The icy air burned her lungs as Bet stood panting under the trees. Snow covered the ground between her and the frozen lake. She clutched something in her mittened hand, a bone-white coffee cup. Why was she carrying that? A noise broke through the winter hush, someone trudging through the snow. She tucked behind a tree. No one should be out this late. The boogeymen of childhood stories ricocheted through her imagination. The silhouette of a man appeared, a dark outline against the white snow that glittered in the light of the moon.
He lurched to a spot on the ice, unsteady with the weight of his burden. It had the shape of a person and was wrapped in white cloth. He dropped it on the ice. Black hair spilled out against the ground.
Bet woke from her nightmare again and again throughout the night, so many details she’d never remembered before sharp now in her mind. She told herself it was the similarity to Jane Doe. She fought against letting it take on significance, no matter what tricks her mind played on her. Schweitzer whined, eyeing her from his place on the floor. She patted the bed and he hopped up, leaning his bulk against her.
“Earle never needed reassurance, did he, buddy?” she asked the dog as she put her arm around him. But she wasn’t her father. Her father had hoped she’d be sheriff, but he never said she had to become him to do the job. She put that on herself.
“You’re in charge,” he’d said, once she’d taken over and asked him for input on a decision. “It’s up to you.”
After a few minutes with the dog, she slid out of bed. Daylight coming through the windows finally let her give up on sleep.
She and Schweitzer got ready for the day, a quick shower for Bet, breakfast for both, Schweitzer’s nails clicking as he tap-danced on the linoleum of the kitchen floor while she set down his bowl. His tail beat out happiness. “Must be nice for life to be so simple,” she said as Schweitzer licked the bowl clean.
Driving to the station, Bet replayed the scenes from the dream. Usually she dreamt it only once a night, not on a never-ending loop. Could this be signaling something new? Or was it just a manifestation of stress over her future and solving the mystery of Jane Doe?
Unrefreshed from her restless sleep, Bet walked through the front door to find Alma watching her closely. “Rough night?” the woman asked.
Bet considered telling Alma about her nightmare. Alma knew everything that happened around town. Had someone disappeared who wasn’t reported? Could Bet be remembering something her father had talked about years ago? Or would Alma think she was crazy and wish that much harder for Earle’s resurrection? If Bet was going to commit to this job, she didn’t want Alma to have any reservations.
“I worked late,” she said instead, and started to go into her office to wait for Clayton and Dale to arrive.
“I owe you an apology,” Alma said, stopping Bet in her tracks. “For yesterday.”
Bet couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice. “For what?”
Alma laughed. “Your father would have asked that too. We both know what I’m talking about, but you want me to say it out loud.”
Why would Alma have needed to apologize to Earle?
“I was out of line asking if the election impacted your decisions. I know you’re better than that.”
Dale came through the door with Clayton behind him, both ready to get started on their day. It broke the moment with Alma, who started pulling out chairs.
The group went over last night’s events. Neither Clayton nor Dale discovered anything useful in his search.
Bet took a breath and put her thoughts in order. “What do we know about Robert Collier?”
“Robert Collier?” Dale repeated. “The rich guy?”
“Senior or junior?” Alma asked.
“Both.” Bet described her interactions with Rob Collier and George Stand. “It doesn’t seem like anyone knew Rob Collier was coming to town.”
“You think Rob had something to do with killing Jane Doe?” Alma said. “That doesn’t fit with my memories of him.”
“What do you remember?” Bet asked.
“He was a very polite boy.” Polite was one of Alma’s highest compliments for people under the age of eighteen. “He’d carry your groceries to the car, stop to help if you had a flat tire, that kind of thing.”
“What about the dynamic with his father? George hinted things weren’t great.”
“When he was young, he and his father were real close. I remember that. We all know what happened to his mother.”
“I don’t,” Clayton said.
“Really?” Alma said.
“He didn’t grow up here, Alma,” Bet reminded her. “That was old gossip by the time Clayton started working for us.”
Alma looked at Bet with raised eyebrows. Bet indicated for her to go ahead and tell the story.
