Hidden Falls (71 page)

It was all a mistake. The note was not for him. No one had known about the missing money.

At the corner, Liam leaned against the wall of the sporting goods store and let his shoulders heave with the effort of regaining breath.

“Liam?” Cooper was beside him. “You okay?”

“It was all a mistake,” Liam muttered. He told his brother about the conversation with Miranda. “I put all of this in motion because I thought somebody else knew. Nobody knew. I was paranoid.”

“That’s a strong word,” Cooper said. “You still did the right thing.”

“I thought it was too late to undo everything.”

“It
was
too late. You would have only implicated yourself in the crime.” Liam didn’t speak aloud how close he’d been to covering up Jessica’s actions if it had been within his abilities to do so.

Cooper glanced back down the sidewalk. “The mayor wanted to talk to me, but she’s gone now. Are you sure you don’t want a ride home?”

3:33 p.m.

“Can we stop for pie?”

As Jack pulled out of the junior high school pickup line, he glanced at the hopeful face of his youngest child.

“Please?” Brooke used her big eyes to their fullest effect.

“Don’t you want to get home to the dog?” At his wife’s request, Jack was fetching Brooke from school, but he wasn’t planning to call it a day quite this early.

“Roxie can wait a half hour. Please? I really want pie.”

Half an hour. Jack’s eyes flicked to the clock in the dash as he headed for Main Street. He was ready for his afternoon coffee anyway. “The café or the diner?”

“Café. The cream pies are creamier.”

Jack hadn’t been in the café in more than a week, not since the Sunday afternoon he and Liam had speculated on the harm that might have befallen Quinn the night before. Now Liam was in his own mess—indirectly, at least. Jack didn’t know any details other than that Liam’s fiancée was arrested a few hours ago. Observing Liam coming and going from their shared office floor in a deteriorating state every day, Jack suspected the arrest had not been a surprise to Liam.

He parked and followed Brooke into the café, letting her choose a booth and sliding in across from her.

She pulled the dessert menu from its holder and studied it. “Should I have chocolate cream, peanut butter cream, or banana cream?”

Jack didn’t answer. Brooke wasn’t asking his opinion as much as she was thinking aloud. He preferred berry pies, and Gavin knew that. While Brooke pondered her choices, Jack caught Gavin’s eye and raised the coffee mug at his place setting. It struck him that the café was unusually busy for this time on a weekday afternoon. Gradually the chatter around them sorted into words and sentences and implying tones.

“I don’t see how Liam Elliott could
not
have known she was doing something illegal. What kind of relationship could they have if he didn’t know what she was up to?”

“That Jessica McCarthy has been a snob since the day she came to town.”

“Did you see the way he kissed her? Right out there on the street.”

“Cooper should recuse himself, even if he is the senior deputy. That woman was practically his sister.”

Brooke stuck the menu back in the holder. “Why is everybody being so mean?”

Jack had hoped she wasn’t listening. “I don’t know. People like to talk.”

“What happened, anyway?”

“I’m not sure, other than that a woman who works at the department store was arrested for some financial transgression.”

“Is she going to need a lawyer?”

“I suppose so.”

Gavin arrived with coffee. “Are you going to take the case? Could be an interesting one.”

Brooke’s eyes moved from Jack to Gavin and back again.

“That question may be premature,” Jack said.

“Looks to me like she’s in big trouble,” Gavin said as he poured. “You should make sure she knows who you are.”

“Did you decide what kind of pie you want?” Jack asked Brooke.

“Banana cream, please.”

“I’ll have whatever fruit pie you have,” Jack said. “Thanks.”

Gavin moved on to the next table.

“Will you be her lawyer?” Brooke asked.

“She hasn’t said she wants me to be her lawyer.” When Bobby Doerr called and requested his services, Jack figured he had come across one of the many business cards Jack spread around town. He would walk Doerr through the arraignment process at least. As soon as Jack arrived at the sheriff’s office, he recognized Doerr as the man who’d stolen a purse in the same restaurant where Jack sat with his daughter now—and he saw the flicker in Doerr’s eyes indicating he also remembered their encounter. That would be a separate matter in the legal system, though, and in light of the weightier charges Doerr faced, perhaps Jack would persuade his client to confess to the smallest of his violations. Ironically Doerr had been successful in more serious crimes while failing to complete a simple purse snatching or pick Richard Jordan’s wallet out of his pocket.

