A Grave Peril

by Wendy Roberts

  “Or he might maul them?” Tracey got up and collected the cupcake box.

  “No.” I laughed. “Or he’ll bother them until the next-door neighbor feeds him so many treats he becomes obese.”

  “I’m bringing the rest of the cupcakes for the road.”

  “Take the cake too. I’m going to forward the house phone to my cell,” I said, picking up the handset.

  “You’re the only person I know who still even has a landline. I guess that’s because Garrett is old.”

  “He’s not old. Sure, he’s over twenty years older than us,” I pointed out. “But that doesn’t make him old.”

  “But I bet you didn’t have a landline before you moved in together.”

  “True. But he called me on it when his cell phone was broken, and he borrowed a phone from someone else.”

  “Probably the first and only call you’ll get on that thing.”

  She was giggling about that but the gears in my mind were turning as I clicked through our caller ID log. Tracey was right. We had very few calls on this line and there it was...the number he used to call me when he didn’t have his phone.

  “Uh-oh. That look on your face reminds me of how Wookie probably looks at his next victim,” Tracey said.

  “What?” I looked up from the phone and then shook my head. “No...um... I just want to make a note of the number Garrett used to call me when he misplaced his phone.” I took out my cell and made a note of the number.

  “You should call that number if you’re worried. It’s probably a coworker, right? You just call them up and say, ‘Hey, is Garrett with you? I’m trying to reach him.’”

  “That makes me sound like a nagging wife or a worried mom tracking him down.” But I admitted to myself that I wasn’t above trying it if he didn’t call soon. I finished punching in the code to forward the landline calls to my cell, then took Wookie outside to do his business.

  After locking up and joining Tracey in the Jeep, she brought it up again.

  “All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t hurt you to call that person’s number and let them know you haven’t heard from him.”

  “I’ll give it a few more hours,” I told her, backing out of the driveway.

  It was taking a lot out of me not to dial that person’s number, but I kept thinking of the look on his face when he got angry. He’d pointed that angry finger in my face and raised his voice...

  “I can’t handle you making me feel guilty right now on top of everything else!”

  If I hunted him down like a truant child, he’d probably blow his top and I’d feel stupid and hurt.

  “He’s an FBI agent working on a tricky case. The last thing he needs is a worried girlfriend tracking him down.” I smiled over at her while we pulled away. “It’ll be fine. Really.”

  “You need to tell your face that. Because that fake smile is scary as hell.”

  My heart was scared too, but I didn’t want to admit that. “He’ll call.”

  The words left my mouth but my heart didn’t believe them.

  Chapter Seven

  After stopping once for coffee, another time because Tracey dumped a cupcake in her lap and we had icing everywhere, and two stops to find a washroom, we finally arrived at the farm where her boyfriend grew up. We entered the property following a long, rutted gravel road. When we pulled up to the old house, a large man was sitting on the bumper of his pickup.

  “Oh!” Tracey exclaimed. “That’s Craig. I told him we were making the drive, but I didn’t expect him to show up. Sorry. That probably makes it awkward for you.”

  “Nope. I’m used to having the victim’s families around when I search.” I shrugged. “Might make it awkward for you since you never mentioned that your new boyfriend is old enough to be your dad and looks like Jay Cutler.”

  “Jay who?”

  “The bodybuilder.”

  “Oh. Yeah, he has muscles.” She smiled. “But he’s not nearly as old as Garrett. He’s only forty. And he’s not my boyfriend. Just...a guy friend. Who’s good in bed.”

  “Right.”

  We hopped out of the Jeep. Well, I hopped, and Craig rushed over to help Tracey, lifting her like she was a sack of feathers and tenderly placing her down on the ground as if she were made of glass. I grabbed my backpack and came around the other side of the vehicle.

  “You’re Julie Hall, right? I’ve heard so much about you.” He thrust out a meaty hand. “I’m Craig. Thanks so much for doing this. It means a lot to me.” His fist swallowed mine in an enthusiastic shake.

  “You’re welcome but I need to warn you that we may not find your brother. I’ll try but...” I lifted my palms up. “There are no guarantees.”

  “Gotcha.” He pointed his finger at me like a pistol and pulled the trigger. “I’m just glad my boo here convinced you to help.”

  “Boo?” I wiggled my eyebrows at Tracey, who blushed in reply.

  We started walking toward the farmhouse, an old two-story in need of paint.

  “My ma is going to lose her shit when she hears you were here. She followed all about your career in all the papers and she even sent you an email one time, but she never heard back.” He held up his hand when I started to speak. “I know you probably get a gazillion requests, so you don’t need to explain anything to me. I didn’t tell her about you coming. This way, if you find my bro it’ll be a nice surprise and, if you don’t, no harm no foul, right?”

  “Right.” I liked that he was reasonable in his expectations. “Boo here already gave me a heads-up,” I said, giving Tracey a smirk. “But why don’t you tell me what happened to your brother in your own words.”

  “Sure.”

  We walked around the house and Craig pointed to the acreage at the back of the property.