“When Rob was about ten, his mother left town, except rumor has it she left because of an affair.” Alma paused dramatically, a consummate storyteller raising the tension. “With Michael Chandler.”
“Who is Michael Chandler?” Clayton asked.
Alma laughed. “Oh, boy. You really are out of the loop, aren’t you? Michael Chandler was married to Tracy Chandler. He’s Eric and Dylan’s father. Did you know any of them?”
Clayton shook his head. “The names don’t ring a bell.”
“Tracy never filed for divorce,” Bet said. “That I do know.”
“After Rob’s mother Lillian left, no woman ever took her place in the Collier household, though plenty were interested. Robert Senior’s sitting on a fortune and he was a handsome man, but he never dated anyone here, so it was just him and Rob, thicker than thieves. And then they weren’t anymore. Some kind of rift. Right before Rob graduated from high school.”
“You don’t know what the fight was about?” Bet asked.
Alma shook her head. “Rob packed up and left town the day after his high school graduation, and we never saw him again.”
“How is this ancient history going to help us figure out who killed Jane Doe?” Clayton asked.
“Interesting timing. Dead girl. Him in town,” Dale offered.
“And he’s been gone a long time. Who knows what he’s like now,” Bet said.
“It doesn’t make sense, though,” Clayton said. “If Mr. Collier killed her, why would he stick around? He could have left and no one would ever know he was here.”
“Arrogance?” Bet said. “Maybe he thinks he’s untouchable. If he’s back here at the family estate, his father didn’t disown him. Though he did have to cut the chain to get in the gate, so maybe his dad doesn’t know he’s here.” She went on to explain about the knots George used on the coyote and where he’d learned to tie them. “Rob would likely know those knots too,” she said.
“You wanted me to do background on Peter Malone,” Alma said. “What’s more important, info on Peter or Rob?”
“Start with Peter, but put Rob on the list,” Bet said. “Both of them arrived in town at the same time the woman was shot, so they’re both persons of interest to me. Our most important task is an ID for Jane Doe.”
Bet turned to the plan for the day. She told them she hoped the killer didn’t know they’d found the body yet, giving him or her a false sense of security.
“Dale, I’d like you to start out on the west end of the lake. We need to do a complete circuit on the chance we can find evidence of a crime scene, or at least where Jane Doe went into the water.”
Clayton would work his way through town again, then start to visit houses out in the valley. He skipped a number of businesses that had been closed last night, plus different people worked during the day that he wanted to show Jane Doe’s photograph to.
Bet planned to walk the east end of the lake and handle the regular business of the office should anything come up. Alma would start with a search on the internet for missing women matching Jane Doe’s description. Missing-children sites and be on the lookout notices—BOLOs—could all include pictures of Jane, especially if she was under the age of eighteen. Carolyn had estimated eighteen to twenty-five, but as that wasn’t confirmed, they had to assume Jane Doe could be a minor.
Alma would also send copies of the photo to other law enforcement agencies in Washington State and follow up with the ranger station about abandoned cars in campgrounds outside of town. Once she finished with that, she’d start in on the background for Peter Malone and Rob Collier. The group would reconvene at noon.
Bet and Schweitzer walked outside with her deputies. She paused a moment to look around town, quiet now that the holiday weekend was over.
The red-brick sheriff’s station sat near the intersection of Lake Collier Road and Bullitt Lane, the dead center of the commercial district. Bet loved all two streets of it. Standing in front of the station, she could see most of the stores. The tiny Ace Hardware, the used-book store, Backcountry Climbers where you could buy an ice ax, a high-tech tent, and an espresso—places she saw every day. She knew the owners and the employees and most of the patrons. It was nothing like her job in Los Angeles, where people were always strangers.
The buildings were a mix of wood and brick. False fronts from the late 1800s stood above raised sidewalks, some the original wood planks, the rest replaced with concrete. Scuff marks along the curb showed where tourists had misjudged the height of the sidewalk and scraped their front ends parking too close.
A wooded hillside rose behind town and the cemetery kept watch over the living. Each section was surrounded by iron fencing, marking the territory of the ethnic groups. The factions lay side by side, not unlike how they’d lived, diverse but not harmonious.
