P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“Why?” she said softly.

“Why what?” Louis asked.

She looked back at Louis. “Why would Sharon go all the way down there to see a doctor?”

Louis knew the answer. He suspected the principal did, too.

Hidden Lake was a thirty-minute drive down Highway 50, close enough to be convenient but far enough away to be private. If Sharon Stottlemyer had been troubled and gone there for help, it had to be because she didn’t want anyone to know. She had probably been eighteen, old enough to sign herself in. At least now he could check Hidden Lake’s admissions records. But there were still many other questions without answers.

“I need to speak to Sharon’s family,” Louis said. “Do you have an address?”

Miss Wigginton nodded and went to talk to a secretary. She returned with a piece of paper and gave it to Louis. He picked up the yearbook.

“It would help if I could take this,” he said.

“Of course.” The principal was looking back through the glass at Allison Deitz, huddled in the chair.

“They keep it all inside,” she said. “Some of them you can see it and maybe help. But others. .” She shook her head slowly. “Some just fall.”

She looked back at Louis. “I’d better get back in there. Please call me if I can be of any more help.”

The Stottlemyers lived in a white frame house on East Street just a few blocks from the high school. It was a pretty house, two stories with a big wraparound porch and several bird feeders hanging in the bare trees of the front yard. As he went up the walk, Louis could see lights on inside and a curl of smoke coming from the chimney. His knock was answered by a round-faced woman with brown hair and dark eyes, and Louis had the thought that it was exactly what Sharon Stottlemyer would have looked like if she had lived to be forty-something.

“Mrs. Stottlemyer?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said warily.

When he produced the police ID, her face crumbled inward and the word came out in one long exhalation. “Sharon,” she said.

“May I come in, ma’am?” Louis asked.

She nodded and held out the storm door. It was a small living room, lamps lit against the afternoon gloom, a big black dog lying in front of a low-burning fire. Mrs. Stottlemyer motioned for Louis to take the sofa and she went to a worn wing chair, setting aside a pile of blue yarn and knitting needles.

“Have you found my daughter?” she asked. Her voice was soft but firm, and Louis had the feeling she already knew that her daughter was dead.

“We think so,” Louis said. “We’ll need dental records to be sure.”

The woman’s eyes were fixed on Louis. “Then Sharon is dead.”

“We found a body in a shallow grave,” Louis said. “There was no identification, just this ring.” He held it out the evidence bag and Mrs. Stottlemyer took it. She picked up the glasses on the cord around her neck and put them on to look at the ring. After a few seconds, her hand closed around the plastic bag.

“Where did you find her?” she asked.

“On the grounds of Hidden Lake Hospital.”

Mrs. Stottlemyer closed her eyes. “Oh my God.”

Louis gave her a minute, sensing she was remembering something, or making some connection between her daughter and the hospital. One that was painful.

“She. . she said something a few weeks before she disappeared,” Mrs. Stottlemyer said. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now. .”

“What was it, Mrs. Stottlemyer?”

Her eyes came to Louis. “She asked me if I ever got sad.”

“Sad?”

She nodded. “I told her that everyone gets sad sometimes. But that being sad was nothing more than a mood and that. .” Mrs. Stottlemyer drew a thick breath. “And that all she needed to do was think positive thoughts and stay busy.”

Louis looked down. Mrs. Stottlemyer’s soft sobs started to fill the small living room. “Mrs. Stottlemyer,” he said, “do you have someone you can call to stay with you?”

“My husband will be home soon,” she said. “And I have a friend next door.”

Louis stood up. Mrs. Stottlemyer looked at him and her hand came up, holding the evidence bag. “Can I have her ring back?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But we’ll return it to you when we can.”

She handed the bag over. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

She didn’t reply, just accompanied him to the door and closed it softly behind him. Louis headed down the narrow walk to his car. As he opened the car door, he glanced over his shoulder at a group of small children playing in front of a bright blue house a few doors away.

Two of the kids were chasing each other, another was up in a tree, a fourth was wrestling with a shaggy brown dog, and a fifth was blowing bubbles that disappeared quickly into the icy air.

The drive back from Napoleon gave him plenty of time to think. But everything was scattered, his thoughts ricocheting between Sharon Stottlemyer, Rebecca Gruber, and Charlie Oberon. Every instinct was telling him Charlie had nothing to do with either woman’s death. Yet there was this small part of him-a part he didn’t want to acknowledge-that wanted to believe that someone like Charlie could kill.

What had Dr. Seraphin said? The line between what is real and what is not is very thin. Sometimes it is even invisible .

He was thinking of Phillip now. Thinking that Phillip’s hold on reality wasn’t very good right now. He had attacked Rodney DeFoe. Not that the bastard didn’t deserve it. But still, Phillip was showing every sign that he was coming apart. And Frances. . he didn’t even want to think about what all this was doing to her.

It started to rain. He switched on the wipers and then upped the heater a notch. Right now, all he wanted to do was go home and knock down enough Heinekens to numb out for a couple of hours.

Through the blur of the wipers, a sign caught his eyes. He had passed Spera’s place.

There was no excuse for not going back and finding out if Spera had any information about Claudia being cremated. He swung into a driveway and turned around.

Spera was standing by a truck backed up to the tent. The truck was an old U-Haul painted over white with red lettering, SPERA amp; SONS EXCAVATIONS, on the side. Spera was wearing a yellow rain slicker and stopped to wait as Louis ran from the car through the pelting rain. Spera motioned him back inside the tent.

“Lousy weather,” Spera muttered.

Louis nodded, wiping his face. He noticed the open back of the truck. Stacked inside were the cans from the Hidden Lake mortuary.

“Is this all of them?” Louis asked.

“Yup. The ones we found names on are over there,”

Spera said, pointing back in the tent.

Louis turned and saw the table where about a hundred of the corroded copper cans were carefully lined up. He went over to the table, his eyes scanning the labels.

“She’s not there,” Spera said, coming up behind him.

Louis’s eyes went back out to the truck.

“The ones still on the truck have no labels at all,” Spera said.

Louis looked back at the cans. He leaned closer. There were numbers stamped on the tops. He hadn’t seen them the first time in the darkness of the mortuary storeroom. He turned to Spera. “What about these numbers?” he asked.

Spera shrugged. “I was hoping it was a numbering system of some kind, but I can’t find anything that matches anything in all the records the hospital folks gave me.”

“You’re sure?” Louis asked. “Maybe they’re-”

“Look, Mr. Kincaid,” Spera interrupted. “I know you want to find your loved one, but I got a job to finish here, and things are just one big mess right now.”