was startling, like the dead coming back to life. His eyes were dull. He looked like he was half-asleep.

  Calloway knelt. “Parker? Parker?”

  His eyes fluttered open.

  “Does he have her?”

  House looked about to speak, then grimaced, struggling to swallow.

  “Get him something to drink.”

  Dan hurried back to the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets before he found a glass and filled it at the tap. When he returned, Calloway was dragging blankets and bedding from the hall. Calloway wrapped the blankets around House, took the glass, and tilted it to the man’s lips.

  House took a small sip.

  “Does he have Tracy?” Calloway asked.

  “The mine,” Parker croaked.

  Calloway set the glass on the floor and straightened, talking to Dan. “I need you to go back and get on the radio.”

  “The radio isn’t working, Roy.”

  “The radio is working. We just didn’t reach anyone. Finlay should be at the station by now and I told him to sit by the radio. You don’t have to do anything except hit the power button. Tell him you need an ambulance and every available officer in Cascade County. Tell them to bring chainsaws.”

  “That will take forever.”

  “Not if you hurry. You get there, you do as I say, and then you get back here and build a fire. If you can’t find wood, burn the damn furniture. Try to keep him warm until they arrive. That’s all we can do at this point. When Finlay gets here, tell him to follow my tracks. Tell him House has her in the old Cedar Grove mine.”

  “If you’re going up there, I’m going with you.”

  “We need more men, Dan. One of us needs to go back and get more men.”

  “You don’t even know if I can reach anyone, do you?”

  “You’re wasting time,” Calloway said. “Right now, I need you to do what I tell you. Tracy’s alive, but she might not be much longer.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because House isn’t trying to hide this time. He could have killed DeAngelo and he could have killed Parker. This is like a trail of bread crumbs.”

  “For who?”

  “For me. I’m the one he wants. I’m the one he hates.”

  “That’s all the more reason to wait.”

  “If I wait, Tracy might die. I lost Sarah, and I lost one of my best friends. I’ve lived with that too, for twenty years. I’m not going to let that son of a bitch take Tracy.”

  “Roy—”

  “We don’t have time to debate this, Dan. One of us needs to go back and get on the radio and get more men. You don’t know where the mine is. Now go get help or they’re both going to die.”

  Dan swore under his breath and handed Calloway the shotgun. “Here. Take this.” Calloway tried to hand Dan the rifle but Dan shook his head. “I can move faster without it.”

  Calloway stepped to the back door, pushing it open. Wind rushed into the room, bringing flakes of snow.

  “Roy.”

  He turned back. The big man had always had a presence about him. He was the law in Cedar Grove, and everyone living there felt better knowing it. But now, Dan saw a man beyond his prime, setting out into a blizzard to find a psychopath.

  Calloway nodded once, stepped out, and was swallowed by the storm.

  CHAPTER 66

  The generator continued to hum, but the available light was quickly fading. Tracy did not have enough slack in the chain to reach the box and crank the handle herself. The filament had dulled from white, to red, and now a pale orange. The daunting onset of darkness made her think of Sarah chained to the wall—her baby sister, so afraid of the dark. What had she done all those hours alone? Had she thought of Tracy? Had she blamed her? Tracy looked to the lone patch of carpet leaning against the concrete wall at the back of the room and wondered if that had been the place where Sarah had sat. She touched it, needing to feel a connection, and noticed faint but distinct scratch marks in the concrete. She pulled back the carpet and leaned closer, seeing grooves in the wall. She traced them with her fingertip and realized they were letters.

  Tracy bent closer, blowing away the fine white dust. She traced the grooves with her fingers. The letters became more distinct.

  I am

  Her stomach tightened in a knot. She blew harder and wiped with a greater sense of urgency, tracing the indentations.

  I am not

  She scraped at a second line of letters just below the first row.

  I am not afraid

  A third line was scratched below the second, though the grooves were not as distinct.

  I am not afraid

  She ran her hand farther down the wall but did not feel any other grooves. She angl
ed herself so her body did not cast a shadow on the wall, but she did not see the rest of their prayer. Sarah had apparently never finished it.

  To the right of the prayer, Tracy felt more scratch marks but these were vertical grooves. Again she angled her body so as not to block the remaining light.

  //// //// //// //// ////

  //// //// //// //// ////

  /

  Tracy sat back, hand covering her mouth. Tears streaked her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” she said. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”

  Another thought came to her. The reason for the calendar was obvious, Sarah was keeping track of the days of her captivity, but why their prayer? Of all the things Sarah could have written, why would she have written something only she and Tracy knew? She could have written her name. She could have written anything.

  Tracy turned and looked to the door in the wall. Her gaze migrated to the black Stetson on the shelf and it brought a realization.

  “He told you, didn’t he? He told you I was the one he wanted,” she whispered.

  Sarah must have feared Tracy would someday be chained to the same wall, and she had left her a message—but it wasn’t just the words that were meant for Tracy. There was more to it than just their prayer.

  “What did you use?” She felt the scratch marks again. Sarah clearly hadn’t made them with her fingernails.

  She had to have used something sharp and rigid. Twenty years ago the concrete would not have been weakened by the years of moist soil above it and damp air.

  “What did you use?” She looked about the floor. “What did you use? And where did you hide it from him?”

  The mine shaft would be more than a mile and a half up the hill, if Calloway could even find it. When Parker House had led Calloway up the mountain twenty years earlier, nature had already reclaimed much of the mining road. In the intervening two decades, the lush vegetation had likely completed its reclamation—not to mention the fact that the road was now buried under several feet of snow.