by Wendy Wax
Maddie made no comment as she scooped up the empty pitcher.
“He’s going to have to get with the program,” Kyra said as they made their way inside. “And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I hope to hell he stops ‘helping’ soon.”
Upstairs, Maddie took her time getting ready for bed but slept fitfully. Near dawn she thought she heard someone in the kitchen but resisted the urge to get up and see who it was.
The house was still quiet when she went down to the kitchen hours later and put on the coffee. From the kitchen table she watched a small sliver of Pass-a-Grille come to life. Saw boats round the pass and head into the Gulf, saw pelicans and gulls dive for breakfast. At eight A.M. she began to worry that Steve might show up determined to cook another meal, so she scrambled eggs and fried sausage patties, then popped bread into the toaster.
She heard movement in Kyra’s bedroom but heard nothing from Nikki’s. She buttered toast, poured a glass of orange juice, and filled a plate with eggs and sausage, then carried it upstairs. Balancing the breakfast tray, she knocked on Nikki’s door. She knew Nikki was stressed out and all these years later she still remembered just how completely pregnancy hormones could jumble a woman’s thoughts and hijack her emotions. But Nikki was going to have to get ahold of herself and she most definitely needed to talk to Joe.
“Nikki?” Maddie knocked again. When there was no answer she pushed open the door. “I brought you breakfast.” Maddie stopped in the center of the room. Nikki wasn’t there. The room was neat. The bed was made. A note sat on one of the pillows. Worried now, Maddie crossed the room, placed the tray on the nightstand, and picked up the folded piece of paper.
Had to go take care of some things. Sorry to bail. I’m no help to anybody right now.
Maddie walked to the window. Nikki’s Jag was not in the driveway. She racewalked to the closet. Nikki’s suitcase and a chunk of her wardrobe were missing, but she hadn’t taken everything. Maddie tried to think what Nikki might have to “take care of.” She knew someone had been texting her and that those texts had upset her. And then there was the pregnancy. The pregnancy. Nikki wasn’t thinking clearly and she was most definitely freaked out, but . . . Her emboldened subconscious immediately began to bring up worst-case scenarios.
No, Maddie scolded back. You should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that.
Is that right? her subconscious sneered.
But Maddie had no answer. And she didn’t have the degree of confidence she wished she did. She had only a prayer. That Nicole Grant might be afraid, under pressure, and in command of less than all of her faculties. But she would never do anything that might endanger those babies.
The midday August sun was a burning orb of yellow, an oven set to broil that Avery would have given anything to be able to turn off. The air was heavy with humidty. The palm fronds hung limp and unmoving. Even the insects seemed to be hiding out waiting for things to cool off.
There was not a man on that site who had not removed his shirt, though the abdomens revealed varied in size and appearance from washboard to beer keg. The water they poured and squeezed over their heads evaporated as it slid down their bodies. But there was no shortage of sweat, which dropped in rivulets and briefly soaked whatever it fell on before it, too, disappeared.
Enrico’s crew scampered over the new roof, careful not to touch the scaffolding with bare hands or bodies. Chase’s crew was spread out around the property. The whine of their saws as they chopped their way through the concrete walkways, pool decking, and patios was high pitched and unrelenting. A cacophony of sound that never really stopped and had to be shouted over.
Maddie and Kyra had gone back to Bella Flora for lunch and hadn’t yet returned. Avery, Roberto, two of Chase’s best carpenters, and Ray Flamingo huddled together in a small patch of shade studying the plans for the rooftop deck. Ray and Avery were the only ones still wearing shirts, which clung like soaked second skins. Avery had tied one of Chase’s spare T-shirts around her forehead, but it didn’t stop the sweat from forming or from dropping wherever the hell it felt like, including on the plans. “Sorry!” She swiped at her sweaty face with an equally sweaty forearm and tried to summon cool thoughts. She might have thrown herself into the nearby Gulf of Mexico, except that at this time of day the sand scorched like the Sahara and the Gulf water belonged in a bathtub. She tried to focus in on the plans. She was excited about finally beginning the rooftop deck. And if they could just find more money, she knew they could . . .
