by Deirdre Dore
Brent sighed and pushed through the double doors in the kitchen to the formal living room, which stretched from the front of the house to the back with enormous windows on both sides. The ceilings were high with large wooden beams and a drop-ceiling fan that twirled lazily.
There was a light on somewhere, probably in his uncle’s study, which was closer to the front of the house and attached to the master bedroom. Brent’s guest room was closer to the backyard and shared a bathroom with another guest suite. Smaller bedrooms filled the upstairs and were rarely, if ever, used.
Brent heard his uncle cough and knew that the older man was still awake. Curious, Brent made his way through the living room, up a small step, and into a short hallway that ran parallel to the front of the house. The doors to the study were open and his uncle was seated at his desk, head bent as he appeared to study a map. Behind him was an enormous pushpin board with Fate written at the top, and newspaper clippings, images, and online articles were pinned all over it. Brent saw references to the serial murders that had occurred six months ago, articles about the solstice celebration held every year in the town circle by Jane “Circe” Arrowdale, research articles about the history of Fate, pictures of the old paper mill, and, in the top right corner, a second-grade picture of Summer Haven, and below it a Fate Journal-Constitution article from 1986. There was large empty rectangular space in the center, presumably because his uncle had taken the map he was looking at down off the wall.
Brent knew that his uncle was fascinated by Fate, but the board struck Brent as eerily similar to the one he’d constructed in his own room as he found out more about the connections among his sister, the Warlocks, and the three oldest families of Fate—the Joneses, the Havens, and the Collinses. Had his uncle been researching Jessica’s disappearance as well? Or was it just his fascination with the town of Fate? Brent hadn’t spent much time with his uncle recently, but he fondly remembered visiting the old man as a kid. His own father was always working, and George would take him around Atlanta to see the sights. Had he been fascinated with Fate that whole time? Brent couldn’t remember, but he knew that he’d moved to this house in 2000 or so, and every time Brent visited, the man had been looking into Fate’s history.
He knocked on the open door to his uncle’s study.
The old man looked up, the light from his desk lamp highlighting his sagging jowls and thick neck. His gray hair was thick on the sides, but there was a large bald spot on the crown of his head. He was short, with thick shoulders and at least two hundred pounds of extra weight on his frame.
He straightened abruptly. “Brent. You’re out late.”
As always, his uncle’s voice had an awkward, almost forced sound, like he knew what he was supposed to say and feel but didn’t actually feel it. “Yeah,” Brent agreed. “How’s it going, Uncle George?” Brent had long ago accepted that his uncle was a little strange.
“Good.” His uncle waved him into the room, picking up his map and pinning it back on the wall behind him.
It was a topographical map showing Cherokee County and the ridges and valleys to the west, the lower foothills of the Appalachians to the east, and Lake Altoona to the south. There were colored rectangular sections, mostly in the ridges and valleys to the northwest of Fate, which included the Cherokee Paper Mill and the land that belonged to Tavey Collins, Abraham Jones, and the witches. Scattered throughout the hills were red dots and green dots with small numbered labels.
“What’s the map for?” Brent walked closer to stand next to his uncle as they both contemplated the map. The top of his uncle’s head barely reached his shoulder.
“Oh.” Uncle George waved a hand. “It’s an old map of the county. I used to use it when I was bird-watching. An old hobby of mine. Now I use it to locate places mentioned in the history of Fate. I’ve been documenting strange incidents and occurrences.”
“Yeah?” Brent noted the red dot approximately where the old Cherokee Paper Mill was located. “You marked this because of what happened last year? The serial killer?”
His uncle nodded. “And because they found those bodies there.”
Brent couldn’t help but notice that the number labeling the old Cherokee Paper Mill was 19820612. If he had to guess, based on the rest of the numbers labeling the map, he would conclude that the number represented the year, month, and day of some incident, but Charlie Collins had been killed in 1986, and the capture of Joe Sherman had occurred last fall, in 2013. Why, then, had his uncle chosen a date in 1982?
“Have you found out what happened to Jessica yet?” his uncle asked before Brent had framed a way to ask his question.
“Not yet,” Brent answered. Thinking about his little sister, her disappearance, never failed to frustrate him. “Have you found anything that might help?”
His uncle had explained previously that in 1986, when she was sixteen, Jessica had showed up at his house and asked to stay a few nights. He had given his permission, knowing that she was having trouble with her parents, but a couple days later, she’d stolen some money from his safe and disappeared. Brent had been in school at NYU at the time, but he’d heard from his parents that Jessica had a new boyfriend they didn’t like, and that she’d gotten a tattoo without permission—a harpy. The name of the boyfriend, one Nick “Mudman” Simon, a known member of the Warlocks motorcycle gang, had circulated during the initial investigation, but no one had been able to locate him, either. The police didn’t spend a lot of time on the disappearance, classifying Jessica as a runaway.
Brent had given this information to the Feds and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation when Jessica’s body had been found in the millpond, thinking that the young man who had been found with her might have been Nick Simon, but without a photo or DNA, confirmation was likely impossible. Brent hadn’t been able to locate any family members, or even any record of a birth of “Mudman,” which was suspicious in and of itself.
