An hour and a half later, Sam Johns arrives with a team of white-suited, blue-gloved men and women from Carlisle. When I called her, she said to tell the four workers to stop any digging but to remain for questioning, so they’ve been sitting on my deck, drinking lemonade and bottled water. They’ve told me about other things they’ve found during their fencing jobs—a wallet, a doll, a beer stein—but nothing like a skeleton. All of them are pale-faced and they speak quietly. They’re shaken by the discovery, but not as shaken as I am.
Sam asks the fencing guys to lead the investigators to the “remains.” I stay behind, alone on the deck, sad and a little nauseous. Should I walk over to the Hockleys’ and tell Ellie? I have no number for her. Would she want to be here or should I wait until the … skeleton … has been taken away? I suppose there’s a slim chance the bones are not Win’s. Very slim.
As I sit there, other thoughts run through my mind. The red-haired woman tried to scare me away from my house … and my land. That Byron Parks guy—the ancient sheriff—tried to buy the property for no reason any of us could determine. I thought about the trash explosion on my lawn, the squirrels in my redbud tree, and all those weird things that Sam told me had happened while our house was being built. The stolen power tools. The dead animals. Someone who is still very much alive doesn’t want me to find those bones. Someone doesn’t want me to wake up the past.
It seems like a long time until one of the investigators, a petite blond woman accompanied by Sam, joins me on the deck and begins questioning me. That’s when I know I need to get Ellie. She has more answers than I do and she needs to know what’s going on. Sam checks her phone to see if Ellie’s number is still on it from the day of Rainie’s disappearance but she can’t find it, so the two of us walk down Shadow Ridge Lane, past the white vans and the builders going on about their work, oblivious to what’s happening at the end of the street.
“This is going to be so hard for her,” I say.
“Want me to do the talking?” Sam asks, and I shake my head.
We climb onto the porch and ring the bell. I try to peer through the screen door to see if Miss Pat and Buddy are in the room; I don’t want to have to explain everything to them as well as to Ellie. But Ellie comes to the door alone and steps onto the porch.
“Hey.” She smiles at us, but quickly sobers at our flat expressions. She looks from me to Sam. “What’s wrong? Is Rainie okay?”
“She’s at school. She’s fine,” I say. “But Ellie … the fencing guys found … a grave in my yard.” Not exactly a grave, I think.
“They found remains,” Sam says, giving it to her straight.
Ellie’s face blanches nearly to the color of her gray-blond hair, and for a moment I think she’s going to pass out. I’m ready to grab her arm. Hold her up.
“Oh.” She looks down the street toward my house. Her eyes close. She presses a hand to her face. “Is it Win?” she asks.
“We don’t know the identity, but my investigator and I need to ask you some questions,” Sam says. “Can you come with us?”
“All right,” she says. “Let me grab my phone.”
Once on my deck, Ellie tells Sam and the investigator everything she told me a few nights before, only this time without emotion. She keeps glancing toward the woods. She has amazing self-control. I’m the one struggling to hold it together. The blond investigator records the interview while Ellie describes finding the bumper of my father’s truck with the rope attached, but no sign of Win. I realize Daddy will be questioned, too. And I suppose poor sickly Buddy as well, for his role in the story.
“Do you have an idea who took part in the beating?” Sam asks Ellie. It’s got to be especially upsetting for Sam, hearing about the gruesome murder of a Black man, but her expression and voice remain professional.
Ellie looks down at the untouched glass of lemonade I gave her, as if thinking. As if she hasn’t thought a million times about her answer. “Everyone was hooded, as I said,” she says. “So I don’t know. I thought I heard Byron Parks’s voice, but everyone said he was at a poker game. And as I said, the truck belonged to my ex-boyfriend, Reed Miller.” She doesn’t look at me. “Kayla’s father,” she adds.
“I’m sure he had nothing to do with it.” I can’t stop myself from speaking up, and Sam gives me a small shake of her head.
“Kayla may be right.” Ellie nods toward me. “I didn’t think he was in the Klan and it’s hard to picture, but it was definitely his truck. And he was very jealous.”
I wish she hadn’t added those last few words. I struggle to keep my mouth shut.
“We’ll talk to him,” the investigator says, “and we’ll want to talk to your brother, too.”
Ellie’s expression is pained. “Please don’t,” she pleads. “He had nothing to do with it and he’s terminally ill.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, “but—”
We suddenly hear voices coming from the path behind the deck and we all turn to see the investigators wheeling a gurney from the woods, a black body bag resting on top. Anton and his team of construction guys follow at a distance.
Ellie and I both turn our heads away. It seems like only yesterday that I watched as Jackson was carried from our unfinished house in a similar bag.
Sam and the investigator—whose name I can’t recall—finally leave. Ellie and I walk them through the house and out the front door. Once they’re gone, Ellie turns to me.
“I’ve got to get back to Buddy and Mama.” She touches my arm and I know before she speaks that she’s apologizing. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I had to tell it the way it happened.”
“I know. But he didn’t do anything.”
She looks toward the street to where the investigator’s van had been parked. “Maybe we’ll finally get some answers,” she says, turning back to me.
And then she leaves me alone in my brand-new house that feels as haunted as any ancient mansion.
I’m tucking Rainie in that night when my phone rings. The caller ID tells me it’s Sam, and I give my daughter a rushed kiss on the forehead before leaving her room and answering the call in the hallway.
“I thought you’d want to know this,” Sam says. “We had Winston Madison’s dental records on file from the sixties when he first disappeared, so we were able to check the—”
“Is it him?” I interrupt her.
“It is,” she says, and I shut my eyes. “The remains in your yard belonged to Winston Madison, without a doubt.”