by Maureen Tan
I intended to begin my investigation of the remains up near Camp Cadiz with a bit of gossip. And Ed Statler was just the man to provide it. Ed always bragged that most days, if asked, he could tell you where half the town was based on who’d stopped in or driven by. Add to that the fact that Ed was an easy man to talk to and, like many such men, was also a good listener. And the fact that for the last thirty years, Ed had sold homemade ham and beans and corn bread at lunchtime every Wednesday.
Ham and beans had always been a particular favorite in small-town southern Illinois, and Ed’s missus did a particularly good job with that old favorite. So anytime after about ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, a sizable segment of the local population drove up the highway to Statler’s. Those who couldn’t spare the time or preferred not to eat elbow-to-elbow with other customers at one of the long, oilcloth draped folding tables at the back of the store carried away warm, heavy foam containers.
Beyond the opportunity to eat good food, Statler’s on Wednesdays was a regular social event. Even folks who just stopped long enough to pick up food greeted neighbors and gossiped with friends. And Ed listened. But unlike a good part of Maryville’s population, Ed only passed that information on to a select group. Fortunately, Chad and I—even before we’d become cops—were among Ed’s chosen.
It was too early for the rush. Too early, in fact, for Ed’s missus to drive over to deliver the big iron pots and battered baking pans that would fill the convenience store with a smoky smell of ham overlaid with a sweet, toasty whiff of corn. And although Mrs. Statler was probably in the midst of frenzied food preparation at their home near the center of town, Ed was sitting at the counter with Maryville’s weekly newspaper spread out in front of him.
Ed lifted his head and a broad smile split his dark face when he saw me come in. For as long as I could remember, he’d favored Hawaiian-print shirts—he said they made him feel cheerful. Today’s shirt was a retro masterpiece of cherry-colored gardenias with bright yellow stamens against a background of lime-green.
The shirts were cheerful. Like Ed. And I had no problem admitting to myself that, most days, Ed’s upbeat attitude was more important to me than keeping abreast of local gossip. It was, in fact, the real reason I made a habit of stopping by to chat with Ed almost every morning. But not today.
“Nice shirt,” I said.
His smile expanded into a grin that revealed a single gold front tooth bisecting a row of bright white.
“Bought it on e-Bay. Man, I love technology.”
I twisted off the lid of my thermal cup and began filling it with coffee. Like no one else in town and probably few in all of southern Illinois, Ed understood that coffee should be something more than brown-tinged water. He ground the beans for every pot, even brewed his decaf dark, and had probably addicted more than a few Maryville residents. I’d discovered coffee—real coffee—sitting in the Statlers’ kitchen when I was in fifth grade. He’d fixed me and his daughter, who was about my age, a big cup cut with sweetened, condensed milk. She’d grown up and moved to Chicago. I’d stayed in Maryville and discovered I preferred my coffee bitter.
I lifted my chin in the direction of Maryville’s weekly paper.
“Anything interesting?” I asked.
I figured that Chad and I had discovered the remains near Camp Cadiz late enough in the evening that we hadn’t made the local paper. And a crime scene that was a decade old wasn’t likely to get much more than a paragraph or two in any of the regional daily newspapers.
“Nope,” Ed said.
But then he thumped the tip of a knobby, black finger on the black-and-white photo of the state’s current governor. A man so hopelessly a big-city northerner that he refused to leave Chicago to live in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, a town that was significantly larger and farther north than Maryville. As far as I knew, no one in Maryville had ever admitted voting for him.
“Unless you consider the latest thing those Chicago Democrats are proposing to make life difficult for us folks down here,” Ed added.
I leaned against the counter, sipped my coffee and idly considered the tray of doughnuts just a few inches from my elbow. You know you’re a cop if you consider doughnuts a food group, I thought with a smile and awarded myself a point. I had a particular weakness for the ones coated in chocolate, but I was too full from breakfast to be tempted.
“Aren’t you feeling well?” Ed asked, real concern apparent in his voice.