“What if she does say she wants you to be her lawyer?” Brooke’s inquiry brought Jack back to the present question.

“Then I would meet with her, and we would decide if I’m the right lawyer for her,” Jack said. “Everybody accused of a crime is entitled to a strong defense, and no one should think they know the truth because they heard gossip somewhere.”

Jack didn’t think Jessica McCarthy would call him, though. She never regarded him with anything other than arrogant distaste. In the past, he wouldn’t have cared. He would have done anything to bring in a fee or to bring a new client to the firm—which was precisely the attitude that got him in trouble in his corporate work in Memphis. Sitting in a small café with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Jack was certain that was not the image he wanted her to see of him. As tempting as it was to try to insert himself into the case, he wouldn’t.

“Tell me about your day,” Jack said, and Brooke launched into her usual vivid accounts.

Thirty minutes later, Jack dropped Brooke at home and turned his attention back to the question niggling his brain all day. Stephen Pease had exchanged his healthy child for the sickly son of Harold Tabor and a significant amount of money. Shortly thereafter, the Peases went through the motions of burying an infant, yet they had raised a boy who lived long enough to father a daughter—Ethan’s mother.

So who was in that grave?

Rather than returning to his office, Jack drove to the cemetery. He didn’t know Old Dom, the groundskeeper who had provided Nicole with the records that led her into the mystery of several babies, but it wouldn’t be difficult to spot a man in his late eighties who seemed to feel at home on cemetery grounds. Jack’s BMW crawled around the widest loop first as he looked in both directions for any sign of grounds-keeping activity. As he drove nearer to the heart of the cemetery, Jack spotted two young men clearing away fallen tree branches, likely remnants from Saturday’s sudden storm. He eased alongside their pickup truck to inquire whether they knew Old Dom. Following their instructions, he found the caretaker with his knees on a pad while he pulled weeds from among a bed of flowers in their last gasp of bloom. Jack introduced himself, and Old Dom tilted his face up in greeting but did not stop plucking weeds and tossing them into a bag.

“I need to get this done,” Old Dom said.

Jack squatted beside the old man. “I understand you know a great deal about the history of this cemetery.”

“A fair bit.” Dom pinched another weed. “You can pull weeds, can’t you?”

Jack hadn’t pulled weeds since he was a boy when he was sentenced for some infraction with a summer of tending his mother’s vegetable garden. He didn’t remember what his crime had been, but he remembered that he hated pulling weeds. Nevertheless, he reached among the flowers and pulled a greenish-yellow stem he was certain didn’t belong.

“Lots of people asking questions these days,” Dom said. “What’s yours?”

“It’s about the Pease graves,” Jack said.

“We only have a couple of those.”

“Two adults and an infant.”

“That’s what the records say.”

Jack reached for another slender but stubborn stem, making sure to get his fingers close to the root. “Do you suppose I could see the records?”

“For that, you want to talk to Jasmine at the front desk in the office.” Dom picked up the nearly full bag and shook its contents down.

“I understand you have some records that might be more informative,” Jack said.

Old Dom smiled with one side of his face. “I do indeed.”

“Then if you would allow me to give you a ride, maybe I could have a look while I’m here.”

Dom folded the weed bag closed. “First I have to put this bag where it belongs.”

“We can do that.” At this point, Jack would do whatever it took to see those records, including haul a bag of weeds in the back of his spotless BMW. He picked up the bag, surprised at its heft and wondering how long it would have taken the old man to carry it. Jack opened the back of his car and set the bag inside, then held open the passenger door for Old Dom.

They drove to an enclosed trash and recycling area, and Jack gladly set the bag of weeds among others like it. Then Dominick pointed toward the main building and directed Jack around to the back.

“It’s curious how many people are interested in my father’s records,” Dom said. “First Quinn, then Richard Jordan’s boy and the Sandquist girl, and now you. I ought to get some chairs. I’ve only got the one.”

