The beeping of the machines monitoring her vitals was erratic. “Her heartbeat is irregular?”
The nurse nodded. “That’s not unusual in patients with severe hypothermia. She went into cardiac arrest when we first started working on her, and it is still a danger. But I promise you, we’re being very careful and we’re monitoring her continuously.” She checked the dialysis machine and the bags of fluid hanging on the pole at Evelyn’s bedside. “Are you here to arrest her when she wakes up?”
I thought I saw a flicker of muscle movement in Evelyn’s fingertips, but when I glanced at her face, it was still. “No.” I was here to thank her.
“I’ll be at the desk just outside if you need anything.”
I sat in the chair at her bedside, tipped my chin to my chest, and let exhaustion pull me under. I woke to the sound of shallow, rasping breath and lurched upright. I took one look at Evelyn’s face as she struggled for breath and lunged from the chair.
“Nurse!”
It was the same woman who had attended her earlier who came running at my shout. “I’ve paged the doctor. I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”
Over the next days, Evelyn’s body struggled to fight the pneumonia that settled in her lungs.
Maggie showed up at the hospital. “Go on home, Hector. You have work to do, and the dogs are waiting for you.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked as she pulled up a chair close to Evelyn’s bedside.
She enfolded the younger woman’s bandaged hand in her own. “Sit with her. She shouldn’t feel alone right now.”
Back in Raven’s Gap, I waited for updates on Evelyn’s condition. When pneumonia finally loosened its grip after days of antibiotics through a PICC line and breathing treatments, she was taken into surgery. She underwent a subsequent surgery the next day.
The FBI sent a team to help us process the greenhouse. The composting trench was a graveyard. Each rose bush was being dug up, every piece of soil examined. Thus far, the body count was over ten.
A search of his computer at work found a folder of photographs of the inn with Evelyn coming and going. There were files on Amanda and Rachel as well, and the technicians were still trying to retrieve the contents.
In the alleyway beside the hardware store, in the stairwell, and in his loft apartment, there were numerous cameras set up to record every angle of entry into his home. Motion detectors and half-buried electrical lines were found surrounding the greenhouse.
I pushed open the door to the apartment and studied the interior from the threshold. It was one large open space with exposed ducts and copper pipes, brick walls, and plank flooring. It was immaculate. Not a thing out of place, not a dish in the sink, not a crumb on the counter. The shower in the bathroom was dry, and there was not a wrinkle in his bed.
I donned a pair of black nitrile gloves and moved to the bookcases lining the far wall. Frank paced around the room sniffing in corners before he settled into a sprawl on the floor. Louie trotted at his heels and then curled up against him with a sigh.
I searched for hours. The evidence team had already been through the place with a fine-tooth comb. If there was anything in the apartment that hinted at something out of the ordinary, they would have found it. According to their reports, only the files hidden on his computer at the bookstore and the greenhouse showed his true nature.
Most of his books were first edition classics and gardening books on roses. I pulled one after the other off the shelf and flipped through them. An hour after I started on the books, I cracked the spine of a Faulkner tome and the pages slid aside to reveal a photograph tucked within.
I studied the photo with dawning realization. A boy and girl in their early teens sat on a porch swing. The girl grinned into the camera, all youthful beauty and enthusiasm. She wore a coat with polka dots over a flower print dress, and her hair was caught in two braids. The photographer had captured her just as she pushed her glasses up her nose. The boy stared at the girl beside him, face unsmiling. His gaze was fixed and held all the worship of a prepubescent boy.
I flipped the photo over, and on the back was a woman’s fine print. The first word was smudged, but the others read & Rose, 1986.
It took me a week of searching the National Crime Information Center files to find Rose Jeffers, listed as missing from Cawker City, Kansas since 1990. She had disappeared at the age of eighteen, last seen leaving her parents’ farmhouse in the company of her boyfriend, who had also never been seen again.
I called Cawker City, a minuscule dot on the map, and when I finally caught one of the few police officers on the phone, I was given Mary Ann Jeffer’s number.
When I explained who I was and why I was calling, the tremulous voice on the other end of the line said, “Someone finally believes me? Please, come over. I’ll put a kettle on.”
I gently informed her that it was a fifteen-hour drive and that she could wait to put the kettle on until the next afternoon.
I drove down through Colorado to avoid Nebraska. Kansas reminded me uncomfortably of the place where I had been born and left to raise myself. Windswept and empty, swallowed up by the sky. Forgotten middle America where the people perpetually squinted against the sun and lived and died within a narrow radius of plains. The endless openness had always left a knot in my throat. I had never been out on a boat in the ocean before, but I imagined that featureless stretch of barrenness was just as haunting.
Places like this whittled people down to bone and sinew and bitterness. My mother had been a prime example.
I reached the outskirts of Cawker City and followed the directions down a dirt county road until I reached a T in the road. In the northwest corner of the T, the house stood just as Mary Ann Jeffers had told me.