“I had a big breakfast at home.”
One of Ed’s grizzled eyebrows crawled up his forehead as his dark brown eyes slid in my direction, making his face a human question mark.
If he asks me how Chad is, I’ll scream, I thought. Ed, like most of Maryville, knew that Chad and I had lived together. It was the kind of arrangement that raised eyebrows in conservative Maryville and, I supposed, kept us very much in the prayers of our local Baptist congregation. But they’d been praying for marriage, not separation, and I doubted anyone had celebrated when Chad had moved into an apartment over one of the businesses on Main Street.
Now the locals could only guess about our relationship, which inspired more gossip than merely living together had. Except for Ed, who didn’t need to speculate because he could use the number of doughnuts I ate to gauge the state of my personal life. And there was no doubt that I ate fewer doughnuts when Chad—and his hearty breakfast habit—were in residence.
Even Ed, as astute as he was, could sometimes put two and two together and come up with five. But I’d apparently misjudged the man. He didn’t ask me about Chad or tell me how pleased he was that we’d gotten back together. Instead, his eyebrow slipped back down into its usual location and his expressive face grew serious.
“A ranger stopped by here for coffee real late last night. On her way home from an emergency call out. She said you and Possum went searching for a little, lost girl and got her back to her parents safe and sound.”
I nodded, thinking of the number of people on the scene last night. Multiply that by colleagues, families and buddies, and a significant part of Maryville had probably been buzzing with the news of the search—and the newly discovered remains—before I’d gone to sleep last night. Just as well, I thought cynically, that the crime scene was as isolated as it was. Otherwise, it’d quickly become a local tourist attraction.
“Possum’s a good dog,” I said.
“Yeah, he sure is,” Ed said. “There was also some talk about a climb down into ravine—a climb that the gal I was talking with said no one else she could think of would have attempted solo and in the dark. Suppose it just wouldn’t do, though, to call the handler heroic.”
“No,” I said, though I smiled at the compliment, “it wouldn’t.”
“Coming from a Tyler, I’m not surprised. You folks have always been real quiet about all the good you do. And the risks you all take doing it.”
Except for the risks, which I supposed might have been thrown in to describe my day job or search work, Ed might have been talking about all of the volunteering Aunt Lucy and Gran did in our town. Or he might have been talking about something else altogether. Something like the Underground.
Despite the precautions our family took to keep the organization secret, I suspected that there were people in town—especially old-timers like Ed—who had caught on. Who knew that not all the guests at the Cherokee Rose were paying customers and noticed the disproportionate number of scared and battered women who stayed with us for just a night or two. And who had figured out that the occasional bruises that Gran or Aunt Lucy or I couldn’t hide weren’t, as we always claimed, the result of clumsiness or bad luck.
Before I could muster a denial or come up with a response that contradicted or deliberately misinterpreted him, Ed shifted to a new subject.
“Heard you also found some old bones buried up near Camp Cadiz. You figure it’s Chad’s momma?”
Though it was unusual for Chad to jump to that conclusion, that was usually the first questi
on asked when any body was discovered within a hundred-mile radius of Maryville. Chad’s father hadn’t remembered exactly where he’d left his wife’s body. In the forest somewhere, he’d said. But he did remember that he’d made her kneel and beg God aloud for forgiveness that he’d assured her wouldn’t be forthcoming. Then he’d put a bullet in her head.
“Don’t know yet,” I said. “Is that what folks think?”
He shrugged.
“You of all people should know…folks hereabouts like to talk. Not much else to do, I suppose. Doesn’t really matter if they’ve got anything to say.”
I couldn’t argue with that. If gossip were illegal, most of Maryville would be jailed as chronic offenders.
“What do you say?” I asked.
“I say, it’d be good if that boy could bury his momma proper after all these years. And Lord knows, those bones might just be her.”
Then he picked up the tongs that shared the tray with the doughnuts, lifted a white paper sack from the stack next to the tray, and tucked a chocolate-iced doughnut into it. Handed it to me.
