He was a soldier here, fighting for his life. If he was smart, maybe he would live long enough for someone to find him and take him home.
His skin was on fire, but that didn’t matter.
His eyes burned, but he focused harder.
His legs were numb, but he remembered the pain.
The snake coiled up on its bed of wood, idly flicking its tongue out, showing Cody how to feed himself.
Cody blinked, focusing on the ant crawling toward him on the floor, waiting . . . like his friend the snake.
10:56 P.M.
The Aldridge property comprised a great portion of the salt marsh surrounding Oyster Point Plantation, and whatever wasn’t owned by the family had been annexed by the City of Charleston. Despite the final successful bid for township in 2012, large portions of the island still belonged to the City instead of the town of James Island. The result was spotty police protection as some areas were still policed by the City of Charleston, while others were patrolled by the county . . . and others, barely at all.
Fortunately for Jack, the area they were searching belonged both to the Aldridges and to the City so he didn’t feel the need to wait for a search warrant, knowing Caroline would give her permission without question. The search party began on Aldridge property. They couldn’t bring dogs out—impossible to track within the marsh, but they found Augusta’s boat grounded at the mouth of the creek.
In the pouring rain, they swept northeast, twenty men deep, from the point at which they discovered her boat to the point at which Ian had discovered Augusta stumbling through the spartina flats. Some of the men were forced to use boats, because the water was too deep to wade through. Others kept to the shallows. Overhead, choppers lit the night sky, spotters slicing through the heavy mist. SLED and FBI joined them with every available man in the area.
They found the small, wooden boat Augusta had told them about at approximately 10:32 P.M. It was wedged into a small sandbar surrounded by deeper waters. The boat had once been a small fishing skiff. Now all that remained were parts of a rotting hull, clinging to a wooden spine that was visible enough above the water at high tide not to require any warning markers for area boaters. It was entirely possible the boat had been there since Hugo. Since it didn’t impose any real danger, it hadn’t warranted much attention, but it apparently missed a recent cleanup of debris along the estuaries. Converging tides along with vegetation had created a natural earthwork of sorts. Behind it, semi-protected from the currents, they found the mass grave.
Some of the bodies had been there for years, judging by their state of decomposition—slower than it might seem possible because the marsh was a natural preservative. On some of the older bodies the skin was still intact and hair clung to the scalp. Working closely with the search team, the medical examiner led the efforts to make certain they salvaged every trace of evidence—mostly for identification purposes. The most recent bodies were still in a much-decelerated state of decomposition, but even so, the physical evidence would be compromised by time submersed in the water.
There was no way to move heavy equipment into the marsh, so wearing biohazard suits, and using whatever tools they could find—waders, nets, heavy gloves—the men worked by hand to unearth the most gruesome discovery in Charleston in nearly forty years. Within the first hour, they had exhumed more than six bodies.
About an hour before Caroline left the office, Daniel was taken into custody. Wanting to be certain the breaking news surrounding his arrest was covered, and covered fairly, Caroline had worked late. It wasn’t until she’d been about to leave the office that her receptionist finally gave her the message that Jack had called. Unfortunately, her cell phone had died around 6 P.M. and she had forgotten her charger in Jack’s car, so she was completely incommunicado on the drive home. By the time she reached Oyster Point, the property was blanketed with flashing blue lights. Choppers roared overhead, spotlights swinging all over the night sky.
Caroline’s first thought was of Augusta. Heart thumping painfully against her ribs, she ran into the house. Finding it still locked and empty, she came rushing back and ran toward the marsh. There were officers swarming the boathouse. More out on the water.
She tried to get information from one of the uniformed officers on the dock. Something momentous was happening here, but no one seemed inclined to share any information.
“This is my property!” she told one uniformed officer.
“You’ll have to talk to Detective Shaw,” the man insisted, and pointed out toward the lights on the marsh.
Unless she took one of the boats out, there was no way to reach Jack, and her cell phone was dead. Realizing the phone in Sadie’s house was closer and easier to reach, she made the trek over to Sadie’s. But Sadie wasn’t home either, and there were more policemen guarding her front door. She asked to use the phone and was refused.
“I’m sorry, we can’t let you in,” the man insisted.
Frustrated, Caroline returned to the main house and hurried back to the office, where there was one of only two available landlines in the house. It crossed her mind that people were entirely too dependent on cell phones. Now that she needed one, there was none to be found. She tried Augusta’s number first, but there was no answer. It went straight to her voice mail. Next she tried Jack, but his, too, went straight to voice mail. Sadie’s, as well. Finally, she checked her messages and discovered the message from Jack. Thankfully, Augusta was at Roper with minor injuries. No word from Sadie, though she was certain she knew where Sadie must be.
Finally, she called Josh, and told him about Augusta and Daniel.
“I’ll go see how she’s doing,” he offered. “You stick around and see what’s going on. Call me back the instant you know something.”
“Thank you, Josh,” Caroline said, grateful he was so willing to help, despite all the trouble she had caused him with the paper’s investigation, and despite the ordeal with his mother. Augusta in particular would appreciate his care. Unfortunately, she didn’t have Ian’s number, and wasn’t quite ready to talk to him anyway. Apologies seemed in order—to Augusta, as well. But that was probably why she had asked Josh to go get Augusta. She didn’t know what to say to her sister yet.
