Her Mother’s Grave_Absolutely gripping crime fiction with unputdownable mystery and suspense

by Lisa Regan

  “Your daddy left us tonight, JoJo. He’s gone forever and ever. Do you know what it means when someone dies?”

  Josie didn’t answer, but she sort of knew. She knew that when people died they went to a place called heaven. That’s what her daddy and her gram said. Heaven was really, really good, except that you didn’t get to see your family anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Frail and thin, Maggie Lane sat hunched in a wheelchair, her long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. Although Josie knew Maggie was about the same age as her grandmother, time had been far less kind to her. Maggie’s face seemed to have twice as many wrinkles as Lisette’s, and her hands curled in her lap, fingers knobby and bent permanently inward toward her palms. Contractures, Josie knew they were called—when the joints or muscles shortened from lack of movement, causing permanent deformities. Josie glanced at Maggie’s feet, turned inward toward one another in a pair of plain white sneakers, and suspected she probably had them in her feet as well.

  Maggie raised her head up as Josie and Gretchen entered the room, and Lisette shuffled off back to the cafeteria with her walker. “Mrs. Lane,” Gretchen said.

  Maggie stared at them, her rheumy eyes flitting back and forth between the two unexpected visitors. Her wheelchair was sandwiched between her bed and a small dresser. Beside the dresser was a recliner, which Gretchen sat in while Josie remained standing. They introduced themselves, and Gretchen explained that they were there to talk to her about a girl who used to be in her care.

  “In my care?” she said in a voice that sounded scratchy, perhaps from years of smoking cigarettes.

  “A girl who lived with you in the group home on Powell Street in Bellewood,” Gretchen said. “This would have been the late ’70s, early ’80s. Her name was Belinda Rose.” Gretchen pulled out her trusty notepad and flipped through a few pages. “Birthday, October 15th.”

  Maggie lifted a gnarled hand and waved it. “I remember Belli. That’s what I called her. Sweet thing. Till she got to be a teenager. Then she was hell on wheels.”

  Gretchen and Josie exchanged a look. Josie said, “How long did she live with you?”

  A series of coughs erupted from her lungs, causing her whole body to shudder. Just as Josie was wondering if she should fetch one of the nurses, Maggie settled. “When I got Belli, she was about five. She was in a couple of foster homes before that, with families looking to adopt her, but it never worked out. One of them foster dads had different ideas about raising a girl, if you know what I mean.”

  Josie’s stomach turned.

  “So, you got her at five,” Gretchen said. “Did they tell you anything about her real parents? Why she was in foster care to begin with?”

  “Well, they don’t tell you much, but if I’m remembering correctly, she was one of the girls that came from a couple of teenagers fooling around who weren’t ready to be parents. Back then, having kids when you was a kid was… what do they say? Frowned upon. So we got quite a few kids come to us from teenage parents.”

  “What was she like?” Josie asked.

  Maggie smiled, and her top dentures slipped a bit. She clamped her mouth shut, sucking them back into place. Then she said, “Sweet. She was a sweet one. Liked to help me around the home. Liked to do things for the other girls. Could always count on her for chores and such. She was affectionate too. A lot of those girls didn’t have no affection growing up, and so they didn’t want none or give it out. Some of them been hurt real bad—only knew a ‘bad touch,’ if you know what I’m sayin’.”

  “You said Belinda was a sweet girl until she became a teenager,” Gretchen said. “What happened then?”

  Maggie shrugged. Her shoulder blades rose as if she were going to have another coughing fit, but when she exhaled, all that came out was a long wheeze. She replied, “Don’t know, really. Sometimes girls just go bad once they get a certain age. She started failing in school, staying out past curfew, smoking and drinking. Police caught her out in the woods drinking with some other kids a bunch of times.”

  In that part of Pennsylvania, it seemed every high school had an area out in the woods where teens congregated to get drunk or high, smoke cigarettes, or simply cut school. When Josie was in high school, they all went to a place known as The Stacks, a spot where multiple slabs of rock had fallen from the side of a mountain in stacks. “So, she went to school in Bellewood?” Josie asked.

