Too Close to Home (10 page)

“Hollow tree,” he murmured. And then he said more loudly: “We missed checking the tree trunk. The body was probably stuffed there first, so it’d be a good idea to take a look inside.”

Years earlier, a murderer had judged the rotting hole at the base of the massive tree large enough to serve as the entrance to a makeshift tomb. But over those years, woody vines as thick as a man’s arm had snaked up and around the dying tree.
Encouraged by the light sifting through the thinning canopy overhead, new growth had crowded the ragged opening. Neither the crime-scene investigators nor Chad looked enthused about flattening themselves on the ground and angling their bulky upper bodies into the cramped hole. And, in fact, I doubted that any of their shoulders were narrow enough to fit.

The taller investigator pointed.

“Is that poison ivy?” he asked. “What is it they say? Something about three leaves?”

“Leaves of three, let it be,” Chad answered. “And yes, that is poison ivy.”

“I suppose you could avoid it if you were careful,” the tech with the jowly face observed.

I hadn’t been careful the night before, I thought as I stood listening, waiting for the men to work out the problem and reach the inevitable—and unwelcome—conclusion. Just lucky. I could still make out the impression of my elbows and knees in the humus-y soil next to the tree, and realized that I’d missed crawling through a patch of poison ivy by just a matter of inches. But then, I’d been concerned only that Tina might be inside.

“Hole’s too small for a grown man to crawl into it,” the taller technician said. “We’ll have to enlarge the opening to get a good look inside. A chain saw would do the job. Probably easy enough to get our hands on one. Be messy, though. Faster and easier if one of us was small enough…”

His voice trailed off about the time I noticed that the hole in the trunk was spun with tattered spiders’ webs. Only my pride and the three pairs of male eyes turned my way kept me from shuddering.

“I’ll do it,” I said without enthusiasm.

I waited for a moment, hoping that some valiant man would try to stop me. Would say that, in fact, the chain saw would be a better choice.

Wishful thinking.

Sighing, I slipped my billy club from my belt, then undid the buckle and wrapped the leather strap around my holster. I handed the holster to Chad, stepped over to the tree and, trying not to think about what my uniform—already perspiration stained—was going to look like by the time I finished, I used the billy club to clear the webs and bits of loose, termite-infested wood from the narrow opening.

I exchanged the billy club for a flashlight, turned the brown ball cap that was part of my uniform around so that its bill protected the back of my neck, then lay down on my right shoulder. Avoiding the patch of poison ivy and trying not to think too closely about the eight-legged residents that I might be dislodging, I pushed myself forward into the hollow trunk. I stopped when my head, shoulders and right arm were just inside the opening.

Contrary to what is reported in children’s storybooks, there is nothing magical about being inside a tree. A couple feet in front of me was a gaping hole where daylight glimmered upward from the direction of the ravine. Above me, surrounded by the remaining trunk, was a damp honeycomb tunnel of rotting wood that narrowed until it appeared solid. Spindly black ants the size of dimes streamed up and down the interior carrying fat, round pupae the milky color of rotting flesh. That didn’t bother me. But the sight of countless daddy longlegs scuttling for cover did.

For a moment, I panicked. I could feel my heart pounding, feel the air trapped in my throat, feel the building scream that would release it. Would release me from the frozen moment
that preceded flight. I shoved my fist against my mouth, drove my index finger against my teeth, and bit down. Hard.

The pain cleared my head and, for a heartbeat, refocused my thoughts away from the spiders. Long enough. I let my captive breath rush out around my hand. Then, though my nerves screamed their objection, I shut my eyes. Counted to ten. And ten again. Told myself that childhood had passed. That I had endured the terror back then. That I need not relive it now.

Memory provided a flash of Katie’s hand holding mine. Warm and tight and strong. Her voice was strong, too, as she assured me that she’d killed the spider. That she would kill any spiders that dared to come anywhere near me. Because she was my big sister and it was her job to keep me safe.

There was more comfort in that than I was willing to admit, even to myself. But I found the courage to open my eyes.

I took a deep breath, then ignored the spiders and did my job.

I turned slightly, running my flashlight slowly around the interior perimeter of the trunk. To my right, I saw recent droppings that my nose suggested were probably fox. The smell was musty and rank. A clump of red fur that was definitely fox supported my identification of the smell inside the tree. And a scattering of tiny bones and feathers suggested the fox had curled inside the tree to have a snack. I abandoned the flashlight long enough to scoop the bones into a bag. Then I picked up my flashlight again and moved it steadily, ignoring fungus and moss and jagged fingers of corklike wood.

