A Grave Search (Bodies of Evidence)

by Wendy Roberts

  After what felt like an hour I thought about breaking free from my hiding spot but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I debated waiting until daylight. It would make it so much easier to see where I was going but it would also make it easier for Ebba to see me and put a bullet through my chest. Hours went by and there were two other times I heard Ebba’s footsteps nearby and at one point she crossed the walking bridge only to return quickly on a run as if she realized I hadn’t made it across. She wasn’t giving up.

  Mosquitos snacked on my skin as the temperature dropped, and the first cool breeze in days began to raise goose bumps on my body. Frogs and crickets serenaded me as I strained my ears to hear the sound of feet in the bush. I was listening so hard that I was sure I was beginning to hear things. With my hands on my knees I took deep breaths and calmed my drilling heart and then forced myself to listen again. Voices. Male voices. And they were coming closer. I slowly made my way out of my thorny hideaway and crouched low as I moved around to the bridge side. I hunkered down behind a bush and stared down the road to my right. A glow of flashlights moved side-to-side scanning the road and ditches as a group of three men walked purposely in my direction. The stride and gait of one of those men was achingly familiar. I bolted from the bushes.

  “It’s me! Julie!” I called and my voice broke into a tearful cry.

  Garrett ran to meet me and had me fully engulfed in his arms. My swollen cheek was being crushed against his chest but it didn’t matter at all. Nothing else mattered.

  “It’s Ebba,” I sobbed. “She killed Ron.”

  Garrett and the other two officers talked in hushed plans about circling the area. Suddenly the sound of a shot rang out, and I felt a sharp searing pain in my thigh. Garrett dragged me back into the woods where he searched for my wound with a flashlight and told me it wasn’t bad.

  “You’re fine,” he said. “You’re okay.”

  He squeezed me tight against him and I sobbed quietly against his chest, breathing in the goodness of him. Over the next few minutes we heard the other officers searching and more gunfire sounded. Garrett covered my body with his and pushed me to lie flat in a bed of damp leaves. I shook violently against him and knew he could smell the wine on me.

  “She made me drink. It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Hush,” he murmured into my neck. “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

  And the weight of his body on mine and his calming voice in my ear stripped the terror that shook my bones. We lay like that for what felt like an eternity. The sun was teasing the horizon by the time the officers came to us and announced they had Ebba in custody. I did not want Garrett to let me go.

  * * *

  The wound in my leg only required a couple of stitches but Garrett still insisted I spend a couple nights in the hospital for my mental health. He contacted Dr. Chen and told her what had happened and the next morning she came to visit me in the hospital. The overwhelming sense that I’d failed by drinking was a dark cloud of despair over me. Sure, I was forced to drink the wine but my body betrayed me by hoping someone held a gun to my head on a daily basis so I could have more. I reached for the pendant around my neck and clutched my father’s wedding band for reassurance.

  “And so you start over. Today is day one,” Dr. Chen said gently. “Life is always about starting again and not giving up.”

  “I can do that. I can start counting again.”

  “Of course you can.” She placed a hand on my arm. “You’re a lot stronger than you think.”

  I didn’t feel strong swathed in a hospital gown with my backside exposed.

  Garrett brought Tracey to visit me in the hospital and they both stood at my bedside.

  “She was the reason we were able to get to you as quickly as we did,” Garrett explained. “When you were late and didn’t answer your phone, I contacted the grocery store and got her number. She told me about the hiking book and the lake. We knew Ebba had a cottage there.”

  “Your old man here did all the real work,” Tracey said. “I just told them where I thought you might be and he went into all hero mode.”

  “Thanks so much,” I told her. “Guess you’re my sidekick after all. We’ll have to think of a nickname for you. Maybe something like Deputy Green Sprout.”

  She snorted. “No thanks.”

  Garrett stepped out of the room to take a phone call, and once he was gone Tracey drew her splinted fingers through her green hair in a nervous gesture.

  “There’s something else I need to tell you and you won’t be thanking me for that. On the way here, your man talked to me about everything that happened to you. The break-in with your stolen laptop and your tires slashed and then he mentioned someone putting a bottle of wine in your car and how it freaked you out. That’s what made me realize I mighta saw something that’s important.”

  She took a breath and the suspense was killing me.

  “Spit it out already,” I told her.

  “Okay, okay.” She held her hands up. “So one time I came by to visit you and your dog was nutso in the window and I could hear him from the road. I slowed my car down as I drove by and saw this woman in your driveway. She opened your Jeep and stuck a bottle of wine in there. I figured it was a present from a friend, like a birthday gift or something, right? So I kept on driving.”

  “Woman? It was Ebba Johansson, wasn’t it?”

  “Nah, I saw Ebba’s face on the news and it wasn’t her. This gal was younger. She was about our age with a cheap blond dye job and driving an old brown four-door sedan.”

  “Oh my God.” I exhaled loudly in disbelief. “Katie! How did she...and why would she?” Words failed me as I was slapped with a dose of disbelief and betrayal. She’d hurt me before and now, given a tiny window of opportunity, she’d lashed out again.

  “This Katie a friend of yours?” Tracey asked.

