My Sister's Grave

by Robert Dugoni

House roared in pain and fell back.

  Tracy spun, shoved a boot against the wall, wrapped the length of chain around her hands, and yanked hard on the metal plate. Bits and pieces of cement and plaster dust sprayed the room as the rusted bolts ripped free of the wall. Her wrists still manacled, the foot-long piece of chain between them, she lunged for the big revolver on Roy Calloway’s hip. She was fumbling to free the snap on the holster when she was yanked violently backward. Edmund House had grabbed the chain and tugged on it like a leash. She fell onto her ass, got to her knees, stood, and reached again for the gun. House wrapped the chain around her neck. She lifted a boot against the beam and shoved off, propelling herself backward into him.

  They crashed into and overturned the makeshift table, sending the generator to the floor. Tracy landed with her back atop House. He continued to choke her. She whipped her head backward, trying to butt him, and kicked and elbowed behind herself too. The chain tightened. Tracy fought to dig her fingers beneath the links, but House was too strong and her fingers wouldn’t fit. She lowered a hand, searching, felt the head of the spike and applied pressure. House screamed and cursed but the chain remained tight.

  She yanked up on the spike, hard. House screamed. The chain loosened. This time, when she whipped her head back, she struck something solid, and heard the bridge of his nose crack. The chain slackened more, enough for her to pull it over her head. She rolled off, fighting to catch her breath, her throat on fire. She crawled across the ground, hoping there was enough slack in the chain, which remained wrapped around House’s hand. She reached Calloway and freed the snap on the holster. This time she’d gripped the handle of the revolver before the chain pulled taut, yanking the manacles around Tracy’s wrists and violently jerking her arms. The gun flew from her hands, landing somewhere in the shadows across the room.

  House had staggered to his feet, the chain wrapped around his massive forearm. Blood stained his shirt where the end of the spike protruded and dripped from his nose down his chin.

  Tracy tried to stand but he yanked the chain again, causing her to sprawl onto the floor. He came toward her. The generator lay on the ground beside her. She grabbed the two copper wires and started to her feet. House tugged again. She did not resist.

  She flew into him, knocking him backward. When they landed, she pressed the stripped copper wires to the iron spike, creating a spark. There was a loud snap, and the smell of flesh burning. House quivered and twitched and jerked as the electricity passed through his body. In her head, she heard her student Enrique at Cedar Grove High shouting conductor. She lost the connection, found it again. House’s body jolted. Then he went limp.

  Tracy rolled off. This time she pulled the chain from his arm as she scrambled across the room in search of the gun. House moaned behind her. She looked back over her shoulder and watched him somehow roll to his hands and knees, like a bear struggling to get up. She felt blindly along the ground where it met the wall.

  House rose.

  Tracy’s hand swept the ground.

  House stumbled forward.

  She swept along the wall and felt the gun.

  House quickly crossed the room, too quickly for almost anyone to get off a shot. Almost.

  Tracy rolled onto her back, already pulling back the hammer. She fired, cocked the hammer, fired, cocked, and fired a third time.

  CHAPTER 70

  Tracy used her own body weight to counter Roy Calloway’s dead weight on the other end of the chain. When she had enough slack to free the chain from the hook that had been holding him up, she slowly lowered him to the ground. Calloway muttered incoherently. His breathing came in short, raspy breaths. He seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness. He was alive, but Tracy did not know for how long.

  Across the room, House lay face down on the ground. The first bullet had pierced his sternum, stopping his forward progress. Before he’d hit the ground, Tracy’s second shot had pierced him two inches to the left of the first bullet, exploding his heart. The third bullet had left a hole in his forehead and blown out the back of his skull.

  She found the key to the manacles in House’s pants pocket. After freeing herself, she cut House’s discarded clothing into strips and tied a tourniquet around Calloway’s leg. She did not attempt to remove the bear trap, fearing that she would further open the wound and Calloway would slip into shock, if he did not bleed to death. She cradled Calloway’s head in her lap. “Roy? Roy?”

