A Grave Search (Bodies of Evidence)

by Wendy Roberts

  “Yeah, well, I don’t...” I cleared my throat. “I don’t drink.”

  “Oh-h-h.” She slowly put the sacks down on the ground. “You should’ve said something.”

  “I just did.” I nodded at the bags. “That doesn’t mean you can’t.” I raised my Coke. “I’m good.” I pointed to the back of the house. “I’ve got a picnic table out back where we can sit to talk about the case.”

  “Well then I’ll have a Coke too. If you don’t mind.”

  I wanted to tell her to grab her beer because it didn’t bother me if she drank but, honestly, I didn’t know if I was strong enough to watch someone drink on my own property without feeling the bite of temptation at every sip she took.

  She fell into step beside me as I walked to the back of the house and then, abruptly, she linked her arm in mine. “We’re going to be like Sherlock and Dr. Watson, right?”

  “Oh I doubt that very much.” I laughed at the idea. “Probably more like Laurel and Hardy.” I bumped her hip with mine.

  “Or Thelma and Louise,” she said.

  “Don’t they both die?”

  We both burst out laughing.

  The faded picnic table was under the shade of a huge cedar tree only a few feet from the back patio door. Tracey took a seat at the table while I went inside and snagged her a Coke. I made a couple trips, grabbing my laptop and also the box of Ron’s belongings. I figured that, if nothing else, Tracey could busy herself going through the box while I answered emails. At least, that was the plan.

  Unfortunately, Tracey’s plan was to rant and rage about her now ex-boyfriend, and when she grew tired of that, she asked me a million questions about Garrett. When I didn’t give in to satisfy her curiosity about our relationship, she started asking questions about dowsing.

  “I don’t know why I’m able to find people using dowsing rods. I just can.” I clicked open another email.

  “Okay, so why don’t you do that divining thing where you hang a crystal on a string and ask questions? Isn’t that a kind of dowsing?”

  I looked at her from over the screen of my laptop and answered her patiently. “Pendulum dowsing doesn’t work for me.”

  “But how do you know if you never—”

  “I’ve tried it!” The words came out on a shout. So much for patience. “Look, it worked for me once but, since then, I’ve tried it many, many times on practically every case but I’ve never had so much as a tremor. So I’m sticking to what works and not wasting any more of my time on pendulum dowsing.”

  She finished off her can of Coke with a gulp and a loud belch and then put it down. “Why do you think it worked that one time?”

  “I’m not really sure.” I blew out a hot breath. “Maybe it was just one of those things. A fluke. Or maybe it was because I was personally connected to that particular situation.”

  “Oh-h-h.” She nodded and looked at me with wide eyes. “That was the case in the news. The one about you and your friend and your grandfather and—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” My voice came out low and soft with a little beg on it. “Want another Coke?”

  “Yeah, and you got anything to eat? I could use a sandwich or something.”

  “Sure.”

  My own stomach was also growling. I went inside and my phone beeped. A text message from Garrett saying he was glad I was having fun with my new friend.

  Ugh. The cameras.

  I replied with a thumbs-up emoji.

  Was I having fun? I thought about that while I put together a couple grilled cheese sandwiches. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of club and partying kind of fun I used to have with Katie. It was definitely more relaxed and casual with Tracey. There was something to be said for that, and I had to admit I liked Tracey. She was different. An oddball. But then so was I so it made me more able to relax around her.

  Wookie tried to come with me when I walked back outside balancing a couple plates.

  “Sorry, boy, you have to stay here.” I closed the patio door behind me and left Wookie staring at us with sad eyes.

  Tracey was sitting cross-legged on the ground next to the picnic table. She’d opened the box of Ron’s stuff and was spreading the various books and random packages and other things out on the grass next to the table. I put her sandwich on the ground next to her but she didn’t even look up.

  I sat back down at the table, scrolling through emails. The one thing missing from my inbox was an email from Ebba. She hadn’t called, texted or emailed me again to ask about my plans to find Ava. It felt out of character for her to give me space, even though I appreciated the time. I sent her an email telling her the truth. I was spending the day doing more research on her case and hoped to follow that up with action soon.

  I ate my sandwich as I looked at messages for media requests and people wanting help finding their loved ones. A mother in Australia and an aunt in Alaska both got a form regret email in response. The locations were just too far to go. I replied to one in California and one in Idaho asking for more information. Maybe Garrett and I could book a B&B somewhere for a weekend. I could find a body and then we could hole up in a hotel room, order room service and make love night and day like we once did. The idea made me smile.

  Sitting outside at the picnic table with my laptop had been a great idea. A light, grass-scented breeze chased the heat away and had me daydreaming of time away with my guy. When Tracey spoke, it startled me. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “I was just looking through the yearbook. Funny how I can look at faces and not even remember the girl I sat next to in a class for an entire year.”

  “Wait. You went to that high school?” I pointed at the book in her hand. “That one where Ron and I went?”

  “Sure but only for a year.” She held up the book and pointed to the thumbnail-sized picture of herself.

  “We’re the same age so we would’ve been in the same grade?” I frowned. “Did we know each other?”