  “The creek that runs along the back of our land gets pretty fast and swollen in spring. Right now it’s not bad but soon, once snow starts melting in the mountains, all the mountain runoff just goes whooshing through, and most years everything is A-okay. The creek level always rises in spring, but some years are worse than others. Every dozen years or so it overflows its banks, but the year Derek went missing most of the farm lands around here were underwater.”

  “And this happened...”

  “Fifteen years ago, this month.” His considerably large shoulders slumped. “Sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said automatically.

  Tracey rubbed Craig’s back until he continued with his story.

  “I’d already left the farm and was working in Seattle. When Ma called and told me how bad the waters were getting, I organized some friends to come and do some sandbagging. The plan was to make a sandbag wall around the house in case the water got that high, and then I was going to take Ma and Derek back to Seattle to stay with me until the water receded.”

  I shifted my backpack from one shoulder to the other as we continued to walk down toward the creek.

  “When we got here, Derek was inside watching TV and Ma was in the house with him. She stayed inside with him and kept busy packing bags for her and Derek. Me and my friends dragged and piled up sandbags around the house for the better part of the afternoon. When we were done, and it was time to go, there was no sign of Derek.”

  “And you believe he wandered down to the creek and got swept away?”

  The trickling creek looked hardly imposing. Right now, I could walk across and might worry about slipping on the rocks, but I’d barely get my ankles wet.

  “Here’s the thing about Derek,” Craig said, coming to a stop. “He was nonverbal autistic, you know? And he was a boy all about his routines. He had his certain shows he watched every day and he liked to watch them in a certain order. He ate like maybe three different food combinations and his favorite of those was a grilled cheese sandwich with chocolate m
ilk.”

  Craig’s voice got soft and tender.

  “On that day Ma, like most days, made him his grilled cheese sandwich with the crusts cut off and cut into triangles, just like always, and Derek ate it in front of his favorite cartoon while she packed. Derek liked to go down to the creek every day and get rocks. He had a collection of small pebbles. To us, they looked like any old piece of gravel you’d find on the side of the road, you know? But when he found one in a special shape or if it had a little bit of sparkle, he saved it.” He sighed and looked dreamy as he grabbed Tracey’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Ma gave me Derek’s box of rocks to hold on to. She just couldn’t stand to see them in the house anymore.”

  I waited patiently for him to continue.

  “We figure that me and the guys were bagging out front of the house and Ma was in her bedroom packing up when Derek decided to go down to the creek to look for rocks. He’d been warned not to but...” He blew out a breath. “He wasn’t always great at listening, and when he was focused on something he was really, really fixated on that thing.”

  We were all quiet as we stood on the edge of the slow-moving trickle of a creek about a dozen feet wide. Hard to believe that it could rise and become treacherous rapids, but I’d seen it happen.

  “That’s so horrible,” Tracey said, once again patting Craig’s back. He leaned in and gave her a grateful one-arm hug.

  “And searchers were brought in, of course,” I said.

  “Yeah. We searched for days. Weeks even. Us and everyone around these parts, but all that was ever found was one of his shoes and his bright blue Pokémon book bag that he used to put his rocks in. Even once the water had gone back down to normal we had people out looking for him every day but...” He shook his head. “No sign of him anywhere. Police said he probably washed right into the river and even though they dragged and searched where the creek opens up a few miles down, they had no luck.”

  “How horrible,” Tracey murmured.

  And even though it really was terrible, my mind was more focused on finding him now.

  “How old was Derek? And how big was he?”

  “He was eleven. Would’ve been twelve a few weeks later.” Craig scratched his head. “Maybe four foot ten and eighty pounds.”

  I put down my pack and pulled out my dowsing rods. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I looked as far down the creek as I could in the direction the water was flowing. “How deep did the water get here?”

  “Deep. The house is on a bit of a rise, as you can see.” He waved his hand toward the house. “Water got to a few feet of where we were sandbagging around the house and it was moving fast. Derek went missing just a day or two before the water crested. If I had to guess, I’d say our field—and every farm between here and the mouth of the river two miles away—was under a good six or seven feet of fast-moving water. Of course the creek itself was a raging river of probably twice that deep.”

  I nodded. “And how quickly did it recede?”

  He shook his head then. “It took weeks before it was back to normal but a number of days before it was off most of the farmland.”

  “Okay, I’m going for a walk.” I had my rods in my hands and hoisted my pack onto my back.

  “We’ll come along,” Craig said, stepping up alongside me.

  “No.” I looked at Tracey. “You two might as well stay here. Rest your knee.” When she started to protest I quickly added, “Keep your cell phone on and I’ll call if I need anything, or if I’ve found anything.”

  Craig looked so hopeful that I finally had to add, “You know, fifteen years is a really long time. There’s a very good chance I won’t find your brother. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, okay?”

  “Oh sure. I know that.” He nodded vigorously.

  “But she’s gonna try her damnedest, right?” Tracey put a small hand on one of his huge biceps.

  “I am.”