The Collier Market now served the best coffee in town, thanks to Sandy Stuart and her coffee cart, parked just inside the front entrance. Even before Bet came through the front door, Schweitzer close behind, Sandy had already started making Bet’s latte.
“Mornin’,” Bet said, taking her hat off as she crossed the threshold.
“Mornin’, Sheriff.” Sandy tossed a dog biscuit to Schweitzer. “Come to talk strategy?”
As soon as Bet announced her bid for sheriff in the upcoming election, Sandy had offered to help with the campaign. “Women have to stick together,” she said when Bet asked her why. “I know what it’s like to be underestimated.”
Sandy stood five feet tall and five feet wide. She had the unaffected smile of a child and the brain of a rocket scientist. People underestimated Sandy because of her size. People underestimated Sandy because she worked standing at an espresso machine. But they never underestimated her twice.
After growing up in Collier, a descendant of one of the African American miners brought in as a strikebreaker, Sandy had gone off to law school in Seattle. She’d worked as a high-powered attorney until a heart attack almost killed her at age forty-five. The health scare brought her back to Collier to regroup.
Now she worked the coffee stand six mornings a week. She’d told Bet the morning shift gave her reason to get out of bed in the morning. She rode her bike in from her house seven miles away. Back in town for a year, she’d lost fifty pounds. She said she never missed the courtroom. Bet almost believed her, though her exuberance about helping with the campaign made her wonder if Sandy was getting bored. Maybe she wanted to practice law again.
“I want to show you a photo,” Bet said, picking a fresh-baked muffin out of the basket on the counter. She could feel its warmth through the cellophane wrapping.
“Something tells me it isn’t a picture of hot, naked men.”
Setting the muffin down on the counter, Bet put the photo of Jane Doe next to it. “It’s from the morgue, okay?” Sandy nodded. She’d seen plenty of crime scene photos from her time in the courtroom. “Have you seen this woman?”
Sandy picked up the photo, her fingers rubbing the edge of the glossy photo paper. Her face showed no reaction. “How’d she get dead?”
“Single gunshot wound to the back.”
Sandy winced. She took the photo over to the window to shed a little more light on it, then handed it back to Bet.
“Where’d you find her?”
“Floating in the lake.”
“She came in Friday morning for coffee.”
Bet hadn’t expected to hit pay dirt so soon. “You get a name? Credit card receipt?”
Sandy shook her head. “Sorry, she didn’t talk much. And paid in cash. She came in early, just after I opened. Bought two drinks and a blueberry muffin.”
“Two?”
“But I didn’t see who she was with.”
Bet contemplated that information for a moment. “Did you see what she was driving?”
Sandy shook her head again.
“Anything stand out about her?”
“She asked what time you would get in.”
Bet rocked back on her heels. “She asked about me specifically? Or she just asked about the sheriff’s office?”
“She asked, ‘What time does Sheriff Rivers get in?’” Sandy finished making Bet’s latte. She turned back to the counter and set the drink down, her brow furrowed and her mouth puckered.
“I’ve seen that look before,” Bet said, before taking a sip. “Something else?”
“I didn’t think much of it at the time, but something struck me just now.”
Bet waited while Sandy put her thoughts together. Sandy never said anything she wasn’t sure about.
“I said,” Sandy continued, “‘Usually around eight,’ and the woman said, ‘I guess I’ll have to wait to see him.’”
“Did you correct her?”
“No. I just assumed she read E. Rivers somewhere and guessed you were a man. People were always doing that with me. S. Stuart, criminal defense attorney; must be a guy, right? I knew she’d figure it out when she saw you.”
“But now you don’t think it was just a wrong guess on her part?”
“Maybe it was something else.”
“Like what?” Bet asked, curious what Sandy had in mind.
“I wonder if she was specifically looking for your dad, not as sheriff, but because of something about him.”
It wouldn’t be the first time someone had come looking for Sheriff Rivers and thought they would get Earle, not Elizabeth. When Bet took over for her father, she hadn’t changed anything in the printed or online material. Her father had been E. Rivers, Sheriff, and now so was she. It was one of the many things Sandy wanted her to change for the election that Bet hadn’t had time to deal with and wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“Huh,” Bet said.