She stood on the dock, watching the police boats in the distance, and tried to muddle her way through confusion and guilt over her actions toward Ian Patterson.
She had been wrong.
So wrong.
She had decided Ian Patterson was guilty and set her sights on bringing him to justice. There was no rationalizing her way out of this one. She’d helped put an innocent man behind bars. He might have faced the electric chair, a man who had very likely saved her life. And still she had persecuted him while the guilty party ran around under their noses the entire time: Daniel Greene.
Jack had been right.
Augusta had been right.
She had been wrong.
Nothing was as it seemed.
Chapter 24
Augusta awoke in the ER, groggy, though she remembered far more than she wished she did. Horrific images flashed through her brain—a tiny hand in the mud—that terrible sense of nudging her way through a nightmarish orgy of decomposing bodies.
A male nurse hovered over her. He smiled warmly when she met his gaze. “Do you know where you are?” he asked.
Augusta cleared her throat and nodded. Her usual sense of sarcasm failed her completely. She was grateful, remembering how he had helped her through X-rays, his disposition pleasant and far more patient than she could have ever mustered herself. He’d given her a sock for her foot, because it was cold. She wiggled it out of the covers as she stirred. The nurse came to check the rails on her gurney, as though to be sure she wouldn’t roll out. “I guess they abandoned me?”
He winked. “They left you in good hands.”
Augusta tried to smile and found her face hurt. She lifted her fingers to her cheek.
“You’re going to have a nasty bruise and a black eye, but n
o broken bones, and the cut won’t leave much of a scar.”
Blinking, Augusta reached for her face, feeling tentatively. “Scar?”
“Just a little one,” he reassured, and then winked. “It adds character.”
She vaguely recalled smashing her face into the dory seat, but didn’t realize she had done so much damage. In that moment, all she had thought about was getting away. “Has anyone called my sister?”
“Your husband must’ve. Your phone’s been ringing off the hook.” He picked up her cell phone from a table nearby and brought it to her, setting it down on the bed beside her.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“For everything,” she said, and tried to sit up, but swayed. He came to help again and once she was in a semi-upright position, she checked her messages. Several missed calls from Ian, but none from anyone else. She guessed Caroline must know by now and apparently wasn’t very concerned. She tried Ian’s number first. It rang until it went to voice mail.
It was only belatedly that she recalled the piece of paper she had shoved down her shirt and she patted her sore ribs.
“Looking for this?” The nurse held up a torn and waterlogged scrap of paper and walked over to hand it to her. “We peeled it off during your X-rays. Not much left of it.”
Augusta tried to unfold it but it was stuck together, completely ruined. Faded gray spots were all that remained of the ink and it was ripped, as well. But she knew what it was.
Sadie didn’t have a malicious bone in her body, but there was a reason she had this codicil in her possession, and Augusta was going to find out why. “It’s ruined,” she said to no one in particular.
“What was it?”
Augusta shook her head, feeling disordered. “More lies.”
At this point, the lies were adding up to epic proportions. Maybe Daniel had discovered the codicil and given it to Sadie? That was the only palatable explanation—unless her mother had written the thing and then changed her mind and given it to Sadie. But that would mean Sadie had lied about its existence. She didn’t believe that scenario either. It seemed more credible to her that her mother had shown it to Daniel and that Daniel had kept it out of the will after her death. She decided he must have given it to Sadie after the fact, because, recalling Sadie’s anger that day on the porch, Augusta didn’t believe any of it was feigned. Whatever the truth, Daniel was obviously not the man they’d thought him to be.
“Are you going to keep me here?”
“Overnight?” The nurse shook his head. “We can release you any time, but I can’t let you leave unless I know you have someone to drive you.”
“I feel fine,” Augusta lied.
Although she didn’t have any broken bones, on the inside, she felt ravaged.
And a far more insidious thought was working its way through her brain—something she didn’t want to believe. In trying to protect Sadie, could Daniel have staged his own burglary and later the attempted robbery at their house, as a means to retrieve the codicil? She knew it hadn’t been Daniel at Sadie’s house, but what if he’d hired some thug to do his dirty work—like last time? It was a kid who’d stolen her purse after leaving Daniel’s office last month, but that person could have easily handed her phone to someone else to lure Caroline to the ruins. Only Daniel had known exactly where she was that afternoon because she had been at his office, and if it was true that Jennifer’s car was registered to him and that he was Karen Hutto’s attorney, as well, then he had a traceable connection to nearly every victim.
The nurse helped her sit the rest of the way up. “Do you have someone you can call?” he persisted. “The Diprivan wears off fast, but you’re not supposed to drive within twenty-four hours of an administered dose. We can’t release you unless you have someone to take you home.”
“I can find someone,” Augusta assured him, realizing it was a battle she wouldn’t win.
“Good. Then if you’ll wait a minute, I’ll get your doctor.”
“Thanks,” Augusta said, and dialed Ian’s number again as the nurse walked away, her thoughts centered on Daniel.