I glimpsed a shape that didn’t occur in nature and spotlighted it.

The object lay opposite me and was caught in the lacework of roots that descended into the sinkhole. A smooth and very regular cylinder. About an inch long with a half-an-inch-in-diameter base. And I thought I recognized…

I used my toes to scoot my shoulders farther into the tree trunk.

Chad must have noticed my movement and interpreted it correctly.

“Are you all right, Brooke? Do you see something?”

Even in his muffled voice, I heard concern.

“Dunno,” I said, and my voice echoed back oddly at me. “I’m going to take a closer look.”

I lay the flashlight down, positioning it so that its beam continued to illuminate the object. Then I stretched out my hand, angled it beneath the cylinder. Using my fingertips, I teased it closer until I was able to enclose it in my hand. Feeling rather than sight told me that a thick plastic tube—dirt clogged, perhaps a quarter-inch long and much narrower than a soda straw—stuck out from one end of the cylinder.

I left the cylinder where it was and backed out of the hole.

“Nothing,” I said as I stood and brushed off the front of my uniform. “All I saw was a pile of scat, a bit of fur from a red fox, and a few tiny bones. Probably bird—”

I held up the bag, stopping the objection I saw forming on the shorter investigator’s lips.

“—but I bagged them anyway. Beyond that, there were only spiders.”

Chad, who knew of my phobia, looked guilt stricken.

I made the effort, grinned at him.

“You owe me,” I said. “Big-time.”

The techs simply looked grateful that they’d avoided a nasty little task.

I
nside the SUV, the air-conditioning was running full blast.

I sat with a pen in my right hand and my logbook propped against my steering wheel. But I wasn’t looking down at the page. Instead, my eyes were on the rearview mirror. I watched the dust cloud kicked up by two departing vehicles—the minivan belonging to the crime-scene technicians and Chad’s squad car.

Once the dust settled, I scribbled a few more lines in my logbook. Then I sat for a while longer doing math, thinking thoughts that I didn’t much like, and making sure that no official vehicles would return unexpectedly.

After that, I went back into the woods.

At the crime scene—now stripped of the yellow tape that marked the exact place where the remains had been found—I crawled back into the hole in the tree trunk and retrieved the cylinder. The one I hadn’t wanted anyone else to see, but that I didn’t need to look at more closely.

There was no need for me to rub soil off the cylinder to know what it was. I didn’t have to examine the bits of clinging label or to peer at the tiny block letters on the flat end as I searched for some hint about the contents of the vial. I knew already who’d manufactured it, knew that—if it had made its way to the state crime lab—any drug residue would prove to be albuterol. From memory, I murmured aloud the instructions etched into the base.

“This end up. Shake before using.”

I shoved the asthma inhaler deep in my pocket and walked back to my vehicle. I climbed into the SUV, turned the key in the ignition and, all the while, kept trying to ignore the suspicion that had been chewing at the edge of my mind ever since I’d found the little cylinder.

It was a coincidence, I told myself. Only a coincidence. Hundreds of thousands of people used asthma inhalers. It didn’t matter that neither of Chad’s parents had asthma. There was no proof yet that the remains belonged to his mother. The victim—or her murderer—might have had asthma. Or an animal, responding to some peculiar instinct, might have stashed the inhaler in the trunk of the tree. Or maybe the little vial was just a random bit of trash that had somehow found its way onto a crime scene. It was improbable that this particular asthma inhaler had any connection at all to anyone I cared about.

That’s exactly what I told myself. And that’s exactly why I lifted the microphone mounted on my dashboard, held it with my thumb near the mike as I considered what to say when I passed the bit of missing evidence on to the state police.

Somehow, it got caught inside my shirt, beneath my vest, when I was crawling around beneath that tree,
I could say.
I thought it was just a stone or a clump of mud. But when I shook out my vest, I found this.

It was a good lie. At worst, they’d think the small-town female cop was a bit incompetent.

But I put the mike down instead of making the call. Instead of contacting dispatch and asking the state cops to backtrack to Camp Cadiz, I slipped the inhaler into one of the evidence bags I carried. And I told myself that the cylinder was too weather-beaten and corroded, anyway, to yield any kind of print. No need to send it to the state lab.

After tucking the little bag safely into my glove compartment, I pulled my SUV out of the parking lot and headed for town. And I did the math again.

Ten years, the investigator with the bulldog face had said. Ten years, give or take a couple of years on either side of that. That meant the body had been there between eight and twelve years.

Nine years ago, my sister Katie would have been sixteen.

