Five minutes later, we were on our way into the woods. My elegant coat was flapping around my calves, getting snagged on twigs and brush, and Rafe had the baby slung across the chest of his new leather jacket, the one he’d bought to replace the one that had burned to a crisp in the fire two weeks ago. The baby sling sported images of cute zoo animals—yellow giraffes, blue elephants, brown monkeys, and green crocodiles on a hot pink background—and it clashed with the black leather, but somehow he pulled it off anyway, and didn’t just manage to look like a good father, but really hot, too.
At first, we kept to paths we’d already traveled back in October when the Skinner investigation was ongoing. This was where Rafe and I had walked on the day when we’d stumbled over the Skinners’ pot growing operation. A few minutes into the walk, we ended up outside the same pot house we’d discovered then.
When we’d been here in October, there’d been traps on the path to the greenhouse, and generators keeping the plants at optimal light and temperature inside the building. Now, everything was silent. There was a notice on the door that sported the logo of the ATF—I didn’t stop to read it, but I could guess what it said—and when I squinted through one of the big windows on my way past, the plants were all gone. The ATF, or somebody, must have brought a tractor trailer or two up here, and loaded up all the marijuana plants for transportation elsewhere.
“Empty,” I told Rafe’s back.
He nodded. “It’s all shut down. Everything they could find.”
We kept walking. The next thing we came to was the track the Skinners had used to get their generators and building materials up to the grow site—probably the same track the ATF had used to remove the plants. Last fall, we’d followed this track to another greenhouse. This time Rafe cut across it, and ducked into the trees on the other side.
We weren’t following a path anymore, although he seemed to know where he was going. If he needed to take his bearings, he didn’t stop to do it, just kept moving into the trees, in a mostly straight line. The ground rose, and then fell. The trees were close together, and there was a slight wind under an overcast sky. Not quite cold enough to snow, but not too far off, either. I stuck my hands in my pockets, wishing I’d thought to bring gloves when I left the house this morning.
When I did, I hadn’t expected to be making a cross-country trek, though.
We might have been walking for fifteen minutes or so when I saw a piece of yellow crime scene tape hanging from a tree to my left. It moved a little in the breeze, or I probably wouldn’t have noticed it. I slowed down and looked around. “Here?”
There were a couple of pieces of yellow tape in the other direction, too. One strand hung between two trees, and another draped over a bush a little farther to the right.
“Up ahead,” Rafe said, and kept going.
“But the crime scene tape…”
“Outer perimeter.” He stepped carefully over brush and broken twigs. I scurried to catch back up so I could hear what he was saying. “There’s a big area, like a football field, that got searched, and then a smaller area, right around where the skull and big bones were found, that was picked over pretty good. We’re inside the big area. The small area is up ahead.”
I nodded, and followed. He didn’t sound winded at all, but I’ll admit that I was a little short of breath. I hadn’t moved much in the two months since the baby was born, and I was out of practice.
Of course, wearing the booties with the two-inch heels over this uneven ground didn’t do me any favors, either.
After another couple of minutes, we came to another piece of crime scene tape. Rafe stopped and waited for me to catch up. “Here’s the crime scene.”
It was a much smaller area—maybe twelve feet by twelve: your standard room size in a house—and it was surrounded by crime scene tape on all four sides. Or at least it had been surrounded at one point. Now, a couple of months later, the yellow tape stretched from tree to tree only in a few places, and was left flapping from branches and twigs around most of the perimeter.
“This was where the skull and bigger bones were found,” Rafe said, pointing. “Some of the smaller bones were probably in the bigger area we just walked through.”
I felt weird about that, about the fact that I’d walked across ground where some of Katie’s bones might have been discovered. It made me want to pick up both my feet at the same time, but of course that was impossible, so I did my best to ignore the feeling.
Instead, I looked around. The location felt remote, but honestly, we hadn’t walked that far. “It isn’t that long a distance from Robbie’s trailer.”
Rafe shook his head. “Far enough that nobody’d be likely to wander out here, but not so far that she couldn’t’a made her way back if she was hurt.”
Just what I’d been thinking. It wouldn’t have been a comfortable walk, or crawl, with a broken leg or other injury, but it ought to have been manageable. If Katie had been out here by herself, and had gotten hurt, she should have been able to make it back to civilization without dying.
“’Course,” Rafe added pensively, “Robbie’s trailer might not’a been there sixteen years ago.”
That was a good point. If Robbie and Darrell Skinner had been in their late teens or early twenties at the time when Katie disappeared, they might have been living at home with their parents. Robbie’s trailer could have been moved to that spot much later.