  “I had some surgeries in eighth grade so I was behind a year,” she admitted, tossing the yearbook to the grass. “I wasn’t there long enough to get to know anyone really. Except maybe Wes.”

  “Abel’s grandson?”

  “Yeah. We went out a few times back then but he had a bit of a mean streak.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, he liked to play practical jokes on people. One time he brought a box of cream-filled donuts to school except he’d replaced all the filling with mayonnaise.”

  “Ew-w-w.” I shuddered. “That’s nasty.”

  “Yeah, that was gross and, at the time, I kind of laughed but then when a teacher gave him a really bad grade he made it his mission to get revenge on her, and eventually she just up and quit.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He started with stupid stuff...petroleum jelly on her classroom door, dowsing her car with hot sauce. Silly things that everyone still thought were funny but then someone gave Wes her home address and next thing there was a rumor going around that he’d broken in and poisoned an aquarium filled with exotic fish.”

  “Wow. Do you think it really was Wes?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. When I told him I didn’t want to go out anymore, he left a long message on my home answering machine talking about how great I was at giving BJs. Of course he knew my mom and dad would hear the message before I did.” She shook her head. “So, yeah, the guy is a big dick.”

  “Abel tried to convince me to go out with him,” I said.

  “Jesus. Good thing you got yourself a hunky FBI guy to tend to your needs.”

  “A very good thing.”

  We laughed.

  I went back to looking at my laptop and a few minutes later Tracey started talking again.

  “You know, I was just wondering if all these comments Ron made in his hiking books might help,” Tracey said.

  I got up from the table and joined her on the grass. She was bent with her legs in a W shape and grunted when she rearra
nged her body to allow me next to her. She held open a book and pointed at scribbled notes in red ink in the margin. I took the trail book from her and began reading Ron’s handwritten notes. Mostly, Ron seemed to rate the trails with various one-word comments throughout the pages: hard, steep, long, rocky, wet and the occasional trail rated a few stars next to the description.

  “It would take me a lifetime to check every trail for Ava’s body.” I put down that book and picked up another.

  “Yeah, too bad there wasn’t a way to narrow it down.”

  “Yeah. Like if he wrote a description that said: this would be a great place to dump a body.”

  We laughed until we snorted.

  I flipped through the pages of another hiking book, pausing wherever Ron wrote comments. Toward the end of the book, just as I was about to toss it to the ground with the others, I stopped on a page that described hiking in Oak Lake.

  A paragraph describing the relatively short trail had been circled. On the side of the page in red ink was a large heart, and written inside the heart was Ava + Ron forever.

  I got chills.

  Chapter Twelve

  Within a few minutes I’d tracked the location of the trail on the map on my phone.

  “Oak Lake is about an hour away. It sounds so familiar,” I said to myself as I looked at the area on my screen. “Why does it sound like a place I should know?”

  “You hike, right? Maybe you’ve hiked there,” Tracey chimed in.

  “Nah, I don’t think so.”

  The trail itself didn’t seem like the type of place Ron would go for a hike. It wouldn’t be a challenge at all for him.

  “It’s rated as an easy day hike in a cottage-like area,” I said. “It’s not the type of trail Ron would do on his own for a challenge but maybe it was a place the two of them enjoyed. Joon Kim told me Ava wasn’t much of an outdoorsy person but she tried hard to be like that for Ron. She could’ve suggested an easier hike just so the two of them could have something to do as a couple.”

  “I think we need to do a field trip and check it out.”

  “We?”

  “Of course. You need backup.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t need backup.”

  “Your superhero sidekick.”

  “You’re going to be the Robin to my Batman?” I smiled.

  “Navigator then. Who doesn’t like someone riding shotgun who can tell them when to turn so they don’t have to take their eyes off the road.”

  I wanted to tell her that was what the navigation system in my car was for but the look on her face was so hopeful that I couldn’t stand it. “We’ll see...”

  Another hiking book caught my eye and I grabbed it off the grass. Best Hiking Trails of the World. The book was hardcover and looked expensive. A page in the center had a corner folded at the beginning of a chapter titled “Trekking in Argentina,” and across the top of the page was the same loopy handwriting as in the other trail book: Soon this will be us! There were lots of Xs and Os after it.

  “They were planning a trip.” I was talking to myself but Tracey snagged the book from my hands to read the note.

  “Or just dreaming of traveling. I buy travel books all the time but I never go anywhere.”

  She had a point. I’d just been dreaming about going to a bed-and-breakfast with Garrett. Didn’t mean it would happen even though I wished it would.

  When she tossed the book back onto the grass, a receipt slipped out and I picked it up.

  “If they’d broken up a couple months before she was kidnapped, why would she be buying him a book and writing a note like that?” I held up the receipt for the book that was dated about a week before Ava’s kidnapping.

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “Exactly.” I used my phone to take a picture of the page.

  Ava reached for the foil packs that had come out of the box along with the books and a few knickknacks. “What are these?”

  I started to tell her that they were something medical to do with Ron’s condition but she’d already torn a package open and dumped the contents on the ground.