That year—the year that Katie had gotten her driver’s license—was easy for me to remember. In fact, it stood out in my mind. In the spring, just days after Katie’s birthday, the Ohio River had flooded many of the low-lying streets in town. That was when I’d found a young German shepherd tangled in a heap of flood-deposited debris, down behind the bars that lined Dunn Street. I’d named him Highball.

I didn’t have any problem recalling that summer, either. Mostly because Katie had pretty much stopped talking to me, particularly at night when the lights were turned out in the bedroom we’d shared. For no reason that I could fathom, she’d stopped sharing secrets and complaining about guests or grousing about chores. No longer was I lulled to sleep by the sound of my big sister’s voice or comforted by the knowledge of her presence in the nearby bed. In fact, sharing a room with Katie that year had been a punishment. The nightmares that had plagued her when we’d first come to live with
Aunt Lucy and Gran—the screaming awakenings that had wrenched both of us from our sleep—had returned that year.

Hormones and stress, Aunt Lucy had diagnosed. Katie was just having a difficult time growing up. Be patient, she said when I complained. It will pass. And at bedtime she began dosing my sister—and me, for good measure—with steaming mugs of chamomile tea sweetened with wildflower honey. A treat for Katie, who liked the concoction. A torture for me, who didn’t. And one more reason for us to bicker. As if teenage sisters needed a reason.

That summer, Katie began taking long, solitary drives in the beaten-up old car she’d bought for two hundred dollars. Back then, I’d figured she had a boyfriend—someone Gran and Aunt Lucy wouldn’t have approved of. I still remembered the curious mix of jealousy, envy and anger I’d felt each time I’d watched her drive off and how I’d speculated about who she might have been meeting. Maybe she was seeing that gangly Baker boy who had dropped out of school and was bagging groceries at a store in Paducah. Or the Rosses’ youngest son who, that summer, had taken to hanging out with his friends late at night at the little park just up the street from the Cherokee Rose.

I sat with my foot pressed down on the accelerator and the air-conditioning blasting away inside my SUV, wondering with nine years of hindsight if I’d gotten it wrong. Wondering now if the reason Katie had so hotly denied having a boyfriend—the reason no boy had ever surfaced that summer or, in fact, any of the summers after that—was that there had never been a boyfriend. Something else, I now feared, had stolen Katie’s attention away from me. Had reawakened memories of our past.

And there was something else that was racheting up the
painful, twisting anxiety I began feeling deep in the pit of my stomach from the moment I’d first wrapped my fingers around the inhaler.

Right after Missy’s murder, Gran and Aunt Lucy had moved Katie into an isolated facility in the hills of Montana where she’d stayed for almost two years. After that, she’d traveled to France. To Paris, where she’d learned to cook and bake. She’d worked for a while at a hotel resort in Colorado, and then for a trendy restaurant in Miami. Finally, she’d returned to Maryville and the Cherokee Rose. Because she missed us and she loved us and she was lonely for her family and her home.

Gran, Aunt Lucy and Katie—especially Katie—seemed to have put the past behind them. Katie had been given a second chance, Gran told me. Just like the women we moved along the Underground.

A second chance. That’s what covering up Missy’s murder had bought my sister. A chance that I owed her. Because she was my sister and my protector. I had willingly paid the personal costs. But now…

I hit a pothole a little faster than I should have. The seat belt tightened across my lap and tugged at my shoulder, jolting my attention back to the winding road in front of me.

For a few minutes, I concentrated on the road and on managing a little more detachment. I dug through my glove compartment, popped a couple of the antacid tablets I stored there, and washed them down with a swig of lukewarm coffee from my Thermos cup. Then I ticked off the facts—only the facts—in my head.

I’d found an inhaler near a female murder victim’s remains.

Katie used an inhaler.

The remains were found within an easy drive from Maryville.

Within the time frame that the murder had occurred, Katie had had a car and had often been absent from town without explanation.

The remains were near Camp Cadiz.

Eight years earlier, my sister had committed cold-blooded murder at Camp Cadiz.

It was beyond circumstantial, I told myself. Just random coincidence and paranoid, guilt-driven supposition, all arbitrarily knotted together into an unlikely pattern. There were other explanations. Better explanations.

No matter that, at the moment, I couldn’t think of any.

Despite my best efforts, my instincts—or maybe simply my fear—presented a horrific scenario that I couldn’t reason away. No matter how reasonable I tried to be.

What if Missy Porter hadn’t been my sister’s first victim? I asked myself.

What if Katie had killed before?

And if what I feared was true, how many murders was I willing to cover up to protect my sister?

