outstretched, calling her name, “Jeannie!” She twisted away without looking at him. He dropped his hands and melted into the crowd.
“Do you think this will be the day?” Kate asked.
“For what?”
“When God decides to ease her pain.”
“You think that’s how it works?” I asked.
“I hope so.”
“I don’t think God is going to choose between these two mothers.”
“You think it’s just a matter of luck, then?”
“I don’t believe in luck, good luck, bad luck, or no luck at all.”
“What do you believe in?” Kate asked.
“A world where everyone takes his turn in the barrel.”
“Maybe they’re both in the same barrel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe the disappearances of their children are related. Maybe the same person is responsible.”
We stopped, both of us looking back and forth at the two groups and the two women at their center. Adrienne Nardelli, the detective in charge of Peggy Martin’s case, hadn’t said anything about possible links to other cases when Lucy and I met with her. We were too focused on Jimmy Martin to have asked, making the mistake of seeing the world through our client’s eyes instead of following the evidence wherever it led us.
“Maybe.”
Lucy waved to us from the edge of the second group, and we joined her.
“How’s Peggy?” I asked.
“Holding up, but only barely.”
“What have you found out?”
She pointed toward two people standing apart from the group. “That’s Ellen Koch, Peggy’s neighbor, the one who organized the volunteer search teams. The guy is her son, Adam. This area had been searched a couple of times, but Ellen decided to give it another try today. She brought her son and a few other people with her. She and Adam were up in the woods above the lake and stumbled across something that looked like a bone, and Ellen called the police.”
“Did you talk to the son?”
Lucy cocked her head, one eyebrow raised.
“Okay, sorry I asked. What did he tell you?”
“Not much. He’s a pretty boy, pouts a lot and looks bored. Said he was just walking along and saw something sticking out of the rocks he thought looked like a bone. He told his mother, and she called the cops.”
“What’s the mother say about her son?” Kate asked.
“She says he graduated high school last year, tried junior college but quit. She says he’s looking for a job, but the way she says it, I don’t know how hard he’s looking. She wants him to join the army, but he isn’t interested.”
“I’d like to talk to him,” Kate said.
“Sure. I’ll introduce you.”
Ellen and Adam were watching the tree line, Ellen’s hands in her coat pockets, her face drawn, crow’s feet fanning out from the corners of her eyes, her mouth turned down and sour. Adam was slender and handsome, jet- black hair falling to his eyebrows, smoking a cigarette, fingers of one hand tucked inside his pants, posing like the lead singer in a boy band waiting for the girls to go crazy.
Kate didn’t wait for an introduction. “Adam, I’m Kate Scranton. I understand you and your mother found the body. That must have been something.”
He nodded and dropped his cigarette to the ground, letting it burn until his mother glared at him, then grinding it under his heel.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about it?”
He squinted at her. “I already told the police.”
“Which is a great help for them but not for us.”
“And I already told her,” he said, tilting his head at Lucy.
“The more people talk about this kind of thing, the more they remember.”
He made us wait while he rolled his shoulders and breathed deep, swelling his chest.
“Okay. We were walking up in the woods, about halfway up the hill. There was some rocks, and we seen somethin’ stickin’ out didn’t look right. I pulled on it, and it come out. I could tell right away it was a bone. Looked like a leg bone. So my mom called the cops, and that’s about it.”
“Had you been in those woods before?”
He looked away. “Nah.”
Lucy interrupted, pointing toward the woods. “Here they come.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Four paramedics carried a gurney out of the woods, a black body bag strapped to it, the bag flat, holding individually wrapped remains too sparse to give it shape or dimension. They stopped, released a wheeled frame tucked beneath the gurney, rolling it across the uneven terrain, a lone woman trailing them.
I recognized Detective Adrienne Nardelli’s stout frame and deliberate walk. She was solid and calm, naturally deadpan, saving any hidden sense of humor for off-duty hours. When Lucy and I met with her about the Martin case, she laid down two simple, non-negotiable terms: be straight with her and she’d tell us what she could; fuck with her and she’d fuck us up. She was Quincy Carter without the charm.
Both waiting groups lurched into motion, blending into a single human wave rising and cresting, rolling toward the gurney, Peggy Martin and Jeannie Montgomery squeezed together in the center of the swell. The gurney’s wheels bogged down in a soft spot, the paramedics hoisting it to their waists, setting it down when they met the crowd on the open plain. The lake was a glistening mirrored backdrop, the rumble, whine, and whir of passing traffic an everyday overture. The crowd spread out and parted, paying silent homage as the paramedics passed among them, some gasping, others crossing themselves, still others silent and weeping. The two mothers, side-by-side, hands clasped, faced Detective Nardelli.
“We found a body,” she said. “It’s definitely an adult, probably female. I’m sorry.”
Peggy let out a low moan that exploded into a guttural wail, collapsing to her knees. Jeannie hung her head, turned, and walked away, no one touching her, no one coming close. Peggy was dying. She was a ghost.
I knew from hard experience that grief born of a lost child begins as a bottomless well; that those black waters eventually dry into a thick wall separating the before and after. Then one day, if we’re lucky, we wake up and find that the wall has eroded and all that’s left is a harsh filter through which the rest of our life passes, every moment measured against what might have been and what should have been.
But when there is no end to the beginning, when we cannot clutch our child to our breast a final time, we suffocate in uncertainty, beyond rescue or comfort, and those who try trip over clumsy words and gestures before retreating to a safe distance. So it was, as Jeannie made her way alone and Peggy’s friends fell away, all except for Ellen Koch, who helped Peggy to her feet, cupping her elbow as if she were a wayward drunk, guiding her toward a pickup truck parked on Cliff Drive where her son Adam waited behind the wheel, engine running.
“Lousy deal for them,” Detective Nardelli said to us. “Stand out here half the day, get all worked up for nothing.”
“There’s nothing else they can do,” I said.
“Doesn’t make it any less lousy. You have any good news for me?”
“We took another run at Jimmy Martin this morning, but he’s sitting on whatever he knows.”
“If he knows anything,” Nardelli said.
“Oh, he knows something. That’s for certain,” Kate said.
