My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(10)

“It isn’t here,” she said climbing out.

“What isn’t here?” Calloway asked.

“The championship buckle,” Tracy said. “I gave it to Sarah last night before we left.”

“I’m not following,” Calloway said.

“Why would she take the buckle and not take her guns?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know. It’s just . . .”

“It’s just what?” Calloway asked.

“I mean, she wouldn’t have had any reason to take the belt buckle unless she intended to give it back to me this morning, right?”

“She walked away,” Calloway said. “Is that what you’re saying? She had time to decide what to take and started walking.”

Tracy looked down the deserted road. The white center line snaked with the hillside’s contours, turning and disappearing around a bend. “So where is she?”





[page]CHAPTER 9





The silver plating had lost its luster, but the cast image of a cowgirl firing two single-action revolvers and the lettering etched along the perimeter remained distinct: 1993 Washington State Champion.

They’d found the belt buckle.

They’d found Sarah.

The emotion that welled inside Tracy surprised her. It wasn’t bitterness or guilt. It wasn’t even sorrow. It was anger, and it coursed through her like venom. She’d known. She’d always known Sarah’s disappearance wasn’t what everyone had wanted her to believe. She’d known there’d been more to it. And now she had a sense that she could finally prove it.

“Finlay.” Calloway’s voice sounded as if it were coming from the far end of a long tunnel. “Take her out of here.”

Someone touched her arm. Tracy pulled away. “No.”

“You don’t need to be a part of this,” Calloway said.

“I left her once,” she said. “I’m not leaving her again. I’m staying. To the end.”

Calloway nodded to Armstrong, who stepped back to where Rosa had resumed digging. “I’ll need that back,” Calloway said. He held out his hand for the belt buckle but Tracy continued to trace the surface with her thumb, feeling the contour of each letter. “Tracy,” Calloway said.

She held out the buckle, but when Calloway grasped it she did not release her grip, forcing him to look her in the eye. “I told you, Roy. We searched this area. We searched it twice.”



She kept her distance the remainder of the afternoon, but she could see enough to know that Sarah had been buried in a fetal position, legs higher than her head. Whoever had used the hole created when the root ball was pulled free of the ground had misjudged the size of the hole, which was not uncommon. Spatial perception can become distorted when a person is under stress.

Only after Kelly Rosa had zipped closed the black body bag and padlocked the zipper did Tracy hike out of the woods back to her car.

She navigated the turns down the mountain without thought, her mind dulled. The sun had dipped below the tree line, causing shadows to creep across the road. She’d known, of course. It was why detectives were trained to work so hard to recover anyone abducted within the first forty-eight hours. After that, statistics showed that the odds of finding the person alive plummeted. After twenty years, the odds of finding Sarah alive had been infinitesimal. And yet there had remained that small part of her, the part that Tracy shared with other families whose loved ones had been abducted and never found. It was the part of every human being that clung to the hope, no matter how unlikely, that they could beat the odds. It had happened before. It had happened when a young woman in California, missing eighteen years, walked into a police station and said her name. Hope had been reignited that day for every family who had ever lost a loved one. It had flared for Tracy. Someday that would be Sarah. Someday that would be her sister. It could be so cruel, hope. But for twenty years it was all she’d had to hold on to, the only thing to push back the darkness that lingered on the periphery, searching for every opportunity to enshroud her.

Hope.

Tracy had clung to it, until that very last moment when Roy Calloway had handed her the belt buckle, and extinguished the final, cruel, flicker.

She drove past the spot on the county road where, twenty years earlier, they’d found her blue truck, and it felt as if just days had passed. Miles down the road, she took the familiar exit and drove through a town she no longer recognized or felt connected with. But rather than turn left for the freeway entrance, she turned right, driving out past the single-story houses she remembered as vibrant homes filled with families and friends, but which now looked tired and worn. Farther out of town, the size of the houses and the yards increased. She drove on autopilot, slowing to turn when she saw the river rock gateposts. She stopped at the bottom of a sloped driveway.

Bright perennials, regularly tended by her mother, had once filled the flowerbeds, but they had been replaced by the bare stalks of dormant rose bushes. At the top of a manicured lawn outlined by neatly trimmed English boxwood hedges was a severed stump, where the weeping willow had once stood like an open umbrella. Christian Mattioli had enlisted an architect from England to design a two-story, Queen Anne–style home when he had founded the Cedar Grove Mining Company and the town of Cedar Grove had sprung to life. As the story went, Mattioli later requested that the architect add a third story to ensure the home would be the tallest and grandest in Cedar Grove. A century later, long after the Cedar Grove mines had closed and most of the residents had moved on, the house and yard had fallen into disrepair. However, Tracy’s mother had fallen in love at first sight with the fish-scale siding and the turrets rising above the low-pitched gabled roofs. Tracy’s father, in search of a country medical practice, had bought her the property and together they had restored everything from the Brazilian-wood floors to the box-beam ceilings. They’d stripped the paneled wainscoting and cabinetry to the original mahogany and refurbished the marble entryway and crystal chandeliers, making the structure once again the grandest in Cedar Grove. But they’d done more than refurbish a structure. They’d created a place for two sisters to call home.