16
Mandy was headed back to her vehicle for a fresh thermos of coffee when she came upon Raquel Collins, striding down the driveway with a frown on her face and twigs in her hair.
The usually impeccably groomed female looked so out of sorts, Mandy halted in her tracks.
Which is when she noticed the woman’s gloved hand, fingers drumming against the top of her thigh.
Mandy had seen that display the other night as well—some kind of nervous tell.
“Everything all right?” Mandy called out.
“The dog is gone.”
“Mr. Man…the stray?”
“We were taking a walk. Then I saw someone in the woods. I thought maybe it was the paparazzi trying to trespass. I went to confront them with the dog by my side. Except then I tripped. And I saw a flash of bare feet. Why would a reporter have bare feet? Why would anyone be running through the woods in bare feet?” Raquel shook her head.
“And now the crazy mutt is gone, and Theo is going to be upset, and…and…shit.”
“Whoa. The intruder was barefoot? You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. But no. But yes.”
“Show me where this all happened.”
Raquel led Mandy back down the drive another twenty feet. She appeared to be studying the edge. Finally, she nodded slightly, pointing to a trampled section of brush. “I entered right around here.”
Mandy stepped into the woods. The bare-limbed trees were intertwined enough to force them to bob and weave, but nothing that wasn’t manageable.
Mandy kept her gaze focused straight ahead, searching for recently trampled underbrush or snapped branches.
With all the dead leaves littering the ground, footprints were impossible to determine, but she could just make out signs of disturbance here and there.
She reached a spot of freshly churned earth. Raquel grimaced. “That’s where I tripped.” She pointed to an exposed root. “Stupid birch.”
“You saw the person as you went down?”
“More like a flash of movement. Long crazy hair. Some kind of gray-colored top. And bare feet. I swear, I caught a glimpse of bare feet.”
“Male or female?”
Raquel frowned, considering. “A girl. That was my first thought. What was a girl doing running through the woods? But she was gone before I could get up.”
Mandy nodded. Her hand was hovering instinctively above her holster.
She flexed her fingers, forced herself to relax.
Someone fleeing through the woods was hardly cause for alarm, especially as the person was running away from the scene.
In Mandy’s defense, spending eighteen hours staring at disarticulated human remains didn’t do wonders for one’s nerves.
Now she shouldered her way through a clump of bushes, then twisted around a larger maple. And immediately came upon a small leather boot.
“Is that a shoe? Like, the person’s shoe?” Raquel spoke up behind her.
Mandy knelt down, studying the single piece of footwear more closely. She withdrew a pen from her coat pocket, used it to flip it over.
The thin brown boot had definitely seen better days, the toe heavily scuffed and sole worn to almost nothing, while the frayed laces were pocked with burs. The size and style appeared consistent with a female, for whatever that was worth.
Mandy rose to standing, checking ahead for any additional items, say, the other shoe, or maybe socks, gloves, personal ID. An investigator could dream, after all.
“I don’t get it,” Raquel said. “Someone was lurking in the woods around my house. And ran…straight out of her own boot?”
The woman picked up the shoe before Mandy could stop her, though the item hardly qualified as evidence unless one wanted to consider trespassing a major crime. Raquel peeled back the tongue, peering inside.
“The insole’s a fitted piece of cardboard.” Raquel glanced up at her. “Old trick for extending wear, especially in the cold.”
Mandy knew that. She was a little startled Mrs. Back Bay Boston did as well. She contemplated the area around them. “Nearest neighbor I can think of is a couple miles away,” she mused.
“Do they have kids?”
“No, older couple.”
“The dog disappeared along with the girl. Do you think…do you think she came to get him?”
There was a trace of hurt in Raquel’s voice. So maybe the woman wasn’t as unaffected by the stray mutt as she pretended to be.
Mandy considered the matter. “People think of the mountains as being postcard perfect,” she stated after a moment, pointing at the forlorn boot and its crude cardboard reinforcement.
“But even a quaint New England village suffers from its fair share of homelessness, addiction, and abuse.
We simply have enough real estate to make those problems easier to hide.
“Truth is, there are plenty of individuals living hand to mouth in these parts. Families living in broken-down trailers with tarps covering the holes in the roof, shower curtains blocking off the rooms, and a plastic bucket serving as a latrine. I hear enough stories from the social workers to know it’s not all Norman Rockwell out there. ”
“You’re saying this boot…it might come from a situation like that, near here. How near here?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily know,” Mandy admitted. “I keep my pulse on the situation best I can, but this is the ‘Live Free or Die’ state. For some, my uniform makes me part of the ‘or Die’ side of the equation. I know some folks I can ask, though.”
Raquel seemed to be considering many things at once. “The skeleton from the well,” she asked at last. “Is it historic?”
Mandy watched the woman’s fingers resume their anxious thrumming.
“Postmortem interval is going to require more testing. At the moment, the forensic anthro is willing to concede the remains belong to a female, approximately eighteen to twenty-five years of age. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the origins of the well, would you?
Your husband said he didn’t remember anything being on the site map. ”
“I’ve been reviewing property docs going back to 1765. So far, I can’t find any indication of the well, which is frankly odd. Access to water has always mattered. For there to be no record of a wellhead for the first hundred-plus years…”
“That doesn’t track,” Mandy filled in. “Meaning the well was never documented?”
“Or eliminated from the records.”
That caught Mandy off guard. For historic documents to be lacking was one thing. But to say those records had been manipulated or even falsified…
She found herself looking at the barely weather-tight boot, so ill-fitting the wearer had managed to run right out of it.
“This damn property,” she sighed.
“One misfortune after another,” Raquel agreed.
“You really going to open a B and B?” Mandy asked bluntly.
“I doubt it.”
“Make this into your summer home? Fix it up for profit?”
“Probably not.”
“So you bought an infamous, abandoned lodge because…”
Raquel finally smiled. “When I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.” Then the woman turned back for the driveway, leaving Mandy standing in the middle of the woods with an abandoned boot in her hand and a million questions still buzzing in her mind.