Rafe kissed me goodbye on Saturday morning just as usual. I kissed him back, like nothing was wrong. We’d spent the evening the same way, carefully tiptoeing around the elephant in the room. Neither of us brought up Catherine and the conversation in the conference room earlier. I didn’t even ask him how he’d spent the rest of his day, since I didn’t want to hear that he’d been digging for evidence against my sister.
We spent the evening watching TV and not saying much. We went to bed as usual. Carrie woke up in the middle of the night, as usual. Rafe got up before me, as usual, and when he was ready to go, he came over and kissed me. I peered up at him out of sleepy eyes. “It’s Saturday. How come you’re up so early?”
“Places to go, people to see,” he told me, as he shrugged a long-sleeved Henley over a short-sleeved T-shirt, both of which covered all those lovely muscles and that warm skin.
I squinted. “You’re wearing a lot.”
His mouth curved, but he didn’t take the bait. “I’m taking a K9 and a handler up on the Devil’s Backbone to walk the Skinners’ property. See if we can find anywhere they mighta kept Katie’s body for fifteen years.”
I thought we’d agreed that it wasn’t likely the Skinners had done that, but I guess I ought to be grateful that he was looking at possibilities other than Catherine. And since it sounded like he’d stay busy for most of the day—the Skinners had a lot of property—and he wasn’t likely to notice that I went to Katie’s memorial service, my semi-guilty conscience (and perhaps a little FOMO, fear of missing out on anything he might discover) prompted me to ask, “Would you like me to bring you lunch in the middle of the day?”
He shook his head. “Thanks, darlin’, but I don’t know where I’m gonna be when it’s time to eat. I could be miles from any of the Skinners’ homesteads by then. Better if I just fend for myself.”
“Don’t forget we’re having dinner with your grandmother and Audrey tonight,” I reminded him.
He nodded. “I don’t figure I’ll be neck deep in any new murders or ready to make any arrests by then, so that oughta be fine.”
Good to know that my sister was safe for today, anyway. “You’ll be home in time to get ready, then?”
He said he would, and that’s when he kissed me before heading out. I kissed him back, since it’s impossible not to, and then I stayed in bed while he let Pearl out so I wouldn’t have to, until I heard the Chevy drive away. Carrie was still asleep, so I took a quick three-minute shower—the only kind of shower I got these days, unless Rafe was around to watch the baby—and got ready for the day. By eight-thirty, I was on my way to Catherine’s house with Carrie, so I could drop her off and then go pick up Darcy by nine-thirty.
Catherine must have been waiting, because she opened the front door as soon as I got out of the car. “Everything OK?”
“Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
I hauled the car seat out of the car along with Carrie’s suitcase-sized bag full of diapers and clothing changes and bottles and pacifiers, and slung it over one shoulder while I took the baby seat over my other arm. It kept me nicely balanced as I staggered up the walk to the front door, but I will admit that I felt a bit like those poor little donkeys you see in videos from Peru or Nicaragua, laden down with sticks and sugar cane.
As I got closer to the door, I saw that my sister seemed to have spent a sleepless night. She had bags under her eyes almost as big as the one currently weighing down my shoulder, and her eyes were bloodshot.
“You look terrible,” I told her.
She grimaced. “Thanks ever so.”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?” Had she changed her mind about taking care of Carrie for a few hours?
“I’m fine,” Catherine said, reaching for the diaper bag. “Just waiting for your husband to come haul me off to prison.”
I relinquished the bag and put the car seat down on the floor in the foyer before closing the door behind us to keep the cold air out. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Not today. He took a cadaver dog and a K9 handler up to the Skinners’ property to see whether they could figure out where Katie may have been kept. It’ll take them the best part of the day, I figure. It’s a big property.”
“Kept?” Catherine repeated, still stuck on what I’d said a couple of sentences ago.
“Before she was dumped in the woods. Oh, don’t you know about that?”