There was a shout. And then another. The saws fell silent—not all at once—but before she realized what was happening there was . . . quiet. A horn beeped on the street. A seagull cawed overhead. A goose bump slithered up Avery’s spine as Chase rounded what was left of the path that led back to the cottages.
“What is it?” she called as she moved toward him, trying to read his face. “What’s . . . Has there been an accident?”
It took him several seconds after he reached her to catch his breath. A small crowd formed around them. Construction sites could be dangerous places. People lost digits and limbs and sometimes even their lives. She’d seen Chase handle many things but she’d never seen him quite this frazzled.
“What happened?”
“Back in the last patio. One of my guys . . .” He panted, drew another breath. His eyes locked on hers. “One of my guys found a skull. There may be a body, or what’s left of one anyway. It was buried in the concrete.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Officer James Jackson and his partner, Officer Jennifer Hartwell, arrived about thirty minutes later. A team from the medical examiner’s office wasn’t far behind them. While the forensic team conferred with the officers and then quickly taped off the area and went to work, Avery, Chase, Ray, the Dantes, and members of their crews huddled in front of the main building in various states of agitation and distress.
Gerald Pitts, who had unearthed the skeletal remains, stood in the center of a fascinated audience expounding on his experience and gesticulating with large callused hands that shook slightly. “When I found the skull, it wasn’t attached to anything and I didn’t understand what it was at first. God, I thought I was going to lose my lunch.”
Since it was her construction site, Avery had gone to see for herself. One glimpse of what lay in the torn-up earth had immediately made her wish that she hadn’t. Now she tried not to listen as Gerald went on to describe the skull in stomach-turning detail. She had watched Deirdre die, had seen Max Golden dead, and her father laid out in his coffin. But there was something primal and frightening about a body devoid of flesh, about what had once been a living, breathing person shorn down to its underpinnings.
Chase put an arm around her shoulders. “You okay?” he asked when Gerald finally ran out of steam and gruesome adjectives.
“Sort of.” Despite the heat a cold knot of dread formed inside her. She texted Kyra and asked her to let Maddie know what had happened. Then she paced the area between the main building and the pool trying not to picture the skull or imagine whatever else might be unearthed in the ground beneath that patio. It was uneven going now that the concrete was gone, the sand beneath it shifting and crumbling.
The workmen lingered in whatever shade they could find waiting to be interviewed by Officer Hartwell. Gerald went first. Others who had been cutting concrete in the same area followed. Those who waited drank from thermoses. There was little conversation. The sun still shone, the sky a vibrant blue painted with white puffy clouds. The shouts of beachgoers, the whine of boat engines, and the caw of gulls still reached them, but here the air was somber and funereal.
“I absolutely cannot believe this,” Ray said after both of their interviews, which were quite perfunctory as neither of them had been anywhere near the cottages. “It’s really quite macabre, isn’t it?” His shudder was no less real for its theatricality. “Do you think it’s Annelise’s mother?”
Avery couldn’t think who else it might be, but she had no energy for speculation. It would be a long time before she figured out how to erase her glimpse of the remains and Gerald’s lurid description from her memory. And then there was the fact that they’d already lost half a day’s work they could ill afford and had no commitment as to how much longer they might be shut down. By the time Maddie and Kyra arrived the interviews had been completed and the crew released. Enrico and Chase stood talking next to the scaffolding. Ray and Roberto were once again going over the roof deck drawings. Avery stood alone unable to focus, let alone participate.
She watched dully as Kyra climbed the scaffolding, her video camera slung over her shoulder. When she reached the top she raised the camera to her shoulder and began to describe the activity below, activity Avery did not want to hear about or envision.
