4
I don’t know, there’s something about them.
” Mandy carried the steaming Yankee pot roast to the dining room table.
She’d already done the honors of piling thick slices of beef atop a bed of roasted potatoes and carrots.
The enormous platter currently weighed as much as a tank and held enough food to feed an army. But that was Betty for you.
Mandy and the retired postmistress had dinner together every other week, generally switching off cooking duties. Truthfully, Betty got the short end of the deal; Mandy’s culinary skills topped out at picking up a rotisserie chicken from the local deli.
Now, Betty followed her into the dining room with a vat of gravy.
At seventy-six, the woman was as spry as they came.
She proudly walked her three miles a day with the help of two ski poles and continued to do the daily crossword puzzle in ink.
Most afternoons, she made the rounds at the village’s local establishments, chatting it up with storekeepers, customers, and the hired staff.
As a result, she was the biggest know-it-all in the town and proud of it.
She was also Mandy’s last link to her parents, who’d counted Betty and her husband, Paul, as close personal friends. Mandy grew up watching the foursome battle it out over dominoes most Sundays, or more rarely, get gussied up for a big night out at Howie’s Pub.
First Mandy’s father had passed. Then her mom.
Then six months after that, Betty’s beloved Paul.
And now there were Betty and Mandy. In the beginning, Mandy had started bringing Betty dinners out of respect, but soon enough, they’d forged their own relationship, born out of shared memories and mutual grief.
Mandy appreciated having a surrogate mom, while Betty counted Mandy as her third child, given her first two now lived on the other side of the country.
Mandy gingerly set down the heavy ceramic platter. Betty insisted on using the dining room, which held a gorgeous Queen Anne table meant for six. Mandy couldn’t decide if it was sad to see the relic of so many family dinners now set for two, or inspiring that Betty still cared that much.
Mandy ate most meals sitting in front of the TV. And yes, cereal did count as an acceptable dinner option.
Betty pulled out her chair at the head of the table. Mandy took the one kitty-corner. Head bowed as Betty murmured a brief blessing. Then, they got down to business.
“The Collinses did buy the property,” Betty commented now. “Doesn’t seem so strange they’d be interested in its past.”
“But some of their questions were so specific—what was the timeline between the start of the storm and Dad’s arrival? Had the blood been collected, tested? What about DNA? Better yet, what about new DNA analysis given the advances in the past thirty years? These aren’t idle questions. They’re…”
“More like the ones your father and now you have been asking all these years?” Betty scooped up a red potato. “Could be they’re amateur sleuths. Lord knows enough have tried to solve the mystery over the years.”
“None of those armchair detectives bought the actual house and moved in.”
“He comes from money,” Betty provided sagely. “Third-generation family wealth. Though I hear his investment firm is successful in its own right. Same with her design business.”
“Which makes it even stranger they’d abandon two great Boston careers to move to Nowhere, New Hampshire.”
“Maybe they wanted a change of pace.”
“And maybe there’s something else going on.” Mandy could be as bullheaded as her father. Probably why they had locked horns so many times.
“It might be good to have them pushing,” Betty continued with maddening calm. “Generate new interest in the case. It’s been…gads…maybe a decade since the last go-round.”
“Which resulted in absolutely no new leads!” It had enraged her father, the two state cold case detectives basically implying the lack of closure was all his fault, a small-town cop unprepared for such a major crime.
Mandy had been in New York for the twenty-year-anniversary investigation, but she’d heard plenty from her mother on the phone.
After the detectives left, Ian Grady had locked himself in his study for a month, poring over his murder board, obsessively searching for that one detail he’d missed.
Mandy often wondered if the stress had led to her father’s heart attack. Though, realistically speaking, his abiding love for red meat was probably a factor as well.
“I advised them to contact the cold case unit,” Mandy conceded. “Mostly to get me out of the hot seat. I can see why Theo and Raquel Collins were both so good at their jobs. They’re nothing if not tenacious.”
Mandy gave up on her pot roast. She hadn’t been able to settle since leaving the Dixon…
Collins…place. She was twitchy and resentful in equal measures.
