27
After she’d left Ollie at the theater, Emma had turned out of the lot, driven for two minutes, and then pulled into a convenience store lot and parked.
She’d sat silently in her car for a long time, her brain going in a dozen different directions.
Customers had given her odd looks as they passed by her car with their huge sodas and six-packs of beer. Emma ignored them.
An ugly thought and possibility had entered her mind during the movie, and she couldn’t shake it. It was a nagging question that had evolved into an obsession in a matter of minutes. She needed an answer. Today. So while she sat in front of the store, she’d made a phone call.
Now she was driving to the old house where she’d lived with her parents. Guilt racked her for lying to Ollie—well, it wasn’t really a lie. Her stomach still felt horrible, and she knew it wasn’t from the popcorn. But she couldn’t forget his disappointed face.
As she drove, her charm bracelet clanked against the steering wheel. She’d been so happy to wear it on her date. The bracelet was the only thing she owned of her mother’s. When the heroine’s mother died in the movie, Emma had gone through the charms, rubbing each one between her fingers.
Two months ago Noelle had taken her to the old house to retrieve her mother’s Christmas charm bracelet, and Emma hadn’t been back. She hadn’t ever wanted to go back.
But here I go.
Her father had destroyed everything of her mother’s, including by burning family photos and even her clothing. For ten years the house had been a miserable place after her mother had left. There was no money. Little food. No love. Her father had treated her like a servant.
A full-body ripple of anxiety drove up her heart rate and breathing.
My dad is gone. Uncle Tommy said he’s dead.
There’s nothing left in that house.
Emma wasn’t going to be at the house alone today. She had called Rowan Wolff from the convenience store parking lot and asked if she would meet her there. And bring Thor.
“I don’t know if this is a good idea, Emma,” Rowan had said on the phone. “If you suspect something, you should tell the police. Or Noelle. Max. Evan. Any one of them can help you.”
“But I don’t know if something happened,” Emma had said. “I’m just wondering.”
Wondering if my mother’s body is buried near our home.
Buried by my father.
Emma knew Thor had found the bodies buried in the woods. All she wanted was for Rowan to take him around the property and see if he reacted.
“He’s not a trained cadaver dog,” Rowan had said, but Emma heard a softening in her tone and knew she could be persuaded.
“I’ll accept whatever results you get with him,” Emma had told her. “I just need to get these thoughts out of my head.”
Rowan had reluctantly agreed to meet her at the property in an hour.
Emma took a hard right turn onto an unmarked gravel road, thankful Noelle had picked a car with all-wheel drive that could handle the deep ruts, gravel, and sand on the road to the old house.
Minutes later, after winding through scrubby pines and big volcanic boulders, she slammed to a stop, and a wave of dust rolled over the car as she stared.
The house was gone.
Not exactly gone.
It’d been torn down and was now a giant, chaotic pile of wood and metal waiting to be hauled away.
Wide tracks left by construction equipment circled the huge, haphazard mound.
Emma realized she’d seen some of the tracks on the gravel road but hadn’t thought anything of them.
She’d been too busy thinking about her bracelet and the movie heroine’s dead mother.
Her heartbeat pounded in her head, and she shuddered, unable to look away.
That garbage pile is my childhood.
She blinked rapidly and brushed her eyes with the back of her hand, embarrassed that she was crying at the loss of a place that had made her miserable for years.
It wasn’t all miserable.
She had a few good memories of her mother where the two of them took long walks of discovery in the woods near the home, her mother teaching her about plants and the little critters that lived nearby.
Every day she had pushed Emma on a swing hung in a tall tree until one day they went to use it and it’d vanished, leaving sliced ropes far above their heads.
Emma recalled how her mother had stared at the ropes for a long time and then pronounced that an animal must have chewed through them.
For years Emma had accepted that explanation. Until she’d found the seat of the swing in her father’s shed with its perfectly cut stubs of rope still attached.
Even then he hated me. Hated us.
Her mother had always baked a cake and sung to her on her birthday.
She’d made a big deal of every holiday, decorating with whatever she could find since they didn’t have much money.
Often using flowers or greenery from the woods near their home.
Her mother tried hard to make even Arbor Day and Flag Day feel like big celebrations.
Before her mother disappeared, Emma hadn’t realized how truly poor they were.