I glanced up at Rafe. “You knew the Skinners, didn’t you?”
“Not to say knew,” Rafe said, peering into the area beyond the crime scene tape. “Darrell was a couple years older’n me, and the other two were older’n that. And none of’em liked me much.”
No, I remembered him saying that. That the Skinner boys had been the kind of good old boys Southern hillbillies who didn’t like black people. Or mixed race people. Or, I’m sure, rich people, or educated people, or anybody else who was different than them.
“I guess you didn’t spend any time up here when you were younger.”
He shook his head. “They woulda chased me off their property with a shotgun if they’d seen me.”
No doubt. The signs warning that trespassers would be shot were still lining Robbie’s driveway. There was no reason to think he hadn’t felt the same way sixteen years ago. “Maybe Katie trespassed and somebody shot her.”
“Katie wasn’t black,” Rafe said. “And they’d’a found something else to do with Katie if they’d found her.”
I winced. “I don’t suppose there’s any way to know…?”
He shook his head. “Not from bones.”
“I don’t suppose there were any bullets found?” If someone had shot Katie, and she’d fallen and bled to death, the bullet would have stayed with the body while it decomposed, and then the bullet would still have been here with the bones when the ATF guy found them.
“Not inside the perimeter,” Rafe said, squinting at it, measuring with his eyes. “It’s a big area, though. Easy to miss something.”
“I don’t think a crime scene crew is supposed to miss anything.”
He shook his head. “But they’re human.”
Yes, they were, and humans sometimes make mistakes. And miss things.
“Besides,” Rafe added, “the perimeter’s arbitrary. Not like when you have a confined crime scene with walls and borders of some sort. Here, some guy prob’ly just said, ‘Let’s string the tape between those big trees there and there,’ and that became the area that was searched.”
“So you’re saying there could be something outside the area that wasn’t found?”
He shrugged. “Might be worth taking a couple hours to look.”
Now?
Honestly, I had wanted to see the place, so it was nothing more than I deserved, I guess, if he made me spend all afternoon staring at the ground looking for clues, but it wasn’t how I wanted to spend the next few hours.
He looked at me, and his lips curved. “Don’t worry, darlin’. I wouldn’t ask you to do it.”
“If you’re going to do it by yourself, it’ll take all day.” Or worse, all week.
He shook his head. “I’d pull in a couple other people if I had to. We could knock it out in a couple hours, if I had two or three other people.”
“I’d be willing to help,” I said, “but preferably not until I’d put on better clothes.” And shoes. “And it would be good if I could find a sitter for Carrie.”
Rafe nodded. “Not sure the sheriff’d be happy about you stumbling around out here looking for clues, darlin’. But I’ll keep it in mind.”
He turned his back on the crime scene. “Ready to go?”
I guess I was. There wasn’t anything more to see her. “How’s the baby?”
He peered down at her. “Sleeping.”
“Warm enough?”
He nodded. “Seems to be.” He tested her cheek with the tip of a finger. “Yeah. No problems.”
“Then let’s head back.” I turned my back on Katie Graves’s final resting place, and started to make my way through the trees.
We’d only walked a few yards beyond the bigger perimeter of the search when Rafe said, “Hold on a second.”
I stopped. “Did you forget something?”
He shook his head. “Saw something shiny.”
He wandered off toward the right, or right-forward. Northwest, if I were any judge of direction. Robbie’s place was more southwest, based on where I thought the sun was. It was still overcast, but I could see a sort of glow behind the clouds. That might have been what had reflected off whatever shiny thing Rafe thought he’d seen.
He didn’t walk far. About the length of a tractor trailer away, he stopped and looked down. By that point, I’d started to follow, and I was about ten feet away when he held up a hand. “Don’t.”
I stayed where I was. “What is it?”
“Looks like a ring.” He stuck his hand in his pocket and came up with his phone. After taking a couple of photos, he bent, with one hand holding Carrie to his chest. “And maybe a couple of bones.”
Ugh. My stomach did a slow turn while he straightened and turned to me. “C’mere, darlin’. Take the baby so I can get down there and take a look.”
I didn’t want to come any closer, but I didn’t think I had a choice. And I certainly didn’t want Carrie to drop from the sling while he was bending and fetching, and there was a real chance of that. Unless he kept his hand on her, but that would make it hard to pick up whatever he’d found.
So I made my reluctant way through the shrubs and dead grass and let him transfer the sling with the baby from around his neck to around mine. Carrie made a couple of squeaky noises, but once she was nestled close to me, she settled back down into sleep.