How dare some outsiders come along and stir the pot?
And yet, why not? She was a cop; she should be grateful for new perspectives.
Mandy sighed. Perhaps this was the heart of her conflict.
“I haven’t followed up since I became chief.
Maybe I should’ve pushed again. The Collinses’ question about reanalyzing the blood using the latest and greatest DNA technology makes sense.
I mean, assuming the state cares, has the budget, and some lab somewhere doesn’t have a hundred-year backlog. ”
Betty chortled. She was well aware of Ian Grady’s ongoing dislike of TV cop shows.
If only I had their unlimited budgets, he’d growl, to test every piece of evidence with every forensic tool ever invented.
Then have some computer magically spit out the name and address of the perpetrator. Yeah, that’s exactly how it works.
“I don’t know about DNA, but I know Ian was fixated on the bloody footprints.”
Mandy stilled. In his later years, her father had compiled an entire binder devoted to forensic podiatry. Which she knew from sorting through his study after his death. But how did…
“We talked about it many times during our meetings,” Betty continued, chewing thoughtfully.
“Your meetings?”
“Oh, yes. It was your mother’s idea, I believe.
She’d grown tired of him shutting himself away in his study for days on end to stare at old crime scene photos.
Since he was clearly stuck, why not fresh eyes and a new perspective.
She convinced him to bring one of his binders to our monthly dinner club, and after that, it became a thing.
Every few months, we had a murder-mystery night.
Really quite fascinating. I had no idea what all went into police work before then. ”
Mandy felt slightly dazed. “How did I not know this? Who, what? My father shared his binders?”
“It involved the usual crew. You know, your father, your mother, me, Paul, Howie, and Gretchen. Your father had amassed quite a bit of information, and wow, that wall in his office. The stuff of obsessive-compulsives everywhere.”
“Why did I never hear about this?”
“You were in New York, dear. With a nice young lady, according to your mom.”
Mandy absolutely, positively refused to blush.
Betty winked at her knowingly. “I’m not quite that old, you know. Love is a many splendored thing—”
“And we’re done with that subject,” Mandy intervened hastily. “But the footprints. What was he thinking?”
Because Mandy knew why there’d been floorboards missing from the now Collinses’ home—to extract the clearest impressions for further testing at the lab.
Did the Collinses have any idea, or did they simply believe the holes had been additional damage inflicted by drunk kids partying some Friday night?
It would be an interesting litmus test to run in the future, to see just how deep their knowledge of the original investigative efforts ran.
“As you’re aware,” Betty said now, “thirty years ago footprints were mostly collected in hopes of matching them against a suspect once they were apprehended. Now, however, footprints can be used to help identify that perpetrator. Isn’t that wild?
For weeks after Ian explained it, I went around studying every shoeprint I could find.
I even stepped in mud one day and made tracks of my own to see how well the impressions gave me away. Quite a bit of fun, I must say.”
Mandy stared at her neighbor wide-eyed. Mandy had taken basic forensics courses as part of her mandated sixteen-week police academy training.
But after going through her father’s extensive collection of articles on podiatry, she’d done a deep dive into the subject.
It was rather wild, to borrow Betty’s phrase.
Originally, analyzing footprints and shoe impressions had been used to determine basic facts. The prints themselves might contain pertinent trace evidence, not to mention a clear print could be matched against a suspect.
But then forensic podiatry had gone next level.
Foot and shoe impressions were currently being used as possible indicators of gender, weight, and age.
Men’s feet were generally longer, while women’s heels were narrower.
Females also had a larger arch, creating prints with more negative space.
Add to that the composition of the print itself, rolled to one side, or weighted heel-toe versus toe-heel, and suddenly an investigator had insights into gait patterns and even possibly injuries.
As Betty put it, in some cases the detectives no longer needed to find a suspect to match to the footprint, but could use the impression to go get the suspect.
“I thought in the Dixon case, the prints were of limited use,” Mandy stated slowly.
“Yes and no. The length of the bloody prints was too short to match Dave Dixon and too long to be the three younger kids. That leaves Janet and twelve-year-old Henry as the possible candidates. Unfortunately, there are too many similarities between the foot of a small woman and that of a growing adolescent to break that tie.”