The crumpled debris pile in front of her didn’t look like it had ever been a home.
Maybe it had always been a pile of garbage.
But this was where Emma had found Cornbread. Definitely an important blessing.
Emma slowly drove the car forward. She automatically looked to park in the level area where her father had always parked, but part of the debris pile now covered the spot.
Imagining getting a nail in her tire, Emma parked a good distance away from the loose boards, turned off the car, closed her eyes, and listened.
It sounded the same. A faint rustling of wind in the pines. A few birds. No traffic noise.
She missed the clucking of the chickens, thankful that a farm down the road had taken them in.
Emma opened her eyes; the ugly mound was still there.
Anger lit a small fire in her belly, and she got out of the car, determined to examine the destruction.
Did Noelle order this?
No. Noelle would have told her.
Emma’s parents hadn’t owned the property.
They’d always rented the old single-wide mobile home.
But Noelle might have contacted the owner to let him know the home was now empty.
He must have decided it was a good time to cut his losses and take down the ancient structure.
By last winter, it’d barely been habitable.
Her father had rarely done repairs. The house was always cold.
It only had one door, so it was also a firetrap.
By destroying it, the owner had likely avoided a future lawsuit.
Emma stepped closer. If she hadn’t lived in it, she would never have recognized the huge pile of rubble as the home.
Pink insulation, broken boards going every which way, pieces of black roofing, collapsed metal siding.
The front door was still in one piece, haphazardly tossed on one side of the pile.
Part of the little front porch was nearby, and she spotted the dark stain where she’d knocked over some dirty motor oil her father had left in a tray on the porch.
He’d made her scrub the stain, but it’d been impossible to remove. The memory of his anger sent a chill up her spine, and she clenched her fists. She could still hear his shouts and smell the beer on his breath.
But I made Cornbread a place to sleep near that spot.
A good memory set on top of a bad one.
Tires sounded on gravel, and she spotted the cloud of dust that indicated someone was headed her way.
Rowan’s Tahoe came into view. Thor’s head hung out the window, his tongue flapping, his ears pointed her way.
The SUV parked by Emma’s car, and Rowan stepped out of the vehicle, shock in her eyes at the sight of the huge stack of debris.
“Emma! Did you know about this?”
“No. It was a surprise.” Her emotions had settled a bit; she’d accepted the mobile home was no more.
I’m okay with that.
The blonde woman let Thor jump out of her door, and she strode toward Emma, her usual limp barely noticeable. “My God. I’m so sorry. What a mess!”
Emma didn’t want to look at the pile again, so she held out a hand to Thor, who gave it a close sniff and a happy lick.
“I was upset at first, but I’ve had a few minutes to get over it.
It wasn’t a very happy place for me.” In fact now there was a little satisfaction in her chest that someone had violently torn down a place she’d always wanted to escape more than anything.
“Thank you for meeting me. It means a lot.”
“Are you sure you want to do this today?” Rowan’s worried brown gaze held hers.
“I’m sure.” Emma had no doubts.
“How big is the property?”
Emma frowned. “I think it’s a few acres, but I don’t know where the property lines are.
There’s an old fence to the south that I know isn’t—wasn’t ours.
It has cows on the other side, but the rest of the land sort of blends into the scattered copses of trees and the woods.
I always played wherever I wanted as a kid. ”
“That’s a lot of property for us to cover. I don’t think we can do that in one day.” Rowan frowned as she scanned the area. “Was there a place you wanted to start?”
Emma had thought long and hard about this.
Where is the best place to bury a body? Where would people be unlikely to look?
“A lot of the ground is hard and rocky,” she told Rowan. “Even around the trees there’s lava rock embedded everywhere. But if we go this way, there’s a larger area that’s mostly grass and sort of sandy. Wildflowers grow there. And there’re a few more places like that further out.”
“Last chance to back out.” Rowan continued to study her.
“No. If I don’t look, I’ll always wonder.”
“I’m sorry that you even had to wonder about that,” said Rowan. “No kid should have to think about one parent dying at the hands of the other.”
“My childhood wasn’t like a lot of other kids’.”
“True.” Sadness flashed on Rowan’s face. “But you’re not alone in that.” She put an arm around Emma’s shoulders and gave her a side hug. “One day we’ll have a long talk.”
