My Sister's Grave (5 page)

Tracy shook her head. “No.”

Ben wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Calloway unlocked the canopy door and bent to peek inside the bed before letting the door lift open. He lowered the tailgate. Again, everything remained seemingly as Tracy remembered. Their rugged carts were strapped to the bed walls. Tracy’s duster lay strewn with her boots and red bandanna.

“Isn’t that her hat?” Calloway pointed to the brown Stetson.

It was. Then Tracy remembered plopping her black Stetson on Sarah’s head. “She was wearing mine.”

Calloway started to raise the gate.

“Can I go in?” Tracy asked. Calloway stepped back. She climbed in, uncertain what she was looking for but feeling the same urgency she’d felt when she and Ben had driven off the night before, as if she’d forgotten something. She unlocked their rugged carts. The shotguns and rifles remained racked, barrel up, like pool cues in a rack. Sarah’s pistols were stored in an interior drawer, the ammunition in the lock box. In a second drawer, where Sarah kept buttons and badges from other competitions, Tracy found the photograph of Wild Bill presenting her with the silver belt buckle: Sarah and the third place finisher stood on each side of her. She slid the photograph into her back pocket, lifted the duster, and checked the pockets.

“It isn’t here,” she said climbing out.

“What isn’t here?” Calloway asked.

“The championship buckle,” Tracy said. “I gave it to Sarah last night before we left.”

“I’m not following,” Calloway said.

“Why would she take the buckle and not take her guns?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know. It’s just . . .”

“It’s just what?” Calloway asked.

“I mean, she wouldn’t have had any reason to take the belt buckle unless she intended to give it back to me this morning, right?”

“She walked away,” Calloway said. “Is that what you’re saying? She had time to decide what to take and started walking.”

Tracy looked down the deserted road. The white center line snaked with the hillside’s contours, turning and disappearing around a bend. “So where is she?”

CHAPTER 9

T
he silver plating had lost its luster, but the cast image of a cowgirl firing two single-action revolvers and the lettering etched along the perimeter remained distinct:
1993 Washington State Champion
.

They’d found the belt buckle.

They’d found Sarah.

The emotion that welled inside Tracy surprised her. It wasn’t bitterness or guilt. It wasn’t even sorrow. It was anger, and it coursed through her like venom. She’d known. She’d always known Sarah’s disappearance wasn’t what everyone had wanted her to believe. She’d known there’d been more to it. And now she had a sense that she could finally prove it.

“Finlay.” Calloway’s voice sounded as if it were coming from the far end of a long tunnel. “Take her out of here.”

Someone touched her arm. Tracy pulled away. “No.”

“You don’t need to be a part of this,” Calloway said.

“I left her once,” she said. “I’m not leaving her again. I’m staying. To the end.”

Calloway nodded to Armstrong, who stepped back to where Rosa had resumed digging. “I’ll need that back,” Calloway said. He held out his hand for the belt buckle but Tracy continued to trace the surface with her thumb, feeling the contour of each letter. “Tracy,” Calloway said.

She held out the buckle, but when Calloway grasped it she did not release her grip, forcing him to look her in the eye. “I told you, Roy. We searched this area. We searched it twice.”

She kept her distance the remainder of the afternoon, but she could see enough to know that Sarah had been buried in a fetal position, legs higher than her head. Whoever had used the hole created when the root ball was pulled free of the ground had misjudged the size of the hole, which was not uncommon. Spatial perception can become distorted when a person is under stress.

Only after Kelly Rosa had zipped closed the black body bag and padlocked the zipper did Tracy hike out of the woods back to her car.

She navigated the turns down the mountain without thought, her mind dulled. The sun had dipped below the tree line, causing shadows to creep across the road. She’d known, of course. It was why detectives were trained to work so hard to recover anyone abducted within the first forty-eight hours. After that, statistics showed that the odds of finding the person alive plummeted. After twenty years, the odds of finding Sarah alive had been infinitesimal. And yet there had remained that small part of her, the part that Tracy shared with other families whose loved ones had been abducted and never found. It was the part of every human being that clung to the hope, no matter how unlikely, that they could beat the odds. It had happened before. It had happened when a young woman in California, missing eighteen years, walked into a police station and said her name. Hope had been reignited that day for every family who had ever lost a loved one. It had flared for Tracy. Someday that would be Sarah. Someday that would be her sister. It could be so cruel, hope. But for twenty years it was all she’d had to hold on to, the only thing to push back the darkness that lingered on the periphery, searching for every opportunity to enshroud her.

Hope.

Tracy had clung to it, until that very last moment when Roy Calloway had handed her the belt buckle, and extinguished the final, cruel, flicker.

She drove past the spot on the county road where, twenty years earlier, they’d found her blue truck, and it felt as if just days had passed. Miles down the road, she took the familiar exit and drove through a town she no longer recognized or felt connected with. But rather than turn left for the freeway entrance, she turned right, driving out past the single-story houses she remembered as vibrant homes filled with families and friends, but which now looked tired and worn. Farther out of town, the size of the houses and the yards increased. She drove on autopilot, slowing to turn when she saw the river rock gateposts. She stopped at the bottom of a sloped driveway.