“For later,” he said. “So, do you think this weather’ll be breaking soon?”
End of discussion, I thought with a stifled sigh. I knew from experience that Ed couldn’t be bullied into saying one more word than he wanted to and, unlike so many others in town, wouldn’t talk about what he didn’t know about. So I didn’t bother pushing him. Maybe tomorrow or the day after, when I had a little more information and Maryville gossip had cranked up another notch or two, Ed would have more to say. But until then…
We talked about the weather for a bit, then moved on to speculate about the price that local farmers would be getting for a bushel of corn this season, then got down to our usual argument. He thought that my doughnut and coffee should be on the house. I told him, as I often did, that I wouldn’t come by anymore if I couldn’t pay.
“I’d sure miss your coffee,” I added. Then I patted my waist, which was made considerably thicker by my bulletproof vest. “But I could probably do without the doughnuts.”
I won as I sometimes did, handed Ed a couple of dollars and got back change. As I left the store with coffee mug and doughnut bag in hand, it occurred to me that not only had I managed to pay for my purchases, but I’d actually just had a conversation with Ed where he didn’t have the last word.
I congratulated myself too soon.
The door hadn’t quite swung shut behind me when I heard his voice.
“You be sure to say ‘hey’ to Chad for me. He’s a real nice boy. ’Bout time you two got back together.”
I raised my hand in a wave, but didn’t look back. As I climbed back into my SUV, I was still shaking my head and laughing. Mostly at myself. How could I have believed, even for a moment, that my personal life wasn’t everyone else’s business?
A quarter mile down 146, I pulled into a used-car lot at the northeast edge of town, tucking my SUV in between a rusted El Camino that I doubted had ever seen better days and a once-blue Chevy truck with oversize tires and a jacked-up frame that I doubted was street legal. The curb in front of me was fairly low, and the location put my radar gun in the right place to catch early-morning commuters speeding toward the ferry.
I spent the next hour making money for the city treasury and keeping the roads safer for the good citizens of Maryville. It was the kind of task I usually enjoyed because it gave me time to think. Today was no exception. And, like so many of my thoughts lately, I couldn’t help thinking about Chad. But today, I thought not of us and the immediate past, but of the circumstances of his mother’s murder.
The trial had been such a popular topic around town that sometimes I felt as if I’d actually witnessed it rather than simply eavesdropped on adult conversations. Like everyone else in Maryville, I knew that Chad’s father was a mean-tempered drunk. And the night he murdered his wife and tried to do the same to his son, he’d been drinking heavily. That was something he’d admitted in court, prompted by a defense lawyer who wanted to blame the alcohol, rather than the man, for what had happened. When the bars along Dunn Street closed at 2:00 a.m., he drove his battered pickup back home.
It was storming that night. Figuring that the thunder had muffled the sounds of his arrival, he’d taken the opportunity to peer in through the tattered curtains of his home and spy on his wife. As always, he expected to catch her with another man. Instead, he saw her talking on the phone that she was forbidden to use except to reach him in an emergency. She hung up when she heard him come in, thus confirming his paranoid suspicions.
Chad’s father had always questioned the parentage of his only child. That’s what the lawyer told the jury. It didn’t matter that his wife swore she’d never been with another man. Or that even the most casual observer could see a strong resemblance between father and son. What mattered was that, in his alcohol-poisoned mind, Chad’s father thought he finally had proof of his wife’s infidelity. So he dragged the sleeping boy from his bed, then forced the child and his wife at knife-point through the rain and into the truck.
With his family held captive in the cab of the old pickup, Chad’s father sped northward along Big Creek Road. As he drove, he raged at his wife, screaming about adultery and betrayal and brandishing a razor-sharp skinning knife in her direction. He told her he was going to kill her and the boy and leave their bodies out in the forest for animals to gnaw on. Their souls, he assured her, would burn in hell. As befitted a whore and her bastard child.
