by Ellen Crosby
She saw our blank looks and smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything.”
“Such as ‘single context excavation,’” Quinn said.
“Exactly. What that means is that I removed layers of dirt in increments of five millimeters, beginning in the first half of the grave. It’s a British technique not often used in America, but it allows great certainty that whatever is uncovered will relate to the examination site itself. In other words, everything that belonged exclusively to this grave. It would be clear that, say, a coin or bottle cap that was also uncovered would not be relevant to this excavation.”
I glanced at Quinn. “I think we get that,” I said.
“Whoever dug this grave used a shovel that had a nick in one side. You can see the shovel marks right here.” She pointed to scrapes in the compacted dirt and we could see the consistent indentation on the left side. “He also used a pickax—I’m presuming it was a man since I doubt a woman would have done this. Here, let me show you.”
She dropped gracefully into the hole she’d dug. Quinn and I knelt and I felt as though I were at a church altar rail, about to take part in something holy and sacred. Susanna Montgomery, if that’s who she was, had died nearly a century and a half ago. There was no scent, no whispering voice in the wind, no telltale sign that any trace of who she was still remained.
“After all this time you can still see shovel marks?” Quinn sounded dubious. “The original shovel marks?”
“I can assure you that they’re not mine, if that’s what you’re implying,” Yasmin said in a dry voice. “Nothing had disturbed this grave. No animals, no insects. Nothing. She must have been buried late in the year, perhaps just before the ground froze for winter. That would also help slow down decomposition.”
That fit in with Abigail’s letter and the wedding timeline. Sometime in the autumn. When Charles came home from the war.
“Right.” Quinn looked chastened. “Sorry about the question.”
She gave him a brisk nod. “No worries. What about you, Lucie? Something’s on your mind.”
“It’s what you said about the shovel. When my parents first started the vineyard, my mother, who was an artist, wanted to decorate everything—including the old dairy barn where we keep our equipment,” I said. “So she got a lot of old tools and shovels and things that had been lying around, cleaned them up, and hung them on the wall. I wonder…”
Quinn finished my sentence. “If there might be a shovel with a nick in it hanging on that wall? Are those tools that old?”
“They might be.”
“Let’s check them out as soon as we’re done here.”
“I should take a look at anything you’ve got as well,” Yasmin said. “I can confirm whether it’s a match with what I found here.”
“Did you find anything else besides the cufflink you told us about last night?” I asked.
“Sorry. That was it. Everything else belonged to the victim.”
“I did some research looking through family papers after we spoke,” I said and filled her in on what I’d found and what I suspected.
Yasmin started to hoist herself out of the grave. Quinn held out his hand and she let him pull her up.
She nodded thanks and said to me, “It sounds like you might have a good start on figuring out who this woman is. I can definitely confirm whether you’re related once I compare your DNA. That should give you something concrete so you’ll know for sure.”
“Though it won’t explain why Charles buried her here after someone killed her,” I said. “Unless he did it and hid her here so no one would find her. If CM is Charles Montgomery, that is.”
Yasmin and Quinn remained silent.
I threw up my hands. “I wish she could talk.”
“Let’s see what the lab turns up,” Yasmin said. “In the meantime, you still have what’s left of her clothes, the quilt, and the cufflink. That’s quite a lot to go on.”
I could sense Quinn’s weight shifting from one foot to the other next to me. He was growing impatient. We had work to do and he wanted to get back to the winery. Lolita would be here in three days.
“Is there anything else you can tell us?” he asked Yasmin.
“I think that’s about it,” Yasmin said. “The rest might be up to the two of you, looking through newspapers and genealogical records at the library or documents at the courthouse in Leesburg … that sort of thing.”
“What happens now?” I asked.
“I’m going to remove one of her teeth and a femur … I’ll take care of that later and of course I’ll return them once the lab is finished so she can be properly reburied,” Yasmin said and I was grateful once again that she would spare us seeing this woman being dismembered, even if it was essential to identifying her. “I’ll also be removing all of her bones from the site so they can be properly interred.”
“You mean, like putting them in a box?” I tried to wrap my head around the idea of a box of human bones. Though it probably wasn’t much different from an urn of ashes. Except for the size.
“That’s exactly right,” she said. “Of course you realize there’s nothing to hold them together anymore—no cartilage and obviously no flesh. It’s part of the natural evolution of all living creatures, Lucie.”
“Right,” I said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
“Seen enough, sweetheart?” Quinn asked me.
I nodded.
“All right,” Yasmin said. “Lucie, if you’re ready to be swabbed, we can do this now and then you’re done.”
“I’m ready.”
Unlike my vial of spit for the Genome Project, Yasmin’s buccal swab of the inside of my cheek took seconds. When she was finished, she put the sample inside a test tube, which she then sealed and placed in a plastic envelope, which she also sealed.
“Let me give you all of the personal effects,” she said. “Unless you want me to keep them with the bones?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll take them, thanks.”