  “All my girls did,” Maggie answered.

  “Do you remember any of the kids she hung around with?” Gretchen asked.

  “Had plenty of girls of my own to keep track of,” Maggie said. “I couldn’t be doing with their friends.”

  Josie said, “What about the girls in your care? Was she close to any of them?”

  Maggie’s lungs whistled again. She held up a hand, and they waited several seconds for her to catch her breath and speak again. “Not really. She kept to herself. She shared a room with Angie… oh dear, I don’t remember her last name, although she went and got married after college, moved out by Philadelphia. Belli was closer to Angie than any of them.”

  If Angie had gone to college, gotten married, and moved to Philadelphia, then she wasn’t Josie’s mother. Still, they’d find her and see what she knew about Belinda and the people she associated with. “I’m sure we can track Angie down through the old files,” Josie said. “That’s very helpful.”

  Gretchen asked, “What did Belinda look like?”

  “My Belli was short and chunky, with the curliest blond hair you ever saw. A nuisance it was.”

  “How long was she in your care?” Gretchen asked.

  “Well, she was supposed to be with me till she was eighteen, but she ran away a couple of times.”

  Again, Josie’s and Gretchen’s eyes met. “When was that?” Josie asked Maggie.

  Maggie leaned her head back and gave a tired sigh. Her face was ashen. The interview was taking a lot out of her. “Well, once for a few months when she was about fifteen or sixteen. Can’t remember exactly. I was so mad at her. Someone at the high school had got her this job at the courthouse doing filing and answering phones a few hours a week. She did so well at first and was bringing in her own money. She stopped cutting school, stayed out of trouble, mostly. But she started fighting with my other girls a lot.”

  “About what?” Gretchen asked.

  Another shrug. “Who knows? What do teenage girls fight about? There were always squabbles about their things—this one used the other one’s hairbrush, that one took the other one’s sweater. Then the other girls said she thought she was better than them ’cause she had a fancy job. Silly kid stuff. Then they teased her ’cause she put on some weight after she started working. She started eating everything in sight; I couldn’t keep up. I never got paid that much for any of my girls. I had to stretch what little the state gave me to feed all of them. Anyway, we had a fight ’cause I said she was eating me out of house and home, and she started crying and ran off. Came back a few months later.”

  “Was she still overweight when she returned?” Josie asked.

  “A little. But she’d calmed down a bit.”

  Gretchen wrote something down in her notebook, and Josie knew she was marking the timeline. Belinda Rose had suddenly gained weight and started overeating after working at the courthouse for a while. She’d left and come back thinner and with less of an appetite. Perhaps it hadn’t been obvious to Maggie, but Josie knew exactly what had happened. “Mrs. Lane, did Belinda ever have any… health issues?”

  Maggie turned her head in Josie’s direction. “What do you mean, health problems?”

  Josie shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything.”

  Gretchen saw where Josie was trying to go and reached forward, placing a palm on Maggie’s thin forearm. “Mrs. Lane, we have reason to believe that Belinda may have given birth at some point.”

  Maggie stared at her, uncomprehending. Then she laughed, her thin shoulders bouncing. “You’re mistaken,” she told Gretchen. “Be
lli never had no baby.”

  Gretchen looked to Josie, and Josie gave a swift shake of her head. Clearly, Maggie hadn’t known about the pregnancy, so there was no point in pursuing that line of questioning with her. Gretchen asked, “Did you report her missing?”

  “Course I did,” Maggie said. “I had to. Police never found her. One day she just came back.”

  “Did she talk about where she had been?” Gretchen asked.

  “No, and I didn’t have time to pry it out of her. I had a lot of girls, and if you don’t know, teenage girls aren’t exactly easy.”

  “Mrs. Lane, can you try to remember exactly when that was? Was Belinda fifteen or sixteen?” Josie asked.

  Maggie sucked on her upper dentures again. “Sixteen. She just turned sixteen.”

  “So, it was the fall?” Gretchen prodded.

