Chapter 5
Jennie
Newton Creek, Wisconsin
Present Day
There were times that Jennie wished her mind didn’t attach paintings to current circumstances.
Maybe it was a form of escapism, though, and it made some moments a little less real and more palatable.
Like the moment her mom was placed in hospice care and Jennie began traversing the perils of death, only a year ago.
She had thought of the painting The Cradle – Camille with the Artist’s Son Jean, where Claude Monet had brush-stroked the image of his mistress and later wife, Camille, as she bent over their infant son, Jean.
The image had carried Jennie through those final weeks, that of a mother lingering over her babe as Jennie nurtured her own mother through the journey toward death.
She hated how the cancer had stolen her mother from her, the one person on earth who understood Jennie’s passions and dreams. Not only understood them but shared them.
Now Jennie was again at death’s door, only this time she envisioned René Magritte’s L’Assassin menacé.
A contemporary painter, Magritte had painted a murdered woman—depicted nude and not something Jennie would hang on her wall—and yet there was so much story in the painting.
The murderer, the bowler-hatted men waiting to pounce, the voyeurs at the window of the scene of the crime—all were interdependent with each other.
In this moment, Jennie was one of the voyeurs.
She had been the one to discover the grisly skeletal remains at Traeger Sawmill; she the one to have to slop her way through the muck, extricate her phone from her pocket, and call the police; and she the one now forced to sit there waiting in a folding camp chair with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
Police vehicles had made their way to the scene of the old crime on the dirt road, now mud, that wound through the former Traeger property Jennie now owned.
The coroner had arrived as well. The place was crawling with strangers, as Jennie was new to Newton Creek.
This wasn’t her home; rather, it was her mess to clean up, and her mother’s dream to conclude.
“Did you move the remains at all?” Detective Darrow jerked her out of her thoughts. He’d introduced himself moments before and offered Jennie the camp chair.
“Um . . .” Jennie blinked rapidly, clearing her mind of Magritte’s muted colors of a crime scene to the equally dull colors that surrounded her now.
Browns, grays, blacks—even the trampled grass and waterlogged creek bank was a grim green.
Dying. It was all dying. Because of the floodwaters or the autumn temperatures or just—
“Miss Phillips?” Detective Darrow squatted by her chair to bring himself to her eye level. He had kind eyes, brilliant blue, which were in stark contrast to the dullness of this real-life impressionist vision Jennie was trying to awaken from.
Jennie sucked in a breath of cool fresh air, marred by the distinct scent of rotting algae. “I’m sorry. What did you ask?”
Detective Darrow offered a comforting smile. “I wanted to know if you moved or disturbed the remains at all.”
“No.” Jennie had come face-to-face with the empty eye sockets of the skull and then all but face-planted in the muck trying to get away from it.
“I might have . . . I mean, the mud and silt are slippery, so my getting back to the creek bank may have disturbed it some . . .” She let her sentence hang, not knowing what they were looking for exactly.
It was obvious this wasn’t a recent accident.
Or was it a crime? “Was the victim . . . ?” Jennie was about to say murdered, but she couldn’t form the word.
Detective Darrow glanced toward the group of people photographing and analyzing the remains. There was a stretcher with an empty bag on top of it, waiting for when they removed the deceased from its current burial ground.
“We don’t know yet.” Detective Darrow opened his mouth to say more but then snapped it shut, swinging his attention to the road as a beat-up, rusted truck fishtailed through the mud to a stop behind the other vehicles.
A man flung open the driver’s side door.
“Oh, great,” the detective muttered. “Zane Harris. Where’d he come from?” As if just realizing Jennie was there watching, he shuttered his frustrated expression and patted her knee. “Hang tight here, okay? I have more questions for you.” He straightened and strode to intercept the newcomer.
Jennie studied the man who’d just arrived.
He was an older version of the boy she’d sent off earlier—the boy who’d led her to the remains.
The same black curly hair and black brows that made his deep-set eyes appear a bit severe, at least from where Jennie was sitting.
He was attractive, athletic looking, unshaven by a few days, and wearing a blue flannel shirt that hung open over a gray T-shirt.
