by Webb, Debra
“Tanner,” I shout to the man still standing several yards away.
“Yeah?”
“Check with the Rescue Unit to see if they have some small tarps for making bundles to bring up the remains. If not, we’re going to need something like that or maybe a small stretcher.”
“Got four of those six by eight blue tarps they sell at Walmart in my truck. Will those work?”
I am immensely grateful for his state of readiness. “Perfect. We’ll need rope or duct tape to bundle them in small enough parcels to get through the opening.”
“Got that, too.”
“I do love a prepared man,” I say, all the more grateful since this is an aspect of the work I should have thought of before descending into this dark hole.
Again I discover a zipper, but this time there’s a metal button instead of a snap. Jeans, for sure. I can just make out the logo pressed into the metal. Levi’s. My breath catches. Natalie loved Levi’s, but so did most of the other kids her age. Another tag from a blouse or tee. Patches of satiny type fabric and u-shaped metal strips consistent with the remains of a bra with underwire support. Again my hands slow, tremble. Natalie was well endowed for a fifteen-year-old. She may have worn underwire support bras. I can’t be sure.
Mother would know.
I steady myself and plunge my gloved fingers into the dirt once more. Voices and images from my childhood reverberate inside me, causing that damned trembling in my hands to spread…along my arms, down my torso and into my legs. My head begins to spin as if some dark place in my gray matter already knows what is coming.
Steady. Calm. Focus on the work.
I find the nylon string before I feel the shoe. I exhume the sneaker.
One by one the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Goosebumps spill across my skin.
Pink.
My pulse quickens. I turn the shoe, to look at the outer side. The letters and shapes made in black permanent marker are faded, partially disintegrated but enough is there for me to recognize hearts and stars and two letters: NG.
Natalie Graves.
14
“You’re sure you’re okay to keep going?”
Letty stares at me, looks deep inside me, waiting for an answer. The worry in her eyes tells me she is as sick as I am. All these years we have waited for this moment. The police, my parents and numerous other people have searched, always hoping and praying they would not find what we have at last unearthed.
We now have the answer to the question that has haunted our families and this town for twenty-five years.
What happened to Natalie and Stacy?
The remote and ever fading possibility that they might be alive somewhere is gone. The theory that the girls tried taking a shortcut, as I did, got lost and died in their sleep in the cold somewhere in those hills around the farm is gone.
Both skulls were fractured in the same manner. Most likely blunt force trauma—multiple blows.
Natalie and Stacy were murdered.
The words pound in my brain, echoing over and over.
I feel numb. Numb and empty. I cannot adequately articulate what I expected to feel in the event my sister or her remains were ever found, but I don’t believe this is it. I anticipated some level of relief, certainly a final jolt of grief and perhaps closure, physically and emotionally.
I feel none of those things.
My hands won’t stop trembling. My skin burns from touching her bones—my sister’s bones…beautiful, perfect Natalie’s bones. Once I exhumed that sneaker with her initials, I tore off the gloves. I needed to bury my fingers in the dirt that had blanketed my only sister for twenty-five long years. I needed to touch her bones…to touch her. To feel the last thing she felt as she died.
Emotion burns my eyes and I swallow back the urge to gag.
My stomach has pitched upward, against the useless, shuddering organ that is my heart, which hangs and quivers in my throat. I alternately need to vomit and to scream. I feel like I’m eight years old again and I am oddly lost. I do not want this to be. I want to go home and throw myself into my mother’s arms. I want to talk to my dad.
But I can do neither of those things. I am a grown woman and many people—my mother, Mr. Yarbrough and the woman staring at me right now—are counting on me to follow through with this somber, miserable task. I’ve done it hundreds of times. I am highly trained and amply experienced.
I square my shoulders and do what I do best. I lie. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Let’s get this done.”
An hour later I watch as each bundle is carefully lifted up and removed from the cave. As the last of Natalie’s remains rise out of this damned place I tremble and I cannot stop the tears.
She is finally found. Free of this dank, dark prison that has held her for so very long.
Drawing in a steadying breath, I mentally walk through the steps that happen now. The techs will transport the remains to the Forensic Lab in Huntsville where they will be thoroughly examined and officially identified. A pair of sneakers is not an official identification by any means. But I know—deep in my soul I know. I didn’t say as much to Letty but the age range is right. Even without my tools or better lighting I’ve looked at enough human remains to judge the age with a fair degree of accuracy. Both sets of remains belong to females between thirteen and eighteen years of age.
Though a forensic team is scheduled to come behind us and complete another search for evidence, first we will sift through the soil for any missed skeletal remains no matter how small. I don’t expect to find any since the remains looked and felt intact, but it’s important to be thorough. Letty has cordoned off a sizeable area where the graves are with yellow crime scene tape. This is the part we will screen before anyone else sets foot down here.
I pull on new gloves and we begin at the outer perimeter, then as we move into the cordoned off area we’re kneeling on soil that has already been sifted for remains and evidence. The process is slow and painstaking. If it takes all night, we won’t stop until we’re done.
“I’ve asked the lab to process the remains ASAP.” Letty pauses a moment. “We’ve waited a long time.”
