‘I do,’ she said. ‘Big bags. They were all folded.’
‘My initial tests didn’t yield too much. Organic material mostly, some fibers and hair. None belonging to the victim. But when I revisited this yesterday I found trace of two different materials I hadn’t detected before.’
‘What is it?’
‘In four of the bags there was something called Symphytum uplandicum. Also known as Comfrey tea. Have you ever heard of it?’
‘Can’t say that I have,’ Ivy said. ‘Not much of a tea connoisseur, to be honest. I can’t imagine that Chevy Deacon was either.’
‘Well, I’d never heard of it either. I got as far as the Wikipedia entry for it, but no further yet. I’ll keep digging. There’s a reason it was in those bags, though. Just not sure what that reason is yet.’
‘What else did you find?’
‘On each of the six bags was trace evidence of horse manure.’
‘No shortage of horses or their output in Holland County, Gary.’
‘That’s for sure,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t very much of it, but what I found interesting is how it was deployed.’
‘How is that?’
‘I only found trace on the outside of the bags, and then only along the bottom seam, end to end. Which would mean—’
‘The bag was placed on the ground, in or around horse manure. Placed, but not laying down on its side.’
‘This is what I’m thinking. What might be even more telling is that this particular organic material is spread along the first four or five inches towards the top of the bag on all sides.’
‘Which would mean that whatever was in the bag when it was placed on the ground was heavy. It spread out.’
‘That’s the consensus around here,’ he said. ‘Have you ever considered a career change, Ivy? Maybe moving over to BCI?’
‘I do look good in a lab coat,’ she said. ‘Can you put this all in a memo and fax or email it to me?’
‘Already in the works, Chief. And I’ll let you know what I find when I dig deeper into the Comfrey tea.’
‘Can you also give me that technical name one more time?’
Baudette spelled it for her.
‘Thanks, Gary. Keep me posted.’
Ivy knew that the Deacons didn’t keep horses, but that did not mean that someone had not crossed their spread recently on horseback. She knew that horses were not all that discriminating about where and when they did their business.
On the way to making her rounds she stopped at The Tea Cup on Parkwood Road and talked to the owner. Ivy often got her morning coffee here, and knew that the shop carried a lot of exotic and foreign teas. She learned that Comfrey tea was a herbal tea not commonly found in tea shops and pantries, but rather used as a healing compound for minor skin wounds, bedsores and insect bites.
Ivy bought a large coffee and took it over to one of the benches at the northern end of the Fairgrounds. The area was alive with vendors setting up for the next day’s festivities. It reminded Ivy that she was pretty much on duty for the next forty-eight hours, and that this case might have to wait.
Still, she could not bring herself to put this new information aside. She took out her iPad, tapped the browser icon, drilled down to her Google Maps app.
She had placed push pins at the sites where the bodies had been found, going all the way back to the 1940s. She zoomed in to the area where Josefina Mollo had been found. There were only a few roads in the area. Her eye traced the route from the Deacon spread over to Cavender Road. There were any number of horse trails in that area, so the manure could have come from any of these.
But why all six bags, and why only on the bottom?
As she scanned the area one last time she saw the dirt access road snaking into the woods just north of Route 44 and Cavender Road.
Of course, she thought.
Why hadn’t she seen it before?
Heritage Equestrian Center was a multidiscipline training facility located on a one-hundred-acre parcel of land at the easternmost section of Holland County.
As the crow flies it was less than two miles from where Josefina Mollo’s body was found. In order to get to Route 44 from the entrance you had to drive along Cavender Road.
Ivy had called ahead and when she pulled into the driveway she was met by the company’s owner.
Stella Eames was in her forties, a fit and vigorous woman with close-cropped silver hair. They met in the reception area of the main building. Ivy told the woman the bare basics of her inquiry, specifically about the Comfrey tea.
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Eames said.
‘It’s herbal tea.’
Eames thought for a moment. ‘I’m a pretty big tea drinker, but I’ve never really been adventurous. Earl Grey, chamomile, peppermint.’
Ivy asked if she knew Chevy Deacon. She did not. Ivy took out her notebook, scanned the timeline. She told her the date in question.
‘Do you know if you got any deliveries that day?’ Ivy asked.
‘It’s surely possible. We buy almost everything we use here.’
‘Can you check your log?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Come on into the office.’
The offices were on the second floor of the main building, and overlooked the training track. Eames sat down at her desk, opened her laptop, tapped a few keys.
‘We got a few deliveries that day, but only from UPS and FedEx.’
‘No local concerns or independent haulers?’
She looked again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘And all deliveries would be on your schedule?’
‘They’re supposed to be. There’s five of us here, though,’ she said. ‘It’s possible that an independent delivered something I don’t know about. I can ask the other employees.’
‘Would you do that for me?’
‘Of course.’
Ivy handed her a card.
‘Can you call me as soon as you talk to them?’
‘Sure thing.’