The windmill leaned precariously. The roof of the silo had fallen in on itself. The house was in desperate need of repairs and a paint job. Snow dusted a neat yard, though. The flowerbeds around the house would be a profusion of color come spring. There were cushions in the swing, and the porch was swept clean.
The woman who answered the door was worn and withered with age. Her eyes were bright, and her smile was kind.
“You’re the police officer who called me.”
“I am. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me.”
She glanced past me and eyed the figures staring at her from the cab of my truck. “Bring your dogs on in. I love dogs.”
Frank and Louie were only too happy to oblige as she ushered me into her home.
She led me into a sitting room that was clean and bright and decorated with an overwhelming profusion of floral patterns. “Make yourself comfortable,” she invited, and then shuffled from the room.
I stood awkwardly beside the blue sofa with glaringly pink flowers, but Louie hopped up onto the cushions and curled up against a green pillow with yellow flowers embroidered on it. Frank stood in the doorway, tail wagging. When I shifted to peer around the corner, I found him watching Mary Ann Jeffers load a tray with a tea kettle, saucers and cups, and a tin of cookies.
The saucers and cups rattled as she struggled to lift the tray, and I moved to take it from her.
“Oh, thank you, dear. That is very kind of you.”
I placed the tray on the coffee table and politely drank the heavily sweetened tea she poured for me. Even the saucer and delicate cup that my hands dwarfed had flowers on them.
Louie moved to her lap, and Frank rested his head on her knees. I pretended not to see her sneak them both a cookie.
“After I spoke with you on the phone, I pulled out all of my old albums.”
She nodded to a box beside a purple chair with white flowers on it. I placed the box at her feet and sat beside her as she retrieved a photo album. She wiped the dust away. The knuckles of her hand were gnarled, the skin crinkled like tissue paper over fine bones. There was a tremor in those bones as she turned the cover and angled the oversized book so I could see.
I
had not come for tea or to see baby pictures, to see the photographic evidence of a little girl aging from infant to teen. But I sat patiently for the next hour and made noncommittal noises over the albums.
Many of the photographs were torn in half, someone clearly and ruthlessly cut out of the picture. I noted that when the little girl was around seven or eight, she began to wear glasses. In most of the pictures she was laughing, bright-eyed and gap-toothed, sweet and innocent. In many of the pictures after she began to wear glasses, the camera caught her pushing her glasses up her nose.
“My Rosie was the sweetest thing,” she said softly. “She never met a person who didn’t fall in love with her, never met an animal that didn’t start following her around. She was just…sunshine. Sunshine and smiles.” Her voice was soft, and her fingers stroked over the pretty face behind the sleeve of plastic. She looked up and met my gaze. “The police never believed me. Do you finally believe me?”
“Tell me why the photographs are torn,” I said, keeping my voice gentle.
She bowed her head and let out an uneven breath. “Where Rosie was light, he was…darkness. Shadow. He loved Rosie to a point where I…I worried. It was obsession. It wasn’t natural.”
I handed her the photograph I had found in Jeff’s apartment. She covered her mouth with her hand as she studied the picture. “I tried to tell them,” she whispered.
“Tell me about him now,” I encouraged her.
“To everyone else, he seemed like such a good boy. So polite. So friendly. Such a handsome little boy. No one believed me.”
“I believe you.”
She shook her head and covered her eyes. Her next breath caught wetly and raggedly in her chest.
I took her hand and enfolded it between mine, waiting to speak until she composed herself and met my gaze. She wore glasses herself, and her eyes were damp behind the lenses. “I believe you. I’ve seen the bones. Everyone will believe you now. The evidence is there.”
She searched my face. “Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes slid closed, and it was not grief that made her face sag but relief. “Good,” she said. “Good.” She stroked Frank’s topknot and met his limpid gaze. “I know that should not be my reaction. But it is. I’m glad.”
And then she began to tell me what she had tried to tell everyone all those years ago.
Thirty-Seven
You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.
-Thomas Moore
EVELYN
I woke slowly, and it took a long moment before I realized I was in my new room on the first floor of the inn. Last night, I had been discharged from the hospital. When I turned my head, I could see the sunlight filtering around the edges of the tightly drawn curtains. The river sighed and warbled as it rushed past.
There was a heavy, cottony feeling in my head and a sore tightness in my chest. My hand felt heavy and numb. I lifted my left arm and studied my casted wrist and my hand swaddled in bandages. The sight still made my breath catch in my throat. The gauze left my thumb and first finger exposed. It was stunted on my middle finger and then wrapped flat to my palm where my ring finger and pinky should have been.
I drew my right hand from underneath the blankets and held it up to the early morning light. I turned it back and forth, reassured by the whole appendage marred only by deep but healing scratches. I flexed my hand, curled it into a fist, and then straightened and wiggled my fingers.
I turned my gaze back to my left hand. I no longer felt the wrench of emotion when I looked at my damaged hand.
Maggie, the owner of the diner, had been sitting at my bedside in the hospital when I first gained consciousness.