Bright perennials, regularly tended by her mother, had once filled the flowerbeds, but they had been replaced by the bare stalks of dormant rose bushes. At the top of a manicured lawn outlined by neatly trimmed English boxwood hedges was a severed stump, where the weeping willow had once stood like an open umbrella. Christian Mattioli had enlisted an architect from England to design a two-story, Queen Anne–style home when he had founded the Cedar Grove Mining Company and the town of Cedar Grove had sprung to life. As the story went, Mattioli later requested that the architect add a third story to ensure the home would be the tallest and grandest in Cedar Grove. A century later, long after the Cedar Grove mines had closed and most of the residents had moved on, the house and yard had fallen into disrepair. However, Tracy’s mother had fallen in love at first sight with the fish-scale siding and the turrets rising above the low-pitched gabled roofs. Tracy’s father, in search of a country medical practice, had bought her the property and together they had restored everything from the Brazilian-wood floors to the box-beam ceilings. They’d stripped the paneled wainscoting and cabinetry to the original mahogany and refurbished the marble entryway and crystal chandeliers, making the structure once again the grandest in Cedar Grove. But they’d done more than refurbish a structure. They’d created a place for two sisters to call home.

Tracy turned off the bathroom light and stepped into her bedroom wearing her red fleece pajamas. A towel turban entwined her hair. She sang along to Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton’s version of “We’ve Got Tonight,” which played on her boom box as she leaned across the bench seat and considered the night sky out her bay window. A magnificent full moon cast the weeping willow in a pale blue light. Its long braids hung motionless, as if the tree had fallen into a deep sleep. Fall was slipping quietly into winter and the weatherman had predicted the nighttime temperature would dip below freezing. To Tracy’s disappointment, however, the sky sparkled with stars. Cedar Grove Grammar School shut down for the first winter snow and Tracy had a test on fractions in the morning. She was less than fully prepared.

She hit the “Stop” button on the boom box, cutting off Sheena but continuing to sing. Then she clicked off her desk lamp. Moonbeams spilled across her down comforter and throw rug, disappearing again when she switched on the lamp clipped to the headboard. She picked up
A Tale of Two Cities
; they’d been slogging their way through the story the entire semester. She didn’t much feel like reading, but if her grades slipped, her father wouldn’t take her to the regional shooting tournament at the end of November.

She continued singing the lyrics to “We’ve Got Tonight” as she pulled back the comforter.

“Boo!”

Tracy screamed and stumbled backward, nearly falling over.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Sarah had popped out from beneath the covers like she’d been spring-loaded, and now lay on her back laughing so hard she could barely catch her breath to speak the words.

“You are such a brat!” Tracy yelled. “What is wrong with you?”

Sarah sat up, trying to talk in between her high-pitched giggles and gasps for air. “You should have seen your face!” She imitated Tracy’s shocked look, then fell back onto the comforter holding her stomach, continuing to laugh.

“How long have you been under there?”

Sarah got to her knees and balled her fist as if singing into a microphone and mimicked Sarah singing the lyrics.

“Shut up.” Tracy undid her turban, flipped her hair forward and rubbed vigorously with the towel.

“Are you in love with Jack Frates?” Sarah asked.

“That is none of your business. God, you are such a child.”

“No duh. I’m eight. Did you really kiss him?”

Tracy stopped drying her hair and lifted her head. “Who told you that? Did Sunnie tell you that? Wait.” She glanced at her bookshelf. “You read my diary!”

Sarah picked up the pillow and began making kissing noises. “Oh, Jack. Let’s make it last. Let’s find a way!”

“That is private, Sarah! Where is it?” Tracy leaped onto the bed, straddling Sarah, pinning her arms and legs. “Not cool. Totally not cool. Where is it?” Sarah started laughing again. “I mean it, Sarah! Give it back!”

The door opened. “What is going on?” Their mother entered in her pink robe and slippers, holding a brush. Her blonde hair, freed from its customary bun, fell to the middle of her back. “Tracy, get off of your sister.”

Tracy slid off. “She hid under my covers and scared me. And she took my . . . she hid under the covers!”

Abby Crosswhite walked to the bed. “Sarah, what have I told you about scaring people?”

Sarah sat up. “Mom, it was so funny. You should have seen her face.” She made a face that looked like an overexcited chimpanzee. Their mother covered her mouth, trying hard not to laugh.

“Mom!” Tracy said. “It’s not funny.”

“All right. Sarah, I want you to stop scaring your sister and her friends. What have I told you about the boy who cried wolf?”

“One of these times you’re going to hide and no one will ever find you,” Tracy said.

“Mom!”

“And I won’t even look for you.”

“Mom!”

“Enough,” their mother said. “Sarah, go to your own room.” Sarah slid off Tracy’s bed and started for the door to the adjoining bathroom. “And give your sister back her diary.”

Tracy and Sarah both froze. Their mother was like that, psychic or something.

“It’s impolite to be reading about her kissing Jack Frates.”

“Mom!” Tracy said.

“If you’re embarrassed to have it read, then you probably shouldn’t be doing whatever you’re writing about in the first place. You’re too young to be kissing boys.” She turned to Sarah, who stood just inside the bathroom between their rooms making smooching noises. “Enough, Sarah, give it back.”