Not much happens down here. He apparently hadn’t grown up in Belmont.
The air was almost a physical presence, a sheet of wet fabric. Climbing up the hill was harder than going down it had been, and I was breathing hard by the time we were halfway back to the overlook. Or I thought that was where we were, anyway. I was disoriented. The rain and the soft, sloping ground made me feel like we were in a snow globe. I glanced around us, uneasy. Leaves, fallen branches, rocks. In the fading afternoon light, the scene in front of me glowed orangish brown. I tried to picture the map from my father’s notebook and wondered where Mallory Evans had been found. I remembered a curving border from his sketch—the access road or the fence, probably the former since the latter looked newer than sixteen years old. Either way, the body was discovered inside of that line, buried ten inches below the ground, covered with rocks and leaves. I tried to take in the scene through my father’s eyes. I knew I only had a few minutes before we got back to the party spot below the overlook.
Leaves were everywhere.
Rocks were, too.
I was looking for a ghost.
Everything seemed suspicious, to the same extent that nothing did.
But about twenty yards past the overlook, something caught my attention: another small plank bridge running across the dried-up creek, this one oddly fortified underneath with large, flat rocks. I squinted through the misty air, noticing an unnatural object sticking out from the rocks. Something folded and shiny.
“What is that?” I said, pointing.
Meeks frowned. “What are we talking about here?”
Instead of answering him, I made a beeline for the bridge, thinking I just wanted to see, I was just curious. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the tarp that Mallory Evans was buried in. The tarp that haunted my father. That’s the work of someone cold as hell, Tom had said.
Behind me, footsteps descended on the leaf-covered steps. “Russ, everything okay down here?” a familiar voice said.
I kept walking but looked over my shoulder to see Sergeant Derrow, also draped in a plastic poncho. He gave me a seen-it-all smile. “What’s going on?”
“I was just telling her that the chief would like a word,” Meeks said.
“He does. An urgent one,” Derrow said. “Come on along.”
“Not sure why she’s down here,” I heard Meeks reply.
“Miss Weary, I’m going to have to ask you to come with us. Now,” Derrow said.
But by then, I was already at the bridge and I jumped down into the creek bed beside the rocks. Up close, the shape became a triangle of plastic, wrinkled and mud-covered but distinctly blue. The rocks themselves were flat and and mossy. One of them lay a foot or so from the others, like it had recently dislodged itself to expose the tarp. I moved a few of them away and found myself looking at another piece of wood, flush against the bed of the creek. Only a few inches of the blue tarp stuck out from under it.
Meeks and Derrow had now caught up to me. “Let’s go,” Derrow said. “Now.”
But Meeks was looking down at the creek bed. “Is this why you were down here?” he said to me.
“No,” I said, then, “I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
Without saying anything else, Meeks got into the creek on the other side of the bridge and peered at the rocks, toed the blue triangle. “Jack, take a look here.”
Derrow stepped down into the creek bed and frowned.
“It looks out of place, doesn’t it?” I said, my nerves vibrating.
Meeks started helping me move the rocks, and then Derrow joined in as well. The rocks weren’t too heavy, but there were a lot of them. We began stacking them on the bridge in neat rows, like teeth.
“Maybe we should get the Parks department,” Derrow said. “Looks like maybe someone didn’t finish what they started. Easy to get away with it. Nobody comes this far out here anymore.”
“I don’t know,” Meeks said, uneasy.
“What kind of Parks department project involves a blue tarp buried in the woods?” I said, but both cops looked up at me like I wasn’t entitled to an opinion on the matter. Maybe I wasn’t. But at least they were helping me, rather than dragging me away by my hood.
It took ten minutes or so to clear them away, and then we stared at the sheet of chipboard in silence. Wet and muddy, no more than an inch thick. It didn’t look like much, but I had this terrible feeling that it was actually a hell of a lot.
“There’s just going to be a hole with worms and shit under this,” Meeks said, in a way that told me he knew better.
“Yeah,” I said, even though I knew better too.
I held my breath as we lifted it up.
Underneath it, another layer of rocks and mud couldn’t quite cover a long, blue bundle.
“Don’t touch anything,” Derrow said, but I was already reaching for the edge of the tarp.
“Sarah,” I heard myself say.
SEVENTEEN
Chief Jake Lassiter was not happy with me. I doubted there were any circumstances under which he would have been, but he was especially irritated with me now that I’d discovered human remains inside his town’s jurisdiction. More cops had come quickly, cut a bolt on the chain-link fence to allow entry to the ravine from the access road, and set up a perimeter that ran from the fence to the bottom of the cliff, and a few hundred yards north and south. I was banished to the viewing platform, where I now stood in the rain with Chief Lassiter. He reminded me of Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men as he delivered a long, red-faced lecture to me on the importance of trusting The Justice System, a phrase he seemed to capitalize with his mouth.
“The system,” he was saying, “doesn’t work if just anyone thinks they can go around playing detective.”
I did not remind him that I actually was a detective, that my license, though not on par with a peace officer certification, was nonetheless part of this system. I just stood there, arms folded across my chest against the chill in the air and, also, the chill in my blood—from the sight of the brown, brittle bones nestled in the folds of that blue tarp. The sparse strands of long, blond hair. My cases usually stuck to the problems of the living, to the trouble people make for each other. It seemed like a meaningless distinction, that I’d never seen anything quite so dead before, but I hadn’t, and I couldn’t stop thinking that.
“And you have no idea how upsetting it is for the residents of Belmont, having you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong,” he added. “This is a real nice town.”
At that point, I’d had enough. “Sarah Cook has been buried in these woods for fifteen years and you still want to say it’s a nice town?”
He bit off a laugh, shaking his head. “Sarah Cook.” He spit the name out, like he had every other time he’d said it during our conversation. “We don’t even know if the remains are human.”