Secret Remains

by Jennifer Graeser Dornbush

  SECRET REMAINS

  A Coroner’s Daughter Mystery

  Jennifer Graeser Dornbush

  To the underdogs, victims, widows, orphans, adoptees, crime fighters, sisters, best friends, and long-lost loves …

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This particular story, as most of mine are, sprung from an amalgamation of experiences and cases that I observed growing up with death investigation under my nose 24/7. Was there a Sandi Parkman in my past? Yes. There were Sandi’s being abused by family members. There were Sandi’s being sexually exploited by so-called boyfriends. There were lonely, wounded girls seeking attention and admiration at often great costs to them.

  There are still far too many Sandi Parkmans.

  There doesn’t have to be. We can each be part of the solution. If you see something or suspect something; say something. It can be as simple as letting that someone know that you see, you care, and you will confidentially help them.

  Additionally, sexual exploitation and trafficking is right under our noses. We can see it in our most vulnerable populations, but also in the most unlikely. In the big cities, but also in the smallest towns and most rural country sides. Learn the signs of someone in distress. Give someone a lifeline, before it’s too late.

  US Department of Health & Human Service, Office on Trafficking In Persons

  https://www.acf.hhs.gov/otip/about/what-is-human-trafficking

  National Trafficking Hotline: 888-373-7888.

  A special thank you to those who read, edited, resourced, and lovingly nitpicked this story as it went along. Ryan, Sidney, Amy, Gordon, Mina, Gail, and Ron. For my spunky and ever-encouraging agent, Julie Gwinn. And thank you to the amazing staff at Crooked Lane who helped shape this novel from its inception: Jenny Chen, Matthew Martz, Ashley Dio, Melissa Rechter, and Rachel Keith.

  PROLOGUE

  Day broke and the sun began to warm the thin layer of frost off the forest floor as the contractor waved to the backhoe operator to fire up the beastly machine. The crew was just beginning excavation on the first parcel of land in a brand-new housing development just inside Freeport city limits in Pinetree Slopes—named appropriately for its long rows of tall white pines planted in a reforesting effort some twenty years earlier. Now many of the pines lay fallen to make way for construction.

  The two-story, four-bedroom house would have a full basement, which meant several tons of earth needed to be hauled away. It would take a full week to prep the land for the concrete pouring.

  The growling backhoe plunged its scoop into the earth, grinding its way through the first layer of rich, dark-brown soil.

  The contractor’s face lit with satisfaction. He had been crafting and creating this dream for several years now. Today it was becoming reality. In a year or two, several dozen homes would spring up in this idyllic wooded setting. Couples would move in. Families would grow. Children would ride bikes down a sidewalk that at the moment existed only on paper. Parents would gather on lawns to share gardening tips, recipes, or local gossip. A community was being born right before his eyes.

  As the sun rose higher in the morning sky, creating bright tunnels of light between the rows of trees, something caught the eye of the contractor in the freshly dug hole.

  He waved his hands frantically at the backhoe operator. The beast sputtered to a stop, leaving a silent void.

  Rushing into the shallow pit, the contractor fixed his gaze on something unearthed from the broken ground. He knelt and brushed away the cool, moist soil, his eyes growing wide as he unearthed a slender gray bone.

  1

  Dr. Emily Hartford sat nervously at her father’s side. He was lying helpless on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance as they raced down the two-lane country road to Freeport Hospital. Had she not stopped by to say goodbye on her way back to Chicago, he might have died right there on the kitchen floor. Thank God she had.

  His heart rate was dropping, and he was going in and out of consciousness. She knew from the sweat beading on his face, his increased breathing, and his recent stint in the hospital for a heart attack that he was having another one. And it took everything in her power not to push the paramedic aside, grab the defibrillator paddles, and take charge. Just be there for him. He needs to see you calm.

  She held tight to her dad’s hand, glanced out the windshield, and saw Nick Larson, the county sheriff, leading the way in his squad car, flashers swathing a red-and-blue path to Freeport Hospital. Nick had been with her at her dad’s house when she’d found him lying in the kitchen. And he had stayed with them until the paramedics arrived and packed Dad into the ambulance. She was so grateful she hadn’t been alone.

