The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(59)

She filled Gretchen in on the morning’s awkwardness with Noah and his sister.

“Well,” Gretchen said. “It is better if he’s not in the area. Safer. If he wants time, give him time. He does love you, you know.”

Josie sighed. She wasn’t sure that was going to be enough, but there were more serious issues to attend to than her own hurt feelings. “Well I’ve got some exciting developments—I think. Let’s get Mett up here.” She called him on his cell phone and five minutes later, he was sitting at Noah’s empty desk so Josie could fill them in on the Wolicki article and on her meeting with Sutton. Mettner tapped away excitedly on his phone as Josie spoke.

“How long do you think it will take to get the personnel records?” he asked.

Josie shrugged. “If they go back that far? Possibly a week. I asked Sutton before I left. How’d it go with the Catholic church?”

Mettner nodded to Gretchen who picked up a sheaf of papers from her desk and handed it to Josie. “Here is a list of students enrolled in St. Agatha’s elementary school between 1958 and 1966. Colette’s name is on here. No one named Ivan.”

“What?” Josie said, skimming the names on the pages. “Are you kidding me?”

“I wish I was,” Gretchen said. “Especially if those personnel records don’t pan out. Anyway, that’s the bad news. The good news is that I’ve got another lead. Look at the faculty names.”

Josie found the names of the nuns and lay teachers who had taught at St. Agatha’s when Colette was a student there. “I see them.”

“There was a nun there, Sister Mary Elsa. Her real name is Tracy Schmidt. She left the church in 1967.”

“Left the church?”

“Yes, left it. Apparently, it was quite the scandal.”

Josie raised a brow. “How do you know that?”

Gretchen smiled. “The church secretary is in her late seventies. She’s been working in the school office since she was twenty-five years old.”

“But she’s never heard of an Ivan?”

“No, but she said she was never great with student names,” Mettner said.

Josie laughed. “Well, that’s a good school secretary.”

“That’s a lot of students to remember,” Mettner replied. “All those decades of working at the school. Faculty and staff last a lot longer. What she does remember is the gossip, and Sister Mary Elsa, otherwise known as Tracy Schmidt’s departure from the church was quite a scandal.”

“What happened?” Josie asked, setting the list aside and taking a sip of her coffee.

Gretchen said, “She’s not sure why she left, just that she left. That was the scandal. Nuns take their vows for a lifetime. Back then it was quite a big deal for a nun to break her vows and leave the church.”

“So,” Josie said. “The school secretary thinks that this nun might know something?”

“Apparently she and Colette were quite close,” Mettner said.

“And then, at some point in high school, Colette switched to Episcopalian and never looked back,” Josie said.

“Yes. They both left the Catholic church,” Gretchen pointed out. “So there’s definitely something there.”

“Something that’s going to lead us to this Ivan person?” Josie asked hopefully.

Gretchen shrugged. “Hard to say. Won’t know unless we ask.”

Mettner stood up. “Let’s go talk to Tracy Schmidt.”

“Hopefully she’s still alive,” Josie said.





Forty





While Mettner and Josie looked into finding Tracy Schmidt, Gretchen did a search for Brody Wolicki and texted Josie and Mettner her results. He was still alive but he had moved to Sullivan County, a remote area in northern Pennsylvania and about three hours from Denton. Josie’s ex-fiancé, Luke Creighton’s sister had a farm up in Sullivan County, so Josie had been there before. She called the number listed for Wolicki twice, but he didn’t answer. After a brief discussion with Mettner, they decided she would drive up there first thing in the morning to follow up on the belt buckle lead.

The ex-nun, Tracy Schmidt, was still alive and in her eighties and living in a run-down part of Denton. Her apartment was in a five-story crumbling brick building on a block where weeds grew from the cracks in the pavement and broken glass and litter gathered in every concrete crevice within sight. The building next to Schmidt’s was condemned, its top floors burned out from a fire several years earlier. The windows of the lower floors had been smashed out, boarded up, and then someone had broken through some of those boards. Josie knew from the patrol officers that there were a few homeless people who routinely stayed on the lower floor. The building on the other side had a Chinese restaurant and a small laundromat on the ground floor, and the top floors looked to be apartments. Directly across the street were several stout two-story rowhouses crammed together. The corner house had a mini-market on the first floor. A couple of men in hoodies stood outside smoking cigarettes.

Josie and Mettner parked outside Schmidt’s building and made their way inside two unlocked wooden doors with smoked glass. There were some metal mailboxes affixed to a wall to the left and a set of stairs to the right. “She’s in number four,” Josie said, pointing to the mailbox with the name “Schmidt” written on it in thick black marker.