“This is so unbelievable,” Maddie said, her voice bleak, her shiver mirroring Avery’s.
“John, Renée, and Annelise are here,” Kyra called down softly from the scaffold sometime later. “Officer Jackson is talking to them.” There was a brief pause. “Now they’re headed over to the area that’s being excavated.”
Kyra paused. She did not continue. Her play-by-play was rendered unnecessary by the scream that rent the air.
Annelise’s scream went on and on. It was a horrible keening thing. The force of it sent her to her knees where she rocked back and forth, her head bent, her eyes locked on the patch of upturned earth and what lay exposed inside it. Renée would have liked to drop beside her, oblivious to everything and everyone but herself, but her knees remained locked, her mind unable to cede control to her emotions no matter how turbulent. Slowly she lowered herself to the ground, her knees creaking in protest. Even more slowly she focused her gaze on what had been unearthed.
The skull was no longer attached to the rest of the skeleton but it lay at a slight angle nearby. Its eyeless sockets stared up at them. Its jaw hung open as if cut off midway through its own long-ago scream.
She wanted to believe that the skeleton belonged to Heinrich Stottermeier. That he had been the intruder. That the third voice, if in fact she’d heard one, had been his. And since she seemed to be making this up as she went along, that maybe he had died and Ilse had somehow survived. Though where her stepmother might have gone if that had been the case, Renée had no idea.
But the skeleton—she stumbled over the word in her mind even as she looked at it—was largely intact, apparently female, and exactly her stepmother’s size. Annelise sobbed incoherently as they watched the technicians complete their work, their movements professionally precise, yet oddly gentle. Annelise’s sobs began to turn into words. Those words were saturated with pain, but laced with triumph. “I knew she’d never run away! I knew she’d never leave me!”
“It’s all right,” Renée whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.” The words were automatic. As was the arm that reached around her sister’s shoulders, the hand that brushed back her hair.
Below, latex-gloved hands moved carefully, exploring, dusting, detaching, saving. Bits of fabric clung to bone. Annelise gasped as they recognized the scraps of pale pink fabric dotted with tiny rosebuds that were brought up in clear Baggies. Ilse had had a peignoir set, a nightgown and robe, made of it.
A band of tarnished metal encircled one bony finger, which was no longer attached to its hand. Renée gagged at the sight of it. Recoiled at the same moment Annelise did when a technician bagged it. The ring had never, until now, left Ilse’s finger. It was the one their father had had engraved with the line lifted from the Book of Ruth. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. It had been Ilse’s most prized possession.
“At least now we know,” Renée said. In view of the ring, there was no point in even suggesting that it might be anyone else.
“Oh, God,” Annelise cried. “I can’t believe she was buried here all along. People have been walking all over her grave.”
They clung together long after Ilse’s remains had been recovered and taken away. It was John who finally helped them up off their knees and onto their feet. Officers Jackson and Hartwell escorted them to the car, carefully picking out a path through the ditches and troughs that now bisected the property.
“I’ll drive you wherever you’d like to go,” Officer Jackson said as he helped them settle into the Cadillac. “Jennifer will follow us in the cruiser.”
It didn’t occur to any of them to argue. None of them could imagine driving even the short distance to their home. When they got there Renée used the last of her strength to tuck Annelise into the guest room bed before crawling into her own.
Maddie watched John, Renée, and Annelise depart. Sandwiched between the two police officers, all three of them appeared smaller and more stooped, their steps slower and more tentative than Maddie had ever seen them. Although they were free to leave, she, Kyra, Avery, and Chase remained at the main building unable to summon the collective will required to do so. They were still there when Officer Jackson came back to find them. Although they hadn’t seem him arrive, Joe Giraldi was with him.
“Was it Annelise’s mother?” Avery asked. Chase’s arm was once again around her.
“We’ll need to wait on DNA for a positive ID, but based on the fact that the original detective noted that the patio was poured shortly after she disappeared and given the personal items found with the remains, it seems pretty certain,” J. J. said.