Maybe Rafe had told me about it after she had left the conference room yesterday. I couldn’t remember, to be honest. The whole encounter wasn’t that clear in my mind. “Yes, apparently she was kept somewhere else until recently.”
“Alive?” Catherine said, her eyes wide. That particular thought hadn’t occurred to me yet, and now I wished it hadn’t. How horrible, if she hadn’t been killed right away, and instead had been kept somewhere, alive, while the search had been going on, and after, when we’d all decided she must have run away.
Then I shook it off, since that hadn’t been what Rafe had meant. “No, no. Not as far as I know. She’s been dead long enough that there was nothing left but bone, so I think she was killed pretty much right away. No, this had something to do with how the bones have never been frozen, so she can’t have been lying outside, where she was found, for sixteen years.”
Catherine looked relieved, and I couldn’t blame her. The other option was unpalatable, to say the least.
“Anyway,” I said, “he told me he expected it to take most of the day. And we’re having dinner with Audrey and Mrs. Jenkins tonight, so I don’t think you have to worry about being arrested later, either. Just relax.”
“Easy for you to say,” Catherine muttered, and I guess it was, so I changed the subject.
“You should have everything you need for Carrie in the bag. I’ll probably be back by noon or twelve-thirty. I don’t imagine the service will last longer than that, do you? People will mostly do their socializing before the service starts, surely. And if there’s a graveside ceremony after, I don’t think Darcy and I will follow along for that. It’s probably more appropriate to leave that for the family.”
Catherine nodded.
“Before I go, I wanted to show you something.”
I dug in the pocket of my coat and came up with the two photographs I’d found yesterday, of the group of teenagers around the campfire in the woods. I handed them to her, and then, as she looked at them, leaned in to point. “That’s you. And that’s Angela, I think. And isn’t that Katie Graves in the back there, behind the blonde with all the teeth?”
“Lynn somebody,” Catherine said. “Where did you get these?”
I told her they’d been in a box in the attic, along with all the other stuff Mother had cleared out of Catherine’s room after Catherine got married.
She eyed me balefully. “You went through my things?”
“They were just up in the attic,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d care. It’s all stuff you left behind when you moved out.”
“But it’s my stuff!”
“I wasn’t stealing it,” I said. “If it’s that big a deal, I’ll put everything back where I found it. I just wanted to ask you about the pictures.”
“Those are my personal belongings!” Catherine said. “I can’t believe you would rifle through my things!”
I put my hands on my hips. “This carrying on makes it sound like you’ve got something to hide. And it’s totally out of proportion to what happened. All I did was go up to the attic in the house where I live, and look through some boxes of old stuff.”
“You think I killed Katie!” Catherine shrieked. “You’re looking for evidence to give to your husband!”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Of course I don’t think you had anything to do with Katie’s death. And I didn’t show the pictures to Rafe. I just want to know when and where they were taken.”
Now that she was holding them against her chest, in some sort of belated attempt to prevent me from looking at them, I could see that there was something written on the backs of the photographs, though. Something I hadn’t noticed yesterday. “What’s it say on the back?”
“Nothing!” Catherine said.
I reached out. For a second or two I was afraid she was going to take off running, but she must have realized that she was acting crazy, because when I took hold of a corner of one of the photographs, she let me tug it out of her hands instead of holding on until it ripped.
I turned it over and looked at the date scrawled there, in Catherine’s rounded teenage girl cursive. “Late August? The month before Katie disappeared?”
She nodded.
“Where?”
“Up in the hills,” Catherine said, as reluctantly as if I’d pulled the words out with pliers.
“The Skinners’ property?”
She shrugged. “It was up there somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly.”
“Were you sleeping with Darrell at this point?”
Catherine flushed. “Yes.”
“Was Katie?”
“I have no idea whether Katie ever slept with Darrell,” Catherine said waspishly.
“Rafe said…”
“He found one of her pairs of panties in Darrell’s collection. Yes. So either Darrell slept with Katie, or your husband lied.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” I said.
