My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(35)

He touched her leg. “Sarah would have wanted you to be happy, Tracy.”

“I was fooling myself,” she said. “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think of her. There wasn’t a day I wasn’t tempted to pull out the boxes, that I didn’t think I had missed something, that there had to be one more piece of evidence. And then I was sitting at my desk and my partner said they’d found her grave.” She exhaled. “Do you know how long I’ve waited for someone to tell me I’m not just some obsessed crazy person?”

“You’re not a crazy person, Tracy. Obsessed, maybe.”

She smiled. “You always could make me laugh.”

“Yes, but unfortunately that usually wasn’t my intention.” Dan sat back and exhaled. “I don’t know what happened back then, Tracy, not for certain, not yet, but what I do know is, if you’re right about this, if House was framed, it wasn’t orchestrated by one person. This was a conspiracy and Hagen, Calloway, Clark—even Finn, potentially—would have had to have been a part of it.”

“And someone with access to Sarah’s jewelry and our home,” Tracy said. “I know.”



Roy Calloway’s Suburban was parked in the driveway of her parents’ home behind another sheriff’s vehicle and alongside a Cascade County fire truck and ambulance. The sirens were silent and no strobes pierced the early morning darkness. It gave Tracy a strange sense of relief. Whatever the emergency was, it couldn’t be too bad if the lights were off. Could it?

Calloway’s call had awakened her at just after four in the morning. Though Ben had been gone three months, Tracy had kept the rental house. Home no longer held the fond memories it once had for her. Her mother and father remained reclusive and quiet. Her father had quit working at the hospital and was rarely seen around town. They had not held their annual Christmas Eve party since Sarah’s disappearance. Her father had also started to drink at night. She heard the slur in his voice when she called to check up on them and smelled it on his breath when she visited. She also did not feel fully welcome there anymore. There was an elephant in the room nobody wanted to acknowledge. The memory foremost on their minds was the one they wanted to forget. They were each wracked with their own guilt—Tracy, for having left Sarah to drive home alone, and her parents, for having gone to Hawaii instead of being at home that fateful weekend. Tracy rationalized it all by telling herself she was too old to be running home to her parents anyway, and that home was no longer home.

In his call, Calloway had told her to get dressed and get to her parents’ house. “Just get here,” he’d said, when she’d attempted to question him further.

She hustled up the front steps to the sound of chatter from the emergency vehicle radios. Medical and police personnel milled about the porch and grand foyer. Nobody seemed to be in a particular hurry, and she took that as another good sign. One of Calloway’s deputies saw her come in and knocked on the doors to her father’s den. Moments later, it was Roy Calloway, not her father, who slid them apart. She saw others in the room behind him, though not her father or her mother. The deputy said something to Calloway, who slid the doors closed. He looked pale and sickly. Stricken.

“Roy?” she asked, stepping toward him. “What is it? What happened?”

Calloway wiped at his nose with a handkerchief. “He’s gone, Tracy.”

“What?”

“Your father’s gone.”

“My father?” She hadn’t even considered her father. She’d been certain something had happened to her mother. “What are you talking about?” When she tried to step past him, Calloway blocked her path, holding her by the shoulders. “Where is my father? Dad? Dad!”

“Tracy, don’t.”

She fought to free herself. “I want to see my father.”

Calloway took her out onto the porch and pressed her shoulders to the side of the house, restraining her. “Listen to me. Tracy, stop and listen to me.” She continued to struggle. “He used the shotgun, Tracy.”

Tracy froze.

Calloway lowered his hands and took a step back. He glanced away, exhaling before regrouping and reconsidering her. “He used the shotgun,” he said.





[page]CHAPTER 25





A week after she’d buried Sarah’s remains, Tracy slid onto a bench seat attached to a table in the visitor’s area of Walla Walla State Penitentiary. “Let me do the talking,” she said.

“I will,” Dan said, taking a seat beside her.

“Don’t promise him anything.”

“I won’t.”

“He’ll try to cut a deal.”

Dan reached over and gripped her hand. “You told me that too. Calm down. I’ve been in prisons before, though admittedly the ones I’ve been in looked more like country clubs. This looks like an austere high school cafeteria.”

Tracy looked to the door but did not see Edmund House. He was imprisoned in the D Unit of the penitentiary’s West Complex, the prison’s second-highest security unit. His placement reflected the severity of his crime, murder in the first degree, not his behavior during his time served. Tracy’s phone calls over the years had revealed House to be a model inmate who kept mostly to himself, reading in his cell or working in the library on one of the many appeals he had filed during his years of incarceration.