The clothes were tattered and had disintegrated so much that they were almost unrecognizable as garments. The quilt was faded and fragile-looking, and it didn’t look like any quilt I’d ever seen. Each block consisted of narrow strips of fabric plainwoven as if they had been on a loom and then stitched along the perimeter to keep the weaving locked in place. The intricate quilting—what remained of the tiny, precise stitches—made the ribbony weaving even more secure, plus it seemed as though there were some kind of backing that helped stabilize the quilt. I didn’t recognize the pattern, an elaborate geometric design that reminded me of a tessellation or three-dimensional motif—a design within a design—that must have been maddeningly complicated to keep track of in order to make it turn out so perfectly. Whoever made this quilt had been remarkably skillful.
Yasmin put the cufflink in a tiny cardboard envelope after letting Quinn and me examine it. I slipped the envelope into my left jeans pocket so I wouldn’t lose it, just as my right pocket buzzed.
I pulled out my phone. Eli. I nearly hit the button to mute his call and then decided to take it.
“It’s my brother,” I said to Quinn and Yasmin. “Excuse me for a moment.”
I answered and said, “What’s up, Eli?”
“I think you’d better get over here.” There was a warning note in his voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. “Now.”
I moved away from Yasmin and Quinn. “Here, where? Are you at the site for your house?”
“Yup.”
The clearing where he wanted to build was bounded by woods on two sides. What had he found? Why did I have to get over there right away?
“What is it?” I asked, but I already knew what he was going to say.
“I might know where Miguel is. Or where he was.”
My heart sank. Miguel was hiding out on our land. Possibly in plain sight. He had managed to make his way across the border from Mexico to the U.S. and evade being caught years ago. He knew how to take care o
f himself, move under cover of darkness, and survive in hostile territory.
“We’ll be right there.”
I disconnected and said to Quinn, “That was Eli. Something has come up. He’s at the site for his new house. It’s kind of important. He’d like us to see something.”
I hoped he could read between the lines because I wasn’t about to say anything about Miguel in front of Yasmin.
“This is about his house?” Quinn frowned, a look of annoyance crossing his face. “Look, why don’t you go check it out? After Yasmin takes her samples, she needs to cover up the grave. It has to be well-protected so nothing happens when Lolita shows up. I said I’d stick around and help her. You can take the ATV and she’ll drop me at the winery when we’re through. I’ll bring the quilt and all the clothes in her car so nothing happens to them.”
I wanted to tell him that I really needed him to come with me, that he had it wrong about Eli. Instead I said, “Sure. I’ll catch up with you later. And, Yasmin, thanks for everything.”
“I’m glad to have been able to help,” she said. “I hope you get the answers you were looking for.”
I walked over to the ATV and glanced over my shoulder. Quinn was saying something to Yasmin, who was laughing as he pointed at her T-shirt.
I wondered what answers I’d get when this was said and done, after Yasmin finished extracting DNA from a tooth and femur of a young woman who’d been beaten to death and wrapped in a quilt, someone I was presuming was Susanna Montgomery, and therefore related to me.
And if they’d be the ones I wanted to hear.
* * *
MULTIPLE VEHICLES MAKING MULTIPLE trips over many weeks had more or less cut a path through the fields to where Eli planned to build his new house. Eventually we would hire someone to put a proper road in, but for now it was serviceable unless it had rained really hard, which turned it into a mud-rutted, teeth-jarring adventure. After Lolita, it would probably be a swamp.
I parked next to Eli’s car, a four-wheel-drive SUV that he’d left in a clearing surrounded by woods. Good thing I’d seen the car because this place didn’t look familiar at all. I thought he only wanted to move the site a few feet from his original choice.
My brother was nowhere to be seen so I pulled out my phone and called him. If he was close by, I should have heard his phone ring. I didn’t.
“Where are you?” I asked when he answered.
“Do you see a grove of tulip poplars where the woods begin? Four or five trees? One has a weird forty-five-degree elbow bend.”
I saw the unusual tree. “I do.”
“Start walking toward them. I’ll meet you.”
I tucked my jeans into my work boots and zipped up my windbreaker. Though spring and summer are the peak seasons for deer ticks, which spread Lyme disease here in Virginia faster than gossip travels in a small town, they were still around since it had been an unusually warm fall. The ticks attach themselves to you when you walk through tall grass. Miss finding and removing them at your peril. Lyme disease was no joke.
Eli met me on the other side of the trees. The look of foreboding on his face told me I wasn’t going to like what he wanted to show me.
“It’s a bit of a hike,” he said, glancing at my cane. “You going to be okay?”
I hate being treated like an invalid or a cripple. Eli, of all people, knew that better than almost anyone except Quinn. I said through gritted teeth, “I’ll be just fine. I can do anything you can do. It just takes me longer.”
He raised both hands in the air, a sign of surrender. “Sorry. Just asking. You don’t need to be so tetchy.”
The ramshackle stone cottage was nearly invisible behind a breakfront of trees, pines, and wild hollies until we stood in front of it. The little house blended into the woods so artfully I wondered if whoever decided to put it there had done so intentionally, ensuring it wouldn’t be discovered. I had never seen it before and by the look on his face, neither had Eli.
I turned to my brother. “What the…?”