  She took a moment, then said, “It must have been. It was real cold. I remember ’cause we had all these extra heaters in the house, and I was afraid one of my girls was gonna start a fire with ’em. It was right before Christmas too. They were all just waitin’ for that Christmas break to come, but holidays were hard ’cause they were all foster kids. A lot of ’em got depressed around the holidays—led to a lot more fights. I hate to say it, but when Belli ran off that first time, it was sort of a relief.”

  So Belinda Rose had been fairly late in her pregnancy in the fall of 1982, just after she turned sixteen, and had gone off to give birth and returned with no one the wiser.

  “Can you tell me,” Gretchen asked, “did she have a boyfriend? Any lads she hung around with regularly or was interested in?”

  “There was one she went to high school with. Oh, what was his name? Lonnie or Lyle or something. He had two first names.”

  Josie suppressed a groan. “Lloyd Todd?”

  Maggie raised an arthritic finger in the air. “Yes, that’s it! They were together almost a year.”

  Josie knew that Lloyd Todd had grown up in Bellewood. He had moved to Denton when he started his business, because Denton was significantly larger than Bellewood and offered many more clients for both his contracting business and his drug venture.

  Gretchen made another notation. “You said the first time—when did she go missing the second time?”

  “Couple years later. She was seventeen; had about six months to go till she was eighteen. I remember ’cause we were trying hard to figure out what she was gonna do after she aged out. She wanted to stay with me, but I told her she couldn’t. It was around Easter, I remember that. She went to work at the courthouse after school like she always did. She was supposed to be home around seven, but she never came back. I called the police again, made a report.”

  “We’ve checked records for the entire county,” Josie said. “She’s not listed as a missing person.”

  “Oh, ’cause she’s not, dear. I got a postcard from her a few months after she left. It was after her eighteenth birthday, so she was free to do what she wanted. Never gave an address and never came to pick up any of her stuff though.”

  Josie felt a tingle race up her spine. “Where was the postcard from?”

  “Philadelphia. Said she was sorry she left suddenly, but she met a man there and they were getting married. Thanked me for everything.”

  Gretchen said, “You don’t still have that postcard by any chance, do you?”

  Maggie laughed. “Oh honey, I didn’t keep anything from my care home days once I married my husband. We took the RV on the road. Wasn’t a lot of room for nostalgia. But I did give it to the police so they could mark their case closed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  JOSIE – SEVEN YEARS OLD

  Josie woke, thrashing and sweat-covered from a nightmare. Her eyes snapped open, and she had a moment of terror at the unfamiliar surroundings before the fog of sleep receded and she remembered where she was—at Gram’s house, in Gram’s bed. Ever since her daddy died, she had been staying here. She had her own room, but she usually preferred to curl up beside Gram. Josie sat up and blinked, her hands searching the bed covers for her grandmother’s warmth, but it wasn’t there.

  “Gram?” she called.

  There was no answer. Fear wrapped its calloused fingers around her heart, squeezing hard. She climbed down from the bed and tiptoed along the hallway toward the sliver of light coming from beneath the bathroom door. As she got closer, she heard her grandmother wailing, a high-pitched keening sound that made goosebumps break out all over her skin. She stood frozen in the hall, wondering if she should knock or call out to her. The pressure in her chest got tighter, and she ran back to Gram’s bed and pulled the covers all the way over her head. She wished more than anything that her daddy would come back from heaven, but deep down she knew she would never see him again.

  She was just wondering if Wolfie was in heaven with him when she heard her gram’s footsteps in the hall. Josie shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep when Gram returned, not moving an inch when she climbed back into bed and wrapped her arms tightly around her.

  When she woke, Gram was gone again, and sunlight streamed through the windows of the bedroom. Hearing voices downstairs, Josie hopped out of bed and went to the top of the steps to listen.

  The sound of her mother’s voice made Josie’s whole body go cold. “She’s mine. You’ll never get her, Lisette.”

  “Please, Belinda,” answered her gram. “She’s happy here. I’ll take care of her.”

  “Over my dead body,” Josie’s mother said. Then she shouted, “JoJo! Come down here.”