“Yeah. Huh.”
Bet took a sip of coffee. If Jane Doe expected Earle, maybe she’d been in Collier before.
“Have you been out to Pearson’s?” Sandy asked.
“Not yet. It didn’t feel like a link. Pearson’s is solely for boys.”
Sandy shook her head in mock despair, “Bet, Bet, Bet. Don’t you know where there are boys, you’ll find girls not far behind?”
Bet gave herself a smack on the head. “Duh,” she said.
Sandy chuckled and leaned over the counter to pat Bet on the shoulder. “You would have thought of it eventually.”
“Thanks. By the way, I know I don’t have to ask you to keep this quiet. The gunshot isn’t public information, or that we found her in the lake.” Luckily for Bet, when outsiders died from falls or accidents, the locals mostly ignored it. As long as they didn’t know it was from a gunshot wound, her death wouldn’t pique their interest.
Sandy crossed her heart. “I know nothing.”
Just before Bet reached the door, Sandy called out, “Next time, bring photos of hot, naked men.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Sandy was right. Clayton would have taken a photo out to Jeb Pearson eventually, but Sandy’s quick connection to his organization made Bet feel foolish. She should have made visiting him a priority.
As she left the market, Bet’s mind turned to her father again, as it usually did when she questioned her abilities. The medical examiner ruled her father’s manner of death after the fatal fall in the backcountry accidental, but Bet didn’t quite believe it. Her father didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. And why had he taken a walk in the woods that day, yet left Schweitzer behind?
She’d poured over the autopsy reports, but just because she couldn’t fault Carolyn’s findings didn’t mean Carolyn’s assessment was right. Her father’s cancer had been worse than he admitted to Bet. Maybe he’d decided to treat his illness his own way in his own time.
After he lured Bet home.
Her father had always stepped up if she asked for help. Could she really turn her back on him now that he was dead?
Bet crossed the street and went back into the station. She set the lemon poppy-seed muffin down on Alma’s desk as a peace offering. “Thank you.”
Alma smiled. “Don’t feel bad. I second-guessed your father sometimes too.”
Bet felt as if she’d passed a test. “I have a question for you.” She thought about her conversation with Sandy. “Did anyone come in looking for me on Friday?”
Alma grabbed her notebook where she marked down events of the day. She paged backward to Friday. “George Stand came in wanting you to know the ghosts were back in the woods again.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Told him you had a meeting scheduled with the Paranormal Society in E’burg at the end of the month and for him to check back then.”
Bet chuckled. Definitely not the kind of issue she’d dealt with down in California. “What about someone you never met before?”
Bet sipped her latte and broke off a piece of the muffin. Alma swatted at Bet with her bony claw of a hand. “Get your own muffin.”
“I’m only eating the stump,” Bet teased her. Alma had a thing about muffin stumps. She always complained it wasted good dough.
“No one came in looking for you, but we did get a phone call at nine forty-one AM. Female. Didn’t identify herself; asked was Sheriff Rivers in.”
Bet remembered she’d driven down to Cle Elum for a quick meeting that morning.
“By any chance, do you remember if she asked for Earle?”
Alma shook her head. “Just Sheriff Rivers. Why?”
“Maybe nothing, just something that caller might have said to Sandy, if it’s the same girl. Did you say she or her about me?”
Alma thought for a moment. “No, I just said, ‘The sheriff isn’t in.’”
“Okay. Did the woman ever call again?”
Alma shook her head, mouth full of muffin.
“You recorded the number from the call though, right?”
“Yep.”
“Find out who that phone is registered to.”
“Will do.”
“I’m going to head over to Pearson’s. Please contact Clayton and let him know he doesn’t need to drive out there.” Bet signaled for Schweitzer to come along, and the two started to leave.
“Here,” Alma said, holding out the muffin stump. “Got to keep your strength up.”