“Hey, don’t look at me. I had no idea there was a cottage here, either.”
It looked as battered and storm-tossed as if it had twirled down from Kansas with Dorothy and Toto during the tornado. The wooden front door hung on a single hinge and there was so much greenery twining over the façade it looked as if the house had grown a beard and sported bushy eyebrows above the windows.
“Maybe it was another hiding place for Mosby and his Rangers like the Ruins used to be until the Yankees burned it down,” I said. “Although this place is really hidden away. A secret hideout.”
“I went inside,” Eli said. “It’s just a big room with two windows, a dirt floor, and a fireplace. And a ladder that leads to a crawl space. I didn’t check it out since the ladder was in bad shape.”
“What makes you think Miguel was here?” I asked.
“Someone was here. Recently.”
“How do you know?”
“The floor was swept too clean,” he said. “Like someone was trying to cover their footprints. Plus I found matches and a couple of candles behind a stone in the fireplace that was sticking out a little too much.”
“Our old trick. Like we used to do at the Ruins when we were growing up.”
In the days when the Ruins were still actual ruins, before Eli renovated the burned-out tenant house and turned it into a stage where we hosted concerts and plays during the warm-weather months, he and I had used it at various times to secretly drink and make out with our latest hot dates. We’d hidden candles, matches, and booze behind loose bricks.
“I’d like to see inside for myself,” I added. “Are the front steps okay?”
“No. They’re rotted, too. I’ll have to give you a boost.”
Eli’s boost was more like a space launch. I managed to catch myself in time so I landed in a crouch rather than on my hands and knees. He hoisted himself inside and pulled me up so I was standing beside him.
A gust of wind blew through the room, rustling the leaves on the vines that twined around and through the house. The whispery scratching sounded like fingers moving the foliage out of the way in order for someone to watch us from a hidden vantage point outside. I spun around and blinked, certain I would catch a flash of movement through one of the windows, like a curtain closing or a winking eye as the leaves and branches settled back into place.
“What’s the matter?” Eli asked. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“I’m fine. It just feels like we’re being watched.”
Eli glanced over his shoulder. “Now you’re getting me spooked.”
“You really think Miguel stayed here?”
“I don’t know. But, like I said, someone did. Not that long ago.”
“Yesterday?”
“Possibly.” He shrugged. “I wonder if he’s coming back.”
“If it was Miguel, maybe he just stayed here last night and moved on. I wouldn’t come back, if it was me,” I said.
We looked at each other. “Who’s going to tell Bobby?” he asked. “Me or you?”
“Tell him what? All this is just speculation. We don’t know anything for sure,” I said. “Besides, do you really believe Miguel would leave his secateurs in that wine cellar where they’d be sure to be found right away? Covered in Jean-Claude’s blood? That’s like having a neon sign saying MURDER WEAPON with an arrow pointing directly at them. How obvious could you be?”
“What are you saying?”
“I think it’s possible Miguel was set up. More than possible.”
“And you don’t think Bobby’s smart enough to draw that conclusion as well?”
I flushed. “Of course I do. But right now Miguel has already been tried in the press and found guilty. I think he’s innocent.”
“Okay, then, who didn’t like Miguel besides Jean-Claude?” Eli asked. “Enough to frame him.”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” I said. “You should be asking who didn’t like Jean-Claude. Enough t
o kill him. And that list is a mile long.”
My phone dinged in my pocket and I pulled it out. A text from Quinn.
Where are you?
“I’ve got to get going,” I said to Eli. “It’s Quinn.”
I texted back.
Still with Eli. On my way soon. Where are you?
“I’m coming with you,” Eli said. “So what do we do about Bobby? Say nothing?”
Another ding. Barrel room. Showing Yasmin around.
“Luce?”
“What?”
“I just asked you about Bobby.”
“Oh. Right.” I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “I’ll let him know. I’ll call him when I get back to the winery. Miguel’s long gone anyway.”
He held out a hand. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ll help you down.”
I looked around one more time. “How old do you think this house is? How long has it been here?”
“Pretty old,” he said. “It’s been here a long time.”
“Thanks for that insight, Captain Obvious. You’re the architect. Can you be any more specific?”
“Maybe mid–eighteen hundreds,” he said. “I did poke at some rotted plaster and lathe and saw what looked like newspapers tacked to the wood. They would have been used as insulation. I’ll come back and take a closer look when I’ve got more time. Maybe there’s a date on one of them.”
I looked at the hole in the wall he was pointing to. “Maybe.”
“Let’s go,” he said, lowering himself through the door. He turned and reached out to me. “Come on. Jump and I’ll catch you.”
We had to walk single file through the dense undergrowth back to his car and the ATV. He led the way. Over his shoulder he said, “I’d really like to restore that little cottage. Maybe move it so it’s near my new place. Okay by you?”
I grabbed a branch he’d held on to so it wouldn’t snap back and whip me across the face. “I’d like to know more about its history before you move it. How it got there and who built it. And why nobody in the family ever mentioned it before. It’s not on any plat of our land that I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ll do some checking. Maybe we missed it.”