  With that, I set out, following the creek with my dowsing rods held out in front of me. A crow swooped and cawed, and a little farther I frightened a brown bunny that took off into the tall weeds. I started thinking about Garrett. The songbirds were chirping, and the creek was babbling, but my head was filled with what-if scenarios that were a horror movie. Dr. Chen taught me how to deal with those sticky, dark, quicksand thoughts by replacing bad thoughts with good. I substituted the idea that Garrett was trapped in the wreckage of his car somewhere with an image of him looking tired as he typed up reports in his Seattle office. I swapped the image of Garrett in a hospital bed bandaged from head to toe with the visual of him waving off fellow agents and telling them he was heading home. I replaced the fear that Garrett was in trouble, with the idea that his phone was turned off and he was so busy wrapping up this case, he’d completely forgotten to message me. Finally, in my mind, I had a happier thought of him stopping on his way home to get all my favorite foods to make us a great barbecue dinner tonight.

  I was smiling at that daydream as I trudged alongside the winding creek bed and nearly slipped on a wet rock. Glancing over my shoulder, I couldn’t even see the farm where I started. Straight ahead the stream continued to meander with acres of farmland stretching on either side. A fat fly buzzed my face and I swatted at it, nearly poking myself in the eye with one of my rods.

  I took a break, sitting on a rock on the edge of the creek, and pulled out a water bottle from my pack. I took a long drink and arched my back in a stretch as I gave the situation more thought. If Derek had been in the water, within days or weeks of his drowning he would’ve washed up somewhere. This brook emptied into a busy river about a mile from where I was now and, sure, the body could’ve traveled far, but bodies rarely stayed at the bottom of a river for long.

  I covered my eyes with my hands and surveyed the farmland around me. All of this would’ve been underwater. He could’ve washed up in any number of the fields around me. The only problem with that idea was that these were working farms, and I doubted these fields had done anything other than produce wheat in all the years since that flood. Even now, the fields had already been planted and soon wheat shoots would stretch toward the sun. Farmers around here planted and harvested and cared for their land and they knew their neighbors. They would’ve been on the lookout for Derek’s body as the water receded.

  Still, I decided to make my way a dozen yards up field, so I walked through the recently planted rows, careful not to step on the precious seedlings. The land from Craig’s farm sloped away at a gentle incline. The higher elevation of the house had saved it from flooding. As I walked between the rows, my mind drifted to my farm upbringing. Dropped off at my grandparents’ farm by my mother, I’d been left to be raised by my grandparents. My grandmother was a vicious woman who got kicks from physically torturing and mentally tormenting me.

  “No!” I spit the word out loud to stop the thoughts in their tracks and startled a murder of crows from a nearby tree.

  “Sorry, guys.” I mumbled the apology to the birds and sidestepped a puddle on the edge of the field.

  Just as I stepped away from the puddle, my rods trembled and swung ever so slightly to my left.

  The movement was lackadaisical, and someone else observing the slight rotation might consider it the result of a light breeze or a turn of my wrist, but I knew differently.

  There was definitely a body here.

  And from my practicing, the mild twitch of the rods felt right around that fifteen-year timeline. I followed the light but compelling tug of the rods across the rows in the field for a few yards until the dark farmed soil ended. A grassy ditch lay between the cultivated land, with a sheet of old rotted plywood on the ground. Once I got closer, my dowsing rods languidly crossed over indicating a body. The leisurely, hesitant movement meaning it was not a recent death.

  “Here you are,” I whispered. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long, Derek.”

  I nudge
d the plywood with the toe of my runner. I knew immediately what I was looking at was an old water well. We’d had a few of these on my farm growing up. They weren’t permanently capped and decommissioned, like they should be, but, instead, just had some kind of covering on top so you didn’t fall in. I’m guessing that when Craig’s brother was swept away in the flood waters, that the cover on this old well had also been moved away. The little boy’s body dropped into the well and the farmer, without thinking much of it, would’ve just placed another piece of wood on top of it once the water receded.

  My phone chimed in my back pocket and I whipped it out, disappointed to see the person texting was Tracey and not Garrett. She asked how things were going. I didn’t reply right away. Instead, I sat down in the soft grass next to the well and placed my shaking hands on my thighs. Finding Craig’s brother had been a slight distraction but worrying about Garrett was making me jumpy. I made up my mind that once I was home I’d call the Bureau office or, at least, try the number he’d used to call our landline. Unless, of course, he called or messaged me before.

  “Please let him call me.” My spoken prayer was whipped away by the spring breeze.

  After a few moments taking in deep, calming breaths and steadying my heart, I called Tracey and told her I was certain I’d found Derek’s body on a neighboring farm.

  “In an old well,” I told her. “Tell Craig to call the authorities. It’s going to take me half an hour to walk back.”

  I could hear Craig peppering her with questions in the background as I ended the call. Before I could slip my phone back in my pocket a text came in.

  Bad cell service. I’ll call soon, Sweet pea. Love you.

  Garrett! My heart leaped into my throat. Immediately I hit call on the number that came in, but it went straight to an automated voicemail, so I texted back.

  Glad you’re safe! I’ve been worried. Love you tons!

  I stared at the phone hoping for the dot dot dot meaning he was replying but none came. I sent another message.