Once out of the forest and miles away from Camp Cadiz, I swung back onto 146 and followed it as it ran south toward town. By the time the highway curved westward to parallel the Ohio River, it was lined with buildings and I’d wiped the back of my hand across my face and convinced myself that it was perspiration that stung my eyes.

The highway curved westward, but I continued south on an abruptly narrowing stretch of roadway that angled sharply downhill and ended, very literally, at the river’s edge. At Maryville’s ferry crossing, which was the only way across the river for fifty miles in either direction.

The ferry captain saw me and waved as I pulled the SUV
off to the side of the road. There was no real reason for a police presence, but I watched for obvious safety violations and expired tags on the big rigs that lumbered up the heavy steel ramp and onto the deck of the ferry. Cars loaded on, too, most filled with shoppers on their way to the grocery stores and strip malls in Marion and with vacationing tourists mostly driving through Maryville on their way to somewhere else.

The ferry crossing was blisteringly hot. Unfiltered by clouds or shade, the sun beat down on the pavement, the glittering white limestone gravel along the shoulder and the low bluff of bare limestone that framed the roadway. Even on idle, the ferry engine was loud, its deep thrum mixing with the sounds of trucks changing gears and the shouts of the crew as they directed vehicles onto the ferry. And the damp breeze blowing off the river smelled. More accurately, it stank. Diesel fumes, car exhaust and the dank, organic scent of the Ohio River in the summertime permeated the air. It wafted through the streets and even carried to the highest point in Maryville—the bluff where the Cherokee Rose looked down over the town.

I slipped out of my vehicle, rolled my shoulders and stretched my arms, then leaned back against the front fender with my legs crossed at the ankles. I took a deep breath and smiled. The heat, the noise, the odor didn’t matter. I loved the river and its distinctive smell. Loved standing on its banks with the sun warm on my shoulders. Loved just doing my job. For a few minutes I stood watching the deep water of the Ohio muscle by and tried not to think, not to feel. Just to be. On the sun-drenched banks of the river, my problems always seemed less complex than they did when I was trekking in the shadowy forest.

Then, when I felt particularly clearheaded, I revisited the promise that I’d made myself as I’d driven into town. Nodded to myself, still satisfied with the strategy I’d decided to follow.

If Chad could manage to approach this case with professionalism and some measure of detachment, so I could I.

Until the forensics report came in, I would avoid speculating about who the murder victim—and the murderer—might be. I would investigate this crime just as I’d investigate any other crime. I would work with Chad and we would build our case carefully and meticulously. Basing it on facts, likely circumstances and evidence.

A big part of that evidence, I knew, would be the report from the state forensics lab. If the remains proved
not
to belong to Chad’s mother, I would add the grubby inhaler to the evidence. And let the investigation unfold from there.

And if the investigation pointed to my sister? Threatened to expose the facts of Missy’s death? Compromised the Underground network? Sent me or Gran or Aunt Lucy to prison for covering up a murder?

My stomach did a half twist, destroying my sense of calm.

I inhaled again, exhaled slowly as I watched the faster flow of current near the center of the river, then made a conscious effort to unclench my jaw and relax the knot of muscles at the intersection of my neck and shoulders. Just do your job, I told myself. The way you were taught. One step at a time. Follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Then, only then, I would deal with the consequences.

Briefly, I craned my neck to look upward along the nearly sheer face of the limestone bluff jutting up from the river just west of the ferry landing. It was emblazoned with graffiti that was spray painted on by teenagers with little else to do in a small town after dark than risk their lives for the sake of self-expression. Newly applied red paint advertised young love and a pair of initials I recognized.

As I considered whether I should drop in at the kids’
homes, maybe give them a lecture about defacing public property, my eyes unconsciously sought a pair of more familiar initials. B.T. C.R. Their faded paint was in two different colors. My initials, which I’d sprayed on the stone myself, were blue and stood alone, unattached. Chad’s were in black, perpetually linked with M.H., a dark-haired girl with bee-stung lips whom he’d loved passionately the summer before he’d enlisted in the military. She’d married someone else and moved away from Maryville, but her initials remained, a visible piece of our town’s history.

The ferry blasted its horn and a deck hand scurried to drape a chain across the road as the ferry’s vehicle ramp groaned upward, locking in the vehicles parked on its deck. On the road, half a dozen more cars and trucks remained, recipients of a questionable honor—they’d be the first in line for the next crossing. Their turn would come once the ferry reached the opposite bank, dropped its ramp, exchanged eastbound vehicles for ones bound west, and then made its way back across the river.