by Sue Henry
She walked slowly through the woods looking up into the branches, taking her bearings from the cabin she could glimpse between the trees in the growing light from the clearing. Jessie knew that trunks and lower limbs of trees do not move higher as they grow; growth extends the branches, but the trunk and limbs only grow thicker as rings are added year by year, swelling their dimensions. Any marks, scars, or trauma to the outer bark might scar over but would remain at about the same level as when damage occurred. Pulling weight over a branch with a rope might abrade and scar it in a way that could be visible, so Jessie looked carefully at each one.
Several times she heard noises in the thick underbrush but saw nothing when she whirled to look, hand going instinctively to the gun at her waist. It was just dark enough to make her nervous, but there were all kinds of small natural sounds in an old-growth forest of this kind, and most were familiar and to be expected. Still, she was cautious in her search and glad to have Tank for company.
It soon grew light enough for her to see quite well. The song of birds resounded around her as she searched, and a family of squirrels chided her for intruding upon their territory. In an hour she had examined every tree within fifty yards of where the woods met the clearing behind where the old man’s cabin had stood, and found nothing. When it was broad daylight and beams of sunshine filtered through the branches and leaves that surrounded her, she sat down on a fallen log to rest for a minute. Yawning, she reached a hand to pat Tank, who had come to sit on the ground beside her.
“Well, it was a good idea, wasn’t it?” she told him, her shoulders slumping in exhaustion and disappointment. With the other hand, she reached up to rub the back of her own neck, weary of holding her head back at an angle to look up into the trees. A robin coasted in to land in the sunlight of a small open spot and cocked its head to listen for underground angleworms.
If she went back to bed now she could get an hour or two of sleep before construction started again and the growl of the crane made it impossible.
“Come on, Tank. Let’s give it up and go home.”
She stood up and was turning toward the clearing when she stopped suddenly and looked back at the sunny spot. Because of its early angle, the beam of sunshine in which the robin was sitting cast shadows that revealed a depression in the ground, a sunken spot about six feet long and maybe two feet wide. It was slightly deeper in the center; three or four inches lower than the surrounding soil. Grass grew there that did not grow beneath the trees, where the ground was littered with spruce needles and decaying birch leaves, a natural rich loam in the making. Standing there, staring down at the depression, she knew she could easily have walked right over it.
As she moved a few steps closer, the robin hopped up, flew away in a whir of red-breasted motion, and vanished quickly into the trees. But Jessie wasn’t interested in the bird or disturbing its breakfast. She walked a slow circle around the depression, taking care not to step into it or disturb it in any way, and stopped again. If this was what she suspected it might be, she could have moved past and missed it in her search of the trees above her head. If she hadn’t been there to see what the light disclosed only at that time of day, the depression could have gone undiscovered. The idea of there being a hidden grave had been valid. She was amazed to have been successful in her search and happy to regain her self-confidence.
She had found, she hoped, the final resting place of Bonnie Russell’s sister. It could turn out to be someone or something else, but she doubted it; it was too close to the old man’s burial spot where Jo-Jo’s butterfly necklace had been found. What would Bonnie feel and do now? It would be a relief for her to finally have closure and be able to account for her sister. But wouldn’t all the years of searching and waiting have irrevocably changed her? Would not having to wonder anymore leave a sudden emptiness where there had been focus and determination?
Jessie thought of her own father and remembered what she had told Lynn: My dad still looks. Everywhere he goes, he’s always looking for Lily. How would he feel if he were unexpectedly given answers to the agonizing questions that had haunted his life? How would I feel? she wondered. Relieved, or guilty all over again?
Staring down at the promise of the depression in the ground, Jessie knew she had long ago given up hope. She wondered which was the easier to bear, her certainty and acceptance that Lily’s disappearance would remain a mystery, or her father’s constant never-ending belief that anything was possible. Again, she wondered what her discovery would bring to Bonnie Russell.
Raising her head, she looked intently at the branches of each tree that grew around the depression and finally found the evidence for which she had been searching. In an ancient birch, one twisted lower branch exhibited a scar, healed over and darker than the rest of its pale bark. From where she stood looking up at it, Jessie could just make out a few strands of what looked like hemp barely moving in the small breath of the morning breeze.
Jessie’s call to John Timmons raised his wife, Gladys, from sleep at five o’clock that morning, but ever polite and used to calls at odd hours, she handed him the phone anyway. His gravelly growl was even more pronounced when he was yanked from dreams.
“Timmons.”
“It’s Jessie, John. I’m sorry to wake you,” she apologized, “but I think I’ve found the body you’ve been looking for—well, at least where it may be buried.”
His response was guarded. “Where? What did you find?”
She began to tell him about her early-morning search but was interrupted halfway through by his irritated, “You mean you’re alone out there? I thought I told you…”
“Look, I’m fine,” she assured him impatiently, her focus on what she had found. “There’ve been people coming and going around here all night. Now listen, please.”