I nod. “A long time.”
Her hands delve into the soil once more. “Besides, we have all these protests going on and the missing kids. We need any and all evidence that might be even remotely related processed immediately.”
“You’re right.” I say the words though I am lost in my own thoughts. The last school bus ride my sister and I took keeps playing again and again in my head. I try to push it away but it refuses to go. It streams over and over like a video on a loop.
I will not melt down like I did in that classroom. Letty needs me. I focus on my hand movements, on the richness of the soil. Scoop, shake. Scoop, shake.
“We won’t be able to share anything about what we’ve found.” Letty hesitates but she doesn’t look at me. When wearing helmets with spotlights you learn fairly quickly not to stare at each other.
“I won’t tell Helen.” I understand she’s gently warning me not to discuss the case with my mother. I can’t help wondering how this news will affect my mother. She just had a heart attack. Has she secretly continued to hope Natalie will come home one day? God, I hope not.
Can I say without doubt that I haven’t harbored that same hope, ever so slightly?
“I’m sorry I have to ask you to do that.” Letty’s voice draws me from the troubling thoughts. “I’m used to withholding information but I realize it feels wrong to a civilian.”
I stop, my fingers deep in the dirt. “It doesn’t feel wrong. I understand. We operate at digs with similar constraints.”
A weary chuckle escapes my friend. “Do you know I’ve never taken a real vacation? I want to go on a dig with you someday.”
I laugh, tension making the sound brittle. “This is a dig, sort of, though it’s about as far from a vacation as I can imagine.”
Letty chokes out a laugh and then suddenly we’re b
oth laughing so hard we can’t catch our breath. It’s like when we were kids and we watched The Christmas Story for the first time. Mother bought me a Polaroid camera that Christmas. Letty and I snapped dozens of photos of each other with a bar of soap in our mouths.
Suddenly we aren’t laughing anymore and we sob. Out helmets bang against each other as we hug so hard we can’t breathe. When I was a child I cried almost every night, wishing Natalie would come home and that my parents wouldn’t be so sad. As I grew into a teenager I just felt depressed. I was angry a lot with Mother for allowing this terrible thing to happen. Deep down I knew it wasn’t her fault, still I had to blame someone. I imagine she did the same thing.
Then the indifference settled in. I just wanted to get out of this town—get away from this place that had damaged me so. Never, not once in my life have I ever spoken to anyone save that damned therapist in Boston after the meltdown about what happened to me—to my family—when I was a child. No one outside Jackson Falls with whom I’ve worked or met has a clue about that day.
I wanted to outrun it. To escape the deep, festering hurt. I didn’t want to be that four-eyed, chubby kid whose sister was lost. I didn’t want to be the only one who came back. I didn’t want to be regarded with pity. I just wanted to be me.
Emma Graves, the woman who digs up bones. The woman who wasn’t afraid in that hole while her assistant and friend lay dying. The woman who made it out of that goddamned hole alive.
The strong woman who comes back home and takes care of her ailing mother and finds her missing sister after a quarter of a century.
Except I am not strong. I cry harder.
When we run out of tears and our faces are smeared with tears and mucus and dirt, we sit back on our heels, our knees furrowed in the loose dirt, and attempt to pull ourselves together. Our lights shine forward as if we’re mesmerized by the craggy rock wall.
“Well.” Letty clears her throat. “Now that we’ve gotten our little breakdowns out of the way…”
I laugh, can’t help it. I feel strangely giddy now. “Nat would say we’re acting like babies.”
“Oh my God, you’re right. She must’ve told us that a thousand times.”
We lapse into silence for a long moment.
“Someone murdered her, Letty.” The words are a whisper in the musty darkness that surrounds us. Where we sit, the area marked off with yellow tape, is lit up like a spotlight focused center stage on the actors in a macabre play.
“Looks that way.” Letty’s fingers ball into fists against her thighs. “I have a killer to find.”
The fractures on the two skulls were far too similar to have happened coincidentally as if they fell into this godforsaken hole. And they sure as hell didn’t bury themselves. Besides, based on what Tanner said, twenty-five years ago the entrance wasn’t a hole with a fifty-foot drop. Whatever happened in here, at least one other person was involved.
“He beat them and then he buried them,” I say out loud. The grim words echo off the damp walls. I am grateful no one else is down here. Tanner went up with the final bundle of remains.
“He felt remorse.”
I frown at the idea. “Maybe he just wanted to hide what he’d done.”
“Maybe, but in my experience a killer who regrets what he’s done tries to do something right—something kind for the victim. They were buried carefully. The graves were mounded the way you expect a grave to look. He wasn’t just covering them up.”
I scrub my dusty forearm across my face to swipe away the tears and snot. I almost laugh as I think that the lying priest might not appreciate me using his hoodie as a handkerchief.
“Now all we have to do is find the son of a bitch,” I mutter as I fill my screen once more.
“If we’re lucky,” Letty scoops dirt into her screen, “he got emotional and careless down here. That’s when they screw up, when they get emotional or in a hurry.”
