All the Secret Places

by Anna Carlisle

  Gin gave her a little wave and took her place in the center court, ready to go after the many dropped and missed balls. No sense giving Nanette any reason to suspect anything was amiss—Gin would simply compartmentalize for all she was worth, and after practice, she’d damn well get to the bottom of the situation. Jake could have been picked up for a variety of reasons, many of them perfectly innocent. In all likelihood, they simply wanted his version of events since he took possession of the land.

  She slipped her phone out of her pocket just in case—but there were no calls or texts. She jammed the phone back into her pocket with more force than necessary.

  “Who’s ready for side-to-sides, girls?” she shouted.

  9

  Two hours later, she finally pulled up at Jake’s house after presiding over postpractice snacks and driving Cherie and Olive and one other girl home. She made sure that Cherie was set for dinner (homemade macaroni and cheese in a microwavable container, precut carrots and cherry tomatoes in a dish in the fridge, and a homemade brownie wrapped in plastic with a Post-it note with a heart drawn in Sharpie, a detail that made Gin feel unaccountably wistful). She turned back Cherie’s neatly made bed, wrote her phone number on a lined pad on the kitchen counter, and told Cherie to call if she needed anything at all.

  Now she was back home, and she shut off the car’s engine and sat in the driveway.

  If Jake had been charged with anything, she was certain he would have called. Of course, he knew she had practice that afternoon, so he was probably trying not to bother her. Now that she was home, she could see that the house glowed with lights, and his truck was pulled up in its usual space, as though nothing was amiss.

  Relief flooded her—mixed with a lingering sense of unease. Why hadn’t he let her know what had happened? Her hand was stiff on the door handle, and as she made her way to the front door, her gym shoes making crunching sounds in the slush that had melted during the day only to refreeze, her irritation grew.

  Inside, the house was filled with savory aromas. Something simmered on the stove, and Jake was grating fresh parmesan.

  “Hey,” Gin said casually, dropping her coat and purse onto the hall table.

  “Where were you?”

  “Basketball practice—remember?” she said. “The Wings kicked off their season today. All over the district, all the other seventh-grade girls are shaking in their shoes.” She kept her tone light, but she was surprised—and maybe a little hurt—that he hadn’t remembered.

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

  “Jake . . . I ran into Tuck Baxter. He told me you were picked up and questioned.”

  Jake froze, his hand on the lid of a pot, and took a deep breath. “I didn’t want you to worry. Besides, I wasn’t arrested or anything. Dinner’s almost ready—I was afraid you were going to miss it.”

  “That smells amazing,” Gin said, not sure what to make of his defensive tone.

  “Well, don’t get used to it—pretty soon it’s going to be Hamburger Helper around here. Or else maybe I’ll get a job at McDonalds, and we’ll get by on chicken nuggets.” He gave a pan on the stove an unnecessarily hard shake.

  “Oh, Jake. Come on, it’s not that bad.”

  Gin wasn’t used to seeing him like this. For a kid who’d had a lot to overcome—never knowing his mother and having a cop for a dad who showed no mercy when Jake got into trouble, which he did a lot—he’d never been one to admit defeat. As a troubled adolescent, it had been all too easy for him to assume that the world was gunning for him; he’d compensated by looking for trouble before it could find him first. Still, he’d always been determined to meet his problems head on, to be bigger and tougher than the challenges facing him.

  But right now, the look on his face was a mixture of shock and despair. And his words sounded more like someone who was giving up than someone who was going to stand and fight. Now that his father was dead, perhaps he’d decided he had no reason to keep fighting so hard.

  Which made it all worse. I’m here, Gin wanted to say. You have to get through this for me.

  Faced with seemingly insoluble problems, Gin had been trained to turn to logic. Maybe it was the natural domain of an eldest sibling, especially one who’d born the yoke of responsibility and high expectations in an extraordinarily high-achieving family.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said. “The discovery of a body may make the jobsite an active crime scene, but it won’t be forever. Based on my experience, you may be looking at a week or two at the most. Look, everyone understands that you have a business to run.”

  “Which won’t matter if I’m in jail for arson.”

  “That’s—” Gin stopped herself. She was going to say it was ridiculous, but on the other hand, Jake had spent decades trying to clear his name for another crime he had nothing to do with. He had every reason to assume that the process would not favor him. “That’s very unlikely. The county has an arson specialist on staff; once they process the evidence, they’re bound to discover it was an accident.”

  “Actually . . .”

  Something in his tone made her skin prickle. Please, she thought. Please don’t let this turn out to be deliberate.

  “They found traces of an accelerant. They rattled off some chemical compound I’ve already forgotten, but Baxter seemed to think it could have been brought here intentionally by someone who knew what they were doing. And the thing is, I’ve practically been spending every waking hour in that house, so it doesn’t look good for me.”

  Gin could attest that he was telling the truth: as the Ashers’ house neared completion, Jake had obsessed over doing the finish work himself and checking every detail that his workers were responsible for. Asher had agreed to let prospective buyers of the other houses tour his home while it was being completed—Jake thought he was the sort of man who enjoyed the attention, even if by proxy—and Jake had been counting on using the house to drum up interest. Later in the month, a local magazine was set to do a feature layout of the home once the couple’s decorator had had her turn inside; it was to be the new Mrs. Asher’s “coming out,” a cementing of her new status, and she’d zealously sought out the media attention. Jake had been keenly determined to make sure every detail was perfect for the magazine piece.