Worrying her fingers in her lap, Sadie sat waiting at the Lockwood station for someone to let her know she could see Daniel. She’d come straight from Queenie’s after his phone call. Whatever it was they were doing back there—interrogating him, arresting him—it was taking forever. But now something else was going on. Uniformed men rushed by her.
She knew enough about the law to know that they could only hold him for a certain amount of time without filing charges, but she refrained from calling Josh to find out exactly how long, reminding herself that Daniel knew the law. And he was innocent. She knew that, but she was getting a bad feeling in her bones . . .
Way down deep.
She didn’t want to talk to Josh right now—nor to Augusta or Caroline—leastways not until she gathered her thoughts . . .
There were bodies buried in the plough mud . . .
She heard them saying so as they rushed by, thinking no one could overhear their hushed conversations. But there was a room full of people waiting, and every one of them exchanged looks, putting pieces together.
Sadie was putting pieces together, too.
She remembered that day as though it were yesterday. He came runnin’ to her, scared and uncertain what to do. It was hot that day, hadn’t rained for nearly a month—since long before Sam went missing. The watermarks were low and even lower at low tide. She was cutting potatoes for a salad and he came in and said he knew where Sammy was.
Sadie hadn’t really believed him, but she’d always had a strange feeling in her breast where her son was concerned, so she followed him out into the marsh at low tide. He led her to a place on the spartina flats where the tide had created a pocket in the marsh. That was where she’d found Sammy’s body trussed up, covered by debris, like alligators did to save their meals for later. But the water was low now, and his body was exposed.
Josh admitted he’d found the body a few weeks earlier, said he stumbled over it by accident and was afraid they would think he’d hurt Sammy, so he kept it from everyone—including Sadie. She’d believed him . . . back then.
Sammy’s body was already badly decomposed and he was long gone, so telling everyone after all that time would have been both cruel and suspicious. They had already searched every nook and every crevice of every beach and every inlet. But they hadn’t found Sam because he was hidden so well.
Only now she was beginning to understand why.
For the love of God—there were bodies in the mud.
A terrible feeling settled in her breast—and this time, it planted itself stubbornly and refused to go away—no matter how much she reasoned with herself. No matter how many excuses she made. No matter what she tried to tell herself.
This time she couldn’t make it go away.
She sat there, thinking about all the times she had denied her suspicions and felt heartsick. But what sort of mother thought such horrible thoughts about her son?
She felt guilty, thinking maybe she’d put all those bad thoughts on him because of his father—because she never actually saw her son hurt anyone.
Not people.
He’d told her Sammy’s drowned body had washed ashore—and it could have happened just exactly that way. Sadie had believed the worst was over. The poor baby was gone, and the funeral was long over with. No one could help that Sammy had drowned, but it was a different time, back in those days. She’d thought they would blame him, too—her little boy—so she had buried Sammy in a good place . . . somewhere with shade and flowers and she had prayed every day for his soul . . . and for the soul of her son . . . and her own.
But deep down . . . she knew . . . some folks were born bad . . . no matter how much you loved them . . . no matter how much you did for them.
Josh had everything, but he always seemed to want more. Florence had loved him too well, doting on him, giving him everything her son should have
had . . . through the years, Sadie had compensated by giving him less, though she had given him the greatest mother’s gift of all—blind faith.
The thought of it brought hot, stinging tears to her eyes.
A vision came into her head of the first dog they’d kept before Tango—a black Lab named Bear. She remembered Josh calling that dog out into the water where he was sitting in his fishing boat. He knew that cottonmouth was lying right there in the dog’s path, but he called that poor animal even knowing Sadie had gone in to phone animal control. When he thought she was out of earshot, he insisted the dog come, his voice mean as a devil.
They couldn’t save Bear. But it was something about the way her son had watched the animal die that had disturbed her down deep in her bones—that soulless look in his eyes as he’d watched the animal in its death throes. Josh swore he was simply trying to get the dog out of harm’s way. But Sadie had had a bad feeling that day—a bad feeling she’d ignored.
She ignored it again the day Josh showed up with Sam in his arms, covered in ant bites. He said the baby had gone and sat in an ant pile.
But Sadie wondered. She hated herself for wondering, but she wondered as she dabbed at every one of his angry bites with bleach to stop the itching.
Josh had never done anyone real harm. It was simply an odd feeling she always had that something wasn’t right—the feeling that somehow her son orchestrated very bad things—like a conductor in a symphony.
She’d had that feeling again the morning they’d found Florence. He’d come over to her house very early in the morning, even though he never visited on Saturdays. That morning he insisted they go visit Flo to make pancakes . . . for old times’ sake . . . as though he knew what they would find in that house.
He had watched Sadie’s reaction with a detached calm as they found poor Florence lying there at the bottom of the stairs, as though she’d fallen down. He’d even helped Sadie turn over the big mirror so Florence’s body wouldn’t be trapped in the glass. He chastened her about silly superstitions, but he had helped her turn it nevertheless, and then he had kissed her on the cheek and asked her if she needed him to stay . . . because he had to go.
Tell No Lies Page 24