Walk Into Silence

by Susan McBride

  “So this is it?” Kim asked.

  “Yes, this is it.”

  “It’s kind of creepy, huh?”

  Despite the ebb and flow of media and curious public in the days since the story had hit the airwaves, the site stood deserted, scattered with the skeletal remains of equipment. It looked as abandoned and neglected as the first time Jo had seen it.

  “Can I drive in?”

  “Sure.”

  Moving ahead at the pace of a snail, Kim drove forward, retracing the path Hank’s old Ford had taken on Wednesday, after the rain had turned the earth to muck and the gravel to oatmeal.

  Jo directed Kim to the spot where they’d found her sister’s Nissan and told her to park. There was no one else in sight. No hikers, no gawkers. It was as if they’d dropped into a black hole. About to push her door open, Jo noticed Kim’s hands clutching the wheel, her knuckles a painful shade of white.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked, not so certain that this was the best way for Jenny’s sister to find closure.

  “No, I’m not sure at all,” Kim said. “But it’s what I need.” She reached for the handle and got out.

  The slam of their doors echoed around the stagger of trees that ringed the crater.

  Jo carried the carnation, walking over to where Kim stood near the hood. The wind tossed brown hair across her tear-stained face, and Jo had more second thoughts about coming. They could have had this conversation at a Starbucks or the police station. What the hell was she thinking? The woman’s sister hadn’t just died here; she’d been led to her grave and murdered.

  Kim took a step forward and hesitated. “You were the one who found her, weren’t you?”

  Jo flashed back on the brown strands of hair floating away from pale skin, one eye staring at her glassily.

  “Yes.” Jo tried not to flinch.

  “Was she tied up?”

  “No.” Not then.

  “Had she been raped?”

  “No,” Jo said, grateful it was the truth.

  “Where was she exactly?”

  “Down there, in the pit.”

  She didn’t embellish, didn’t talk about falling from the path into the pooled water and finding Jenny, dark hair floating about her head, debris clinging to her clothes and skin. Those were things Kim didn’t need to hear. Things she wished she could forget.

  “It’s so quiet. I can’t even hear the birds. Why is it so still? Maybe she’s around,” Kim said. “Maybe she’s with us.”

  Jo didn’t usually believe in such things. But since they’d arrived, she’d had a sense they weren’t alone, that someone else was there, looking over their shoulders. Maybe it was Jenny, or whatever part of her she’d left behind in this place.

  If it comforted Kim to believe it, Jo didn’t see the harm in supposing it could be true.

  Jenny’s sister turned in a slow circle, taking in the evergreen of the forest around them, the way it seemed to stand sentry over the man-made hole in the middle of the earth.

  Angry gusts batted at them, an invisible pugilist, tugging at Jo’s hair, whistling with each chilly breath. The air smelled of dust and rock, of things rotted.

  Jo shivered and pulled her wool collar high so it tickled her chin and brushed her ears. She shoved her left hand in her pocket, grasped the carnation in her right, the stalk caught between her fingers.

  “I hope she’s at peace. Do you think she is? Can you feel her with us?” Kim said and stretched her arms out, fingers reaching for something—for someone who wasn’t there. “She’s close, isn’t she? Do you sense it?”

  Jo didn’t tell her what she really felt, or what she smelled on each breath she took. It wasn’t peace but sadness, decay, and death.

  She said instead what Kim wanted to hear. “She’s close, yes.”

  “Are you holding him, Jenny?” Kim asked the wind, tilting her face to the sky. “Are you happy now?”

  Jo hung back, wanting to give Kim her space. She was trying hard to stay impassive and not give in to the powerful things she was feeling, that threatened to wash over her and take her down.

  Jenny’s sister turned, reaching out. “Could I have the flower? Then I can say goodbye.”

  Jo held out the carnation, and Kim took it, slowly walking away. She headed toward the pit, and Jo let her go.