  “I would have known, Gin,” he said tightly. “Accelerant in large enough amounts to do that kind of damage? I’d have smelled it the minute I came through the door. Which means that whoever brought it there did it that night, right before the fire. Apparently the cops think it might have been done in an effort to stop the project so the body wouldn’t be discovered.”

  “That makes no sense,” Gin said. “If their aim was to destroy evidence, why start a fire so far away from the body—and why did they wait so long? For that matter, why not just dig it up and move it?”

  “I don’t know, Gin,” Jake said tightly. “You’re the expert here. I would think that if someone came and dug a huge hole next to my project, someone would notice. I mean, it’s not like you could drive a Cat up there and excavate without anyone seeing you.”

  “They probably dug that hole by hand in the first place. They could have dug it again. One person could do it in one night. Two people could do it in half the time.”

  “But there’d be evidence left behind, wouldn’t there?” Jake persisted. “I mean, you’ve told me that the fluids drain out of the body. Unless they were going to take all the dirt underneath, wouldn’t there be some indication of what had been there?”

  “Give me a second,” Gin said. She needed to run through the scenario in her mind, just as she would if she was in the autopsy room back in Chicago. “If there were bone fragments left behind, they could perform DNA analysis on them, but if the body truly is Civil War era, DNA sampling would be meaningless. I mean, what would you compare it to?

  “But if the victim died more recently, then yes, possibly. But that assumes the murderer was careless enough to leave behind part of the remains. And I would think that s
omeone willing to take the risk of retrieving the remains would be very careful to get all of them.”

  “But what about the seepage? I mean, there’s DNA in all of that, right? Couldn’t they just sample the dirt underneath?”

  Gin shook her head. “It’s not like body fluids just stay unchanged in the soil. When a body breaks down, it alters the chemistry of the soil underneath. The nutrients and minerals attract insects and maggots and rodents. It’s like there’s a food island for certain species—the soil would be organically rich. And then you have to factor in what’s left behind—dead insects and fecal material from larger animals—all of that would alter the composition of the soil. So no, it isn’t reasonable to expect to get any useful evidence from the soil.”

  “That’s . . . that’s disgusting,” Jake said.

  “More to the point, it isn’t very helpful.” Gin sighed. “Honestly, it just throws more complications into the issue of the age of the remains. If someone really was trying to prevent their discovery, that makes it more likely that they were contemporary. And that the murderer is not only still alive but still keenly worried about being found out.”

  “Okay, so who would ever bury a body up there in the first place?”

  They were both silent for a moment, thinking.

  “There’s always the Rudkin brothers,” Jake said. “Or more specifically, Griffin Rudkin. He’s got a pretty notorious record.”

  Griffin Rudkin, the youngest of the three brothers, had torn through his adolescence on a string of spectacularly bad behavior, flunking out of Penn and getting arrested for cocaine possession and, after his parents cut him off financially, selling coke and other drugs. For a while in the nineties, it had seemed like he was in the paper every other week for crashing a car or breaking up with a model or showing up drunk at the black-tie fund raisers for the organizations his mother supported.

  His name had eventually stopped appearing in the news, and there were rumors that he was in prison or rehab or dead, and eventually he was forgotten. In fact, he had been in the news only once more that Gin was aware of.

  “Didn’t his mother leave him out of the will?” she asked. “I feel like I read that he was estranged from her.”

  “That’s how I ended up with the land in the first place.”

  “I thought you picked it up at auction.”

  “Well, yes, but the reason it was sold at auction was that Corinne Rudkin’s will specified that Griffin’s third be sold immediately upon her death and the proceeds were to go to one of her charities.” He grimaced. “Honestly, I don’t feel great about getting my hands on it that way. There’s a lot of bad blood in that family, and well, I guess it seems kind of tainted.”

  “Was Griffin angry about being left out?”

  “No idea. I met the other brothers—Randy and Keith, they had to sign papers at the closing—and they seemed okay. I mean, we didn’t talk about Griffin, obviously, but they wished me luck with the project and all. It was decent of them, because they could have objected to housing going up so close to the main estate.”

  “How close is it?” Gin said.

  “Just under a quarter mile. The main road to the house is off of Chilipin, on the other side, and the ridge blocks line of sight—but still, before I began the project, there were no other houses for almost three quarters of a mile in any direction.”

  Gin considered that for a moment. “The brothers were stuck with the terms of their mother’s will,” she said slowly. “But they may not have been happy about it, despite what they told you. Maybe they figured it would be easier to block the project than to stop the sale.”

  “You mean, by burning it down?” Jake frowned. “I don’t know, seems like a hell of a stretch. Griffin, on the other hand . . .”

  “If he felt that he was cheated out of his share, he might resent anything being built on land he thinks should be his. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “But angry enough to kill someone?”