Catherine turned her nose up so she could look at me down the length of it. She’s several inches shorter than me, so it didn’t work too well. “Are you sure about that? You can’t tell me he’s never lied before.”
No, I couldn’t. But he didn’t make a habit of lying to me. At least I didn’t think so.
Although Catherine wasn’t likely to be swayed one way or the other by that, so I let it go. “Do you want to keep the pictures, or should I put them back in the box?”
“Don’t you want to show them to Rafe?” Catherine asked.
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
She looked surprised, and I added, “They don’t prove anything one way or the other. The date is a couple of weeks, at least, before Katie disappeared, so she obviously walked away from this evening in one piece. I was just curious.”
“You can put them back in the box,” Catherine said. “And if Rafe wants to see them, feel free to show them to him. If nothing else, it proves that Katie and I could be in the same place at the same time without me killing her.”
It did. Although if Catherine was sleeping with Darrell and Katie hadn’t started yet, Catherine wouldn’t have had any reason to harm Katie at this point.
Not that she’d harmed her later. Of course not.
I tucked the pictures back into the pocket of my coat. “I should go. I don’t want to be late.”
Catherine nodded. “Carrie and I will be fine here.”
“Are you alone?” I looked around. It was pretty quiet, and neither of the kids had come running to greet me.
But she shook her head. “Jonathan went to the gym. The boys are upstairs watching cartoons. Annie slept over with Abigail and Hannah.”
“I appreciate you doing this.” Taking on the care of my daughter when she might have had a free hour or two on her own, was going above and beyond, in my opinion.
“It’s no problem,” Catherine said. “I’ll probably never have another baby of my own, so it’s nice to spend time with yours. And give her back when I’m done.”
No doubt.
I turned toward the door. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Take your time,” Catherine said. “Try to find another viable suspect so I can get your husband off my back.”
I told her I’d try to do just that, and then I left my daughter with her and walked back out in the cold January morning to pick up my other sister.
Darcy lives in a small rental house on the south side of Columbia. It’s a little ranch, and a far cry from Catherine’s sprawling subdivision McMansion, but it’s cute, and she seems happy there. When I pulled up in front, the bright blue door opened before I’d come to a full stop, and Darcy walked out.
Like me, she looked ready for a funeral, in tall, black boots and a sober wool coat.
I sometimes wonder whether anyone who sees us together think we’re sisters. I suspect not. We’re both tall, although Darcy has me beat by a couple of inches. She gets that from Audrey, just like I get my extra height from the Georgia Calverts, and not the Martins.
Darcy is also thinner and more athletic looking than me. Her hair is short and dark where mine’s dishwater blond and longer, and her eyes are brown, courtesy of my father. I sometimes fancy I can see a little of him in her face, just enough to soften the sharper angles of Audrey’s bone structure, but there, too, I look more like Mother, so I don’t imagine Darcy and I look that similar. She’s always looked more like Rafe, and once we discovered that her mother was his second cousin or some such, that made a lot more sense.
Anyway, she’s my sister, and I love her. When she got into the car next to me, I gave her a big smile. “Morning.”
She smiled back, looking amused. “You’re awfully happy for someone who’s going to a funeral.”
“I’ve had some interesting experiences at funerals,” I said. Like almost getting run down in the parking lot of a funeral home in Nashville back in November. “Did I ever tell you about the time the victim’s current boyfriend and ex-boyfriend came to blows over the casket? Literally? They knocked it over and everything.”
Darcy shook her head, her eyes huge.
“It was last year sometime.” The story—not a bit of it made up, I swear—kept us busy until we’d made it to Broad Street. Darcy doesn’t live that far from the center of town, since the center of Columbia isn’t that far from anything to begin with.
“I don’t think anything like that’s going to happen today, though,” I said. “Under the circumstances, I’m sure everyone will be very well behaved.”
Darcy nodded. With the funeral home up ahead, as evidenced by the bright orange cones in the middle of the street, I started looking for a parking space.
“Besides,” I added, “I’m not sure Katie had one boyfriend, let alone two. Darrell Skinner’s dead, so he certainly won’t be doing any fighting.”