  “Weird. So he was stockpiling his own phlebotomy kits?” She pointed to the tourniquet, alcohol pads, needles and gauze pads. Everything you needed for drawing blood.

  “His dad told me he had a medical condition where his body made too much iron. Hemochromatosis. I looked it up later and one of the treatments is to go for regular blood draws. Ron was a young guy and got regular treatment for it. Got blood drawn every so often and that took care of it.”

  “But he wasn’t just drawing his own blood at home himself, right?”

  “Why not? Maybe he got sick of going somewhere to have it done if he could do it himself.” I shrugged. “No different than someone with diabetes learning to give themselves shots, right?”

  “I guess, but then what would he do with the all the blood? Just dump it down the sink?” Tracey visibly shuddered.

  “Or dump it in the woods,” I murmured. I pulled out my phone and dialed Garrett.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Tell me when they found all that blood on the ground that’s how they knew Ava was dead, right?”

  “Yes, that’s why she was presumed dead.”

  “Presumed.”

  “Sure. No body so we can only deduce that she’s dead.”

  “What if it wasn’t her blood?”

  “It was definitely her blood. The lab tested it and confirmed.”

  “Oh.” I chewed my lower lip as I thought. “What if someone took her blood and dumped it there? Or she even drew her own blood?”

  “First of all, she would’ve had to draw a lot of blood. Not just a couple tubes full like you have done when going for a blood test. Why go to that extreme to disappear? It wasn’t like she had a life she needed to run from but if she wanted to walk away, she could’ve picked up and done that at any time and nobody would’ve blinked an eye besides maybe her mother.”

  He had a point.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I thought I’d swing by with a couple steaks around six and we could break in your barbecue,” he said.

  I glanced over at the covered stainless cooker sitting behind me on my patio gathering dust. “That sounds nice but make it a bit later. Around seven o’clock. I’ve got some errands to do.”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you too.” After I ended the call I explained what Garrett said and then returned to looking through the books on the grass. I didn’t find any more hidden notes so I went back to answering emails on my laptop. Tracey sprawled out on the grass and appeared to doze for a few minutes while I worked. When she woke up I told her I had some errands to do. She glanced at her phone and said the garage called to say they were still waiting on a part for her car.

  “Do you mind driving me home?”

  I agreed to do that and we packed up the box of Ron’s stuff and climbed into the car. Tracey lived in the basement apartment of a small older two-level house in town.

  “You know where I live now so you can just come over anytime,” she said as I pulled to the curb. “Or, you know, text me so we can do coffee or tea or burgers or even just hang since you don’t drink and I don’t need to drink either so...”

  She hopped out and mouthed text me as she offered me a wave and a smile.

  Once she was inside her place I punched an address into the navigation system. It was the cottagey area at Oak Lake mentioned in Ron’s book. I’d never frequented the area before but it was only an hour each way so I’d be back in plenty of time for dinner with Garrett.

  I stopped for gas and checked my phone before hitting the road again. There was a message from Katie saying that she had come up with a list of places Ron used to go and she believed they could all be areas that would be useful in my investigation. She didn’t include the list, instead, she told me which nights she was free to go to dinner and named the steak house she preferred.

  �
��Katie at her best.” I just shook my head.

  Part of me felt bad for my old friend because she lost so much after last year. She’d nearly been killed because she was connected to me and then she lost her mom and her home. Although the fact that she had to grow up and get a job or two to survive like the rest of the world might actually be a good thing.

  As I drove up to the lake area I thought about Tracey and how easy things were with her. My only other true experience with friendship had been my friendship with Katie. Being with Katie had always been a tumultuous whirlwind of activity and, at the end of the day, Katie did what was best for her. Tracey wasn’t like that. She was easygoing and made me feel interesting. I was cautiously optimistic about the idea of having a friend.

  Dr. Chen would be so proud of me.

  The Oak Lake area had one corner store with a gas station, an ice cream shop and a small commercial building with a combination of insurance and housing sales. I decided to stop for an ice cream before I headed out for a look-see around the lake. The woman serving up soft-serve behind the counter looked as old as the town. After I paid her for my cone, I showed her Ron’s picture on my cell phone.

  “Do you ever remember seeing this guy around here?”

  She took readers out of her pocket and slid them up her nose before she glanced at the picture. “Ronald Low. The guy who killed that nice Ava girl. Haven’t seen him lately on account of he’s dead but then you know that already because you’re that weird girl who found him.”

  She was a helluva lot smarter than I gave her credit for and she watched a lot of news. I took a long lick of my ice cream cone.

  “So before Ron turned up dead, or even before Ava went missing, any chance you saw just him or even the two of them together out here? I understand he enjoyed hiking up this way.”

  “Nope, never saw either of them up this way but of course saw her mom from time to time.” She motioned for me to step aside so she could take the order of two boys behind me.

  After she’d served them I walked back up to the counter. “Ebba Johansson? You’ve seen her around here?”

  “Well, sure, but not lately. Not since her daughter was killed. Who feels like coming out to their lake cottage after that? Always said she’d retire here but who knows what’ll happen now.”