by Maureen Tan
There was more comfort in that than I was willing to admit, even to myself. But I found the courage to open my eyes.
I took a deep breath, then ignored the spiders and did my job.
I turned slightly, running my flashlight slowly around the interior perimeter of the trunk. To my right, I saw recent droppings that my nose suggested were probably fox. The smell was musty and rank. A clump of red fur that was definitely fox supported my identification of the smell inside the tree. And a scattering of tiny bones and feathers suggested the fox had curled inside the tree to have a snack. I abandoned the flashlight long enough to scoop the bones into a bag. Then I picked up my flashlight again and moved it steadily, ignoring fungus and moss and jagged fingers of corklike wood.
I glimpsed a shape that didn’t occur in nature and spotlighted it.
The object lay opposite me and was caught in the lacework of roots that descended into the sinkhole. A smooth and very regular cylinder. About an inch long with a half-an-inch-in-diameter base. And I thought I recognized…
I used my toes to scoot my shoulders farther into the tree trunk.
Chad must have noticed my movement and interpreted it correctly.
“Are you all right, Brooke? Do you see something?”
Even in his muffled voice, I heard concern.
“Dunno,” I said, and my voice echoed back oddly at me. “I’m going to take a closer look.”
I lay the flashlight down, positioning it so that its beam continued to illuminate the object. Then I stretched out my hand, angled it beneath the cylinder. Using my fingertips, I teased it closer until I was able to enclose it in my hand. Feeling rather than sight told me that a thick plastic tube—dirt clogged, perhaps a quarter-inch long and much narrower than a soda straw—stuck out from one end of the cylinder.
I left the cylinder where it was and backed out of the hole.
“Nothing,” I said as I stood and brushed off the front of my uniform. “All I saw was a pile of scat, a bit of fur from a red fox, and a few tiny bones. Probably bird—”
I held up the bag, stopping the objection I saw forming on the shorter investigator’s lips.
“—but I bagged them anyway. Beyond that, there were only spiders.”
Chad, who knew of my phobia, looked guilt stricken.
I made the effort, grinned at him.
“You owe me,” I said. “Big-time.”
The techs simply looked grateful that they’d avoided a nasty little task.
Chapter 9
Inside the SUV, the air-conditioning was running full blast.
I sat with a pen in my right hand and my logbook propped against my steering wheel. But I wasn’t looking down at the page. Instead, my eyes were on the rearview mirror. I watched the dust cloud kicked up by two departing vehicles—the minivan belonging to the crime-scene technicians and Chad’s squad car.
Once the dust settled, I scribbled a few more lines in my logbook. Then I sat for a while longer doing math, thinking thoughts that I didn’t much like, and making sure that no official vehicles would return unexpectedly.
After that, I went back into the woods.
At the crime scene—now stripped of the yellow tape that marked the exact place where the remains had been found—I crawled back into the hole in the tree trunk and retrieved the cylinder. The one I hadn’t wanted anyone else to see, but that I didn’t need to look at more closely.
There was no need for me to rub soil off the cylinder to know what it was. I didn’t have to examine the bits of clinging label or to peer at the tiny block letters on the flat end as I searched for some hint about the contents of the vial. I knew already who’d manufactured it, knew that—if it had made its way to the state crime lab—any drug residue would prove to be albuterol. From memory, I murmured aloud the instructions etched into the base.
“This end up. Shake before using.”
I shoved the asthma inhaler deep in my pocket and walked back to my vehicle. I climbed into the SUV, turned the key in the ignition and, all the while, kept trying to ignore the suspicion that had been chewing at the edge of my mind ever since I’d found the little cylinder.
It was a coincidence, I told myself. Only a coincidence. Hundreds of thousands of people used asthma inhalers. It didn’t matter that neither of Chad’s parents had asthma. There was no proof yet that the remains belonged to his mother. The victim—or her murderer—might have had asthma. Or an animal, responding to some peculiar instinct, might have stashed the inhaler in the trunk of the tree. Or maybe the little vial was just a random bit of trash that had somehow found its way onto a crime scene. It was improbable that this particular asthma inhaler had any connection at all to anyone I cared about.