  “Em?” mumbled Dr. Robert Hartford from under his oxygen mask.

  She snapped her gaze back to her father, struggling for his life. “Dad. I’m here.” She removed his oxygen mask for a moment and pressed her ear close to his mouth. “What is it?”

  “I’m not gonna make it this time,” he said in a wispy voice.

  “That’s not true. Hang in there. There’s a surgeon waiting for you at the hospital.”

  Doc, as he was known by locals, not only held a thriving family medical practice at his home office but had also served as Freeport County’s coroner for over thirty years. He shook his head ever so slightly. “No, Em. Don’t waste his time.”

  Emily put the mask back on her father so he could get more oxygen into his system. “It’s not a waste. We’re going to do emergency bypass, and in a couple weeks you’ll be back in your orchard fertilizing the trees for spring. Okay?”

  He struggled to lift his hand to his mouth. Emily understood that he wanted to speak again, and she removed his mask. “Your mother had cancer when she died,” he sputtered out in short breaths.

  “No, Dad. She died in a car accident. Remember?”

  “She had terminal cancer, and she didn’t tell us.” Tears started to flow from his eyes.

  “Are you saying Mom died from cancer?”

  “No …” A breath caught in his throat, and he began to wheeze.

  Emily quickly replaced the mask over his nose and mouth. He wasn’t making sense. Just like when she’d found him on his kitchen floor twenty minutes earlier, babbling about how it was his fault his wife had died thirteen years ago.

  It had been an accident. Deer versus car. The police had confirmed it. But Emily had found evidence to prove otherwise. Her mother’s blue slipper under a bush near the crash site. What had Mom been doing driving her car in slippers? It was unlike her. But Dad had refused to investigate, and they’d drifted angrily apart. At sixteen, hurt and grieving, Emily had run to Chicago to live with her Aunt Laura. She’d finished high school and immediately enrolled in pre-med at the University of Chicago. She was now three years into her surgical residency. Emily hadn’t been to Freeport since she’d left at sixteen. But a week ago, her father’s first heart attack had sent her rushing back after her long hiatus.

  “Breathe, Dad. Breathe.”

  He tried, but had trouble sucking in the air he needed. Emily noticed his gray skin taking on a bluish hue. If he didn’t get into surgery as soon as they got him to the hospital, she would lose him.

  “How close are we?” Emily asked the paramedic.

  “About three minutes,” he said.

  “Can you get the driver to go faster? Please!”

  “Sit back, please,” barked the other paramedic, who was standing by with the paddles and monitoring her father’s sinking heart rate. Her dad’s eyes rolled back.

  Emily slapped his arm three times. “Dad! Dad! Wake up! Come on!”

  It worked. Doc’s eye fluttered open. “Just a few more minutes, Dad. Focus on me. Focus on breathing. That’s all you have to do.”

&nb
sp; His eyes darted back and forth, finally landing lazily on Emily’s face.

  “That’s it. Good. Good. Look at me.”

  He started to talk again, but she couldn’t understand him with the mask over his mouth. She leaned over again and lifted it a few inches from his face.

  “The day … your mom died … I was meeting … a woman …”

  Emily felt the ambulance jostle as they made a corner. They were here. Thank God.

  The ambulance rolled to a halt, and she heard the driver open the front door and slam it shut.

  “I need to get him ready to exit,” the paramedic said, unlocking the gurney wheels. Emily stayed firmly in place, still grasping her father’s hand.

  “A woman? Who? Dad?” Emily gasped. “What woman?”

  “Mom … loved you. I love you.”

  The other paramedic touched Emily’s arm and gently removed her hand from her father’s.

  “We have to take him now.” The back doors flew open. Emily instinctively gripped her father’s gurney. But as soon as she did, the cold metal was ripped from her palms and the wheels dropped to the ground and snapped into position. The paramedics rolled the gurney toward the ER entrance, where three hospital staff were waiting to assist their patient inside.