  Stopping six feet from the edge, Kim bowed her head like she was praying. Then she tossed the flower to the wind. For a moment, it arced, a blot of crimson on gray.

  Jo stared into the clouds, half expecting an ethereal hand to reach out and snatch the carnation from the air. But it didn’t happen.

  The flower dropped away, out of sight.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  How quickly we could go. One last breath, and it was over. No second chance to get it right. You got a shot; then your turn was up.

  Jo thought the whole thing sucked.

  A screech rent the air, so like a woman’s cry. She turned to see the uppermost branches on a pine tree shudder as a flutter of wings hit the sky, pitting black against the dove-gray heavens. The hair at her nape prickled again.

  Kim was right about something.

  Someone was here. She felt it more strongly than before.

  And she wasn’t so sure it was Jenny.

  Cords of plastic flags stretched left and right from the roof of the mobile realty office, creating a triangle of color that vibrated like a thing alive. Light danced off dusty windows. Gravel surrounded the boxy structure, as slate-gray underfoot as the sky above.

  Jo had asked Kim to stay put, told her she’d only be a few minutes. She closed the door, muffling the blast of country-western music as Kim turned the radio on and Keith Urban twanged about wanting to kiss a girl.

  Jo buttoned her coat and looked behind them at the road, the dust since settled and nothing in sight to stir it. Wind rattled through the boughs of the bordering pines. She flipped up her collar and turned away, walking with the gusts at her back.

  She took in everything: a sign with the proposed plots laid out in neat squares; the broken twigs and fallen pinecones at her feet; the swoop of a crow as it came to land on the stump of a tree. It cocked its head at her, staring, letting out a rowdy caw-caw before it took off again and joined a couple of its cackling brethren on the roof of the trailer. They sat in a neat row, watching her, accusing, black heads bobbing.

  A murder of crows.

  Maybe they were related to the carcass left in her mailbox. As long as they didn’t come after her, like they had Tippi Hedren in The Birds.

  Jo tried to shrug off her unease, shoving her hands in her pockets. Her fingers touched the cell phone for reassurance as she made a slow circle of the single-wide structure. She approached a window and peered inside between frosted glass shutters, slanted at an angle that allowed only glimpses of a desk and chairs. She moved to a second window along the same wall and was able to discern a tiny kitchen, the counter cluttered with brochures.

  She went around the front, shoes crunching on dead leaves and bits of rock. Holding the railing, she climbed the steps to a white metal door and tested it, but no dice.

  It was locked tight.

  The posted hours of operation indicated the place was open on weekends and by appointment only. She noticed the phone number listed was the same one she’d dialed when she’d been looking for Alana Harrison.

  Who had shown up at Jenny’s memorial service . . . out of guilt?

  Who was married to Jenny’s ex-husband . . . and would do anything to protect him, his career, and their future?

  If Jo had come to seek answers, maybe she was starting to find them.

  Standing on tiptoes, she cupped hands around the diamond-shaped pane, nose to the glass, the best view she could get. The top of the desk was visible now, filled with stacks of paper and files, a cup holding pens, coffee mugs—the usual office detritus.

  Something hung from a coatrack just to the right. Even with her cheek pressed to the pane,
she couldn’t see what it was. A winter hat? The dark sleeve of a coat?

  Damn.

  Her breath steamed the glass, and she came off her toes, rattled the handle once more for good measure. Then she leaned her hand against the metal jamb, disappointed. She felt something sticky and held up her fingers. They were smudged with black.

  WD-40?

  Like the stain on Jenny’s pullover?

  Beeeep.

  The bleat of the car horn startled her from her thoughts, and she checked her watch. She’d told Kim five minutes. A few had surely passed, but barely that. Kim was doubtless impatient to get to the reception at Patrick’s.

  Jo took the steps down, sighed, and looked around at the roofline of the trailer, at the mesh of chain link protecting a pair of propane tanks stored under the stairs, at the ground beneath her feet.

  A fleck of black against the gravel caught her eye, and she stepped toward it, crouched low and stared. Was it blood?