That’s exactly what I told myself. And that’s exactly why I lifted the microphone mounted on my dashboard, held it with my thumb near the mike as I considered what to say when I passed the bit of missing evidence on to the state police.
Somehow, it got caught inside my shirt, beneath my vest, when I was crawling around beneath that tree, I could say. I thought it was just a stone or a clump of mud. But when I shook out my vest, I found this.
It was a good lie. At worst, they’d think the small-town female cop was a bit incompetent.
But I put the mike down instead of making the call. Instead of contacting dispatch and asking the state cops to backtrack to Camp Cadiz, I slipped the inhaler into one of the evidence bags I carried. And I told myself that the cylinder was too weather-beaten and corroded, anyway, to yield any kind of print. No need to send it to the state lab.
After tucking the little bag safely into my glove compartment, I pulled my SUV out of the parking lot and headed for town. And I did the math again.
Ten years, the investigator with the bulldog face had said. Ten years, give or take a couple of years on either side of that. That meant the body had been there between eight and twelve years.
Nine years ago, my sister Katie would have been sixteen.
That year—the year that Katie had gotten her driver’s license—was easy for me to remember. In fact, it stood out in my mind. In the spring, just days after Katie’s birthday, the Ohio River had flooded many of the low-lying streets in town. That was when I’d found a young German shepherd tangled in a heap of flood-deposited debris, down behind the bars that lined Dunn Street. I’d named him Highball.
I didn’t have any problem recalling that summer, either. Mostly because Katie had pretty much stopped talking to me, particularly at night when the lights were turned out in the bedroom we’d shared. For no reason that I could fathom, she’d stopped sharing secrets and complaining about guests or grousing about chores. No longer was I lulled to sleep by the sound of my big sister’s voice or comforted by the knowledge of her presence in the nearby bed. In fact, sharing a room with Katie that year had been a punishment. The nightmares that had plagued her when we’d first come to live with Aunt Lucy and Gran—the screaming awakenings that had wrenched both of us from our sleep—had returned that year.
Hormones and stress, Aunt Lucy had diagnosed. Katie was just having a difficult time growing up. Be patient, she said when I complained. It will pass. And at bedtime she began dosing my sister—and me, for good measure—with steaming mugs of chamomile tea sweetened with wildflower honey. A treat for Katie, who liked the concoction. A torture for me, who didn’t. And one more reason for us to bicker. As if teenage sisters needed a reason.
That summer, Katie began taking long, solitary drives in the beaten-up old car she’d bought for two hundred dollars. Back then, I’d figured she had a boyfriend—someone Gran and Aunt Lucy wouldn’t have approved of. I still remembered the curious mix of jealousy, envy and anger I’d felt each time I’d watched her drive off and how I’d speculated about who she might have been meeting. Maybe she was seeing that gangly Baker boy who had dropped out of school and was bagging groceries at a store in Paducah. Or the Rosses’ youngest son who, that summer, had taken to hanging out with his friends late at ni
ght at the little park just up the street from the Cherokee Rose.
I sat with my foot pressed down on the accelerator and the air-conditioning blasting away inside my SUV, wondering with nine years of hindsight if I’d gotten it wrong. Wondering now if the reason Katie had so hotly denied having a boyfriend—the reason no boy had ever surfaced that summer or, in fact, any of the summers after that—was that there had never been a boyfriend. Something else, I now feared, had stolen Katie’s attention away from me. Had reawakened memories of our past.
And there was something else that was racheting up the painful, twisting anxiety I began feeling deep in the pit of my stomach from the moment I’d first wrapped my fingers around the inhaler.
Right after Missy’s murder, Gran and Aunt Lucy had moved Katie into an isolated facility in the hills of Montana where she’d stayed for almost two years. After that, she’d traveled to France. To Paris, where she’d learned to cook and bake. She’d worked for a while at a hotel resort in Colorado, and then for a trendy restaurant in Miami. Finally, she’d returned to Maryville and the Cherokee Rose. Because she missed us and she loved us and she was lonely for her family and her home.