  Calloway opened his eyes. Though the room remained bitterly cold, sweat beaded on his face, as if he were running a deadly fever. “House?” he whispered, voice weak.

  “Dead.”

  Calloway gave her a thin-lipped smile. Then his eyes fluttered closed.

  “Roy?” She slapped at his cheek. “Roy? Does anyone else know we’re here?”

  Calloway whispered, “Dan.”

  CHAPTER 71

  Dan met Finlay Armstrong, a second deputy, and two Cedar Grove locals with chainsaws at Roy Calloway’s Suburban. Leaving the locals to cut through the downed trees and clear a path to Parker House’s property, Dan and the two deputies took off up the mountain toward the house and littered yard.

  The snow had let up and the wind had lessened, making the trek not as difficult and bringing an eerie peace—as if they were in the eye of a tornado. When they reached the building, they found Parker alive, but he looked to be in even worse shape than when Dan had left him.

  “You stay here,” Armstrong said to Dan, “and wait for the ambulance to arrive.”

  “Not a fucking chance,” Dan said. “I’m going with you to get her.”

  Armstrong looked about to debate, but Dan used the same line Calloway had used on him.

  “We don’t have time to debate this, Finlay. Every second we remain down here is another second for House to kill both of them.” He started for the back door. “Let’s go.”

  Armstrong and Dan climbed the mountain. Having grown up in Cedar Grove and hiked the hills their entire lives, they knew the way to what had been the Cedar Grove mine. The snow made everything look different, but their path was carved by footprints that must have been left by Calloway.

  Twenty minutes into their hike, they found snowshoes staked in the ground about fifteen feet below what looked like the entrance to a cave. Someone had recently carved it larger. Deep boot prints had created a path to and from the opening, and there was a long imprint that looked as if someone had been dragged across the snow. That was disconcerting in itself. More disconcerting was the trail of blood that streaked the snow and led to the mouth of the mine.

  They knelt outside the entrance, and Finlay shone his flashlight into the tunnel before he entered the mine first, his shotgun at the ready. Dan clutched the rifle. Their flashlights sent two cones of light down the shaft.

  “Turn it off,” Dan whispered, shutting off his own flashlight.

  They were plunged into complete darkness. After a few seconds, however, Dan saw a faint orange glow emanating about twenty feet down the tunnel. They walked toward it and came to a doorway leading into a room. Finlay paused outside, then flipped on his flashlight and spun in, shotgun extended. Dan followed with his light and rifle. The cones of light swept over what had apparently been an office, with metal desks and chairs and army-green file cabinets.

  The orange glow was coming through an opening in the paneled wall at the back of the room.

  “Here,” Tracy said. “I’m in here.”

  Dan started for the door but Finlay grabbed his arm. “Tracy?” Finlay called out. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “House is dead.”

  Finlay stepped into the room, Dan behind him.

  A bare bulb dangled from a wire. Beneath it, resting against a wooden beam, Tracy sat cradling Roy Calloway’s head in her lap. In the far corner lay Edmund House, blood saturating the back of his head and his shirt.

  Dan knelt and hugged her. “You all right?”

  She nodded, then looked to Calloway.
“He’s not going to last long.”

  Morning dawned and with it, the storm passed. Tracy stood near the mine’s entrance, which had been dug out by Finlay and the others who had responded to his call for help. She wrapped the thermal blanket around her shoulders as she considered the patches of blue sky and shafts of sunlight knifing through the cloud layer in hints of magenta, rose, and orange, a post-storm sky. In the distant valley, the rooftops of the houses in Cedar Grove looked like tiny pyramids. Smoke spiraled from chimneys and curled into wisps in the dead air. Tracy had had a similar view from the window of her bedroom, and the knowledge that she knew so many in those homes had always brought her a sense of peace and comfort.

  A noise from farther down the mine shaft drew her attention, and she looked back and watched paramedics carry Roy Calloway, bundled in blankets, out of the mine on a sled. Calloway turned his head and made eye contact as they carried him past. Tracy followed them outside, watching as they lowered the sled to the snow and tethered it between two snowmobiles.

