“So there you are,” Ken said. “The cowardly little creep did this to Rachel and then committed suicide to keep from having to face the consequences.”
“He actually said he didn’t do it,” Mel said. “At least, that’s what his suicide note led us to believe.”
“How?” Ken asked.
“How what?”
“How did he kill himself?”
“With a rope,” Mel said. “He knotted some of his grandfather’s ties together and hanged himself on the closet door in his room.”
“Was that part of this same choking-game garbage?” Ken asked. “Maybe he didn’t intend to die, either.”
I had seen the kicked-over chair and the knotted ties that had been tied together in a fashion that meant they wouldn’t give way. And I had seen the expertly crafted noose. No, Josh’s death hadn’t been an inadvertent consequence of the choking game. But suddenly I was seeing the scarf again. The scarf around Rachel’s neck had been inexpertly knotted.
When I tuned back into the conversation, Mel had her notebook out and was making a list that included the names of as many of Rachel’s friends as her mother and stepfather were able to provide. There was no question of using Rachel’s cell phone directory or history to reconstruct Rachel’s social network because Rachel didn’t have a cell phone. Neither did either one of her parents. The Broward household was evidently one of the last of the breed when it came to having only landline telephone service.
By the time Mel finished writing and closed her notebook, Ardith was staring at her. “What are we supposed to do now?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s dead,” Ardith said huskily. “You know that, and we know that, but only because we saw it happen on the video; but if there’s no body, how do we have a funeral? What do we tell the other kids? What do we tell our friends? I don’t want to have to tell them about it. I don’t want them to see it.”
Ardith had aimed her questions toward Mel, and I was happy to have that particular ball dropped in her court.
“That’s up to you,” Mel answered finally, “but if Rachel were mine I believe I’d say that she ran away, that she’s missing and presumed dead. You don’t have to say anything more than that. You don’t owe people detailed explanations about what’s happened.”
“Missing and presumed dead.” Ardith repeated the words slowly, as if trying them out on her lips and on her heart. “I’m not sure I can say that.”
Then she dissolved into tears once more. Surprisingly enough, the belligerent bartender from the Bike Inn didn’t seem nearly as belligerent now, not to us and not to Kenny Broward, either.
“We’ll have to try, honey bun,” Ken said, holding her close. “We’ll just have to try.”
After we gleaned all the information we could from Ken and Ardith, Ken summoned Rachel’s younger brother, eleven-year-old Harlan, to see if he was able to add anything to what the parents had already told us. He wasn’t. Or, if he knew something about Rachel’s mysterious friend, Janie, he wasn’t ready to spill the beans. When we finally left to head back into town, we had Deputy Timmons lead the way to the home of Conrad Philips, the high school principal.
There were only three hundred or so students in White Pass’s combination junior and senior high school. Conrad Philips knew them all. According to him, Rachel had been far more trouble in junior high than she was now as a high school sophomore. He chalked her behavioral turnaround to Ken Broward’s arrival on the scene. He didn’t have much good to say about Ardith, but he had a lot of good to say about Kenny.
Unlike Rachel Camber’s parental units, Conrad Philips was able to provide not only last names for the kids at his school but also phone numbers and addresses. He also gave us a rundown of the various cliques at the school. It was late by the time we finished talking to him, but we came away with an armload of information about Rachel and her friends, none of which could be tracked down until Wednesday morning. We thanked Deputy Timmons for his help, told him good-bye, and headed for the barn in Olympia.
Mel was uncharacteristically quiet as we drove back down Highway 12 toward I-5. I was busy watching for stray wildlife crossing the road. She was evidently mulling over our Lewis County interviews.
“I guess I was wrong about Kenny Broward,” she said finally. “I was so ready to believe that the stepfather would be a bad guy.”
It’s odd to be involved with and married to a woman who will come right out and admit it when she’s wrong-odd, and more than a little refreshing.
“Does that make you guilty of sexual profiling?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said. “Now, what’s there to eat around here? I’m starving.”
We ended up with Subway sandwiches from a combination gas station/restaurant at an exit south of Chehalis. Over our sandwiches and coffee, we strategized.
“There has to be some connection between Josh and Rachel,” I told Mel. “Once we find that, we’ll be close to pulling the whole thing together.”
“Right,” she agreed. “We need to go at it from both ends. How about if I come back to Packwood tomorrow and start working my way through the girls whose names Conrad Philips gave us. You can work the Olympia end.”
Talking to Josh’s fellow summer-school students was the place to start, but I didn’t expect to find a bunch of exemplary students enrolled there.
“Right,” I said. “You get the regular kids from Packwood while I’m stuck with the juvenile-delinquent types who are about to flunk out of school.”
“Want to trade?” Mel asked.
“No,” I said. “That was just pro forma grumbling. You’ll do better with the girls and I’ll do better with the rough and tough boys.”
“I wonder if Todd’s made any progress on tracking down the source of that file,” Mel said.
We both looked at our watches. It was long past midnight. Even though we knew Todd worked all hours, it wasn’t fair to call in the middle of the night and risk waking Julie.
“We’ll check with him in the morning,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We made it back to the Dreaded Red Lion, as Mel and Harry I. Ball both call it, without incident. We rode up in the elevator. I stripped off my clothing and fell into bed. Two cups of late-night coffee had absolutely no impact on my ability to fall asleep. I took a pair of Aleves and was out cold before Mel ever emerged from the bathroom. I probably could have slept for several more hours, but the jangling landline telephone in our room jarred me awake minutes after 6:00 A.M.
“Just had a call from Sheriff Tyler down in Lewis County,” Ross Connors said without preamble. “They’re in the process of recovering a body from a water-retention pond north of Centralia. Looks to be a young female.”
“Rachel Camber,” I said.
“That would be my guess,” Ross said. “I want you and Mel there on the double.”
“What?” Mel asked sleepily.
“It looks like Ardith Broward is going to get her wish and have a body to bury after all.”
Mel sat up in bed. “They found her? Where?”
“The Lewis County Sheriff’s Department is in the process of dredging the body of a young female out of a retention pond north of Centralia. Sheriff Tyler thinks it’s probably Rachel. Ross wants both of us there ASAP, so give me first crack at the bathroom. I’ll take my car; you take yours.”
The term “on the double” is more applicable in terms of my getting up and out than it is to Mel. Fortunately, the ice-pack treatment we had applied to her hand had helped enough that she’d be able to drive herself once she was ready to go. I was back on the freeway and headed south with a cardboard cup of hotel-lobby coffee in hand less than fifteen minutes after Ross rousted me from a dead sleep.
Just north of the Harrison exit in Centralia lies an unnamed body of mostly muddy water that supposedly keeps pollutants from a nearby abandoned gravel quarry from getting into the water table. As I came around the long freeway curve at Ford’s Prairie, I caught sight of a clutch of emergency vehicles gathered at the far north end of the pond. I exited I-5 and made my way there as best I could with the GPS bleating plaintively, claiming that I was “off road” and in an area where “turn by turn directions” were not possible.
Once on the scene, I found several Lewis County Sheriff’s vehicles along with an ambulance and a Lewis