  She touched a finger to the spot, finding nothing more than a black button about the size of the ones on her peacoat. Was it from a black coat, like Jenny’s?

  She slipped it into her pocket. Then she grabbed the chain link to pull herself up. As she stood, she saw the flash of something shiny. Somehow, she’d missed it before, the silver blending into the chain link. Holding her breath, she untangled the necklace from where it had been snagged and brought it close to her face.

  It was a locket on a sterling chain.

  She blew at a layer of dirt on its surface, held it right to her eyes to see the F so delicately engraved.

  “She has a locket she wears all the time. It’s silver with the initial F, for Finn. She keeps his picture in it. She rarely takes it off.”

  Jo tripped the latch with her fingertip and opened it up to reveal a tiny photo, showing the puckered face of an infant.

  Finn.

  She pressed her palm on the ground to steady herself, dizzy with the thought that Jenny had been there. Had she dropped the button and locket, hoping someone would find them like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs?

  Lifting her face to the breeze, Jo glanced around, her pulse surging fast with a mix of urgency and elation. Was this the site that she’d been looking for? The place where Jenny had been forced to drive by the man she’d spoken with in the Warehouse Club parking lot? Was it where her coat had been removed and she’d been bound with duct tape before she was taken to the quarry and killed? Had her abductor kept her here until the accomplice had shown up?

  Something Emma Slater had said came back to her, and it all clicked.

  “The mirrors weren’t moved. Rearview and side were still angled for someone your victim’s height. So whoever took the wheel must not have had far to go, or at least wasn’t worried much about traffic.”

  Why change the mirrors when you just had a couple of miles to go on a gravel road with no other cars?

  Jo stared at the locket in her hands.

  Jenny had been brought here because it made sense.

  Jacob Davis Properties.

  Was Alana a part of this?

  Jo could hardly fathom that a pregnant woman would kill another woman, one who’d lost her own child.

  What about Kevin Harrison? Would he mix up his wife in a murder plot when it seemed more logical that he’d have gone to his father-in-law for help in ridding the world of a troublesome ex, to save his reputation and his career?

  Aw, hell.

  She rose from her crouch and slipped the locket into a coat pocket, digging in the other for the borrowed cell phone. Her emotions on overdrive, she punched in Hank’s number and started walking around the end of the trailer.

  “Hey, pretty lady,” she heard him answer, and she figured he saw his wife’s number and momentarily forgot he’d loaned out the phone.

  “Hank, it’s me,” she said, and he quickly sobered.

  “Oh, yeah, Jo. You okay?”

  “I found something.” The words came out faster than she intended, but she couldn’t hide her excitement. “I’m at the mobile realty office for Jacob Davis Properties on the farm road just about two miles from the quarry. I’ve got Jenny’s locket. We have to get a search warrant for the trailer. There’s a dumpster behind it. They might have missed something, Hank, and we have to find it before they have a chance to destroy it. This is the place,” she insisted, and it was more than a gut feeling this time. “Can you get a judge to sign off and meet me out here?” She finally paused to ask, “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at Dielman’s, looking for Lisa. I went to the station first. Your friend Terry Fitzhugh kept trying to reach you, and Emma Slater was looking for you, too. I talked to Emma myself. She said she ran the scarf, and it’s loaded with Jenny’s DNA—”

  “Well, it was her scarf,” Jo said, interrupting.

  “From her saliva,” Hank went on. “Emma thinks it was used to gag her.”

  “Oh, God.” Jo blinked, taking that one in, hating how this case kept twisting and turning just when she thought she’d figured it out. “You have to find Lisa Barton. We need to bring her in, sit on her. That scarf could tie her to the murder, and it can’t be the only thing—”

  “I know,” he talked over her. “That’s why I came back to the Dielmans’ house. Hold on a sec.” Jo heard the hum of voices, the scratch of static on the cell phone, then Hank’s mumble before he came back on. “Dielman said she went for ice at least a half hour ago, and she hasn’t come back.”

