“What’s your point?” Gerard gave me a look that challenged me to answer.
This was becoming personal. “Detective Jefferies, this isn’t productive,” the sheriff said. “Let’s not dig up old history.”
“I want an answer,” I said. “I want to know why Gerard was the only Barstow boy ever forced out of Alber.” I turned to the chief and asked, “What did you do?”
Gerard Barstow tracked toward me, as angry as I’ve ever seen a man. But at that precise moment, the phone on the desk buzzed. The sheriff latched onto it, perhaps pleased with the distraction.
Not ready to let up, I prodded, “I think you should answer, Gerard. Tell me why you were forced out.”
Gerard turned to the sheriff, I supposed to enlist his aid. But Sheriff Holmes had refocused his attention on the phone call. We all stopped talking and stared at him, as his face blanched pale.
“I’ll be right there,” he said, and then he hung up. “Chief, we need to put this to bed, at least for now.”
“Sheriff, I shouldn’t have to tolerate—” Barstow started.
“Max, round up everyone you can find and the CSI folks,” the sheriff ordered. “We need to head over to Alber. Someone found a body.”
“That’s my town,” Gerard objected.
“Not the back of the trailer park, Chief,” the sheriff said. “That area below the mountain is outside the city limits. It’s in the county. It’s mine.”
Without asking a single question, Max rushed from the room.
The trailer park. My family. My mother. Delilah. A body.
“A man’s or a woman’s body? A child?” I asked. “How long dead?”
“I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “They found it hidden behind the cornfield.”
Twenty-Four
I trailed the caravan of squads and the crime scene unit’s mobile base, fashioned out of a converted horse trailer, to Alber. We passed fields planted with alfalfa and wheat, herds of cattle and bison. I wondered whose body had been found, if it was Eliza or Jayme. If it was Delilah. My mind wandered back to Dallas. As hard as I’d tried, I couldn’t save him.
Driving past the trailers, I flashed back to the boy’s body, dismembered, nearly destroyed. I tried to blot out the image. At least his parents had been held back, not allowed inside the house where they would have seen the horror of what remained of their son. His mother dropped to her knees when I told her the boy was dead. I knelt beside her and held her. I tried to soften the blow, but there is pain that it’s impossible to lessen.
As well as horrors that are impossible to unsee.
Overwhelming dread flooded through me, as I wondered what waited for us in the cornfield. My grip on the steering wheel tightened as the grisly vision refused to leave. The blood. The slaughtered child. In seconds the image transformed from the body of a young boy to that of a girl—ivory skin, long auburn hair. When I saw freckles on her upturned nose, I fought to stifle a scream.
We reached the two dozen or so remaining rows of corn, and the cars at the lead pulled over, the deputies and officers hastily disembarking and advancing on foot. I grabbed my bag with my badge and gun inside. Behind the cornfield, we picked our way around and over rocks, the mountain looming above us. Boulders, some as tall as we stood, had fallen from the mountaintop over the millennia. I guessed townsfolk discarded many of the smaller rocks a hundred years earlier when they first cleared the fields to plant.
Up ahead, the troopers congregated at the far east corner, below Samuel’s Peak.
“What’ve we got?” I shouted as I walked up.
Apparently everyone was still trying to figure that out for themselves and no one responded. I found Max talking to a man with two dogs on leashes standing separate from the rest, a black Lab and a small gray-and-beige fellow that looked like some kind of terrier mix.
“A body, no description yet. It’s buried under a layer of rocks,” Max pointed to a mound fifty yards away. “Not sure how long, but it sounds like whoever it is has been dead for some time.”
“Looked like that to me at least,” the man told Max.
I knew him. His name was John Proctor. A mechanic, he used to repair my father’s saws at the mill. In my decade away, Mr. Proctor had acquired the heavily lined face of a man well into his eighties. His bushy hair had turned stark white, and he carried a wooden cane with a carved stag’s head at the top.
“Somebody notify the coroner?” I asked Max.
“Yeah. I did before we left the office. Doc Wiley from Wilbur. He’s been ME for the county for the past four or five years. He’s on his way. Should be here soon.”
“I remember him,” I said. “He trains the midwives in town.”
“That’s him,” Max said.
That settled, I turned to our companion. “Mr. Proctor, tell us what happened here.”
The old man looked at me warily. I’d pinned my badge on my shirt during the walk to make sure I wasn’t stopped from entering the scene. Proctor recognized me. I saw it in his eyes. His jaw worked as he undoubtedly considered what must have struck him as an untenable situation. If he didn’t answer me, he’d be refusing to talk to a cop. If he did, he broke his prophet’s decree and spoke to someone who’d turned her back on the church.
The situation was uncomfortable. Max pulled me to the side and whispered, “Clara, I don’t think the sheriff would approve of your being here.”
“You know what, Max? I’m not leaving. If you want me gone, you’ll have to haul me away.” I wondered why he’d sold out, when he’d stopped following his best judgment to kowtow to his boss. “That could be