Dom led the way through a door at the rear of the building. Jack followed through the underfurnished room Old Dom referred to as his office. Dominick took a key from his pocket and opened another door and flipped a light switch.

“What you’re looking for is in here,” Dom said.

Jack saw the books lying open on a counter. “Thank you for indulging me.”

“What are you all looking for?”

“I’m sure you know Quinn disappeared,” Jack said. “We’re looking for whatever he saw when he looked at these books.” The answer was overly simplistic, but Jack hoped it was enough to keep Dom talking. Jack didn’t think the cemetery records had anything to do with Quinn’s disappearance, but he had discovered months ago that merely dropping Quinn’s name into conversation seemed to improve people’s moods and cooperation.

“Like I told the Sandquist girl, those are the books Quinn was looking at. But since you mentioned the Pease graves, I’ll save you some time. My daddy never believed that infant was the Pease baby.”

Jack’s head snapped up and he raised his eyebrows. “What makes you say that?”

“Daddy knew things. That was the way of him.”

“The official records say the Peases lost an infant son.”

“There’s official records, and then there’s what really happened,” Dom said.

Jack gently laid his fingers on an open page of an oversized volume. “What do you think happened?”

Dom shook his head. “Can’t say. I was just a boy myself. But I remember a lot of children took sick that winter. Whooping cough and measles are hard on the little ones. My own baby brother had the croup all winter. My mama was scared something awful that we’d lose him.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No sir. He pulled through.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“But many families were not so blessed.”

“Like the Peases?”

Dom removed his hat and scratched the top of his bald head. “That’s hard to say.”

Jack waited.

“So many babies were sick, and of course it was the Depression. If a grieving family turned up at the funeral home with a baby wrapped in a blanket and no money for more than a pauper’s burial, nobody asked many questions. My daddy and I just dug the graves. Daddy had nothing to do with who went in them.”

“But he had his ideas,” Jack said.

“Yes sir, he had his ideas.”

“Do you mind if I look at these books for a while?”

“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? You seem like a smart man. You’ll see soon enough what I’m talking about. But I’ll tell you something else Daddy didn’t write in those books.”

“What’s that?”

“Stephen Pease had a bicycle. He dropped by the next morning in his rattletrap of a car and asked me if I’d like to have it. Of course I said yes.”

“Of course. What boy doesn’t want a bicycle?” What did a bicycle have to do with the grave? Jack hoped Dom would get to the point.

“It was a heap of rust,” Dom said, “and I had never ridden one before. Mr. Pease got back in his car and I waved. And that’s when I heard a baby cry.”

“A baby? In the car?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you tell your father?”

“Yes sir. He said he already knew and I shouldn’t worry about it.”

Jack’s heart lurched ahead of itself. There was a crime. Multiple crimes.

Who—or what—was in that grave?

4:48 p.m.

Lauren smiled at the face she’d been hoping all day would turn up. “Hey, Cooper.”

“Hey you. You’re looking good.”

Lauren hoped he would pull the chair close. She was ready for him this time, with her hair brushed, her bathrobe cinched, the head of her bed up, and her glasses on straight—more than presentable by hospital standards.

While Cooper, still in uniform, adjusted the chair to his liking—and Lauren’s—a CNA stuck her head in.

“Do you need anything? Fresh water? A snack?”

“No thanks,” Lauren said. “Someone said my dinner would be here soon.”

The CNA let her glance settle on Cooper as she half-backed out of the room.

“Funny,” Lauren said, “when my mouth is parched, I can’t get anyone to come in and freshen my water pitcher for the life of me.”

Lauren heard indistinct voices in the hall, which she ignored in favor of giving Cooper her attention. “I hope you’ve had a good day.”

“Some highs, some lows,” he said.

“Oh, what happened?”

Someone from food services came into the room. “I just wanted to confirm your dinner order. Pork chop or baked chicken?”

“Pork chop.”

“Brown rice or potatoes?”

“Brown rice.”

“Vegetable?”

“Whatever you have.”

“Perfect.”

Once the hospital employee left, Lauren looked at Cooper, puzzled. “That was weird. I don’t always get what I mark on the menu, but they never come in to double-check.”