There was no hesitation in his response when she finished. “Call Becker and tell him I’ll be there in an hour and a half.”
“Fine. I’m going back to bed. Wake me up when you get here and I’ll show you where it is.”
Timmons wasted no time. The barking of the dogs in the kennel and Pete from inside the motor home demanded Jessie’s attention at a quarter after six. She dragged herself up from where she had crashed on the bed, fully dressed, and went out to lead Timmons and his yawning lab crew to the depression in the woods. Becker, it turned out, was working on another case but would show up when he could.
Getting Timmons to the site in his wheelchair was not easy, as the ground under the trees was anything but level and there was plenty of brush and a log or two to negotiate. But, rocking and rolling, and with a certain amount of assistance, he made it and finally sat beside the depression in the woods, assessing her find with a frown that narrowed his eyes under the beetling brows that were as wild as his fuzzy hair.
Jessie pointed out the scar she had located on the branch of the nearby birch and gave him her theory of how it came to be there.
“Um-hmm.” He nodded in agreement. “I think you may have found it all right, Jessie. Get busy, guys. Lots of pictures as you go.” He spun himself around toward her, his frown deepening to a scowl of disapproval. “But what the hell were you thinking to be out here alone? You don’t listen, just insist on doing things your way. What if the guy who left those roses had been out here?”
“I had my fourty-four,” Jessie rejoined defensively, “and Tank.”
“And what did I tell you about handguns and getting yourself shot with them? Dogs can get shot too, you know. Besides, out here he could kill you without showing himself at all. We’d just find you later, as dead as whoever may be in this grave—if it is a grave.”
Huffing in frustration, Timmons glared at her. He’d had fifty miles in his drive from Anchorage to crank up his dissatisfaction with her behavior.
“Aw, hell, go back to bed. We’ll be out here most of the morning. I’ll let you know what we find—if anything.”
Swinging back toward the depression to supervise his lab assistants, he made it
obvious that he intended to ignore her and any justification she felt inclined to offer.
“Hey, I found your damn grave for you!” Jessie snapped, and stalked away toward the clearing, smarting from his dressing-down and muttering to herself, leaving Timmons and his crew to the task of digging.
“Relieve tension by doing something constructive?” she asked herself under her breath. “Hardly!” If anything, the tension had increased, now that everyone seemed to be angry with her. “Dammit!”
And what if her floral benefactor had been lurking? What if he was responsible for either or both of the burials on her property and had been searching for this old one, meaning to dig it up and move the remains she expected they would find in its depths? He could have been disoriented by the changes she had made to the clearing and unable to find it in the dark. The roses might have been meant to scare her away, right? It was an idea she hadn’t considered.
Tired from too much thinking and lack of rest, she reached the Winnebago and went immediately to bed, as Timmons had suggested. Exhaustion proved better than pills, for she was asleep in minutes, little caring what old secrets they might unearth from the asylum of her woods.
20
“LEAVE HER BE FOR NOW,” HANK PETERSON TOLD VIC Prentice that morning, when they arrived to find the crime lab van in the yard, the motor home silent, and Jessie not up. “She had a bad night last night and the crane will wake her anyway when it starts.” He looked around for the lab workers but, seeing no one, thought no more about it for the moment.
Vic agreed, and they walked off together to talk with the log-raising crew that had just arrived.
J.B., Dell, and Stevie arrived close behind them and went to work to organize the materials for the roof they would build as soon as the other crew had finished. There was lumber to be cut, and Bill had driven in a truck full of insulation and roofing paper that needed unloading. They came and went through the yard, attending to a variety of jobs.
The sound of machinery and activity in the yard did wake Jessie, who came yawning to open the door of the Winnebago, a cup of coffee in one hand, a bagel in the other, to see the remaining logs begin to go up. Hank waved but left her alone to make her peace with the new day, going instead to make roofing plans with Prentice.
Jessie was tired and, at first, a little depressed and embarrassed, still remembering her emotional revelation to Ehlers the night before and her anger at Timmons’s scolding. But soon she shrugged it off and went about getting dressed for work. “I’m beginning to sound like Scarlett,” she said to Tank, who sat by the door, waiting to be let out. “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
Letting Tank and Pete out, she tethered the two to their boxes, then fed and watered all her dogs. Though she had refused to spoil the pleasure of watching the new cabin grow by going over the night’s events, she was quiet and thoughtful for most of the morning. She did not totally regret what she had told Lynn about her family, but she would have liked him to think her stronger than tears.
Weepy women are boring, she told herself in disgust.
Do you care that much what he thinks—what anybody thinks?
No! Oh, I don’t know. Why can’t everyone just leave me alone to build this damn cabin?
The amount of anger she was feeling surprised her.
What is it that’s making me so angry? she wondered as she sat down on Tank’s dog box to think about it. Finished with his breakfast, he jumped up and lay down beside her, and they both watched the crane operator skillfully lower a log into place on the south wall.