“No.” His uncle shook his head. “I haven’t heard any more about Jessica, or about that other girl.” His uncle pointed to the picture of Summer. His finger trembled a little, and Brent was distracted by the thought that his uncle didn’t look all that well.
“You doing okay, Uncle George? You should get some rest.”
“Yes, yes.” His uncle waved him off. “I’m too old to sleep.”
Brent chuckled and yawned. “I’m too old not to sleep.”
His uncle frowned, like he didn’t quite understand the joke, but he nodded. “Get some rest, then. Are you staying in town tomorrow? We could have lunch.”
Brent couldn’t remember the last time he’d had lunch with his uncle George. “I would, but I’m supposed to meet with a family outside of Canton to talk about their missing fifteen-year-old daughter, she’s been gone six years, and another woman over in Rome, whose eleven-year-old son went missing in 1996.”
“You think the disappearances are connected?” George seemed concerned, his brows drawn together, creating a deep trench between his eyes.
Brent shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve ruled out several, but most of the ones I’m looking into are for young women from eleven to sixteen who are presumed runaways. There are quite a few, statistically more than there should be for a county with our population, and these types of missing persons are rarely investigated since the police usually assume the child ran away. Most of these kids fit that profile.”
“What about her?” His uncle pointed at Summer again. “She doesn’t fit that description.”
“No,” Brent agreed. “I’m wondering if her disappearance is unrelated to what happened in the woods near her home.”
“Hmm.” George seemed to digest that bit of information. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “They say in town that she could see the future and that she knew when people were lying.”
Brent had heard that about Summer as well, though Raquel, Tavey, and Chris had never mentioned it. The Triple
ts, her nieces, were also rumored to have strange abilities.
“Yeah,” Brent agreed and yawned again. “I’m sure people exaggerate.”
A flash of something that looked like anger touched his uncle’s face and quickly was gone, but Brent was too tired to be curious, especially about his uncle George, who seemed to get more strange as the years went by.
“Good night, Uncle.” He clapped the old man on the back. “I’ll let you know what I find out. You can put it in your blog.”
“Yes,” his uncle agreed, his attention still on his board, as Brent left to go to his room.
3
THE MORNING AFTER the funeral, Raquel woke up around seven o’clock and sat up straight in panic, the smell of the woods in her nose. I won’t go, she screamed in her head, clutching her white matelassé coverlet.
She looked around, uncertain for a moment where she was, but after a moment she recognized her bedroom. She kept her grip on her coverlet, waiting for her heart to slow. Sun streamed in through her window, covering her bed in stretched squares of bright light. She was hot, sweat beaded on her brow, and her heart raced in her chest. Throwing aside the covers, she laid back and just breathed for a few minutes.
The dream came to her often lately. She didn’t remember it, but she would wake up, a scream on her lips, every few months. She was certain it was the same dream every time and that she’d been having them since before Summer disappeared. For nearly ten years, she hadn’t had the dream at all. Then Chris had been taken by Joe Sherman, and the dreams had started in earnest.
Shaking a little, she stood and walked to her ancient dresser to find some clothes, pulling out shorts and a tank top. She had Thursday, Friday, and Sunday mornings off. She’d planned to sleep in a little since she’d been up late tracking down her mother’s associates in Atlanta.
As soon as she’d gotten back to Tavey’s house yesterday, she’d said goodbye to everyone, changed into her motorcycle leathers, and headed south the thirty miles to Atlanta, where she worked at the Major Crimes office. She’d wanted to get away from the people, from her grief, from the all-seeing eyes of Brent Burns, and she’d thought that this time she’d find out something—anything—about the whereabouts of Gloria Belle. Tavey had tried to stop her, to find out where she was going. Chris had done the same. Brent hadn’t said anything, just folded his arms and watched her. Raquel thought he’d known what she was doing.
She’d resisted all of them. When she’d gotten to Atlanta, she’d talked to Vice, asked them if they’d heard anything from their CIs, but they’d had nothing. She’d followed up with her mother’s friends and known associates at that point, hunting them down in their various haunts even though it wasn’t particularly safe, but none of them—not the dealers, the streetwalkers, or the pimps—had any idea where Gloria Belle could be or who had taken her.
As one kid had put it, “No one round here would mess wit GB, lady, you hear what I’m sayin’?”
She did. He was saying that her mother hadn’t been taken for the usual junkie reasons. No one would have bothered to kidnap an old black woman, and certainly no one would kidnap Gloria Belle. She was one of their own, a blues singer, one of the best. It had been one useless waste after another. By the time Raquel had gotten home, it had been nearly two o’clock in the morning.
Raquel felt her lips twist a little, thinking about how concerned all the junkies had been. More concerned than she was. She wanted to find her mother and get her to talk about Charlie Collins, Mark Arrowdale, a drug deal gone wrong, and what had happened to Summer. Other than that, she didn’t care what the woman did. Or so she told herself.
Padding along her hardwood floors into the kitchen, she located her phone on the counter where she’d dropped it last night before going to bed. She hadn’t looked at it since the funeral. She hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone. Still didn’t. She had ten voice mails and several text messages. The most recent text was from Brent:
be careful looking into your mom. dangerous. know someone who knew her well. call me.