  “Well, I guess we should see if either of his brothers has mysteriously disappeared.”

  “It’s worth looking into, anyway.”

  “You’re going to call Stillman?”

  That was the logical thing to do, but given their contentious relationship, Gin had little hope he’d be receptive to her ideas. “Maybe. I’ll sleep on it.”

  “Okay.” While they were talking, Jake had spooned stew over polenta in large soup bowls and set them on the table. He poured wine into two glasses and handed one to her. “Better eat while it’s still hot.”

  Gin had just taken her first bite when Jake snapped his fingers. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Gus and his wife are coming over to dinner tomorrow.”

  Gin swallowed. “Oh,” she said. “That should be nice.”

  “Try not to sound so excited.”

  “No, sorry, I am. It’s just—”

  What, exactly, had caused the spike of dismay at the news? Gin had been thinking for a while that they should entertain, meet other people. And this was a perfect opportunity. Maybe it would be just what she needed to get out of the mild doldrums that held her in their grip all during the autumn.

  “Let me help,” she said instead, aiming for an enthusiastic tone.

  “I already did the shopping today. Thought I’d smoke ribs. You can make the salad, if you want.”

  “That sounds great.” She forced a smile. “It’ll be nice to meet his wife. I could use some more women friends.”

  “Atta girl,” Jake said, lifting his glass in a mock toast. “You guys can get to know each other while Gus and I drown our sorrows and smoke cheap cigars.”

  “Jake . . .”

  “Kidding, Gin. Look, let’s just take one evening and forget everything else, okay? I promise not to mention anything having to do with the project.”

  “And I promise not even to think about dead bodies all evening.”

  As they touched glasses, Gin had a sinking feeling it was a promise she wouldn’t be able to keep.

  10

  The next day, Jake went to check on a small project one of his crews was wrapping up in Clairton. After breakfast, Gin called Baxter but reached his voice mail.

  “Could you call me when you have a chance? I’ve got . . . something I want to run past you.”

  After she hung up, she stared at her phone for a moment, thinking. The image she used as her wallpaper was an old photo of her and Lily from when they were in their early teens. They’d been at the beach, and Lily had found a starfish, which she’d wrapped around her fingers. She was holding it in Gin’s face, while Gin shrieked and tried to get away. Her father had caught the moment on film.

  There was something in the sibling bond, a need to antagonize, that was the other side of the coin of deep love. She thought about Griffin Rudkin, abandoned and shunned by those who’d loved him most. What would a blow like that do to a person? What could it drive him to do?

  She tapped Griffin’s name into the browser on her phone and narrowed the results to the last year. The few mentions were all in articles about his mother’s death, and most were a single line about the three brothers who’d survived both their parents.

  Finally, she found what she was looking for. “Son Griffin, forty-two, owns a small business in Tarryville.” A quick search revealed that the business was called Mike’s Bikes; Griffin evidently hadn’t changed the name of the shop when he bought it. He looked like an older version of the boy who’d posed in the family picture that had run in the paper when his mother Corinne died. He stood in front of a refurbished old Vespa with an elderly man in bike shorts and a plaid shirt—Mike, perhaps. Both men looked somber in the photograph.

  Griffin resembled his brothers in the sense that he shared the same receding dark hair, the same rounded chin, and the same sharp-planed brow. But there, the resemblance ended. He was dressed in a frayed flannel shirt over a pair of cargo shorts and leather huaraches. He had allowed his hair to grow p
ast his shoulders in an untamed style reminiscent of a seventies shag. He was wearing small wire-framed glasses that gave him an air of a poet or a philosopher.

  He certainly didn’t look like a murderer.

  But Gin knew that looks were deceiving at least as often as not. She’d examined elderly spinsters with livers destroyed by secret alcoholism, thugs with fingertips flattened from practicing piano. To really get a handle on whether Griffin could be guilty, she would have to talk to him in person.

  Which she could do . . . in the space of a half-hour drive.

  Gin checked the website again and found that the shop opened at 10:00 AM. It was already nearly nine. And the hours stretched between now and the dinner party with very little to fill them.

  She could—should—visit her mom and dad. Gin made a regular habit of popping in on her mother in her modest office at the city building, but she saw much less of her father. He had retired abruptly after Lily’s murder had been solved and her remains buried; he barely went out at all, and while he said he wanted to take a little time to “rest” before setting up a regular routine, he seemed to spend most of his time reading in the small den off the kitchen. Gin was worried about him, but she wasn’t ready to face the possibility that Richard needed more support than he was getting. In fact, she and her mother both seemed to feel that way.

  A visit would be a good thing. She could pick up a bucket of chicken—Madeleine wouldn’t have to know—and some root beer and talk to him about his plans for his plot in the community garden or his thoughts on the NFL roster.

  But her mind kept wandering back to Griffin. She could be there and back in less than a couple of hours; she wouldn’t even have to say anything to him if it didn’t feel right. There was an organic market in Tarryville that had an exceptional assortment of cheeses; she could pick some up, with some olives and rosemary crackers, as an appetizer for tonight. And she was nearly out of her shampoo, which they sold at the Aveda store in Tarryville but nowhere in Trumbull.