Emma had an inkling of what Rowan was referring to. She’d heard that the woman had been kidnapped as a very young girl along with her brother and tortured. Her limp was a result of that time.
I don’t think I want to hear details.
But here was another woman who’d made something of herself. Another person in Emma’s life to look up to. Rowan might have been through hell as a child, but now she was known all over the country for her search and rescue work with Thor. And was going to be married soon.
“Thor! Come!” The black dog raced back to the women. He’d been sniffing the ground where the henhouse had stood.
“Wedding plans coming together?” Emma asked as she walked beside Rowan to her vehicle.
“It’s going pretty good. I’m glad I have two sisters who are into organizing that sort of thing. I’ve given them free rein.” She grinned at Emma. “Hope I don’t regret it.”
“You won’t.” Emma had visited the sisters’ stunning beauty salon and followed their artsy Instagram account. The women were very talented with both hair and decor.
Rowan opened the Tahoe door and grabbed a harness. “Who’s a good boy?”
Thor gave an excited shimmy and then planted himself at her feet, his eyes eager, his tail brushing the dirt.
Rowan studied the harness. “When I put this on, he knows it’s time to work,” she told Emma.
“But every time he’s found remains, he wasn’t working or wearing this.
” She hesitated but put it back in the SUV.
“I think I’ll leave it behind.” She eyed her dog.
“But he saw me get it out and now he has expectations. Give me a minute to distract him.” She grabbed a fabric disc toy and flung it like a Frisbee.
“Go get it!” The dog instantly shot away.
They repeated this several times, moving away from the vehicle, until Thor was panting. Rowan finally announced he was ready.
Emma gave a last look at the jumbled pile and then led Rowan and Thor toward the north. Their walk was dotted with pink pieces of insulation that the wind had blown off the pile. “Does that stuff ever decompose?” she asked.
“Good question,” said Rowan, wrinkling her nose.
They walked on for a couple of minutes, Thor off leash and casually trotting ahead. Emma constantly studied the terrain.
Could a body be buried there? What about over there?
Emma wondered if her father could have borrowed some construction equipment to move boulders over a grave. There were enough huge pieces of rough black lava rock around. If it’d been ten years since they’d been moved, no one would be able to tell the difference.
“How does Thor know he’s supposed to look?” she asked Rowan.
“Like I said, he’s not trained to search for remains, but he’s alerted a few times over the years when we’ve been sort of close to them, like he did on Sunday when I was with Noelle.
I reward him so he knows to do it again in the future.
But I don’t have a command to give him like I do when we’re looking for something specific, so we’ll see what he does today. ”
“What if it’s a dead animal?”
“He acts differently. He might show some interest in sniffing the area, but he doesn’t give me an alert. And learning to alert only on human remains can take a lot of training for cadaver dogs. I don’t know how he automatically understands that I’m only interested in human scents.”
“He’s just smart,” said Emma.
“He is,” Rowan agreed, turning an admiring gaze on her dog.
Emma steered them to the right for a few dozen yards and then stopped.
They’d passed through some pines and brush.
“This is the area I was thinking of.” Here the trees were taller than near the house, and there were a few wide-open flat areas between them.
Small plants with red blooms were scattered among clumps of dry, coarse grass.
Rowan nodded, scanning the area. Her focus stopped on a tall tree across the clearing. “What’s that?” She pointed at two hanging ropes.
Emma swallowed. She’d hoped the woman wouldn’t notice. “Used to be a swing.”
“Ah.” After a glance at Emma, Rowan said no more.
The woman went down on one knee to be at Thor’s level. She rubbed his ears and looked in his eyes. He tipped his head, holding her gaze. “Good boy,” she said quietly. She stood and he continued to sit, his gaze locked on her. “Let’s take a little walk around, Thor.”
Emma took a shaky breath and followed, deeply confused about whether she wanted the search to be successful or not.
Within five minutes, Thor gave an alert.
Emma’s head spun. She knew when the dog abruptly stilled and lifted his nose the smallest fraction. Then he sat and looked back at Rowan.
She walked him away and then led him toward the spot from a different direction. Thor alerted again, and Rowan drove out to the main road and called the sheriff’s department.
Emma sat down on a rough lump of lava rock and cried.
I knew it.