The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller
Lisa Regan
For Monica Ebbenga and Bonita Klatt. Speaking your truth is a powerful thing.
Prologue
The screams followed her, echoing all around her as she sprinted along the ridge and fled into the darkness, her feet scrabbling over the brush and loose stones. To her right was a sheer drop, hundreds of feet down. She didn’t know just how far, but she knew the fall would be enough to kill her. To her left was a wall of dense forest.
When the first gunshot sounded, she veered left into the trees.
Branches slapped at her arms and face, slicing thin ribbons of blood into her fair skin. A tree root snagged her toes, sending her flying. Leaves and stones rose up to meet her and her elbow cracked against a large rock, sending an agonizing shot of pain through her arm and up into her skull. Still, she heard the screaming in the distance. Her breath came in gasps as she scrambled to her feet, holding her elbow close to her body. Tears leaked from her eyes, but panic and the will to survive drove her deeper into the forest.
Another gunshot shattered the night.
She had to get as far away from the encampment as she could, but the thickening springtime foliage overhead blocked out the light of the moon, plunging the forest into total darkness. Which way had she come?
Another gunshot cracked like a whip, but as the echo bounced around her, she couldn’t tell which direction it had come from. Using her good arm, she began to move by feeling her way, praying she was going away from the shots, her fingers fumbling over tree trunks and branches, small sticks and stalks crunching beneath her feet. The muscles in her calves cramped. How long had she been running? It felt like hours but it couldn’t have been.
The snap of a nearby branch pierced the roar of panic in her head. She whipped around, but she could see nothing in the blackness. Then came a voice, cold and calm, the sound slicing through her like a knife, paralyzing her.
“Did you really think you could get away?”
“Please,” she whimpered. “Please don’t.”
She felt the hard circle of the gun’s barrel against the base of her skull.
“You’ll never leave me again.”
One
Smoke billowed from Josie’s oven, thick and black, spilling out around the edges of the door. Coughing, she hit the button to turn off the oven and waved a cloth to clear the smoke. From across the room, the smoke alarm shrieked.
“Shit,” Josie said.
Abandoning the oven, she raced from window to window, flinging them open, trying to wave some of the smoke outside. Over the din of the alarm, she heard Noah’s voice. “Josie? You okay—what the hell?”
She dragged one of her kitchen chairs across the room and stood on it, pulling the smoke alarm off the wall. Then, banging it against the table, she popped the batteries out to silence it. Tossing it aside, she managed a sheepish smile for Noah.
“What are you doing?” he asked, waving a hand to clear some of the smoke from his eyes.
“It’s fine,” she mumbled. “Nothing’s on fire.”
“Looks like something was,” he pointed out.
Josie returned to the oven and, putting mitts on each hand, reached into the blackness in search of the edges of the cake pan. What she pulled out made them both grimace.
“What… was that?” Noah asked.
Josie threw the entire thing into the sink. “It was supposed to be a raspberry coffee cake. Your mom likes raspberries, right?”
Noah’s face twisted into a look Josie recognized as part sympathy, part skepticism and just a little bit of him trying not to laugh. “Uh, yeah, but if you wanted to make something for dessert, brownies would have been fine. Or, like, a bundt cake or something.”
Josie pointed to the kitchen counter where three other bake pans lay in a mangled, blackened heap. “Those are the brownies. That was a bundt cake, and that last one was a chocolate Devil’s food cake from a goddamn Betty Crocker box, which I still managed to burn.”
Noah leaned against the kitchen doorway and covered his mouth with his hand. Josie pointed an oven mitt at him. “Don’t you dare laugh.”
From between his fingers, he said, “Maybe something cold? Jell-O? Something simple.”
“Are you out of your mind? I am not taking Jell-O to your mother’s house for dinner.”
“Something store-bought,” he suggested. “That’s simple.”
There wasn’t a chance in hell that Josie was bringing something simple to Colette Fraley’s house. The woman was the consummate homemaker. Everything she cooked looked delicious and tasted even better. Her garden was lush, colorful and perfectly pruned and she even found time to sew beautiful quilts that she donated to foster children. Colette was the reason Pinterest was invented. People like Josie just couldn’t compare to the Colette Fraleys of the world.
Colette barely tolerated Josie as it was, but for the first time ever, she had tasked Josie with bringing dessert to their monthly dinner. Josie saw the request for what it was—a challenge—and she was damn well going to rise to the occasion. Well, possibly. If she could pass something store-bought off as her own creation.
Josie sagged one hip against the counter. “She’s never going to like me, is she? Even if I could whip up a chocolate soufflé with my eyes shut, it wouldn’t change anything.”