  “No. Definitely not. She’s no Deputy Green Sprout.” I took her hand and squeezed.

  Garrett came back into the room then and I filled him in on what Tracey told me and he just kept shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m going to her place right now and—”

  I stopped him with a raise of my hand. “You’re not going to her place. I am.”

  I was discharged in the early afternoon after Dr. Chen paid me a visit and pronounced me mentally healthy enough to go out into the world. Garrett had taken the time to discreetly place some calls. He found out Katie wasn’t working at her mall job or her fast-food place today and an officer had recently driven by her house and seen her vehicle in the driveway.

  We dropped Tracey off at home on our way.

  “You sure you don’t need me to come along and bitchslap this ex-friend for you?” she asked as I walked her to her door. “I’m stronger than I look.”

  “I’m sure you are, Sprout, but I gotta do this on my own,” I told her.

  “Okay. Shoot me a text and let me know how it all went.”

  I nodded and then, abruptly, I leaned in and hugged her. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Aw-w-w. It’s what friends do for friends,” she replied, hugging me back.

  I returned to Garrett’s sedan and once we were close to Katie’s I began to feel more confident. “I’d like to confront her by myself.”

  “Not a chance,” he replied.

  “But—”

  “No. You don’t know what she’s capable of.”

  We pulled into the driveway of a dilapidated old house with a weed-choked yard and Garrett walked beside me to the door. Even as I rapped my knuckles against the peeling paint part of me wished she wasn’t going to be home, but she answered almost immediately.

  “Oh hey-y-y.”

  Katie stood there in a ratty bathrobe and looked from me to Garrett and back again. “I’d invite you in but, as you can see, I’m about to get in the shower, so-o-o...”

  I pushed my way past her into the living room. There on the coffee table was my laptop. A ball of fury in my
gut had me putting fists on my hips and raising my voice.

  “So you drugged Wookie just for a stupid frigg’n laptop?”

  “That’s not yours!” she protested. She ran to the coffee table and closed the lid on the laptop. “It’s mine. You’re not the only one that can afford a newer computer! I work two goddamn jobs, you know!”

  She stood there straightening her bathrobe and attempting to look at me with righteous indignation but she only looked weak and pathetic. I was finally seeing Katie for the person she really was.

  “It’s mine and not only did you steal from me, you put a bottle of wine in my Jeep. Why? Because you thought that would bring me down?” I shook my head. “Don’t even try to deny it because it was all on camera.” I hooked a thumb in the direction of Garrett. “He had cameras installed everywhere on my property.”

  “And the cameras at the shopping center showed you were the one who slashed her tires,” Garrett piped up. “You popped the trunk and then climbed inside and got her address from the insurance papers in the glove box.”

  “You think you’re such hot shit,” Katie yelled, running her fingers through her greasy bottled blond hair. “If it wasn’t for me you woulda had no one growing up! No one! I was your only frick’n friend. When my life went to shit last year because of you, you were nowhere to be found. Too busy living in your new house, driving your new Jeep and screwing your FBI boyfriend. You owe me, Delma.” She drew out my old name on her tongue as a taunt, and then sneered. “You owe me big-time.” She tucked hair behind her ears. “So what ya gonna do now?” She stuck her arms out, wrists up toward Garrett. “If you’re here to arrest me, just do it already.”

  “I’m not going to have you arrested. You say I owe you? Now we’re even,” I said quietly. “Just stay away from me and mine, you got that? Stay away. Forever.”

  I stomped out of the house in a whirl of anger that was mostly all tears and raw hurt.

  Garrett joined me in the car a few minutes later.

  “You won’t be hearing from her again. I guarantee it.” He turned and kissed my tear-stained cheek. “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Just take me home, please.”

  * * *

  Wookie greeted me like I’d been gone a year. He’d been well cared for by Garrett in my absence but he needed to give me a hundred licks and needed two hundred head pats to make everything right again. It was my pleasure to give him all the attention he needed and I didn’t get annoyed with him when he climbed in bed with Garrett and me for a snuggle that night.

  The next day I insisted on a road trip with Garrett.

  When he parked in the boat launch parking lot near the spot I’d left my Jeep before, he asked, “Why are we here?”

  I could hear the anxiety in his voice as he covered it with an exasperated sigh. Maybe part of him thought I was some masochist wanting to relive the terror.

  “Just humor me.” I hoisted my pack from the back seat of his car. “If nothing else, it’s a beautiful day for a walk around the lake and it’s a very easy hike. So easy—” I elbowed him in the ribs “—even a soft federal agent like yourself can handle it.”

  He mumbled something under his breath about not being soft and I giggled. I smiled sweetly as he insisted on carrying my pack after I’d retrieved my dowsing rods.

  He leaned forward and kissed me chastely on the nose. I wrapped my arms around his neck and brought my mouth to his kissing him deeply until we were both breathless.

  “Have you ever done it in the woods before?” I breathed against his mouth.

  “Certainly not while someone was poking the back of my head with dowsing rods.”