Gran, Aunt Lucy and Katie—especially Katie—seemed to have put the past behind them. Katie had been given a second chance, Gran told me. Just like the women we moved along the Underground.
A second chance. That’s what covering up Missy’s murder had bought my sister. A chance that I owed her. Because she was my sister and my protector. I had willingly paid the personal costs. But now…
I hit a pothole a little faster than I should have. The seat belt tightened across my lap and tugged at my shoulder, jolting my attention back to the winding road in front of me.
For a few minutes, I concentrated on the road and on managing a little more detachment. I dug through my glove compartment, popped a couple of the antacid tablets I stored there, and washed them down with a swig of lukewarm coffee from my Thermos cup. Then I ticked off the facts—only the facts—in my head.
I’d found an inhaler near a female murder victim’s remains.
Katie used an inhaler.
The remains were found within an easy drive from Maryville.
Within the time frame that the murder had occurred, Katie had had a car and had often been absent from town without explanation.
The remains were near Camp Cadiz.
Eight years earlier, my sister had committed cold-blooded murder at Camp Cadiz.
It was beyond circumstantial, I told myself. Just random coincidence and paranoid, guilt-driven supposition, all arbitrarily knotted together into an unlikely pattern. There were other explanations. Better explanations.
No matter that, at the moment, I couldn’t think of any.
Despite my best efforts, my instincts—or maybe simply my fear—presented a horrific scenario that I couldn’t reason away. No matter how reasonable I tried to be.
What if Missy Porter hadn’t been my sister’s first victim? I asked myself.
What if Katie had killed before?
And if what I feared was true, how many murders was I willing to cover up to protect my sister?
Once out of the forest and miles away from Camp Cadiz, I swung back onto 146 and followed it as it ran south toward town. By the time the highway curved westward to parallel the Ohio River, it was lined with buildings and I’d wiped the back of my hand across my face and convinced myself that it was perspiration that stung my eyes.
The highway curved westward, but I continued south on an abruptly narrowing stretch of roadway that angled sharply downhill and ended, very literally, at the river’s edge. At Maryville’s ferry crossing, which was the only way across the river for fifty miles in either direction.
The ferry captain saw me and waved as I pulled the SUV off to the side of the road. There was no real reason for a police presence, but I watched for obvious safety violations and expired tags on the big rigs that lumbered up the heavy steel ramp and onto the deck of the ferry. Cars loaded on, too, most filled with shoppers on their way to the grocery stores and strip malls in Marion and with vacationing tourists mostly driving through Maryville on their way to somewhere else.
The ferry crossing was blisteringly hot. Unfiltered by clouds or shade, the sun beat down on the pavement, the glittering white limestone gravel along the shoulder and the low bluff of bare limestone that framed the roadway. Even on idle, the ferry engine was loud, its deep thrum mixing with the sounds of trucks changing gears and the shouts of the crew as they directed vehicles onto the ferry. And the damp breeze blowing off the river smelled. More accurately, it stank. Diesel fumes, car exhaust and the dank, organic scent of the Ohio River in the summertime permeated the air. It wafted through the streets and even carried to the highest point in Maryville—the bluff where the Cherokee Rose looked down over the town.
I slipped out of my vehicle, rolled my shoulders and stretched my arms, then leaned back against the front fender with my legs crossed at the ankles. I took a deep breath and smiled. The heat, the noise, the odor didn’t matter. I loved the river and its distinctive smell. Loved standing on its banks with the sun warm on my shoulders. Loved just doing my job. For a few minutes I stood watching the deep water of the Ohio muscle by and tried not to think, not to feel. Just to be. On the sun-drenched banks of the river, my problems always seemed less complex than they did when I was trekking in the shadowy forest.
Then, when I felt particularly clearheaded, I revisited the promise that I’d made myself as I’d driven into town. Nodded to myself, still satisfied with the strategy I’d decided to follow.