  “He’s still a tough son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Dan said, walking up behind her.

  “Like a two-dollar steak,” she said.

  Dan wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. “So are you, Tracy Crosswhite. And you can still shoot. No denying that.”

  “What about Parker?” she asked.

  “He’s critical. DeAngelo Finn is too.”

  “DeAngelo?”

  “Yeah. Looks like House was settling up with everyone. Hopefully we reached them in time. Hopefully they’ll all be okay.”

  “I’m not sure any of us is going to be okay,” she said.

  He adjusted the blanket around her shoulders. “How’d you do it? How’d you get free?”

  Tracy watched a tendril of smoke that had spiraled up from one of the chimneys, which hung motionless, like the vapor trail left by a jet. “Sarah,” she said.

  Dan gave her a quizzical look.

  “House wanted me all along,” she continued.

  “I know, Calloway told me. I’m sorry, Tracy.”

  “He must have told Sarah he intended to bring me here next. She carved me the message in the wall. Even if he’d seen it, House wouldn’t have known what it meant. Only I knew. It was the prayer we used to say together at night. It was a message to me. Sarah wanted to let me know she’d found something to dig at the wall, to loosen the bolts. She must have just run out of time, and the concrete would have been stronger twenty years ago than it is now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s chemistry.” She sighed. “That wall was poured some eighty years ago, maybe longer. Over time, the chemicals from the decaying plants wicked down through the soil and interacted with the concrete. When concrete deteriorates, it cracks, and we know that water will always find its way through cracks. When water reached the bolts, it caused them to rust. When the bolts rusted, they expanded, cracking the concrete even more. Sarah scratched the message in the wall, but what she was really doing was using the spike to chip away at the concrete behind the plate and around the bolts.”

  “Mrs. Allen would be proud,” he said.

  Tracy rested her head on his shoulder. “We used to say that prayer together when Sarah was young. She was afraid of the dark. She’d sneak into my room and crawl in bed next to me, and I’d tell her to shut her eyes and we’d say it together. Then I’d turn out the lights and she’d fall asleep.” She started to cry, not bothering to wipe away the tears. “It was our prayer. She didn’t want anyone to know she was afraid. I miss her, Dan. I miss her so much.”

  He squeezed her tight. “Sounds like she isn’t gone. Sounds like she’s still with you.”

  She quickly raised her head and pulled back to consider him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “That’s the strange thing about it. I felt her, Dan. I felt her presence here with me. I felt her leading me to that spike. There’s no other way to explain why I dug in that exact spot.”

  “I think you just did explain it.”

  CHAPTER 72

  The snowstorm had stranded the media, which had come from all over the country to attend the post-conviction relief hearing, in Cedar Grove and the nearby towns. When news broke about DeAngelo Finn and Parker House, and about what had happened in the Cedar Grove mine, reporters and their cameramen rushed from their hotels to their vans. Maria Vanpelt was in her glory, broadcasting from all over town and telling anyone who would listen that she had been first to break the story on KRIX Undercover.

  Tracy had watched the media frenzy unfold on the television from the comfort of Dan’s couch, Rex and Sherlock on the floor beside her as if to protect her from the horde of reporters who had camped outside Dan’s home. Knowing the media would not leave them alone until she had addressed them, Tracy sent word she would hold a press conference at the First Presbyterian Church, the only building in Cedar Grove big enough to accommodate the anticipated crowd. The church where they’d held her father’s funeral.

  “I’m doing it to appease the brass,” she told Kins over the phone.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “I’m not buying that for a second. If you’re doing it, you have an ulterior motive.”

  Tracy and Dan stood in an alcove at the front of the church, hidden from the crowd that filled the pews and stood along the aisles.

  “You did it again,” Dan said. “You’ve managed to make Cedar Grove relevant. I hear the mayor is telling anyone who’ll listen that Cedar Grove is a quaint little town full of opportunity and ripe for development. He’s even talking about reviving the long-abandoned plans for Cascadia.”

