The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(11)

“Someone straddled her,” Josie remarked.

“Right. Whoever the killer was, he straddled her, pressed her head into the dirt and stuffed her mouth with soil. I’m thinking it was a man because of the strength that would have taken. Mrs. Fraley was in her sixties, but I understand she was physically healthy. Against a smaller opponent, I would expect to see more evidence of a struggle. More bruising and lacerations on her body, more of the dirt and grass disturbed out here. I’m thinking this guy was big enough to overpower her completely and hold her here until he was finished.”

“Then he turned her over onto her face,” Josie said.

“Boss,” Mettner said.

“Just Josie, now, remember?”

Mettner corrected himself shyly. “Josie. I think this was personal.”

Josie nodded. “It doesn’t get much more intimate, does it? Looking down into someone’s eyes while you suffocate them? Then turning them over so you don’t have to see what you’ve done? You should alibi the family.”

“I thought the family lived far away from here,” Mettner said.

“Well Noah’s oldest brother has a pretty airtight alibi since he lives in Arizona, but you should still make some calls—find out where he was at the time of Colette’s death and who can corroborate his whereabouts. It’s just good practice. Laura and her husband, Grady, live only a couple of hours away, and I think Colette’s ex-husband lives in the state. They’re closer. Even more reason to alibi them. Rule out those closest to Colette right off the bat.”

“You think any of them are capable of this?” Mettner asked.

Josie shrugged. The grief she had seen at Noah’s house was genuine. “Probably not, but the first thing we’d do if this was a case that didn’t involve one of our own would be to make sure everyone close to the victim had an alibi.”

“Right,” Mettner conceded. “I thought Mrs. Fraley divorced Noah’s dad years ago.”

“She did,” Josie said. “But we really have no idea what kind of relationship they had then, or if they maintained one afterward. It’s worth looking into.”

“You got it. By the way, come upstairs with me. There are some drawers disturbed up there as well.”

The upstairs rooms were in a similar state of disarray to the downstairs. Just like the living room and kitchen, the upstairs rooms looked as though Colette had simply been looking for something. The drawers in her night stands and the top dresser drawers stood half-open, some of their contents scattered onto the floor. The closet doors had been pushed open and the lids from various shoeboxes sat crooked, as though hastily replaced. A large, standing jewelry box in the corner of the room had also been disturbed. A quick glance told Josie that whoever had raided the room had left behind several—if not all—valuable pieces of jewelry. They would be better able to tell what might be missing after Noah did a walk-through.

“Someone was looking for something, like I said,” Josie told Mettner.

“Yes,” Mettner agreed. “Looks that way. Come, see the rest.”

In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet stood open, a bottle of Advil and a tube of toothpaste discarded in the sink beneath it. Cleaning supplies spilled from the cabinet beneath the sink. The heavy top of the toilet tank was askew.

“What the hell?” Josie said. “What did this guy think she had?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out,” Mettner said. “Did Noah or his sister tell you anything at all?”

“There’s nothing for them to tell,” Josie said. “They say she wasn’t having problems with anyone, didn’t have many valuables in the home and that no one would hurt her.”

“Then what secrets was she keeping?” Mettner asked. “Even from her children?”

Josie said, “That’s what we have to figure out.”

Colette’s spare bedroom, which Josie knew her other children slept in when they visited, was undisturbed except for the closet where several of Colette’s old handbags had been pulled out and left on the floor. The other bedroom had long ago been converted to a sewing room. Its dozens of plastic drawers against the far wall had all been pulled open. The large sewing machine that sat in the middle of the long, narrow sewing table in the center of the room had been knocked onto its side. Other than that, the room appeared to be in order. The shelves of fabric and spools of thread lining the opposite wall were undisturbed as were the baskets of yarn. In the corner of the room stood a waist-high wooden quilt rack draped with Colette’s latest masterpiece.

“If she could sew like that, she definitely didn’t have Parkinson’s,” Josie remarked as she stepped into the room.

“We’ve already photographed it and printed what we could,” Mettner said. “So you can take a look around.”

Josie walked reverently around the room, thinking of the hours Colette must have spent at her beloved sewing table. Had she made the newest quilt for her forthcoming grandchild, Josie wondered? The thought caused a small ache in her chest, and she tried to turn her mind back to the facts of the case, the clues. Surely the killer had been the one searching the house, not Colette in a state of dementia? She wondered if he had found what he was searching for and made off with it. Was that why the place was not more thoroughly ransacked? Or had he been trying to make it look like it was just Colette searching for something? She ran her fingers over the quilt hanging on the rack, the beautiful, perfect work causing the ache in her chest to bloom once more; Colette would never sew again.