Rafe squatted, meanwhile, and took a couple more photographs with his phone. I squinted at the area he was photographing, and nodded. “That looks very much like a ring.” And maybe a small bone. Like a finger bone.
Which made total sense if I thought about it. But since I didn’t want to think too hard about what the finger was doing so far from the rest of the body, or how it had moved so far away, I banished the thought from my head. “Are you going to pick it up?”
He sat back on his heels. “Might as well. There’s no point in leaving it and then getting somebody else out here to pick it up when I can do it.”
No point at all. “Do you have something to carry it in?”
“My pocket?” Rafe said.
“I meant before you put it in your pocket.” That’s what they usually do with evidence, isn’t it? Pack it up carefully before they take it to the lab to analyze it?
He shook his head. “After all these years of being out here, ain’t like I’m gonna be messing up any clues if I don’t wrap it up tight.”
I guessed not. And besides, he was the professional and I wasn’t. So I didn’t say anything else, just watched as he used a pen he pulled from his pocket to wiggle the ring out of the ground. Part of me expected him to tell me that all it was, was the ring off a can of beer, but after putting it in his palm and peering at it for a second, he nodded. “Definitely looks like something somebody’d wear.”
He held his hand out and I bent forward for a closer look. Yes, it looked like a ring someone would wear. And furthermore, it was familiar.
Rafe brow arched when I said so, and I amended my statement. “I mean, I know what it is. I’ve seen them before. Those were popular around the time when Katie disappeared. I had one, and I think Catherine did, too.” Or at least I remembered seeing something very similar in my sister’s room. “They were some sort of friendship ring, I think. You could get them with combinations of initials on them. Ready-made, not the way you’d engrave your names on a wedding band, you know? They were just cheap aluminum rings you’d buy at the mall, with the initials already there.”
Rafe nodded. “Whose initials did you have on yours? S & T?”
I shook my head. “This was several years before Todd. I was probably twelve or so. Mine said S & C.”
His lips curved. “For Savannah and Charlotte.”
I nodded. “I don’t suppose you had one?”
He shook his head. “No, darlin’. No ring with initials or a woman’s name until this one.”
He lifted his left hand, with the wedding band I’d put there in June. The wedding band with my name inside it.
I took a second to enjoy the warm and fuzzy sensation that being married to him always gave me, and then I asked, prosaically, “What does that one say?”
“Looks like a D & C,” Rafe said, peering at it. “Maybe an O. It’s gonna have to get cleaned before we can say for sure, I think.”
He handed it to me. I looked at it and nodded. After a decade and a half out in the woods, through rain and snow and mud and everything else, the ring was encrusted with dirt. But even so, the D was pretty clear. The C—or maybe O—was the thing in question.
I shifted it back and forth. “Looks more like a C to me. But it isn’t a K, at any rate.”
“C for Catherine?” Rafe suggested.
I suppose it might be. No one had ever called my sister Katie, or Kate or Kathy, or anything other than her full name. But that didn’t mean that Katie Graves’s first name couldn’t have been Catherine, with a C. “D for Darrell?”
Rafe shrugged, but not because he disagreed. “That’d make sense.”
It would, since the ring was found here, on Skinner property.
“I don’t suppose Katie was involved with Darrell?”
“If she was,” Rafe said, “the information ain’t in the file.”
No, that would be too easy.
“And it isn’t like you can ask him.” Since Darrell was as dead as Katie now.
He shook his head. “We should get back.”
I nodded. “What about the… um… bones?”
He glanced at the ground and then at me. “Those are twigs, not bones.”
I squinted at him.
“See for yourself.” He bent and picked something up. It was small and brown, and I didn’t want to touch it. When I put both hands behind my back, Rafe rolled his eyes and held it up in front of my nose. Close enough that my eyes crossed when I tried to focus on it.
“A little more distance?” I leaned back. “Yes, that’s a twig.”
“Told you,” Rafe said and dropped it before wiping his fingers on his jeans.
“So the ring might not have anything to do with Katie.”
He shook his head. “If it was Darrell’s, he mighta dropped it. Before Katie died.”
“Why— Oh.” If it had been after, he would have seen Katie. And if he hadn’t had anything to do with her death, he would have notified the police. Or so I would hope.
“C’mon.” Rafe put a hand on my back and began to nudge me forward.
We hit the dirt track after a few minutes of walking, and then adjusted our direction toward Robbie’s greenhouse and the path back to Robbie’s trailer.
