“Yes.”
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
“Did you close your curtains last night?” He looked over his shoulder at her, and she knew what he was thinking:
She flushed. “There aren’t any curtains in that room.”
“Those are too big to be Britta’s boots,” said Gresham. “She’s the only person who’d be tramping around up here, checking on the house.”
“Looks like a Vibram sole,” said Ballard. “Size eight, maybe nine.” His gaze followed the prints back toward the woods. “Deer tracks overlie them.”
“Which means he came through here first,” said Maura. “Before the deer did. Before I woke up.”
“Yes, but how long before?” Ballard straightened and stood peering through the window into her bedroom. For a long time he did not say anything, and once again she grew impatient with their silence, anxious to hear a reaction-any reaction-from these men.
“You know, it hasn’t rained here in close to a week,” said Gresham. “Those boot prints may not be all that fresh.”
“But who’d be walking around here, looking in windows?” she asked.
“I can call Britta. Maybe she had a man up to work on the place. Or someone peeked in there ’cause they were curious.”
“Curious?” asked Maura.
“Everyone up here’s heard about what happened to your sister, down in Boston. Some folks might want to peek into her house.”
“I don’t understand that kind of morbid curiosity. I never have.”
“Rick here tells me you’re a medical examiner, right? Well, you must have to deal with the same thing I do. Everyone wanting to know the details. You won’t believe how many folks have asked me about the shooting. Don’t you think some of these busybodies might want to take a peek inside her house?”
She stared at him in disbelief. The silence was suddenly broken by the crackle of Gresham ’s car radio.
“Excuse me,” he said, and headed back to his cruiser.
“Well,” she said. “I guess that pretty much dispenses with my concerns, doesn’t it?”
“I happen to take your concerns very seriously.”
“Do you?” She looked at him. “Come inside, Rick. I want to show you something.”
He followed her back up the steps to the front porch, and into the house. She swung the door shut and pointed to the array of brass locks.
“That’s what I wanted you to see,” she said.
He frowned at the locks. “Wow.”
“There’s more. Come with me.”
She led him into the kitchen. Pointed to more gleaming chains and bolts barring the back door. “These are all new. Anna must have had them installed. Something scared her.”
“She had reason to be afraid. All the death threats. She didn’t know when Cassell might turn up here.”
She looked at him. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find out if he did?”
“I’ve been showing his photograph around town.”
“And?”
“So far, no one remembers seeing him. But it doesn’t mean he wasn’t here.” He pointed to the locks. “Those make perfect sense to me.”
Sighing, she sank into a chair at the kitchen table. “How could our lives have turned out so differently? There I was, getting off a plane from Paris while she…” She swallowed. “What if I’d been raised in Anna’s place? Would it all have turned out the same? Maybe she’d be the one sitting here now, talking to you.”
“You’re two different people, Maura. You may have her face, her voice. But you’re not Anna.”
She looked up at him. “Tell me more about my sister.”
“I’m not sure where to start.”
“Anything. Everything. You just said I sound like her.”
He nodded. “You do. The same inflections. The same pitch.”
“You remember her that well?”
“Anna wasn’t a woman you’d easily forget,” he said. His gaze held hers. They stared at each other, even as footsteps came thumping into the house. Only when Gresham had walked into the kitchen did she finally break off eye contact and turn to look at the police chief.
“Dr. Isles,” said Gresham. “I wonder if you could do me a little favor. Come up the road with me a ways. There’s something I need you to look at.”
“What sort of thing?”
“That was dispatch on the radio. They got a call from the construction crew right up the road. Their bulldozer turned up some-well, some bones.”
She frowned. “Human?”
“That’s what they’re wondering.”
Maura rode with Gresham in the cruiser, with Ballard following right behind them in his Explorer. The trip was barely worth climbing into the car for, just a short curve up the road, and there the bulldozer was, sitting in a freshly cleared lot. Four men in hard hats stood in the shade next to their pickup trucks. One of them came forward to meet them as Maura, Gresham, and Ballard climbed out of the vehicles.
“Hey, Chief.”
“Hey, Mitch. Where is it?”
“Out near the bulldozer. I spotted that bone, and I just shut my engine right down. There used to be an old farmhouse here, on this lot. Last thing I want to do is dig up some family graveyard.”
“We’ll just have Dr. Isles here take a look before I make any calls. I’d hate to have the M.E. drive all the way over from Augusta for a bunch of bear bones.”
Mitch led the way across the clearing. The newly churned-up soil was an obstacle course of ankle-snagging roots and overturned rocks. Maura’s pumps were not designed for hiking, and no matter how carefully she picked her way across the terrain, she could not avoid soiling the black suede.
Gresham slapped his cheek. “Goddamn blackflies. They sure found us.”
The clearing was surrounded by thick stands of trees; the air was close here and windless. By now, insects had caught their scent and were swarming, greedy for blood. Maura was grateful she’d chosen to wear long pants that morning; her unprotected face and arms were already turning into blackfly feeding stations.
By the time they reached the bulldozer, the cuffs of her trousers were soiled. The sun shone down, sparkling on bits of broken glass. The canes of an old rosebush lay uprooted and dying in the heat.
“There,” said Mitch, pointing.
Even before she bent down to look more closely at it, Maura already knew what it was, lodged there in the soil. She didn’t touch it, but just crouched there, her shoes sunk deep in freshly overturned earth. Newly exposed to the elements, the paleness of bone peeked through the crust of dried dirt. She heard cawing among the trees and glanced up to see crows flitting like dark specters among the branches.
“What do you think?” asked Gresham.
“It’s an ilium.”
“What’s that?”
“This bone.” She touched her own, where the pelvis flared against her slacks. She was reminded, suddenly, of the grim fact that beneath skin, beneath muscle, she too was merely skeleton. A structural frame of honeycombed calcium and phosphorus that would endure long after her flesh had rotted. “It’s human,” she said.
They were silent for a moment. The only sound on that bright June day came from the crows, a gathering flock of them, perched in the trees above, like black fruit among the branches. They stared down with eerie intelligence at the humans, and their caws built to a deafening chorus. Then, as though on cue, their screeches abruptly stopped.
“What do you know about this place?” Maura asked the bulldozer operator. “What used to be here?”