If Chad could manage to approach this case with professionalism and some measure of detachment, so I could I.
Until the forensics report came in, I would avoid speculating about who the murder victim—and the murderer—might be. I would investigate this crime just as I’d investigate any other crime. I would work with Chad and we would build our case carefully and meticulously. Basing it on facts, likely circumstances and evidence.
A big part of that evidence, I knew, would be the report from the state forensics lab. If the remains proved not to belong to Chad’s mother, I would add the grubby inhaler to the evidence. And let the investigation unfold from there.
And if the investigation pointed to my sister? Threatened to expose the facts of Missy’s death? Compromised the Underground network? Sent me or Gran or Aunt Lucy to prison for covering up a murder?
My stomach did a half twist, destroying my sense of calm.
I inhaled again, exhaled slowly as I watched the faster flow of current near the center of the river, then made a conscious effort to unclench my jaw and relax the knot of muscles at the intersection of my neck and shoulders. Just do your job, I told myself. The way you were taught. One step at a time. Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Then, only then, I would deal with the consequences.
Briefly, I craned my neck to look upward along the nearly sheer face of the limestone bluff jutting up from the river just west of the ferry landing. It was emblazoned with graffiti that was spray painted on by teenagers with little else to do in a small town after dark than risk their lives for the sake of self-expression. Newly applied red paint advertised young love and a pair of initials I recognized.
As I considered whether I should drop in at the kids’ homes, maybe give them a lecture about defacing public property, my eyes unconsciously sought a pair of more familiar initials. B.T. C.R. Their faded paint was in two different colors. My initials, which I’d sprayed on the stone myself, were blue and stood alone, unattached. Chad’s were in black, perpetually linked with M.H., a dark-haired girl with bee-stung lips whom he’d loved passionately the summer before he’d enlisted in the military. She’d married someone else and moved away from Maryville, but her initials remained, a visible piece of our town’s history.
The ferry blasted its horn and a deck hand scurried to drape a chain across the road as the ferry’s vehicle ramp groaned upward, lock
ing in the vehicles parked on its deck. On the road, half a dozen more cars and trucks remained, recipients of a questionable honor—they’d be the first in line for the next crossing. Their turn would come once the ferry reached the opposite bank, dropped its ramp, exchanged eastbound vehicles for ones bound west, and then made its way back across the river.
Maybe it was my presence—the sight of a uniformed cop, mirrored glasses glinting in the sun, leaning against a glossy white SUV that was topped by Mars lights and emblazoned with Maryville’s logo. Or perhaps it was simply that today’s drivers were all veterans of the process. But in either event, no horns blared, no curses flowed, and no one broke traffic laws trying to back uphill and out of line. The drivers sat patiently, most with their windows shut and their vehicles idling, burning fuel for the sake of air-conditioning.
The noise from the ferry’s powerful engines indicated that they were now fully engaged, fighting to navigate across the strong river current. I looked away from the water churning in the wake of its departure and toward the bluffs again. Up near the top, there was a section of rock that staggered outward, like a side view of a sloppy stack of thick, grubby white dinner plates. And at the very top of the stack was a flat stone, just big enough for two. Though there were undoubtedly others of many generations who claimed that spot as their own, I always thought of it as ours. Chad’s and mine.
I glanced again at the departing ferry and smiled to myself as I resisted the urge to look down at my watch. But the impulse to time the ferry’s circuit from the Illinois side to the Kentucky side and back was a strong one, rooted in the best days of my childhood.
How old had we been, I wondered, when Chad and I had first climbed down onto that outcropping, defying every adult rule about children staying off the bluffs? On days just like this, the two of us would lie on our stomachs, betting pennies on the timing of the ferry, our elbows propped, our bare arms and legs touching. Not all that many years later, we’d snuggled together on that same rock after midnight, two off-duty cops sharing a bottle of Jack hidden in a paper bag and watching the lights of the ferry moving ever-predictably between the two riverbanks. Touching then, too. But in a way that childhood had never imagined.