The interior of the cottage was cozy. Jo liked the freshness of the off-white and pale florals she decorated in. The chippy paint she’d applied to update her furniture had turned her shabby yard sale finds into chic retro pieces. The cottage was small, but her needs were simple.
She had never planned to stay in White Rock. She’d come for a specific reason. But now that reason didn’t seem so important. She loved her job, and she loved working with Sam. And much to her dismay, she discovered that she wanted to stay in White Rock.
At first when she’d come, she hadn’t put any time into decorating the cottage because she thought she wouldn’t stay. But it had been a few years, and things had crept in. Yard sale finds, flea market treasures. Now she had it exactly as she wanted, comfortable and cozy. The cottage had become the home she never knew she wanted.
She’d even gotten a pet. Finn wasn’t a furry, cuddly pet like Lucy; he was a goldfish. A fish had been about all she could handle in the way of commitment.
Her eyes darted to the aquarium in the corner. Finn swam around, his orange-gold scales shimmering in the fluorescent tank lighting as he darted under the ceramic bridge then past the treasure chest that opened, sending bubbles rising to the top, before weaving around several aquatic plants in the corner.
She carefully plucked one large flake of food from the fish food container. She’d been training Finn to take food from her hand. She opened the lid and poised the flake just above the surface of the water. Finn swam up. His golden eyes looked up at her, his lips broke the surface, and he grabbed the flake before swimming down under his bridge. Odd—he usually stayed at the surface longer.
“What’s the matter, guy?”
Maybe he was lonely. Jo was a little lonely too. Maybe she should get a bigger pet, something that could sit in her lap. The few times Sam had come over with Lucy, it had felt good to have a dog in her cottage. It had seemed right. Now that she was sure she was staying, a pet could be the thing. The next step on the road to commitment. Not a dog, though. That was too big a step. Maybe a cat, like the stray out back. But she couldn’t have a pet in her cottage. She was just renting. Perhaps now was the time to buy a place.
With Finn fed, her eyes turned to the bedroom, and a familiar ominous feeling settled in. The room was decorated like the rest of the house. White chenille bedspread on a queen-sized bed, the headboard of which was an old fireplace mantel painted off-white. In the corner, a gigantic robin’s-egg blue armoire sat, the sight of which speared Jo with a pang of guilt.
Inside the armoire was the real reason she’d come to White Rock. A reason she’d never told Sam about. And now that Sam had shared his secret about his cousin and the knife, Jo felt that she should share hers. But the time had never been right, and now she thought that perhaps it was time to give up on the investigation that had haunted her most of her life. Somehow, it didn’t seem important to her anymore. It was time to move on.
She lifted the corner of the rug at the foot of her bed and grabbed the brass skeleton key that opened the armoire. The armoire was her workstation. Inside, her laptop sat on a shelf in the middle. The insides of the doors were covered with notes and photos on the two cases she was working.
One of those cases was Tyler’s. The other—the one that had been her obsession—was the case of her sister. Looking at the yellowed photos tacked inside the armoire door twisted Jo’s heart. She still mourned Tammy, who had been abducted when they were children thirty years ago. She’d never been found, and it had ripped Jo’s family apart. No wonder she had commitment problems.
The police had stopped looking after the case grew cold. Years later, when a female serial killer had been caught, the cops thought she’d been the one behind Jo’s sister’s disappearance. But the killer denied it. Jo had at least hoped she could tell her where her sister’s body was. The finality of a body would be difficult, but it would bring closure.
The cops said the killer might be holding back to use those last unclosed cases as leverage somehow. Jo wasn’t so sure. And that was why she’d become a cop and had been looking into the case herself all these years. She’d been led to White Rock when she’d heard rumors of a copycat killer in the area. But those rumors had been unfounded, and no killer ever surfaced.
Her sister’s disappearance had eaten away at her for years, but somehow, coming to White Rock had been cathartic. She’d found herself thinking less and less about solving her sister’s case and more about solving the cases that affected her new town.
Maybe now, after all these years, it was time to put her sister’s case to rest. Time to heal her old wounds and move on. And if she let go of her sister’s case, she wouldn’t have that secret. She’d never have to tell Sam about the real reason she’d hired on here.
Jo’s focus turned to the right side of the armoire, where she kept her notes and research on Tyler’s case. Here she had been, trying to find Tyler’s killer, and it turned out he had been screwing them over. She stifled the urge to rip all the notes and photos down and tear them to pieces. They still needed to find the box that key opened, and her notes might help. Now more than ever, she was afraid of what might be inside.
She turned back to the left side and carefully removed the photos, some of them brittle and yellow with age. Over the years, she’d collected whatever she could from the detectives who had originally investigated the case. She had notebooks filled with notes, all of which led nowhere.
She placed the photographs in a manila envelope, her gaze falling on one black and white of several shallow graves. That photo had haunted her dreams almost every night. Her sister was in a grave just like that, still waiting to be discovered and brought back home.
The graves all had something in common. They were all near beech trees that had some of the lower branches broken. When Jo had pointed this out to the officers who had investigated, they shrugged it off. They said she was trying to read things into the case that weren’t there. The case had been twenty years old by then. The original investigators had retired. No one really cared about an old cold case in which they thought they’d already incarcerated the killer.
Maybe they were right. Maybe, in her desperation to solve the case, she had been reading too much into the trees. It wasn’t uncommon for branches to break, especially with the harsh New England winters. Besides, she’d been all over the woods here in White Rock and never found any indication of unmarked graves near beech trees.
She slowly put the rest of the photographs in the folder then piled it on top of the notebooks. She opened the bottom drawer, took out several layers of folded jeans, and placed the folder and notebooks on the bottom before putting the jeans on top.
It was time to move on. It was time to start anew and focus on putting Thorne away so that she could clean up the town she intended to call her home for the rest of her life.
Chapter Seven
I’ve got good news and bad news,” Reese said the next morning as she came around the post office boxes into the squad room where Sam, Jo, Kevin, and Wyatt were going over the case. She held up a white bag from Brewed Awakening. “And doughnuts. Harry dropped them off.”
As she handed the bag to Jo, Sam glanced toward the lobby, expecting to see Harry, but he wasn’t there. Apparently, he’d dropped off the treats and left. Maybe he wasn’t so annoying after all.
“What’s the good news?” Sam asked as Jo passed him the bag of doughnuts. At his feet, Lucy’s ears whipped to attention at the sound of the bag opening.
“We’ve got a partial on that fingerprint from the leaf that Kevin bagged,” Reese said. “Turns out it is a print.”
Kevin pulled a cruller from the bag. “Really? Did you get a match?”
“No match.”
“So, that’s the bad news, then,” Jo said.
“Not quite.” The bag came back around to Reese. She ripped off a tiny piece of a glazed doughnut and chewed it thoughtfully. “This might be good news or bad news, I’m not sure, but that partial print did match something.”