The garage door stopped with a final rattle. My ragged breathing was the only sound in the sudden quiet. Another deep breath and I realized my legs felt quivery. “The cemetery?” Mitch prompted.
I nodded. Mitch knew the path as well as I did from his jogs. “Part of it’s washed away. There’s an open grave and bones.”
His grip eased a bit. “It’s probably been there for at least a century, Ellie. It’s not surprising—”
“Mitch.” My sharp tone cut him off. In the twilight, his dark eyes looked almost black. “There’s one open grave and two skulls.” We stared at each other for a moment. “The missing woman—the posters. We have to call the police,” I said.
He nodded, reluctantly. This wasn’t the first time we’d had to call the police. “Look, I wish I hadn’t seen it. I don’t want to call them either.” I knew there would be an endless round of questions and a very late night after that phone call. “But we have to.”
“I know.” His voice was quiet, restrained. “Were they…recent?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, there was no…skin or anything. That’s why I think it might be her…Jodi. She’s been missing for almost a year. If her body’s been in the woods that long…” I couldn’t bring myself to talk about a human body decomposing. “I thought it was a Halloween mask. It wasn’t gross, just…” I searched for the right word. “Eerie. The path was so still and deserted.”
He released my arms, picked up the garbage bag with one hand, and circled my shoulders with his other arm. “Let’s go inside. I’ll call. You can go wash the mud off before they get here.”
Two hours later, I sat on the curb near the stop sign where I’d talked to Coleman May. I felt a bit of mud still stuck to my arm and rubbed it away. The sky and woods were dark, but the path was full of light and movement. Bars of light sliced through the trees and hurt my eyes when I glanced from the pale moonlight that bathed the rest of the street to the glaring lights.
I checked my watch and figured Mitch would be here in a few minutes. We’d decided that he would stay and get the kids in bed, then call our neighbor Dorthea to come sit with them while he met me at the path. We figured it would be best to keep the kids on their schedule and not disrupt their routine. No need for the whole family to be freaked out.
It wasn’t the police, but the sheriff’s department that responded to the call. I’d forgotten that our subdivision was in an unincorporated area of the county and the sheriff had jurisdiction here. The man who arrived first was unfailingly courteous, but his good manners barely coated his skepticism when I told him what I’d seen.
By the time I walked down the path with the officer, I’d begun to doubt my story, too. But his strong flashlight picked up the unmistakable human remains and cracked casket.
The officer had escorted me back to the neighborhood street and cordoned off the whole path. Then the parade began—cars, vans, SUVs, all with official logos on their doors, disgorging their official people. I watched the show with a strange feeling of detachment. When the neighbors began to emerge from their houses, I’d shrunk back, not wanting to talk to anyone. I planted myself on the curb where the dark night and the front tire of a sheriff car shielded me from curious looks.
I watched a young man stride quickly toward me. He had a badge clipped to his belt and was dressed in chinos and a navy polo shirt with the words Dawkins County Criminal Investigation Division stitched on it. I stood up.
“Mrs. Avery?” he asked, extending his hand. “I’m Detective Dave Waraday. You found the remains?”
As I shook his hand, another officer trotted up to us and hovered. Waraday said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and stepped over to the officer. When we first moved here, I might have been slightly offended to be categorized as a “ma’am,” but now I knew it was just ordinary courtesy. Southerners took politeness to a new level and sprinkled “ma’am” and “sir” throughout their conversations.
The second officer said, “The GBI is on the way.”
“Good.” Waraday nodded. “Let me know when they get here. And move those people back,” he said, glancing at a cluster of people beside the yellow tape. “I don’t want anyone slipping past us through the trees to the site.”
“Yes, sir.” The officer nodded and raised his voice. “Okay, step back, please. Y’all can head on home.”
I studied Waraday as he turned back to me. This was the boss? The other man had certainly spoken to him with a deferential tone and looked to him for instruction, but Waraday looked more like a high school quarterback than a crime scene investigator. How long had this guy been investigating crimes? Was he even old enough to rent a car?
I couldn’t see a wrinkle anywhere on his face. My path had crossed with a few law-enforcement types, and from what I’d seen, time had certainly left its mark on them: wrinkles, gray hairs—or no hair—and a weary manner marked most of them, well, except for Thistlewait, a military investigator I’d met at our last assignment. He’d actually had a full head of nongray hair, but he’d been in his thirties.
Waraday tilted his notepad toward the light and jotted down my pertinent information, then said, “Do you walk this path often?”
“Yes. Lots of people in the neighborhood take it when they’re walking or jogging.”
“When was the last time you walked it, before tonight?”
“I’m not sure.” I looked over his shoulder at the beginning of the path. “I’d have to look at a calendar, but I think it was last Saturday. It’s been raining nonstop for at least a week, so it wouldn’t have been this week.”
“And you didn’t notice anything out of place with the Chauncey Cemetery last time?”
I shook my head. “No. But it’s not like I check it every time I walk by it. For weeks, I didn’t even notice it. Chauncey? That doesn’t sound familiar,” I said.
“The Chauncey family died out a couple of generations back. They owned everything south of the railroad depot. You know that white house on Scranton Road right before the turn-in to Magnolia Estates? That was theirs. It was the only house for miles and the cemetery was their family plot.”
“I’d wondered why no one kept it up. It’s not surprising it’s in such bad shape.” Waraday went back to writing in his notepad. I was surprised he’d shared that bit of local history with me. In my run-ins with the police, I’d found they were fond of asking questions and never too keen to give answers.
Maybe I should stop right here and clarify. I’ve never been arrested. Although it’s been close. I wondered how Waraday would feel about me once he found out that I’d been involved in murder investigations. Would he be as chatty? Maybe his friendliness was a southern thing.
I rotated my shoulders to relax them. No need for me to worry about getting mixed up in this investigation. I’d sworn that off after last time. And there was no way I could be considered a suspect this time. Those bones had obviously been there a long time, and since I’d never set foot in Georgia, much less Dawkins County, until ten months ago, I was in the clear.
“Did you touch anything?”
“No. I thought the first one was a Halloween mask, but when I got closer, I knew it wasn’t a costume. I did go to the top of the little rise beside the cemetery to see if any more graves were open. I tried to stay away from the mud.”
He’d been writing, but his gaze snapped up to mine. “And why did you do that?”
“Because if there were other graves open, then two skulls wouldn’t be that strange. It would be bad, don’t get me wrong, but it wouldn’t cause this.” I looked around at the jam of cars and milling people.