She was angry with herself for allowing the stress of outside problems to interrupt her focus on building the cabin. There seemed to be so many of them. But what were those outside problems, really, and what could she do to minimize the disruption? Putting them out of her mind clearly wasn’t working, and neither was doing something positive, like searching for another grave.
It started with the skull in the wall of her basement excavation and had escalated from there. Law enforcement—Becker and Timmons—complicated matters with the old Hansen case and its copycat. With Becker had come Bonnie Russell and, by extension, her dead sister, to stir up all the old feelings that Jessie would rather have kept locked away. The depression she had found in the woods and what it might contain was now added to the mix. Lynn Ehlers was not an unwelcome intrusion—or was he? His arrival had inspired a reconsideration of the end of her relationship with Jensen, loaded with disappointment and a sense of failure. Then there were the roses, the awful sweet-sour dichotomy of their alarming beauty and the puzzle of who was sending them, and why. The intruder in her yard and living space, and the women he was evidently killing, seemed another, but it was related to the roses, wasn’t it? Anything else? Oh, yes, the small stuff: J.B.’s unwelcome attentions and the harassment of the reporter, Gary Huddleston—who hadn’t been back, thank God.
Five major categories of distraction and two small ones. No wonder she was feeling stressed and angry. Getting rid of some of them would lower the tension level, but how was that to be accomplished? She still thought that doing something positive was better than letting the whole related tangle wash over her, snarling her emotions into tears and jeopardizing her judgment. When she was pressured, she tended to stubbornness and frustrated anger, neither of which was useful.
A second truck loaded with logs swung into the drive and replaced the first, which had rumbled off to collect another load. Watching log after log swung into place on the walls was growing repetitious, so, still thinking, she went to clean up the scraps of plywood and materials that had been tossed down in haste as the floor went in the day before. She piled anything burnable neatly beside her storage shed, with a thought toward winter. The rest she began to toss into an industrial-sized Dumpster that Prentice had provided for trash purposes.
Ignoring the comings and goings in her long driveway, she was unaware that someone not on the building crew had driven in until she heard her name and turned to find Bonnie Russell standing nearby with a tentative smile on her face.
“Could you use a hand?”
She was dressed in jeans and a dark red sweatshirt, a pair of hiking boots on her feet. A pair of gloves stuck out of one pocket.
“I thought you might be able to put me to work.”
With a sinking feeling, Jessie glanced across the yard at the crime lab van, still parked where Timmons and his minions had left it hours before. She had a hunch they wouldn’t care to have Bonnie show up at a site that could possibly be the grave of her sister.
Her concern must have shown on her face, for Bonnie’s look followed hers to the van. She was asking questions before she even looked back.
“Where are they? Have they found something?” The tone of her voice betrayed her tension.
Jessie felt cornered, afraid she might say something Timmons might not want disclosed.
“Maybe,” she admitted reluctantly. “But they can’t be disturbed right now.”
“Where are they?” Bonnie asked again.
Jessie shook her head.
Wheeling, Bonnie walked across to the van and examined the ground around it. The tracks of Timmons’s wheelchair on the ground, distinct and unmistakable, headed directly toward the woods at the back of the property. Before Bonnie could follow them, Jessie stepped into her path.
“Don’t,” she warned. “John doesn’t want you there, or anyone else. They’ll come back. Wait for him if you want to, but I don’t know how long it’ll be.”
“What’ve they found?” Bonnie demanded, her face a study in frustrated determination.
So I’m not the only one who wants her own way, Jessie thought.
“I don’t know what they’ve found—if anything. Stay and see,” she encouraged. “You can help me while you wait, if you like.”
The other woman hesitated, staring into the trees as if she could see through them if she focused her concentration. Finally she turned back to Jessie with a resigned sigh. “Okay, I’ll wait—for
a while. What can I do?”
“Well,” Jessie told her, with a grin, “all this stuff is trash and goes in that.” She indicated the large Dumpster. “You’re a glutton for punishment to offer.”
“Not really. Just got tired of my own company.”
Knowing she had been working to keep her own thoughts at bay, Jessie sympathized. Remembering what Becker and Timmons had told her of Bonnie’s discovery of the woman’s body near the river, she didn’t think her helper would welcome questions, so she didn’t ask. They spent the next half hour working together to collect and dispose of the trash.
“What now?” her assistant asked, when the work area was clear again.
“Now we take a coffee break; then we’ll see if Vic has something we can do, though it may not be much till they’re finished with the logs.”
With another long look toward the woods, Bonnie agreed, unenthusiastically.
They had no more than settled in the sunshine outside the Winnebago with their coffee when Phil Becker came up the drive in his patrol car and got out, his face like a thundercloud.
“It’s Grand Central Station around here these days,” Jessie said to Bonnie. Then, anticipating the cause of Becker’s bad temper, she added, “Hold on to your hat. He’s not happy with me, but that’s nothing new.”
Phil came striding purposefully up to where they were sitting and stood looming over Jessie, where she sat on the step, having offered the bench to Bonnie.