As Ivy headed back to the village she drove the same route that someone leaving the center would take to bring them to the intersection of Cavender Road and Route 44. It was as thickly wooded as any area of Holland County.
Perfect cover, she thought, for someone to transport the body of a dead girl.
62
Will had a final meeting with the HR department at Kent State at two o’clock. He took a shower, put on slacks and a blazer, made himself a sandwich. When he sat down at the dining room table he opened the package he had gotten from Eli’s grandson, Zach.
He carefully opened the large envelope, gently shook out the contents onto the table. Inside were three smaller envelopes, perhaps six by nine, all sealed with a metal clasp. One of them contained an old leather notebook, as in very old. Its cover worn and creased, rutted with use. Will could see that the pages were yellowed and brittle.
Etched on the cover was:
Daily Pocket Remembrancer
He set it aside, opened the second envelope. This one contained a stack of photographs, similar to the ones that had been on the wall at the Historical Society. These seemed even more brittle than the notebook. He put them back in the envelope.
The third package was a children’s book. The binding on the book, titled The Eclectic Reader, was all but disintegrated, the pages loose. Will gently flipped through it. The contents were a mix of stories and fables and poems, all illustrated.
Let me put a few things together for you.
Why had Eli Johnson wanted him to have these things? While they looked like collectible items, memorabilia for history buffs in Abbeville, nothing looked like anything one might put on display.
He set aside the book and the photographs for later in the day.
He then opened the journal. Inside the front cover, on the left-hand side, in deep blue ink, was written in a beautiful cursive hand:
Being the true diary and journal of Eva Claire Larssen.
On the right side
was printed:
For the recording of events, sums and sundries.
Will again looked at the inscription. He remembered the name Eva Larssen from the old photograph of the eight girls standing behind Godwin Hall, the scullery maids and room attendants, taken not ten feet from where he now sat. The thought gave him a chill.
Will wondered if she’d sat on this very spot, in this very room, and wrote in this diary.
As he was about to begin reading, he suddenly had the feeling that he was prying. Whenever he was with a patient, and the person began to open up about their most private feelings, it was different. He was not prying at those times, but rather listening, helping the patients to understand.
Not so with a diary.
A century and a half after this young woman wrote down her innermost thoughts, Will felt that reading her words might not be right.
There was little chance that Eva Larssen had written this journal for eyes other than her own, surely not for a man one hundred fifty years in the future to read.
Detta was another story. She would love to read it.
He took the book into the kitchen and wrote a note for her.
Thirty minutes later he locked Godwin Hall, and cycled the two miles to the campus.
63
Jakob stood at one end of the long, narrow gallery on the third floor of Veldhoeve. The corridor ran the entire length of the structure, north to south, end to end, gable to gable. On the east wall of the gallery there were seven peaked dormers, each aligned with a section of the whitewashed wall that stood opposite.
The corridor itself was a mere forty-six inches wide, room enough to walk shoulder to shoulder. It was carpeted in a rich burgundy wool. The hardwood floor beneath was a burnished chestnut, highly glossed with a polyurethane finish.
Jakob sipped his tea, breathed deeply the air, the sweet tisane of apple blossoms, the grace note of every memory he’d ever had.
Tremble at this day, came the voice from Charity.
Jakob closed his mind to the voices.
The only furniture in this part of the house was a small white table at one end of the gallery, upon which Jakob preferred a crystal vase with white irises. On either side of the table were two fine mahogany chairs in the Queen Anne style. Each chair was upholstered in black silk.
In the morning, Jakob’s cherished time of day to come here, he would watch as the sunlight gently ascended the wall. As a child he had many times spirited himself away from the orchards to watch the chalky, luminous light slowly reveal each of the drawings.
If the world knew what he had in his possession it would beat a frenzied path to his door. He had known this just as his fathers had known. It would shake the art world to the extent that books would surely be rewritten, histories revised. Scholars from all over the world would rethink what they had generations ago thought to be true, knew to be true.
Pieter Bruegel had produced fourteen preliminary sketches of his seven virtues and seven vices.
Upon Bruegel’s death in 1569 the rough sketches were thought to be lost. In truth, an apprentice in Bruegel’s studio had spirited the drawings away in a secret compartment in an exquisite oak cupboard with ebony inlay.
Rinus van Laar purchased at auction the kolommenkest in West-Friesland. Three days after the night of his wife’s murder, Rinus, in the hallucinatory grip of the mandragora, saw the future.
He would create a legacy to Bruegel’s virtues in the seven sacred groves at Zeven Farms. Four virtues to each grove, each representing one season.
Jakob knew as a young man, as had his fathers, that what he would create would be a meager impression of the master work. Even with the years of planning and arranging, the care with which they had all curated the objects, the final result could only be an approximation of Bruegel’s vision.
Jakob had once tried to log the miles, the total distance, that all the objects had traveled, and had forsaken the exercise somewhere in the tens of thousands.
On this day Jakob came to a halt in front of the final two drawings, as he had every day for the past twenty-five years, except for those days when he had been collecting.