It didn’t take long before the last building in town slipped behind her and the openness of the Train Yard spread out all the way to the base of Iron Horse Mountain. She thought about the glacier that formed their valley. U-shaped, the basin was flat bottomed and steep sided. Ponderosa pines, with their distinctive red bark hatch-marked with black crevices, rose in giant stands above the valley floor.
The forest ringed the Train Yard, an area clear-cut years ago to build the town and make way for the roundhouse. The open valley hosted livestock—horses and cattle—along with a roving elk herd, protected by law from hunters unless they strayed too far off the valley floor.
Bet felt something in her chest release at the beauty of her community. An ability to breathe she’d never felt driving around Los Angeles.
Neatly painted white fence marked the beginning of Pearson’s Ranch. Jeb firmly believed Mark Twain had it right and painting fence could turn the roughest Tom Sawyer into a fine, upstanding citizen.
Sometimes he was right.
Turning onto the drive in front of the main building of the complex, Bet could see Jeb putting up storm windows on the boys’ cabins, battening down the facility for winter. During the winter months he rented some of the cabins out to snowmobilers, cross-country skiers, and snowshoers, but he closed the bulk of the buildings for the season. The round building in front of her had once sat at the end of the Colliers’ private railway line. The giant turntable it housed spun the locomotives around to head back down the mountain. Pieces of track still glinted in places across the meadow, peeking through tall grass, but most of it had been pulled up and used in other locations around the state.
Jeb’s dog, a huge, slow-moving Newfoundland named Grizzly, uncurled himself from his spot by the door and wandered over to join Jeb in greeting Bet. Even from her seat in the SUV, Bet could reach out and pet the bear-sized dog. Though Schweitzer stood an inch taller at the shoulder, the Newfie had a good fifty pounds on him. His hair was more black than the brown of his namesake, but Bet thought the name was perfect.
Standing at the side of her SUV, Jeb scratched Schweitzer, who had stretched his neck out over the back of the rear seat to get some attention. After greeting the dogs, Bet and Jeb turned to each other.
“Howdy, Bet,” Jeb said. Now well into his fifties, the only evidence he wore from his years of hard drinking were scattered red trails of broken capillaries across his craggy face, his wiry body taut from manual labor and clean living. “Everything okay?”
“I’m trying to identify someone. I need to show you a photo from the morgue.” She handed him a copy of the photo.
Jeb looked at it carefully before he shook his head. “Not sure. It’s hard to tell with her like this.”
If the young woman had known Earle Rivers, she might have a connection to a boy who ended up at Pearson’s. Earle had volunteered during the summer teaching fly-fishing to the boys Jeb rehabilitated, and sometimes to the family or friends who came to visit. Bet had taken on her father’s role here this summer too. If Jane Doe met Earle that way, it would have been at least a year ago, maybe longer.
“She might have visited someone here. It could have even been a few years ago, so try to picture her younger.”
Jeb looked at the photo again. “Pretty little thing, isn’t she?”
“She was,” Bet said.
“What happened to her?”
“Accident.” Law enforcement officers didn’t have to tell the truth about an ongoing investigation.
Jeb looked down at the image again. “I don’t know, Rivers. It’s possible I’ve seen her before. I meet a lot of kids out here.”
“Hang on to that, would you? It might spark a memory. Call me if you think of anything.”
Jeb nodded. Bet headed back to the lake. She needed to start walking around it, taking the route opposite the one Dale was examining. Perhaps the lakeshore held evidence of a crime scene.
A few hours later, Bet stumbled across the loose rubble covering the area where the mine mouth had once opened above the lake. Standing a hundred feet above the water, she could see Peter out on his little boat at the far end. Today the lake surface was quiet, and where she stood the air was still. The white-and-silver granite stone of the mountainside glowed visible at the edge until it plunged into the water and the darkness created by depth swallowed it whole; a great, white whale into the sea.
Neither Bet nor Schweitzer found evidence of a crime scene on this side of the lake. Schweitzer scanned the lakeshore with his nose while she searched with her eyes. Jane Doe could have traversed the rocky shore of the lake with a companion-turned-killer. Bet hoped to find where the victim bled out. She knew the stats: more than half of female homicide victims were killed by men they knew, intimate partners or family members. Jane could have gone hiking and tried to break up with someone, triggering anger that turned violent.