  I laughed and we trudged down the trail. “Yeah, so as you know I forgot my pack that day and made myself a divining rod out of a branch.” I walked ahead holding the rods out in front of me. “Using a branch isn’t exactly my thing. Sure, that’s how I learned but it isn’t as...well, the vibe isn’t as strong.” I glanced over my shoulder. “Does that make sense?”

  “Nothing you do makes sense but carry on.”

  “Right well, I remember there was a spot where I felt the branch offer a tremor. Barely a shake but it was...something.”

  “And what was it?”

  “That’s the thing.” I glanced back. “I was determined to get to Ebba’s cottage and thought I had more than enough time to check the trail a little more thoroughly on my trip back to the car.”

  “But, of course, you didn’t.”

  “Nope. Things got a little crazy,” I said in the understatement of the decade.

  It felt good walking the trail with Garrett. We paused at one point to smile at a squirrel who’d stopped half up a tree to glare and chatter at us.

  “Do you remember where it was that you felt the branch move?” Garrett asked.

  I stopped and looked around.

  “I thought it was before this point but I could be wrong,” I told him. “I know it was near one of the other cottages before Ebba’s place.” We’d already passed one of those houses. “Let’s go as far as Ebba’s before we turn around and head back.”

  I didn’t want to go that far. I didn’t want to see the small white house with the gray shutters that looked so innocent. I concentrated on the trail and the beautiful summer day. The air was thick with the smell of cedar trees and lake water and even the gnats who buzzed my face didn’t dampen my feeling that all was right with the world. Until it wasn’t.

  The rods both pulled right and I stopped in my tracks and nodded. “This way.”

  We turned and walked through thick shrubs.

  The bush opened onto tall knee-high grass that swayed in the breeze and parted as we walked only to close around and disappear around our feet. I followed the rods slowly and deliberately, allowing them to lead me like they had countless times before, knowing that in the end there’d be a body.

  When the rods pulled right again I followed and when they crossed in an X pattern it was under a giant monkey tree where the grass was nearly waist high. At the sight of pink high-tops I stopped cold.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Garrett moved around me to take a closer look.

  “It’s Ava,” Garrett confirmed over his shoulder.

  “Did her mother kill her?”

  “She’s been here a while. I don’t see any visible sign of being shot, and Ebba confessed to everything but never once mentioned anything but concern about Ava. Then again, who knows? I think we’ll have to wait for the coroner to rule on cause of death.”

  I turned away from Ava’s body to view the tranquil lake that peeked between the trees and bush we’d just traipsed through. This peaceful lakeside community was about to be forever tainted.

  We stayed with the body until others arrived and then walked back to Garrett’s car in silence. Once buckled up and headed back, he thanked me for helping them find the body. I didn’t want to think of Ava dying however long ago in that field. And I didn’t want to believe her own mother had killed her in a fit of maniacal rage.

  “Could we get ice cream?” I asked, wanting and needing at least one thing to be that simple.

  On the drive home from lake with ice cream cones in our hands I casually mentioned to Garrett about changing my name.

  “I started using my middle name partly because I didn’t want the name my mother gave me and also because that was the name my grandparents called me. I figured they were the ones raising me.”

  I took a long lick from my cone knowing that saying my grandparents raised me was a huge understatement. I’d survived in spite of that upbringing.

  “So you’re thinking about going back to being Delma?” Garrett asked.

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “I’m going to give it some thought.”

  Even though Garrett was in the middle of his own investigations he managed to wrangle some time off. We spent a lot of time in bed and, when not in bed, Garrett spent a lot of time cooking. We had Tracey over for steak so that Garrett could finally use the new barbecu
e. Even though the sirloins were too well-done for my liking, we enjoyed each other’s company.

  “You two are kind of made for each other,” Tracey remarked. “Sure you’re hella lot different but you’re also the same, you know?”

  “I’m not at a-a-all like him.” I elbowed Garrett in the ribs.

  “And I’m sure as hell not at all like her,” Garrett protested, feigning insult. “She’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, but you’re both the good kind of crazy.”

  Then she sliced up a birthday cake she’d brought from the store even though it was nobody’s birthday, and before the end of the evening I’d agreed to attend the next stitch and bitch with other women my age in the community.

  * * *

  The next morning Garrett told me the coroner report had come in on Ava Johansson’s cause of death.

  “Blood infection. She was septic.”

  “But how?” I frowned.

  “She did a bunch of blood withdrawals and stored her blood to fake her own death but she wasn’t careful with the needles. Coroner figured she gave herself a raging infection and it killed her. I’m guessing she was on her way to meet up with Ebba at the cottage when the infection did her in.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  He shrugged. “I think it’s more sad that all she wanted from her mother was cash. Her mother is dying and all she wanted was to get as much money as she could so she could take off once her mom was dead.”

  “Well, maybe in the end she was trying to meet her mother and spend time with her. I’d like to think that.”

  He nodded. “They did find a key for the cottage that she wore around her neck.”

  “I’m sure Ebba will go to her grave thinking her daughter was on her way to see her,” I said. “And I’m sure that might bring her more comfort than thinking her daughter flew off to South America without saying goodbye.”

  “Ebba went off the deep end and almost killed you,” Garrett said, his eyes hard. “I really don’t care to bring her comfort in her dying days.”