  What woman? What was he talking about?

  Emily froze for a moment, unable to jump from the back of the ambulance. A sudden drop in adrenaline made her legs go to jelly. She took a deep breath, and when she looked up, Nick had parked behind the ambulance and emerged from his patrol car to meet her. He rushed over and offered his sturdy grip, and she grabbed his forearm. He lifted her from the back of the ambulance and led her through the emergency room entrance.

  Emily was in a foggy dream state as they traveled into the waiting room. Nothing was normal. Not the sounds. Not the smells. Not the staff or other patients. Where was Dad? Her eyes darted around the room, frantically searching.

  She felt Nick’s grip again, leading her to a curtained area. One of the nurses at her father’s bedside looked up from her mask, and Emily recognized those eyes immediately. Jo Blakely, her best friend. She was a floater nurse at Freeport Hospital and had been the first to call her when Dad had had his initial heart attack.

  Emily knew once she looked into Jo’s grief-stricken eyes. “He’s not going to make it, is he?” she whispered.

  Jo didn’t answer. She just motioned for Emily to come closer. Nick let go of Emily’s hand as she moved toward her father’s bed.

  The staff were working hard in their efforts to stabilize him. An eerie foreboding swept through the space as Emily entered and saw one of the doctors on duty prepping the defibrillator. Dad was slipping into unconscious, and Emily took his hand again.

  “Dad, I love you.” She choked out the lump in her throat and kept her focus on her father’s chest as he released a breath. Please don’t go now. We have twelve years of catching up to do.

  The heart monitor blipped a weak rhythm as a nurse continued compressions and another one by his face squeezed the bag mask over his mouth and nose.

  Emily looked up at the doctor in charge. Their efforts were in vain, but they kept trying. Emily knew he was gone. “It’s okay. You can stop.”

  The doctor looked at Emily but kept charging the defib paddles.

  She didn’t have the authority to make the call, but she couldn’t stand watching this torture. “I’m his daughter. Please. Stop.”

  When they didn’t, Emily dashed over to the defib machine and switched it off. The nurses in the room stood still, unsure how to respond. Their eyes landed on the doctor in charge and then back on Emily.

  “I’m calling it,” she said in a defeated tone as she glanced up at the large clock on the wall.

  “You can’t call time of death,” said the doctor in charge.

  She went on in a breathy, desperate voice. “Time of death, thirteen sixteen.” She looked around the room. Everyone was staring at her. “He’s gone. He’s … dead.” Her voice cracked and broke.

  The doctor nodded and called out, “Time of death, thirteen sixteen.”

  He then turned to Emily, putting a hand on her arm. “I’m very, very sorry. We all loved your father.”

  Emily’s throat constricted as she stared at her father’s lifeless body. The staff began to remove tubes from him, then carted away machines and exited the space in a silent parade. Nick and Jo stayed with her.

  “I’m so sorry, Emily. I don’t know what to say,” said Jo, gripping Emily’s hand with a tight squeeze. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Neither can I.

  She wasn’t able to voice the reality.

  Here she was, thirteen years after the death of her mother, again in the emergency room of Freeport Hospital, now with a dead father. How can this be happening? She and her father had just started to reconcile after a long hiatus of estrangement. Her body went cold and quivery, and she couldn’t get it under control. Nick and Jo’s supportive grips were the only thing keeping her from buckling to the floor.

  Emily let out a long sob. Why had she waited so long to return home?

  2

  Five restless nights later Emily lay awake watching the sky from her bedroom window in the house she’d grown up in. She couldn’t sleep. Hours passed, and mercifully the jet black slowly changed to midnight blue tinged with orange as the sun rose on the day of her father’s funeral.

  Emily crawled out of bed to take a walk around the property, a fifty-acre farm and orchard. She wandered across the harvested wheat field that her father had rented out to a local farmer, and through the small orchard of apple and peach trees he had planted that were almost past their prime. The dew was heavy on the tall grass and soon soaked her tennis shoes and pant bottoms. She had a hard time following her thoughts, so she stopped fighting them and let her mind drift as her senses absorbed the earthy odor and the cool morning air, which had dipped to around forty degrees. Soon the swirl of thoughts presented themselves as a string of questions.