We dig and sift in silence for a time, the soil shaking across the screens, sifting through the hundreds of small holes and sprinkling down like cake flour. Piece by piece we carefully inspect anything that doesn’t filter through the screens. Lots of small rocks. Another rivet from the jeans.
The jingle of metal on metal rattles in my screen. I still, then lower my screen and inspect the contents. Rocks. More rocks.
Metal. The air halts in my lungs. Partially caked with dirt and visibly rusty, the dog tags dangle from a beaded metal chain.
The beam of Letty’s headlamp joins mine. Her screen lowers to the ground. She doesn’t speak, only stares.
The silence in the cave echoes inside me. Even my heart seems to have failed.
I rub the dirt away and read the letters stamped into the metal.
Cotton. James D.
I recognize the string of numbers as a social security number. B positive. Baptist.
James Cotton. Letty’s father. Why would his dog tags be here?
Letty turns to me. I squint against the bright light. She does the same since mine shines in her face as well. Simultaneously we adjust our headlamps. That’s when I see the paralyzing terror in her eyes, on her beautiful face. Everything inside me weeps.
I shake my head. “This is a mistake.”
Letty extends her hand toward me. I drop the dog tags into her gloved palm.
She inspects the tags for a long while. The muscles of her throat work with the effort to swallow, to breathe. I want to say something comforting, something reassuring.
There are no words.
Slowly, as if her muscles are so cold they cannot move quickly or smoothly, she reaches for an evidence bag. I help her open it and she deposits the dog tags into the plastic and seals it.
“We should stop now.”
Her soft words reverberate through the dank space.
I am aware we probably should have stopped as soon as I pulled that pink sneaker out of the dirt. “We should.”
“If we stay, we compromise the evidence.”
I nod my understanding and begin packing up the tools. I fold the screens and tuck them into the bucket. The shovel, the rake, it all goes back into the bucket. We stand and dust off our knees.
“I’ll let them know we’re coming up.”
My entire being aches for Letty. If her father did this awful, heinous thing, why would he be so foolish as to leave his dog tags? The chain wasn’t broken so it’s not likely that he accidentally left the necklace he wore all the time. I don’t recall ever seeing him without them.
It doesn’t make sense. The experts will say it’s because he was mentally ill. He wasn’t thinking. He lost control. Murdered the girls and then became frantic, desperate. Or maybe he actually wanted someone to find the truth.
Except I do not believe James Cotton was a murderer. I do not believe he would have harmed Natalie for any reason.
My mother has spoken many times about how he searched for us that night. He could not have done this.
“Letty.”
She turns to me as she fastens her harness into place.
“Your father never laid a hand on you or your mother. He broke things. He yelled. He walked away. But he never hurt a person.”
My friend—the one true friend I have in this life—shakes her head. “I can’t talk about this.”
I, of all people, understand her feelings to the very core of my being.
I nod and harness up.
Only a few minutes are required to make our way out. Night has fallen and the thick canopy of trees blocks the moonlight and stars. I check my cell, it’s 8:45. Floodlights operated by a generator were set up to chase away the coming darkness in the immediate vicinity of the cave opening. Tanner and three deputies have been standing by for further orders.
“Sheriff Cotton,” the deputy named Lamont steps forward, “I called in back-up. The media got wind of what’s going on up here and there’s half a dozen reporters parked down by the road. Hill and Shaw are keeping them out of the woods. I guess one of those rescued cavers s
pilled the beans.”
Letty and I exchange a look. She walks over to the box of bags and other potentially needed materials. After a bit of poking around she pulls out a paper sack. She drops the plastic evidence bag containing the dog tags into the sack and takes it to Lamont.
“I want you to hand carry this to the lab. Tuck it under your shirt, whatever you have to do to get past those reporters without them seeing that you have something. Okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He pulls his khaki shirt free of his trousers, puts the bag under his shirt and then re-tucks the tail. Flashlight in hand he heads down the mountainside.
“Anderson, you and Syler,” she glances at the other deputy, “stay put until the next shift gets here. I’m setting up around the clock guard duty. I don’t want anyone going into that cave.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the two call out together.
Without saying more Letty begins helping Tanner pack up his gear. I do the same. Letty tells the caving expert that they will likely need him again tomorrow and maybe for a couple of days after that. He assures Letty he’s happy to help for as long as it takes. We start down the mountain together, the three of us. Letty asks Tanner more questions about how and when the opening of this cave collapsed. Is it possible a person caused the collapse? An explosion or something along those lines?
Her reasoning makes sense. She wants to rule out the possibility that whoever buried the bodies there tried to cover up the evidence.
“To be absolutely certain,” Tanner admits, “you might need someone above my pay grade, but I’m pretty confident this was a natural phenomenon.”
“Tell me why you’re pretty confident,” Letty tosses back at him.
“The lack of unnatural interior damage,” he explains. “It’s like when a tree falls. If you’re a logger or an arborist you know enough about trees to recognize when one falls on its own and when it was pushed over by some outside element like the wind or a bulldozer maybe.”
Makes sense to me.
“As a cave expert,” Letty asks, “what precisely convinces you that this was a natural occurrence?”