“By the time the search and rescue team found you, you were severely hypothermic and had frostbite.” I turned my head on the pillow and squinted at the blurry figure at my bedside. I flinched away when she leaned toward me before I realized it was Maggie. She pressed the remote to raise the head of my bed and stood to ease a pair of glasses onto my face. “Faye found this extra pair in your room at the inn. I hope you don’t mind that we went through your things.”
They were an old pair of glasses, not my current prescription. Even so, I sucked in a shuddering breath as the room came into focus. My chin trembled in relief at finally being able to see again, and I closed my eyes against the overwhelming flood of emotion. When I opened my eyes and saw my hand, saw that Maggie held it in her own and I could not even feel it, I had cried in earnest.
“I had frostbite?” I finally asked, voice a rasp around the weight in my chest. A rough cough rattled through me.
“It was most severe in your fingers and toes. Doctors tried to save your middle finger, but the gangrene persisted and they had to take part of it. You’ve lost two toes on your right foot.” Her voice had been matter of fact but gentle. “And part of your right ear.”
Shock reverberated through me. I lifted my unscathed hand to feel the bandage covering my ear, and I stared at the outline of my feet under the sheet. I could see the bulk of bandages on the right.
Now when I looked at my hand, when I felt the shorn remains of my ear, I remembered the certainty I had felt in the midst of the whiteout, the realization that I would die. And that was enough.
The next week was grueling. Maggie and Faye took turns driving me to physical therapy. The last remnants of pneumonia were hard to shake. The sensation began to return to my hands and feet, bringing with it a prickling awareness that pieces of me were missing. I remembered the small finger bone I had found in the greenhouse, and I shuddered. I could learn to cope with fewer digits, with the blisters from my altered stride, with the balance issues and the ache in the arch of my foot weighed against that fate.
I was questioned by the FBI. They had taken over the case. I repeated my story to them, from beginning to end, from the moment on the road mere weeks ago to the women I had found to the private collection at the museum to the horror of his greenhouse and the aftermath. I found the papers detailing the donation to the museum still folded in my pocket and gave them to the agents.
Hector and his poodle, Frank, with Rachel’s little dog in tow, came to the inn at the end of the week. Hector sat across from me in the great room. I grew chilled easily these days, and when he saw me shiver, he stoked the fire burning in the hearth.
“Thank you,” I said. “For finding me.” Frank hopped carefully onto the sofa alongside my stretched out legs and curled up against me.
Hector dipped his head toward the poodle. “Thank him.”
I threaded the fingers of my right hand into Frank’s curls. “Is this the end of it, then? For you?” I remembered the woman’s Mona Lisa smile in the banner in Ed’s shop. The little girl’s grin.
“It’s just the beginning.” His gaze lingered on my face with an expression I could not quite make out. “There have been fifty-six remains found. The forensics team is working on identifying them, but it will be a long process.”
They are all roses now. I shivered. “And Rose? He told me it had all begun with a woman named Rose. Have you found out who she was?”
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. His face moved as he rubbed the back of his neck. For the first time, I saw a chink in that harsh, still façade. He looked weary. “His real name was Russell Jeffers. Rose was his sister. His twin.”
My other half.
I dreamt of roses that night, their vines skeletal hands that reached out to me beseechingly and begged me not to forget them where they lay.
Epilogue
The Rose is without an explanation;
She blooms, because She blooms.
-Angelus Silesius
HECTOR
two months later
“I wanted to be the one to tell you,” Grover said when I answered the phone. The coroner continued before I could say anything. “I wanted you to hear
it from me and not read it in a report.”
“You found them.” Thank fuck. I could finally bring my girls home, where they belonged, where I should have cherished them.
The silence on the other end of the line went on for too long. “I wish I could tell you that. But the DNA matches came back with nothing, even on the Jane Does.” He sighed. “Their remains were not recovered at the greenhouse. I wish like hell I had answers for you. But they weren’t there, Hector.”
I sank onto the edge of my bed. My legs would not hold me up any longer. Frank jumped up on the bed beside me and curled up with his chin on my knee.
Given a serial killer’s reliance on patterns, if Winona and Emma were not found among the remains in the greenhouse, it was unlikely Jeff Roosevelt had killed them. The realization carved me open with a dull, serrated knife.
My instincts about the man had been right. I had used an innocent woman as a pawn to prove just that. But now the belief I had held for fifteen years that I knew who was responsible for the disappearance of my girls vanished. Fifteen years of certainty were burned to ash in an instant.
Pressure built behind my eyes, and I tilted my head back. The web was still tacked to my ceiling. Maps with Winona’s usual route in and out of town highlighted, memories of things she had said that might be a link scrawled on Post-It notes, receipts, photos printed from the CCTV camera footage around town in the weeks leading up to that one day. Tacks were shoved into the map at the locations she visited regularly. I had not pinned the photograph of Jeff Roosevelt back in place.
The blank spot in the center the labyrinth of clues stared back at me.
“Current institutional practices allow missing and murdered American Indian women to disappear not once, but three times—in life, in the media, and in the data.”
Hunting Ground Page 25