“Good to know,” Darcy said.
There were no open spaces along the street, and I ended up pulling to a stop next to Patrick Nolan, who was directing traffic into and out of the funeral home. He smiled politely at me, and then bent down to give Darcy a beaming grin. “Hi there.”
“Hi,” Darcy answered, blushing.
“I didn’t think I’d see you this morning.”
“Me, either,” Darcy said.
I would have been happy to sit there letting them make eyes at each other for a while, but by now an Escalade had pulled up behind me, so I told Nolan, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but where can we park?”
“You going to the funeral?”
I nodded.
“The parking lot here’s full,” Nolan said. “You can try to find something on the street, or there’s a parking lot on the next block—Vasquez is up there—and I think there might be some spaces left there.”
“We’ll see you on the way back,” I told him, before I lowered my foot on the gas and we rolled off, with the Escalade behind us.
A block farther on, Officer Lupe Vasquez, shorter than Nolan by about a foot, waved us into a parking lot, and I found an empty space and slotted the Volvo in. The Escalade moved past, so whoever it was wasn’t here for the memorial. Or maybe he or she thought she’d have better luck finding parking somewhere else.
We greeted Lupe Vasquez before we walked back to the funeral home, and then I had to wait while Darcy greeted Nolan again, up close and personal. While she crossed into the middle of the street, I stayed on the sidewalk and looked at the place where we were going.
At one point, the building that housed the Kovacz Funeral Home must have been a lovely old home. It was another foursquare, like the one Sheriff Satterfield and Mother lived in, in Sweetwater. This one looked like it might have been built a little earlier, as it had more Victorian touches, and was less Craftsman-like. The windows were arched at the top, even if they weren’t as tall and skinny as the traditional Victorian windows.
Unfortunately, the two on the top floor looked like they were painted over, and in the same virulent mustard-olive color as the walls. I had seen that exact color come out of my daughter more than once in the two months she’d been with us. And as fond as I am of my daughter, that didn’t make me appreciate the color any more.
There was a steady stream of people climbing up to the porch and going inside, though, and when we made it through the double doors ourselves, I realized that there wasn’t just Katie’s memorial going on, there was another visitation taking place, too. Two arrows in the foyer pointed in different directions: Graves to the right and Mason to the left.
The vast majority of people were headed right, and I felt kind of bad for Mr. or Ms. Mason, for being so thoroughly upstaged in death.
The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Maybe I had come across it in Catherine’s yearbook yesterday afternoon. I’d looked at a lot of pictures and read a lot of names.
Although it isn’t an uncommon name, so maybe that was all there was to it.
It wasn’t any of my concern, anyway. I was here for the Katie Graves memorial, so the Mason visitation didn’t matter. We joined the throng going right, and entered what had probably been a formal parlor or maybe a dining room back when this had been a home a hundred years ago.
It was already full of people, more than an hour before the service was scheduled to start, and the buzzing of voices was like being inside a beehive. I tried to block it out as I scanned the room, but it wasn’t easy.
There was no casket, not that I’d expected one. There were only bones left to begin with, and I knew they hadn’t found all of Katie up there in the hills. The skull and most of the bigger bones, was how Rafe had put it. A full size casket would be ridiculous.
There was a small box sitting there, though. Pretty wood, with some metal filigree accents on the corners. They’d either fit the bones inside, or maybe cremated them. Or maybe the box was empty and Katie’s remains were still at the lab. Maybe only her skull was inside. The box was about the right size for it.
The idea was a bit troubling, so I shunted it aside. “There’s Mrs. Miller,” I nudged Darcy, “in the navy blue dress. She was Katie’s mother. The guy on the other side, with the mustache, is her husband.”
Darcy glanced at me. “Not the girl’s father?”
I shook my head. “They married after Katie disappeared. Not sure how much later. And I don’t know what happened to Mr. Graves. I don’t even know whether there ever was one. Mrs. Miller might have been a single mother. Or maybe they broke up after what happened to Katie. That kind of thing can be hard on a family.”