“Which brought my father back to the blood evidence.” This much Mandy knew. “The sample tested O-positive. Unfortunately, a third of the population is O-positive, including Janet and Henry.”
“We wanted to do computer modeling,” Betty announced brightly. “So we could better understand the individual tracks. You’ve seen your father’s photos of the scene. It’s a confusing mess of bare feet racing back and forth on top of each other.”
Mandy nodded. The tracks were confusing. Her father had tried on many theories over the years. Last Mandy knew, however, the meaning of the crisscrossing tracks remained a mystery.
“Could the top prints be separated from the ones beneath it for a clearer view?” Betty was musing now. “Given everything computers can do now, it certainly sounds feasible—”
“TV forensics,” Mandy coughed out.
Betty smiled. “You are your father’s daughter.”
“Here’s the problem.” Mandy leaned forward.
“All of this assumes the blood belongs to someone who lived in the house, say, Janet or Henry. Except what about someone who wasn’t a family member?
Two out of six Dixons had the same size foot, but there are probably a hundred others in this town alone who’d also be a match.
And the quality of prints—they are too smeared for a more detailed analysis. ”
“Oh, that’s not the only problem, dear. We came up with loads of issues. Your mother was personally fixated on the source of the blood. Starting with, where did it come from? There was no blood pool or spatter.”
“Cut on the foot itself?”
“That continuously bled out?” Betty arched a brow. “Without a single other family member cross-contaminating the trail? Also, shouldn’t there be paw prints? There was blood on Dog’s fur. But none of his prints on the floor. It starts to feel stranger and stranger. Even…”
“Manufactured.” Mandy felt a genuine jolt. “You’re saying my father thought the blood evidence was a plant? A trail left behind to deliberately misdirect, or even distract, the investigators?”
“Ian was certainly entertaining the notion. He felt a little foolish—he’d spent so much effort studying what was present, he hadn’t stopped to consider what wasn’t. I understand that can be some kind of investigative blind spot?”
Yep, and her father wasn’t the first investigator to fall into such a trap. “Why didn’t I see these new considerations in his notes?” Mandy wanted to know.
“Because we never reached a conclusion. Your father’s next step was to research the possibility of computer analysis. But he was still looking into options when, well…”
“He died.”
“Sad time,” Betty murmured. “Your mother, she needed a break from your father’s obsession. Except then her own health…”
“Yeah.”
“And then Paul.”
Mandy nodded again. “Bad things come in threes.” Something she and Betty knew all too well.
“Without your father,” Betty said at last, “there didn’t seem to be much reason to continue playing Sherlock. He was the professional, after all. What did we know?”
“I know things.” The words came out sounding petulant; Mandy had no idea why.
“My opinion…?”
“Like you’re going to hold back on me now?” Mandy gave the older woman a look, which Betty returned with a warm smile of her own.
“What matters is that you’re not alone. This terrible tragedy, an entire family disappearing in the middle of the night, affected all of us. We need answers. How else can our community heal?”
Mandy sighed. From the first moment she’d laid eyes on the Collins couple, or maybe even the second she’d heard the house had finally sold, she’d known what needed to happen.
She was her father’s daughter. But also her town’s chief and maybe even still the young girl who stared at the school photos of four missing children and saw herself staring back.
People talked about closure in terms of a loved one or close friend, but sometimes it involved an entire community. Shereford, New Hampshire, had prided itself on being the kind of place where bad things never happened. Until, of course, they had.
“All right,” Mandy muttered. “I may not be ready for the full-on amateur-hour murder-mystery dinners, but reaching out to you, perhaps even others for, say, consulting services…”
Betty smiled. There was a moist sheen in her eyes. She reached across the table and took Mandy’s hand.
“Your father would be proud of you,” she murmured.
Mandy was less convinced. Her father had been a genuine hard-ass. She doubted he cared about group sports or his neighbor’s engagement, either. For him, it’d always been about results.
Meaning thirty years later, it was time to finally get the job done.