Neither of us said much on the way back. I guess we were both pondering the ring, and what it was doing there, and whether it had belonged to Katie, and had gotten separated from the rest of her body at some point, or whether it had been Darrell’s, and had gotten there some other way.
Back in the clearing, Rafe helped me get the sling with the baby over my head, and we transferred her into her car seat in the back of the Volvo. Her eyes blinked a couple of times, and her lips pursed and made sucking motions, and I thought for sure she was going to wake up. But Rafe popped a pacifier into her mouth, and she settled back down again. I closed the door carefully and turned to him. “Thanks for showing me around.”
His lips quirked. “Anytime. Thanks for lunch.”
“I guess I’ll head home,” I said. And clarified, “Back to the mansion.”
He nodded. “I’m gonna get this ring to the sheriff. See what he wants me to do with it.”
“Katie’s parents might be able to identify it,” I suggested, “if it was hers.”
“Not sure he’s gonna wanna do that. He went to see’em yesterday, and Katie’s mama didn’t take the news well.”
It wasn’t the kind of news anyone would take well. Although after a decade and a half, they must have had their suspicions that she wasn’t coming home. At least not alive.
“The sheriff will know what to do,” I said. “And it might not have anything to do with anything. It might be Darrell’s ring.”
Rafe nodded. “Might. I’ll follow you outta here…”
He trailed off and turned toward the driveway. I hadn’t noticed anything, but after a second or two, I picked up the sound his keener ears had heard. “Someone’s coming.”
My first instinct was to run and hide. I’m not sure why, except maybe because the last time I’d been standing in this spot, we’d been in the middle of a homicide investigation involving seven deaths, one of which had occurred just a few feet away, and we had no idea who the killer was.
Rafe nodded. “Guess I won’t be leaving just yet.”
The sound of a car engine came closer, and we watched as a blue sedan crested the driveway and bumped into the rough patch of ground Robbie had used for his parking lot. It came to a stop a few feet away. After a couple of seconds, the driver’s side door opened, and a man got out.
He looked from Rafe to me and back before he said, “I’m Doug Miller. One of you with the sheriff’s department?”
My husband nodded. “What can I do for you, Mr. Miller?”
The guy glanced at the car. “My wife… we called the sheriff, and he said somebody was up here. My wife wants to see where her daughter was found.”
Some of the color drained out of my face, or at least it felt that way. This is one of those parts of police work I don’t think I’d be good at. Telling people their loved ones are dead, or just dealing with those that are left behind, must be the hardest part of the job. I glanced at Rafe to see whether he looked as uncomfortable as I felt, but he just nodded. “I’ll be happy to take you back. It’s a bit of a walk.”
By now Mrs. Miller had exited the car, too, without waiting for her husband to come around and fetch her. She was a faded brunette in her late fifties, and where she and my mother were probably around the same age, Mrs. Miller looked ten years older, and like she’d been through the wringer. Her face was devoid of makeup, and it didn’t look like she’d taken the time to comb her hair today.
Even so, she gave Rafe a stare. “We don’t mind walking.”
“Now, now, Laura,” Mr. Miller said, his tone like an audible pat on the hand. “He wasn’t saying we couldn’t go.”
Mrs. Miller pretty much ignored him in favor of pinning Rafe with a glare. “She was my daughter. I want to see where she died.”
My husband’s voice was even. If her attitude bothered him, he didn’t let it show. “I’ll take you there. I’m just letting you know you’ll have to hoof it for a while. Through the woods.”
Mrs. Miller nodded. After a second, so did Mr. Miller. I cleared my throat. “I’ll just get going. I’ll see you at home later.”
Rafe nodded.
“I’m Rafe’s wife,” I added. “I brought him a sandwich for lunch.” Just in case they thought I’d had some ulterior motive for coming up here. Like, I wanted to gawk at the place where their daughter had died. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Miller stared at me for a moment. It was quite uncomfortable, but now that she was looking at me and not Rafe, I got the impression that the stare and pause wasn’t so much confrontational as because it took her that long to process what I’d said and formulate an answer for it. The world was probably coming at her with a bit of a delay right now. I remembered that feeling from times in the past, when someone I knew had died. “I lost Katie a long time ago.”
But finding out that she was never coming home was still not easy. How could it be?
I didn’t say so, just nodded. “Excuse me.” I exchanged a glance with Rafe and walked around to the driver’s side of the Volvo. As I reversed and circled and reversed again, the Millers locked their car and then all three of them walked toward the woods. By the time I had gotten my car all the way turned around and was on my way down the driveway, they had disappeared behind Robbie Skinner’s trailer.