After completing her section of the lake, Bet traveled higher up the hillside to get a larger view. As she let her eyes scan away from her, the flash of something metallic caught her attention. Carefully picking her way over, she found a section of train track poking out of the rock. Bet picked up a few loose pieces of stone, her fingers brushing the metal, hot from the sun. She tossed the rocks in the direction of the lake. Schweitzer traced their arcs, as if he might need to recover them later. He looked up at her.
“Good boy.”
He tilted his head, assessing her comment. She crouched down next to him, taking his face in her hands. “We’re going to be all right, you and I.”
The dog touched his nose against her cheek. She felt him give her a tentative lick before he sat back. His face said he expected a scolding.
She reached out and scratched his chest. “Earle wasn’t much for physical affection, was he?”
The dog grumbled in his chest as if agreeing with her comment, though it might just have been appreciation for the attention.
“I’m not my father, Schweitz. You can give me kisses anytime.”
Bet stood back up and balanced on the old track. From where she stood, she could look back and forth at where the train had run over a hundred years ago. The hillside showed a slight flattening the length of the landslide, where the train had stopped to be loaded at the mine. Somewhere below her, all the miners lay buried.
In the distance, Dale worked his way around the other end of the lake. He hadn’t found any evidence of a crime scene either. When they spoke on the phone, he reported that even the picnic areas showed no footprints near the water’s edge. Several people had used the scattered picnic tables, there were footprints in the parking lot, and flattened spots still showed under the trees, but he found no blood pool on the ground and no obvious tracks led to the lake.
Bet’s phone rang, breaking the silence.
“Carolyn, what have you found for me?”
“Hey, Red. Here’s what I know so far. It was a bullet hole. The bullet was removed, probably with pliers, most likely needle-nose from the thin gouges left behind. No sexual assault. No water in her lungs.”
“Anything else?”
“I found fibers in the wound, leading me to believe she was dressed when she was shot. I sent them over to the lab, but I wouldn’t hold out hope it will tell us anything more than whether she wore cotton or a poly blend.”
“Were you able to save any fingerprints?”
“The chemical poured on her fingers was lye. It’s highly caustic and destroyed the ridges of her fingerprints. I also didn’t find anything under her fingernails. She may not have scratched at her killer, or if she did, the lye dissolved any tissue left behind.”
Bet asked about latent fingerprints on Jane Doe, but Carolyn reported she had found none.
“I’m still working on TOD,” Carolyn said, referencing time of death. “I’ll call you back when I know more or get blood and tox reports back from the lab.”
“Okay,” Bet said as they ended the call. “Thanks for the update.”
Bet considered other options for identifying Jane Doe. DNA was rarely useful for victim identification without something to compare it to. DNA tests could take months, and the likelihood that Jane Doe was in a criminal database was negligible. Fingerprints might have identified the woman if she had been entered in a database, such as for a job in education or health care. Now their best chance of identifying Jane Doe would be through a missing persons report or a plea to the public with her description. If their attempts to find her identification failed locally, Bet would move to a wider audience, which would also expose her investigation, making it available to public scrutiny.
Looking across the lake at the road, Bet couldn’t believe someone cautious enough to remove all of Jane Doe’s easily identifiable characteristics would risk dumping a body from there. Despite the small population of Collier, the likelihood that someone would drive along at the exact moment the perpetrator was pushing a body into the water would be too great, especially during a holiday weekend. The shoulder along the stretch of road by the lake was narrow; parking a vehicle would stand out to anyone passing by.
The voice of Earle Rivers came through loud and clear. If the only options you have don’t make sense, there must be another option.
“What other option would that be, Dad?” Bet asked out loud, as no one else was within earshot. Schweitzer looked at her as if expecting a command.
If the body didn’t get dumped in the lake, maybe it came in some other way.
“How could a body get into a lake except by being dumped?”
Out on the water, Peter Malone caught Bet’s attention again. “Guess if I want to know something about a lake, I should ask an expert.”
Bet thought her father would approve and turned to make her way back across the loose rocks to talk once more with Professor Malone.