  Tracy smiled. The old town deserved a second chance. They all did.

  She peered out at the sea of faces, her gaze flowing over the standing-room-only crowd. The media throng sat up front with notepads and tape recorders. Cameramen had established positions in the aisles from which to film. The locals and the curious had also come, many of the same faces that had come to Sarah’s service and sat through the hearing. George Bovine sat in a pew near the front, his daughter Annabelle seated between him and a woman who was presumably his wife. He had told Dan over the phone that he thought the finality of the event, that knowing that Edmund House was indeed dead, might help his daughter finally find closure and begin to slowly move on with her life.

  Sunnie Witherspoon and Darren Thorenson had also come, and toward the rear, Tracy saw Vic Fazzio’s unmistakable mug a foot above the crowd, along with Billy Williams and Kins.

  “Wish me luck.” She stepped from the alcove into the clicking of dozens of cameras and whirl of flashing lights. The bouquet of microphones taped to the podium was even more substantial than the one that had greeted Edmund House at his post-hearing press conference at the jail.

  “I’d like to keep this short,” Tracy said. She unfolded a sheet of paper containing her prepared notes. “Many of you are wondering what transpired following the hearing that culminated in the release of Edmund House. As it turns out, I was correct. Edmund House was wrongfully convicted. I was wrong, however, in thinking him innocent. Edmund House raped and murdered my sister, Sarah, just as he confessed to Sheriff Roy Calloway twenty years ago. But he did not kill or bury her right away. He kept Sarah captive for seven weeks in an abandoned mine in the mountains. Shortly before the Cascadia Falls Dam went online, he killed her and buried her body. The area flooded, seemingly covering his crime forever.”

  She took a breath and gathered herself. “Many of you are wondering who was responsible for convicting Edmund House. I’ve wondered the same thing for twenty years. I now know that the person responsible was my father, James Crosswhite. For those of you who knew my father, I understand that this is probably hard to accept, but I ask you not to condemn him. My father loved Sarah and me with all his heart. When she disappeared, it broke him. He was never the same man.” Tracy looked to George Bovine. “What he did, he did out of love for her, and for every father who loves his daughter; he was determined to en
sure that no father would ever suffer the grief that he and George Bovine had suffered because of Edmund House.”

  She took another moment to gather her emotions. “The only logical and reasonable conclusion is that after Edmund House confessed to Chief Calloway, taunting him that they would never convict him without my sister’s body, my father gathered the strands of hair from the hairbrush in the bathroom that my sister and I shared in our childhood home, and placed that evidence in the Chevy stepside. And it was my father who hid Sarah’s earrings in a sock in a can in the toolshed on Parker House’s property. As a country doctor, my father made frequent house calls, including calls on Parker. It was my father who reviewed every tip received about Sarah and who called Paul Hagen and convinced Mr. Hagen that he’d seen the red Chevy that night he had driven through town. My father acted alone in doing these things. I want to emphasize that neither Roy Calloway, Vance Clark, nor anyone else, to my knowledge, played a part in my father’s wrongdoing. My father’s actions were born from grief, despair, and desperation. We can all question his actions, but hopefully you won’t question his motives.

  “For those of you who knew my father, I ask that you remember that man—a faithful husband, a loving father, a loyal friend.” She folded her notes and looked up. “I will be happy to answer your questions.”

  And the questions came in a flurry. Tracy bobbed and weaved around them, answering what she could, deflecting others, and pleading ignorance when necessary. After ten minutes, Finlay Armstrong, the Acting Sheriff of Cedar Grove, stepped forward and ended the conference. Then he provided Tracy and Dan a police escort out of the church and back to Dan’s home, where they again went into seclusion, protected by the best security system in town.

  The following day, Tracy walked into Roy Calloway’s room in the Cascade County Hospital. She found Calloway sitting up, though leaning back at a forty-five-degree incline with his leg suspended in a sling above the bed. “Hey, Chief.”