Or so I’ve heard. And if the police had done their job at the time, they’d probably looked at Katie’s father and his relationship with his daughter after she disappeared. They’d be fools not to, since fathers sometimes do kill their daughters.
Darcy nodded. “We should go pay our respects.”
We should. I’d already done that when I met the Millers up on the Devil’s Backbone a few days ago, but it would be appropriate to do it again now.
So we made our way toward the front, slowly. There were so many people packed into the room that it made moving extremely difficult. Especially since most of those people were standing in the aisles and around the perimeter of the room instead of sitting in the rows of chairs that were provided for the purpose.
We were about halfway there when I heard a familiar voice. “I’m afraid I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”
My head came up, like a pointer scenting game, and I scanned the crowd.
Yes, there she was, just a few feet ahead of me and to the right, speaking to a woman in her early sixties: a short, plump, older version of my sister Catherine, with dark curls shot through with gray.
I reached out and grabbed Darcy by the arm, and elbowed a couple of people out of my way to get there. “Morning, Detec… um… Chief Grimaldi. Have you been promoted to the crime beat, Aunt Regina?”
“Goodness me, no,” my father’s sister said with a shudder. “Just curious, you know.”
I nodded. I was curious by nature, too, and would probably have cornered Grimaldi myself, to ask for news. And Aunt Regina had the additional incentive of being the society columnist for our local paper, the Sweetwater Reporter.
“Hello, Savannah.” She leaned in.
I folded her in a hug, and then indicated Darcy, who was hovering a foot away. “Here’s Darcy.”
Aunt Regina embraced her, too. “Hello, dear.”
“Um…” Darcy said, looking stiff and uncomfortable. “Hello.”
“I’m your aunt, too, you know,” Aunt Regina told her, but she didn’t press the point, just turned back to me and Grimaldi. “I didn’t think I’d see the two of you here.”
“Rafe’s working the case,” I said. “The sheriff asked Grimaldi if he could borrow him, and she said yes.”
Aunt Regina nodded approvingly. “Is he here?” She looked around.
Grimaldi shook her head. “I’m the official representative for law enforcement today. Collier’s up on the Devil’s Backbone with a dog and a handler, and Sheriff Satterfield has other things to do. Meanwhile, I’ve got an open homicide case in this room, and another on the other side of the foyer.”
That’s right. That’s where I’d heard the Mason name recently. It was earlier this week when Grimaldi told me she’d assigned Detective Jarvis to the Scott Mason case as a consolation prize for missing out on the Katie Graves investigation.
“How’s that going?” I asked.
Grimaldi shrugged. “It’s still just a suspicious-looking suicide. That might be all it’ll ever be.”
Maybe. But if it kept Paul Jarvis happy and out of Rafe’s hair until the Katie Graves investigation was over, that was all that mattered.
“I was planning to stick my head in there at some point,” Aunt Regina said. “I went to school with Scott. Haven’t had anything to do with him in the time since, but I’m here. I might as well go pay my respects.”
“I’ll go with you if you want,” I said. I had no connection whatsoever to Scott Mason, but I’d already spoken to Katie’s mother and stepfather the other day, and besides, one funeral is better than two.
“In a little bit, dear,” Aunt Regina said and patted my hand. “Where’s that beautiful baby of yours?”
I explained that I’d left Carrie with Catherine. “I can’t really expect her to behave herself somewhere like this, and I’d hate to have her start screaming in the middle of the eulogy.”
“That wouldn’t be good,” Aunt Regina agreed, and glanced over her shoulder. “I should make my way to the front and give my respects to Katie’s parents.”
“Take Darcy with you,” I told her. “I already spoke to them a couple of days ago.” And it would give me a chance to have a word with Grimaldi.
Aunt Regina nodded, and twitched her arm through Darcy’s. “Come along, dear.”
She tugged Darcy behind her toward the front of the room, and left us standing there.