Another was from Chris:
where r u? tavey has news.
And yet another from Tavey:
are you ok? please call me. i think i know where my father is buried.
Now, that was interesting. Raquel’s eyebrows shot up in curiosity. Jane had said that maybe Charlie Collins had died in 1986, but she hadn’t been real clear on the subject. She’d explained that Charlie had faked his own death in 1982 in order to run drugs for a biker gang, but that he’d tried to steal the money he’d gotten from the drugs rather than turn it over. She’d claimed that she had thought he’d left with the money, but then she’d said that Mark had made her look for Charlie’s body. Whatever the real story was, Raquel knew he hadn’t died with his wife and driver in 1982—she’d overheard a conversation between her grandmother and Gloria Belle about it. Raquel was fairly certain that Charlie Collins was dead, but she’d never really believed they would locate his body.
She dialed Tavey’s number and started making coffee while she waited for the phone to ring.
“Raquel.” Tavey sounded fierce. “Don’t ignore your phone. We were worried.”
“Sorry,” Raquel said, willing her coffeemaker to brew faster.
If she’d told her friends that she was going into Atlanta to talk to junkies, they would have stopped her, or sent someone with her, Ryan or Brent since Tyler was still in the hospital from the gunshot wound he’d received when he’d tried to take down Mark Arrowdale. Raquel hadn’t wanted company anyway—there was no reason to endanger anyone else.
“Don’t ‘sorry’ me with that tone. You sound like Chris.”
Raquel’s lips twitched. She did sound like Chris. A little childish, a little obnoxious, though Chris usually behaved that way only when Tavey was at her most autocratic.
“I am sorry, Tavey,” she said more sincerely. “I had to get away for a bit.” Truth. Sort of.
The coffeemaker made more noise as the water heated, but coffee was not yet pouring into the carafe. She needed one of those single-brew machines. Raquel sighed and leaned back against her counter, glancing over at the small window in her kitchen. Outside, rosebushes grafted from those in Tavey’s garden bloomed in riots of color.
“Hmm.” Tavey sounded disapproving, but she didn’t argue. “Well, I have news. I think I know where my father is buried.”
“Yeah. That’s what your text said. Where—?”
“In his grave.”
“Come again?” Raquel blinked and straightened.
“Well, his grave is supposed to be empty, remember? When he and my mother and the driver went off that bridge in 1982, his body was never recovered. You know my grandmother had an empty casket buried and a tombstone placed.”
“Okay . . . So what makes you think that he’s buried in it now?”
Tavey paused, and Raquel knew that her friend was hesitating for some reason, probably because her reasons weren’t logical. “Two things. One is something Atohi told Tyler, that my father was ‘where he belonged,’ and the second is this weird dream I had when I fell in the woods a few weeks ago and hit my head.”
Raquel halted in the act of reaching for a mug in the cabinet.
“What weird dream?”
Tavey made a humming noise in her throat. “This is going to sound crazy, but I dreamed of Summer. She was a teenager and she was sitting on my father’s gravestone and kicking her feet. She said that quote from the book they found at the paper mill, ‘Sometimes the dead sit up and smile,’ or something like that.”
Raquel knew it: “ ‘In a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.’ ”
“That’s it.” Tavey sounded satisfied. “I remembered the dream when I was talking to Tyler and suddenly it just occurred to me. What if he’s back where he belongs? And I thought of looking in t
he grave.”
Raquel took a sip of her coffee and glanced at the clock. “It’s seven fifteen. Are you planning on looking right now, or are we going to church?”
Every Sunday, she, Tavey, and Chris met for church, then visited the old graveyard in the center of Fate, where they’d built a small remembrance of Summer under an oak tree, and then they’d have lunch at the Alcove and discuss the nonprofit foundation they’d started, Once Was Lost.
“I think we should meet in the graveyard on my property. We can check my father’s grave and then go back to the house for lunch and talk about what we’ve found and what our next steps are in the case.”
Raquel would prefer that Tavey had little to no active involvement in the case. She wanted her friend safe, but Tavey wasn’t the type to wait patiently while other people did something. It wasn’t in her nature.
“How are you going to confirm that there’s a body in there without digging it up?” Raquel asked.
“I called my contact at the GBI. They have one of those ground-reading sonar things. I’ve seen them used when my cadaver dogs pick up a scent in a general area.”
“But they aren’t going to bring it out to your land on a Sunday morning because you have a hunch,” Raquel protested. Surely not.
“Of course they are,” Tavey said, as if the idea of refusal were impossible. “I made sure the governor was aware of how important this is to me.”
Raquel sighed. Nothing stopped Tavey Collins when she wanted something, except maybe Tyler, but eventually he’d given her everything she wanted as well—namely, him.
“Well”—Raquel took another swallow of her coffee—“then I’ll be there soon. Are Chris and Ryan coming?”
“Yes. And Brent.”
“What? Why?” Raquel’s eyes narrowed. If Tavey was trying to matchmake, she was going to kill her.
