The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(33)

“I’ll get it,” Noah told her. “Stay here.”

Josie watched as he threw on some clothes and disappeared into the hall. She listened to his footsteps and the sound of his front door creaking open. Then a female voice. Josie stood and pulled on her own clothes, padding downstairs after him. By the time she reached the foyer, he had closed the door. In his arms was a large casserole dish with a card taped to its lid.

Noah smiled at her. “A lady from my mom’s church,” he explained. “They thought I might need some nourishment.”

Josie followed him into the kitchen. “That’s so nice.”

“She said to put it in the oven for twenty-five minutes at 350 degrees,” Noah mumbled as he found a place for it in his freezer. He came to the table with the card in his hand, tearing off the envelope and opening the card. He read it quickly and then handed it to her before heading back to the fridge to look for something to make for breakfast. “They’re really good people,” he said over his shoulder.

“Yes, they are,” Josie agreed as she read the card. It was a pretty standard sympathy card. Rather than having the congregants each sign it, someone with flowery script had written:

Please let us know if you need anything. Keeping you in our prayers. Your family at St. Mary’s Episcopal.





“I thought you said your mom was Catholic,” Josie said.

“What’s that?” Noah said, closing the door to the fridge with only a carton of orange juice in hand.

“I thought your mom was Catholic. She went to an Episcopal church?”

He took a swig of the orange juice, directly from the carton, and said, “So?”

“So an Episcopal church is not the same as a Catholic church, and there are four Catholic churches in Denton, one of which is closer to her house than St. Mary’s Episcopal,” Josie pointed out.

“Josie, who cares what church my mom went to?”

“How long did she go to St. Mary’s?”

He gave a sigh of frustration and said, “I don’t know. She always went there.”

Which meant as long as Noah could remember. Josie rose from the kitchen table and went to the counter where his coffeemaker sat, getting the filters and coffee grounds from the cabinet above it. “Noah,” she said. “Those things we found in your mother’s sewing machine—”

The orange juice carton slammed onto the kitchen table. Josie turned and stared at him. “Why do you keep going on about those things? I told you, it’s some kind of mistake. They’re not important. A couple of old trinkets and a flash drive some lawyer had.”

Josie turned her entire body toward him. “Not ‘some lawyer’, Noah. Drew Pratt. The assistant district attorney who disappeared twelve years ago. Yesterday, Drew Pratt’s daughter was murdered. In very similar fashion to your mother. Suffocated in her own home. Whoever did it was looking for something because her house had been ransacked. We had to talk to her cousin, Mason, after she died. Mettner showed him the arrowhead, and he says it belonged to his dad.”

“So what?”

“So his dad is dead, too.”

Josie could see some of the irritation in Noah’s tense shoulders bleed away. “What?”

She gave him a brief rundown of everything she, Gretchen and Mettner had learned about the Pratt brothers.

“My mom didn’t know those men,” he said.

“How do you know she didn’t?” Josie prodded. “You couldn’t have known everything about her.”

“I knew enough about her. I’m telling you, she didn’t know those men.”

“Then how did she get their possessions?” Josie asked.

“It’s some kind of a mistake,” Noah said, his voice rising.

“I’m sorry, Noah, but I don’t think it is. Two men, one dead and one missing—brothers, no less—and your mother had their personal property hidden in her house. You don’t think she was hiding something?”

He walked toward her, stopping so close that Josie could see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “Like what?” Noah asked. “What could she possibly have been hiding?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

He pointed a finger at her chest. “You’re trying to figure out what my mother was lying about when you should be trying to figure out who killed her.”

Josie placed a palm on her sternum. “Because I think whatever she was hiding is what got her killed, Noah.”

“What could she possibly be hiding? What? You think she was some kind of serial killer? Drowning men in rivers? Making it look like they killed themselves? Is that what you think?”

Josie’s back slid along the counter as she inched away from him. “I never said that. But Noah, she had secrets. Surely you recognize that.”

His face twisted into an expression that was unrecognizable to her. When he unleashed his next words she realized why; he’d never once been cruel to her. Then again, he had never been this traumatized, this off-kilter. He said, “I know you were raised by a woman who might as well have been Satan’s sister, and she’s the only example you have, but normal mothers don’t keep secrets, and my mom was normal. You have no frame of reference for normal, so maybe that’s why you don’t get it, why you’re not listening to me. With my mom, what you saw, you got. She wouldn’t have gotten caught up in anything like what you’re talking about. I don’t know where those things came from or how they got into her sewing machine, but she didn’t do anything wrong.”