This is the day that the Lord hath made, came the voice of his father.
Jakob opened the small drawer in the table, retrieved his magnifier, a fine Edgar Berebi with a burnished silver handle.
He stepped closer to the drawing, brought the glass to his eye. There had been renderings before and after, by many gifted artists, but for Jakob, and his fathers, this was where it all began and ended, the faultless center between the light and the dark, between equinox and solstice.
He looked at the inscription at the bottom.
Sweet is the trust that springs from hope, without which we could not endure life’s many and almost unbearable adversities.
Hope, he thought as he glanced out the window, across the Fairgrounds, at Godwin Hall. He reached into his pocket, retrieved the two photos. Eva Larssen and Bernadette Hardy. The two handmaidens of his legacy.
The last girl is the first girl, he thought.
The last girl is Hope.
64
Walt Barnstable walked into the station at three o’clock, flushed with purpose. He had two documents in hand.
‘I was just at the Sheriff’s to pick up some posters,’ he said. ‘They asked me to bring these back. I think we’re going to want to follow up on them.’
The documents were two missing-person case summaries. Two teenage girls; one fourteen, one fifteen. Both had been missing for a month. Neither of them were from Holland County, but were from the tri-county area.
Ivy’s eyes scanned the pages. She saw what Walt wanted her to see. While it was not that rare for teenage girls to run away, or go missing, these two girls made them potentially special to this case.
One of the girls, the younger of the two, was last seen near her home in Auburn Valley. She was a volunteer at the Red Cross clothing drop-off center in nearby Hazelton. The other girl, missing from Waite Hill, volunteered at the Lake County food bank.
As Ivy read the documents she felt her heart clock a little faster. ‘They volunteer,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
Ivy looked at the full reports. Both were light on details. One of the family interviews was conducted by a rookie county deputy; the other was by a village police officer, a part-timer.
‘Have you spoken to both families?’ Ivy asked.
Walt nodded. ‘I called them on the way over.’
‘Have they had any contact with the missing girls?’
‘None.’
Before leaving the station Ivy decided who would get which file. Ivy took the fourteen-year-old girl. Her name was Julie Hansen.
The Hansen house was in a sub-development called Auburn Valley Greens. Built in the 1970s and 1980s, the zip code was now home to middle income families with children, as the schools were among the better funded in the county.
On the way out to Auburn Valley Ivy stopped by the Pooch Pawlor in Kimmel Junction to pick up Frankie. Ivy had sprung for the works. Frankie’s coat gleamed.
Meredith Hansen was in her mid-thirties. She was willowy and fair, and moved in a way that suggested she had at one time been a good athlete, a tennis player, perhaps. To Ivy she seemed tightly wrapped, ready to uncoil at any moment.
The front room was full of lighted votive candles in red glass holders.
While they talked, Meredith Hansen sat on the very edge of the couch. In deference, Ivy did the same thing, matching the woman’s posture. Ivy had seen it many times. Women in Meredith Hansen’s dire circumstance wanted to be ready to move. She kept her cell phone firmly clutched in her right hand.
Ivy got the basics out of the way first. Then she moved on to what had, for her, become the beating heart of the case.
‘Julie is a volunteer?’ Ivy asked.
‘Yes,’ Meredith said. ‘She’s always doing something. She works with the Friends of the Library when they do their book sales and bake-offs. Sh
e collects for March of Dimes, sells magazine subscriptions to raise money for the Cancer Society. She collects clothes for the Red Cross. She also has a part-time job.’
‘Where does she work?’
‘She does some shelf stocking at Dahlausen’s.’
Dahlausen’s was a country store and farmer’s market on Granger Road. This information had not been in the initial report.
‘She took the job so she could pitch in around here. Her older brother and sister are away at college now.’
‘You mean pitch in financially?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Her dad is on disability.’
‘May I ask what happened?’
‘It was at his work. He’s an iron worker. Local 207.’
‘And there was an accident?’
‘Yes.’
Ivy looked at the door to the bathroom. It had recently been widened, the drywall patched but as yet unpainted. A glance out the back door showed a recently installed ramp. Now Ivy recognized the sound she’d been hearing. It was the steady diaphragm pump of an oxygen concentrator.
‘Tell me about the last time you saw Julie.’
Meredith went through the morning of the day her daughter disappeared. It seemed ordinary enough. When Julie left early that morning, on her bicycle, she was headed to Dahlausen’s. She never arrived.
‘Can you describe Julie’s bike?’
Meredith did.
‘What was she wearing the last time you saw her?’
‘She had on her red cardigan. It has white trim around the collar and the two pockets.’
‘Bright red? Deep red?’
‘I can show you.’
The woman stepped out of the room for a few seconds, then returned. Ivy expected her to be holding a photograph. She was holding a red cardigan sweater on a padded hanger.
‘I don’t understand,’ Ivy said. ‘She was wearing this sweater?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I mean, not this exact sweater. One exactly like it. We always buy her two of everything.’
‘May I ask why?’
Murder Scene Page 27