“How are Renée and Annelise?” Maddie asked.
“Renée’s pretty stoic. Her sister isn’t doing so well,” the officer said. “In my experience with cases like this, assuming something and knowing it are very different things.” He turned to Joe. “I was just saying to Agent Giraldi that forensic science can reveal a lot of the ‘what’ and even the ‘how.’ I’m hoping that we’ll hear something from Stottermeir’s former handler that might help us understand the ‘why.’ But it’s not unusual in a case this cold to have to settle for less than a complete explanation.”
“Any idea how much longer we’ll be shut down?” Avery asked.
“I would imagine they’ll continue to work the scene for a few more days, but I’ll check and let you know,” Officer Jackson said. He, Chase, and Avery left.
Joe remained behind. He seemed to be looking for something. Or someone. “Do you have a minute, Maddie?”
“I’m going to get a little more video,” Kyra said. “Just let me know when you’re ready to go.”
“All right.” She and Joe watched Kyra disappear around the side of the building. Maddie turned back to face Joe, but she waited for him to speak.
“Is Nikki around?” he asked finally. “Or is she playing hooky back at Bella Flora?”
Maddie stared up into the agent’s face. It looked uncreased and unworried. His tone was a little too light for her liking. “Why do you ask?”
“Do I need a reason?” he asked.
“I don’t know, you tell me.” Maddie waited and watched.
He shrugged. “I haven’t heard from her. I just wanted to be sure she was all right.” He held her gaze but his gave nothing away. At least nothing important. Even smart men could be so incredibly stupid.
“You haven’t heard from her,” Maddie repeated. “And has she heard from you? I mean in any way that would make her feel you really cared to know what she thought or felt?”
“Of course I . . .” He stopped, closed his mouth.
“Ah, so she might not be sure you’d want to hear anything that might be troubling her?”
He went still in the way of a lion scenting prey that she’d seen once on Wild Kingdom. She needed to be careful what she said and even what she didn’t.
“Is something troubling Nikki?” No matter how carefully he shuttered the dark eyes and pretended otherwise, he cared.
“Maybe.”
“Then if you’re as close a friend as
she thinks you are, you would need to tell me.”
Maddie thought about the children Nikki was carrying. Joe’s children. She thought about the ambivalence with which she was carrying them and her fear that Nikki’s thinking might be muddled enough to do something Maddie knew Nikki would regret. Something from which she might never recover.
His eyes were like lasers. She could feel them searching her face, and possibly her mind and heart, for the truth. But Nikki’s pregnancy was not her secret to share. Malcolm was a different thing altogether. He had some hold over Nikki that Joe could possibly do something about. But this, too, was a dicey matter. No wonder Nikki was keeping her distance—she could feel Joe’s eyes probing.
“Would you be surprised if I told you that Nikki went to see her brother in prison?” Maddie asked.
“Not entirely.” His gaze still gave nothing away. Neither did his answer.
“And if I told you that he’d been texting her nonstop and harassing her and maybe even threatening her?” Maddie asked.
“Then I’d have to make him stop,” Joe said quietly. “I’d have to break him into tiny pieces and scatter those pieces to the corners of the earth.”
“Because you love her.”
“Because he’s the scum of the earth and that’s what he deserves.”
This was not exactly the answer Maddie was hoping for. “The thing is, she hasn’t completely confided in me. But I’m pretty sure he’s trying to get her to do something for him. Something that she doesn’t want to do but may feel she has no choice about.”
“Is that it?” His eyes plumbed hers as he searched for more.
“That’s all I know. Or think I know.” And definitely all she should say. “Except that it’s possible that she’s not thinking as clearly as she usually does.” She clamped her lips shut and dropped her eyes.
“Thank you.” He said this quietly and then, with none of his earlier feigned nonchalance, turned to leave.
