She made to leave and then turned around. “Was it bad?”
I looked up the number on my phone and sighed. “It’s going to get worse.”
“I’m sorry, Del. I’ll get a press release ready for when the ID is confirmed.”
Nancy shut the door behind her. I sighed and looked at the picture on the wall of me holding up a thirty-pound muskie on Lake Michigan, the biggest fish I’d ever caught in fresh waters. Bud had called him my monster and then practically outdid me the very next day with a twenty-six-pounder of his own. Jesus Christ. I hit the call button before I could think any more about it.
He answered on the first ring. “Is it her?”
I gritted my teeth, took a breath. “You’ve heard.”
“Mona’s out of her mind for worrying. What do you know?”
“Can’t say who it is yet.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Bud’s voice didn’t rise or change at all, but I’d never heard him ask that kind of question of me in the twenty-five years we’d been friends.
“Can’t, Bud. There was some . . . trauma . . . to the face and we can’t make a positive ID.” He didn’t say anything to that, although I knew he was taking it in somehow, and his picture of the dead girl who could be his daughter just got a whole lot uglier.
The last time anybody’d seen Hattie, according to Bud, was on Friday night after her play up at the school. Bud and Mona’d gone to see it and they hugged her afterwards and said not to be too late, but Hattie never came home.
“You remember what Hattie was wearing last night, Bud?”
“Her costume. It was a dress.”
“A sundress?”
“No, a white dress with blood all over it. Fake blood. And she had a crown on.”
“Would she have changed out of that before leaving?”
“I guess.”
“Does she own a yellow sundress with some ruffly stuff on it?”
“Hell if I know.” Bud checked with Mona. I could hear their voices low and tense.
“No, Mona says she doesn’t.” He came back on the line, sounding almost relieved. I didn’t share the feeling.
“Hmm. Still no idea who she got a ride with from the school?”
“Mona and I keep thinking it should have been Portia. She was in the play, too, but she says she didn’t see much of Hattie afterwards.”
“Okay, Bud. Listen, I need you to release Hattie’s dental records to my office. I’ll have Nancy stop by with the form and you’ll be the first to know about this girl one way or the other. I promise you that.”
He made a sound like a shaky acknowledgment and hung up the phone.
Before I could think too much about what I’d just asked of my best friend, I called Rochester and confirmed the autopsy was scheduled first thing tomorrow. It didn’t matter that tomorrow was Sunday; morgues didn’t keep business hours.
While Nancy took care of the paperwork and pictures, I opened the case file with Jake’s fancy new software that made it impossible to get any work done. Couldn’t grumble about it now. After getting the damn thing open, I filled in the few details we had. It was bleached bones, almost nothing.
Female.
Caucasian.
Stab wounds and possible head trauma.
Body found by two local juveniles at the old Erickson barn on Saturday, April 12, 2008, 4:32 p.m.
I swallowed and rubbed my jaw, looking at all those blank fields. I was worried for the first time I could remember, thinking about what I might have to type in there. Girls didn’t get murdered for nothing, not in Wabash County. There were no drive-by shootings here, no angry boys unloading an arsenal inside the high school. All that crazy city shit was a world away from us, and that’s why a lot of the folks who lived here stayed. Sure, the Pine Valley storefronts were always half empty. When crop prices were down, people might not scrape out their mortgage payments, but this was a community. A place stuck on the idea that people still mattered. Something certainly had mattered enough to draw this girl out to the Erickson barn in the middle of nowhere. And whatever it was had also mattered enough to someone else to kill her over it.
It was getting late so I walked home, but who knew why. I ate most of my meals at the station and hardly slept anymore. It used to be just during big cases, but lately I was only down about four hours a night. I owned the top half of a duplex a block off Main Street. The Nguyens, the folks who ran the liquor store now, lived downstairs. They were practically the only Asians in the county and although their cooking smells were downright pungent—nothing like Chinese restaurants—they were quiet and never banged on the plumbing to tell me to shut up like the last old woman did before she had a stroke and died. I kept it down anyway, especially in the middle of the night when I wasn’t sleeping. I played records sometimes, but I never watched the TV anymore; it just made me feel dead already. I got my news in the paper and listened to ball games on the radio, so there was no point even having the thing except the Nguyens’ cat liked to jump in through the window and lie on top of it. Even though I’d never liked cats, this one was all right. He didn’t strut around demanding food or rub his fur all over the place. He just sat on the TV on one side of the living room and I sat on the couch on the other side, and we were okay.
I sat up all night long thinking about that body. If I dozed off a little, I didn’t remember it. I made notes and lists of people to talk to and watched the clock turn slowly toward 7:00 a.m., while the cat’s tail twitched.