That’s when Chad, who was almost thirteen, lunged past his mother and grabbed his father’s wrist. But the boy wasn’t as strong as his rage-maddened father, and the man shook him loose. He used the back of his hand to knock the boy aside, then raised the knife—
Maybe it was God’s will that the boy lived, Chad’s father told the court. Just as it had been God’s will that Abraham not slay his son, Isaac. More likely, the prosecutor rebutted, it was the determination of the boy’s mother that had saved his life. There were deep scratches on her husband’s arm where she had grabbed it in an attempt to deflect the deadly blade away from her son.
In the midst of his parents’ struggle for possession of the knife, the truck hit water where Big Creek had overflowed onto the road. Chad’s father grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, fighting to regain control of the skidding vehicle. That was when Chad’s mother opened the passenger-side door and pushed her son out of the truck.
He landed in the water, somehow scrambling to his feet in time to watch as his father brought the truck under control. Then the driver-side door opened. Chad watched as his father jumped from the truck and waded through the knee-deep water toward him. For a moment, Chad was sure it would be all right, was sure that his father had regained his senses and come to rescue him. But as his father reached his side, a flash of lightning revealed that the knife was still clenched in his hand. He struck at his son again, a heartbeat before the boy flung himself into the deeper, fast-running water of the creek. That time, the blade sliced flesh.
A red Toyota sped by, the radar gun registering sixty. The posted limit was forty-five, so I hit the siren and the accelerator, and pulled the car over.
The driver was a pretty gal from up north who accepted the ticket philosophically. The gray-muzzled black Lab riding on a big cushion in the backseat of the car seemed predisposed to liking cops. After I’d issued the ticket, the driver and I spent a few minutes chatting about dogs in general, Labs and German shepherds in particular. But there was no doubt in my mind that she wished I was male, preferably young and cute. Chad, I suspected, would have let her off with a warning.
I smiled as I thought of a quip I wouldn’t repeat to Chad.
You know you’re a male cop if…you consider traffic stops a social event.
I crossed the street and spent a little time monitoring the speed of northbound motorists who today didn’t seem to be in the same hurry as those heading south. My thoughts turned toward the remains near Camp Cadiz. Within a day or two,
we’d have definite information about sex and age and a more accurate determination of height. There were no dental records—Chad’s mother had never gone to a dentist. But if everything else fit, a test might just match Chad’s DNA—already on file—with the unknown victim’s.
For Chad’s sake, I hoped the victim was his mother, that he could finally lay her to rest. But, realistically, the remains probably belonged to someone else. Most likely a stranger. For many decades, bodies had been disposed of with some regularity in the forest. The sparse population, difficult terrain and dense woods made it likely they wouldn’t be found. Except by accident.
If the DNA didn’t match—if our victim wasn’t Chad’s mom—maybe we could send the skull off for facial reconstruction and eventually have some idea about the victim’s appearance. But chances were we would never discover the identity of the victim. And a murderer would continue to walk free.
Just like Katie.
Chapter 7
A call from dispatch saved a tanned, lean-faced young man from Ridgway from a ticket. I’d just pulled the white-on-cream three-quarter ton Ford pickup over and was discussing the need for a safety sticker on a vehicle registered as a farm truck when the radio crackled to life.
“Your lucky day,” I murmured as I waved him on his way, then turned my full attention to a report of bad news from a familiar address.
“They’re at it again,” the female voice on the radio added to the end of one of her characteristically businesslike messages.
Feeling every bit as exasperated as she sounded, I acknowledged the call as I pulled out into traffic with lights and sirens clearing the way. As unlikely as it was that the call was, in fact, an emergency, I did my job and treated it as if it were. Minutes later, I left Route 146 and headed for an old neighborhood of neatly kept bungalows and—for the most part—law-abiding senior citizens.
I slowed down when I turned onto Honeysuckle Drive and parked my car between the two houses on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. The emergency call had been made by the owner of 1231 Honeysuckle, but I had no doubt that I’d end up talking to the neighbor at 1233.