  What did Dad mean by ‘meeting a woman’? Was he having an affair? Did Mom know? Why didn’t she tell me about the cancer? Did this other woman somehow contribute to Mom’s accident?

  When Emily returned to the house, she found Cathy Bishop, Dad’s new wife of just six months and third-generation owner of Bishop and Schulz Funeral Home, in the kitchen boiling eggs for breakfast. Emily’s stomach turned at the thought of food, but that’s how people fed their grief here in Freeport. She would be expected to eat, or pretend to, anyhow.

  “I know you’re not hungry, but you need to eat something,” said Cathy, correctly guessing the thoughts behind the look on Emily’s face. “It’s going to be a long day. Three bites.”

  Emily nodded and sat at the kitchen table. Cathy brought her a mug of coffee and a hard-boiled egg. She sipped on the bitter black brew, so deadened inside that she did not even make the effort to add her usual sugar and a dash of cream.

  “I want you to know that I’ve decided to move out of the house,” Cathy declared after Emily had taken her first bite of egg.

  “No. No. You don’t have to do that. This is your house now.”

  “Technically, it’s probably yours. We never got around to making a will together.”

  Emily wasn’t surprised by this. Even Emily hadn’t known about her father’s marriage until recently.

  “I’m not kicking you out. Besides, I don’t even know if I’m sticking around Freeport now.” She had arrived in Freeport less than two weeks ago to attend to her father after his first heart attack. She hadn’t intended to stay long, because she had a surgical residency in Chicago … and a fiancé, Brandon. Well, ex-fiancé. They had been engaged for a week before things took an odd turn. The same day she arrived in her Freeport home, Senator Dobson’s daughter, Julie, had been killed riding her horse and Dad had begged her to assist on a medical examiner case. Just like the old times when Emily was a teenager, assisting as junior coroner.

  At first, Emily begrudgingly a
greed to help him, but she soon found herself engrossed. It turned out to be a homicide case, and she quickly became bent on cracking it as the familiar, old passions for investigation kicked in from the years when she and her Dad had solved cases together.

  Emily rubbed her healing ribs, a lingering reminder that the Dobson murder investigation had almost cost her her life. But she had found the killer. The Dobson case had invigorated Emily in a way she hadn’t felt since she had worked side by side with her dad in death investigations.

  “It doesn’t feel right to stay. I’ll be out by the end of the week,” said Cathy.

  “Back to the funeral home?” asked Emily. Cathy owned the large red brick Victorian home in downtown Freeport that served as a funeral parlor and upstairs residence.

  “Yes. I rented it out, when your father and I got married, to a young couple. Fortunately, they understand my need to have the place back.”

  “Cathy … please stay here. The place is huge, and there’s no reason we can’t both be here. Besides, I’ll be having to get back to Chicago sometime soon.”

  “I just can’t. I need to move on.” Cathy wagged her head. “Fresh start.” She took a seat at the table, slid two hard boiled eggs onto a plate, and broke them with a fork. “My son, Ben, came into town last night,” Cathy said, taking a seat at the table. “He’s bringing the hearse by in a half an hour to take me to the funeral home. You’re welcome to ride with us.”

  “Nick said he would pick me up. But thanks.”

  Emily forced down two more bites of breakfast and went up to her room to slip on Jo’s black A-line dress. All of her stuff was still in Chicago. When her father had his first heart attack, she had rushed from her shift at the hospital, dressed only in jeans and a blouse, to drive four hours north to Freeport upon getting news from Jo. Since that horrible call, Emily hadn’t had a single moment’s time to return to Chicago, where she lived, to retrieve her things, which was now proving very unfortunate because Jo was tinier than Emily and the dress snugged her chest and hips. Emily had to wriggle the fabric into place to keep it from riding up. My own father’s funeral, and I don’t even have my own dress.