  A crow cried and alighted from a tree, rattling leaves, and Jo put a hand to her heart, startled. Damn, but she was jumpy.

  “You there, Larsen?” Hank was saying, but a noise—tiny annoying pings—swayed her attention from the phone to the graveled parking lot.

  She spied the white rental car where she’d left Kim listening to Keith Urban. The front driver’s-side door stood wide open.

  A brief shower of sun between clouds glinted off the beige roof of a car parked on the other side of Kim’s rental.

  Someone else was there.

  Jo saw a flutter of red across the gravel.

  Kim’s scarf.

  Oh, no, no, no.

  “Kim!” she called out, lowering the phone from her ear.

  The crackle of rushing footsteps behind her came as a warning too late.

  She half turned, glimpsing the spade of a shovel swinging fast. It clipped her shoulder and knocked the phone from her hand as she fell to her knees, pain shooting through her arm like fire. The shovel came at her again, striking the back of her head, sending her facedown into dirt and rocks. For a moment, she felt only agony.

  Then she felt nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Smoke.

  Jo smelled it even before she could get her eyes open wide enough to see.

  Wincing, she lifted her head from the ground, a tsunami of pain flooding her skull so fiercely that it made her stomach roll in waves. She fought the urge to vomit and gritted her teeth till her jaw ached. It felt like the mother of all hangovers, and it took her a minute to figure out where she was, what she was doing lying on her belly in the grit.

  Lifting her hand, she gingerly touched the soft spot above her nape, felt no damp, just a knot the size of a Whataburger. Her left shoulder throbbed, and she could hardly get it to move.

  Hank.

  Her partner’s name jumped out at her, reminding her of something, of needing to talk to him, and calling him to tell him about this place.

  Where had she dropped that cell phone?

  A loud crack filtered through the ringing in her ears, like the pop of a firecracker, and she forced herself upright, squinting at the world around her, everything in duplicate until she squished her eyes closed for a moment, then tried again.

  She saw the smoke first, puffing from the rooftop of the trailer maybe five yards away. The lick of orange flames ate at the plastic line of flags and chewed on the flimsy shoe box from the inside, lighting up the frosted windows.

  Burning down the
house.

  Bowie? No, no, Talking Heads.

  More like burning down the trailer.

  Her thoughts zigzagged, making her even dizzier.

  A blood-red carnation.

  Kimberly’s scarf.

  Red, red, red.

  Where was Jenny’s sister?

  Blurry double vision set in again, and she blinked hard, focusing to clear her disjointed thoughts. Every nerve in her body shouted for her to stay still, to put her head down. Instead, she wobbled to her knees, crawling on gray pea gravel that dug into the skin of her palms and pricked through her jeans.

  Just beyond the rental car, black shoes protruded at odd angles. Then she saw bare legs beneath a checkerboard skirt.

  There.

  Kim sprawled on the ground within arm’s reach, unmoving, trails of crimson streaking from ear to cheek.

  No, don’t let her be dead like Jenny.

  If she could just crawl over without her head falling off.

  Jo had almost reached her when she heard the pop again, like the crack of a rifle. Instinctively, she dropped down flat, hands over head, glass shattering from the trailer’s windows and raining to the ground, the fire louder now, hot enough that Jo could see black ashes fluttering down upon her skin.

  She dragged herself another few inches until she could touch the other woman, could reach fingertips to upturned wrist and feel a pulse.

  Not dead, not dead, not dead.

  Who would’ve done this? Left them alive, but torched the trailer to cover tracks?

  Jo lowered her forehead to her hands, willing the stabbing pain in her brain to cease. She rolled on her back to catch her breath, to close her eyes for a moment, listening to the fire grow angrier behind them, knowing she had to move them away, remembering metal tanks beneath the stairs.

  Propane.

  Lord, she was so tired.

  Another voice came to nudge her, whispered in her ear.