  Slowly, like her limbs were moving through mud, Josie made her way down the stairs. Her mother smiled at her. Not in the scary way she sometimes did just before she did something mean, but in the way she did on the rare occasion that she was nice to Josie—like when she gave her the coloring book. She knelt so that she was face to face with Josie and gently smoothed Josie’s hair out of her eyes. “JoJo, you want to come home with Mommy, right?”

  Josie didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to leave Gram, but she liked it when her mother was nice to her. When she didn’t answer, her mother said, “I’ve missed you, JoJo. Don’t you want to come home with me? We’ll color and play games and do girl stuff together; what do you say?”

  Josie looked at Gram, whose face had gone all stiff.

  “JoJo?” her mother said.

  She wanted to do all those things with her mother. They could play hide and seek and tag, and maybe they could paint their nails together. One of Josie’s friends from school had spa days with her mother where they played with makeup and did each other’s hair. Josie wanted that more than anything.

  Josie nodded, and before she knew it, her mother was stuffing her into the passenger’s seat of her blue Chevette and slamming the door. Josie looked up to where Gram stood on the porch, tears glittering in her eyes, waving slowly. Josie’s mother got into the driver’s side and started the engine.

  “Mommy,” Josie said. “I forgot my clothes and my blanket.”

  “Shut up, JoJo.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It took nearly four hours to get their hands on the Belinda Rose file. Josie considered it a miracle that the tiny Bellewood Police Department still had it. Their chief was gracious enough to let Josie, Noah, and Gretchen search their dusty back room filled with old, closed files. It didn’t appear that they had ever thrown anything away.

  “Gotta love small-town departments,” Noah remarked as he pulled box after box off the storage shelves for Josie and Gretchen to look through.

  Josie was just beginning to lose hope of ever finding it when she finally put her fingers on it. The ink on the yellowed file tab was so faded that Josie could barely make it out, but there it was: Belinda Rose.

  After signing the requisite forms, the three of them left with the file in hand and headed back to their own station house, Gretchen sneezing the entire time from the hours spent kicking up dust. Josie’s eyes burned like hell. They rode most of the way back to Denton wit
h the windows of Josie’s Escape all the way down, letting the cool March air blow away the past for a little while.

  Once in Josie’s office, they spread the contents of the file across her desk. It was thin, and the reports were faded and typewritten with an old-fashioned typewriter. There wasn’t much more than what Maggie Lane had told them. Josie noted the names of the officers who had taken the two missing persons reports. A quick call to Bellewood PD revealed that both had retired long ago.

  “Here,” Noah said, plucking an old color photograph from the pile of pages. It was slightly bigger than an index card and showed a heavyset teenage girl standing in the small garden outside the care home. Sunlight streamed down on her, the light bouncing off her tight blond curls, and she squinted against it, smiling. A shapeless floral-print dress draped over her large middle, stopping midway down two pale, thick thighs. Josie saw the strap of a backpack on one shoulder, and in one of her hands she held a brown paper bag.

  “First day of school,” Gretchen said.

  Josie took the photo from Noah’s hand and turned it over. Someone had written September 1982.

  “She was pregnant in this photo,” Josie said. “If we’ve got our timeline correct.”

  “Is there another photo?” Gretchen asked, her fingers shuffling the contents of the file once more. “From before the second time she ran away?”

  Josie found it paper-clipped to a second set of reports that had been prepared over a year after the first set. In the photo, Belinda was descending a flight of stairs in what Josie guessed was the foster home—the background was all dark wood paneling and ratty gray carpet. The photo didn’t look posed for as the last one had—more like someone had caught her coming down the steps and snapped the photo. Belinda was considerably smaller and thinner than in the first photo they had found—she looked half the size she had been in September of 1982. Her hair hadn’t changed; tight blond ringlets hung to her shoulders, offering a splash of life to the otherwise drab background. Without the sunlight in her face, her blue eyes shone wide and clear over a thin smile. This time she wore a tight pair of jeans and the same nylon windbreaker that Dr. Feist had unearthed along with her body. Peeking out from the collar of the jacket was a small gold locket in the shape of a heart.