Even though they were several yards away, Jennie could hear the man as Detective Darrow approached him.
“Is it her?”
Darrow held his palms up as if to calm the man. “Zane, we don’t know.”
Zane pushed forward toward the mill, but Detective Darrow’s hand landed square in the middle of the man’s chest.
“Hang back, Zane.” Darrow’s tone was stern, and yet, Jennie noted, it didn’t carry the dogmatic insensitivity she would have expected from a police detective. Instead, there was a hint of empathy in his voice, threaded through the two simple words hang back—as in don’t look.
Jennie knew then that the body she’d found was somehow related to this man Zane.
Zane eyed her over Detective Darrow’s shoulder. He shoved the detective’s hand off his chest and marched toward Jennie.
She shrank into the camp chair as the man approached.
“Zane!” Detective Darrow shouted.
“Were you the one who sent my son to come get me?” Zane’s green eyes bored into hers, but he didn’t sound accusatory so much as desperate.
Jennie nodded, grasping the blanket the police had provided her and holding it tight around her shoulders. She wasn’t cold; the blanket just made her feel safer.
“I can’t believe . . .” Zane paced a few steps toward the mill and then spun back toward her. He looked at Detective Darrow as he came up alongside them. “Ben, you gotta tell me if it’s her.”
Detective Darrow’s mouth was set in a grim line. He shook his head. “I don’t want to speculate until we know—”
“Milo found her!” Zane interrupted. He pointed behind him at the mill wheel and creek bed. “My son found her, Ben.”
“I thought—” Detective Darrow bit off his sentence and turned to Jennie.
“It’s true,” Jennie acknowledged. “I was on the property, and I noticed a boy. It was . . . Milo?” She looked at Zane, who responded with a curt nod.
“He led me here. When I saw what I thought was a . . . a hand, I sent Milo for help.” She swallowed back a sick feeling rising in her chest. “I wanted to protect the boy from seeing anything.”
“Good thinking,” Detective Darrow affirmed.
“So?” Zane spun toward the detective. “Don’t mince words—what do you know, Ben?”
Darrow hesitated, and then with a sigh he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a plastic bag. Jennie saw the glint of metal.
Zane’s features fell. He reached for the bag, but Detective Darrow held it away from him. “Do you recognize this?”
“It’s Allison’s necklace. The one I gave her,” Zane said.
The hollowness of the man’s voice filled the air around them.
Jennie could sense the raw pain that was building.
She didn’t know who Allison was. She didn’t know how Zane Harris might be related to her, yet she had a gut feeling that Allison was the person whose remains she had come face-to-face with.
Detective Darrow continued, “We won’t know for sure until we run DNA, but yes—we think we found her.
Finally.” As soon as the words left the detective’s mouth, he reached out to steady Zane.
Zane stumbled as though strength had been stolen from his legs.
He bent low, gripping his knees for support. The detective patted him on the back.
Jennie blinked away tears. It was quite obvious that this Allison had been important in one way or another to Zane.
“Again, we can’t know for certain until DNA is confirmed,” Detective Darrow stated, “but the necklace was found near the remains. If you’re sure it was Allison’s—”
“I’m sure.” Zane slid closer to the earth, crouching with his forehead against his knees.
A guttural moan escaped from him, which carried across the creek bed to the mill and to the body, now in a black bag and being lifted.
The bag sagged as the skeletal remains proved just how small a person became after decomposing, the earth having claimed the deceased one and leaving behind only the frame that had once housed a soul.
Another groan, and Jennie’s eyes immediately filled with hot tears.
She didn’t know Allison who’d died, or Milo the boy, or Zane who’d collapsed to the ground.
But she knew death and grief, and worst of all, she knew the lack of resolution.
People thought answers brought closure. They didn’t.
They just compounded the infection in the already seeping wound of loss.
Whether from cancer or something more inexplicable like a body being found at a dilapidated sawmill, loss was loss.
Memories were seared into a person. The good, the bad, and the horrifying.
Yes. Jennie knew what this man was experiencing.
He was experiencing the black hole of loss, and once a person was sucked into that black hole, they could never get out.