My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(108)

She took a breath and gathered herself. “Many of you are wondering who was responsible for convicting Edmund House. I’ve wondered the same thing for twenty years. I now know that the person responsible was my father, James Crosswhite. For those of you who knew my father, I understand that this is probably hard to accept, but I ask you not to condemn him. My father loved Sarah and me with all his heart. When she disappeared, it broke him. He was never the same man.” Tracy looked to George Bovine. “What he did, he did out of love for her, and for every father who loves his daughter; he was determined to ensure that no father would ever suffer the grief that he and George Bovine had suffered because of Edmund House.”

She took another moment to gather her emotions. “The only logical and reasonable conclusion is that after Edmund House confessed to Chief Calloway, taunting him that they would never convict him without my sister’s body, my father gathered the strands of hair from the hairbrush in the bathroom that my sister and I shared in our childhood home, and placed that evidence in the Chevy stepside. And it was my father who hid Sarah’s earrings in a sock in a can in the toolshed on Parker House’s property. As a country doctor, my father made frequent house calls, including calls on Parker. It was my father who reviewed every tip received about Sarah and who called Paul Hagen and convinced Mr. Hagen that he’d seen the red Chevy that night he had driven through town. My father acted alone in doing these things. I want to emphasize that neither Roy Calloway, Vance Clark, nor anyone else, to my knowledge, played a part in my father’s wrongdoing. My father’s actions were born from grief, despair, and desperation. We can all question his actions, but hopefully you won’t question his motives.

“For those of you who knew my father, I ask that you remember that man—a faithful husband, a loving father, a loyal friend.” She folded her notes and looked up. “I will be happy to answer your questions.”

And the questions came in a flurry. Tracy bobbed and weaved around them, answering what she could, deflecting others, and pleading ignorance when necessary. After ten minutes, Finlay Armstrong, the Acting Sheriff of Cedar Grove, stepped forward and ended the conference. Then he provided Tracy and Dan a police escort out of the church and back to Dan’s home, where they again went into seclusion, protected by the best security system in town.



The following day, Tracy walked into Roy Calloway’s room in the Cascade County Hospital. She found Calloway sitting up, though leaning back at a forty-five-degree incline with his leg suspended in a sling above the bed. “Hey, Chief.”

He shook his head. “Not anymore. I’m retired.”

“Did hell freeze over?”

“For three days,” he said.

She smiled. “You got that right. How’s the leg?”

“Doctor says I get to keep it after a few more surgeries. I’ll walk with a limp and need a cane, but he said it won’t keep me out of the streams.”

She took his hand. “I’m sorry I put you through this, Roy. I know my dad told you not to say anything, and when I kept pushing for answers, I put you in a situation where you felt the need to protect Vance and DeAngelo and try to convince me to let it go and just leave.”

“Don’t go making me out to be some hero,” he said. “I was covering my ass too. You know, I thought about telling you.”

“I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said.

“That’s what I figured. That’s why I didn’t try. You’d made up your mind, and I knew you were as stubborn as your old man.”

She smiled. “More.”

“He didn’t want you suffering any more than you already were, Tracy. He’d lost Sarah. He didn’t want to lose you too. He was afraid that the guilt would be too much for you to live with. He didn’t want that, Tracy. He didn’t want you thinking Sarah died because of you. She didn’t, you know. House was a psychopath. He killed her because he got the chance. But I guess I don’t need to tell you that. I imagine you get a fair share more of those types of killers than we get here in Cedar Grove.”

“What do you think happened to him, Roy?”

“Who? Your father?”

“You knew him as well as anyone. What do you think happened?”

Calloway seemed to give his answer some thought. “I think he just couldn’t get past the loss. He couldn’t get over the grief. He loved you both so much. He felt so much guilt because he wasn’t here. You know how he was. He thought if he had just been here, he could have stopped it somehow. It hurt their marriage, you know?”

“I figured it did.”

“He blamed her for him not being here, for them being in Hawaii. He didn’t, but . . . he did. And then when he thought that we weren’t going to be able to get justice for Sarah, I think it just kind of put him over the edge and it snowballed on him. He was a man of such high character. I’m sure that planting the evidence just weighed on him even more. Don’t judge him, Tracy. Your father was a great man. He didn’t kill himself. The grief did that.”

“I know.”

Calloway took a deep breath and let out a sigh. “Thanks for what you did at the news conference.”

“I just told the truth,” she said, unable to suppress a grin.

Calloway chuckled. “I’m not sure it will satisfy the Department of Justice.”