Stitches In Crime Box Sets

Chapter 3

I slept fitfully, but fortunately, Sawyer’s first day of school had made him so tired that even my tossing and turning didn’t affect him. When we both finally crawled out of bed with about twenty minutes to spare before we had to leave for school, he looked at me and said, “Mama, I slept like I was a log.”

I laughed. “You did sleep like you were a log, Love Bug. You were tired.” I hugged him close and took a deep breath of the scent of him. “How are you feeling about school today?”

He put a finger to his chubby cheek, like he always did when he wanted to seem pensive but already knew what he wanted to say, “Well, Mama, you know I’ll miss you…but I love school, especially the pouring part.”

“Pouring? Like pouring water?” I asked.

“It’s an important skill, Heather says.” His face was so serious as he mimicked what his teacher had told him, and I had to agree with Heather myself. Pouring was an important skill. The sticky spots on my floor were a testament to the fact that Saw needed a bit more in that skill area.

This time when I dropped him off, Saw didn’t even want me to walk him to the door, so I waved from beside the car, took a deep breath to pull my tears back in, and called Santi. “You ready?” I asked when he picked up.

“As I’ll ever be. You almost here?” He sounded tired, and I imagined he was. It had probably taken him most of the night to deal with the paperwork and reports on the body and the campsite.

“Be there in five. You want me to drive?” I was pretty sure his answer was going to be no because of the nature of our visit to Frank, but I wanted to offer.

“The cruiser is better for today. Just park out back.” He disconnected, and a couple of minutes later I pulled in behind the police station, locked my car, and climbed into the passenger seat of his car.

“Hi, Beautiful,” he said and kissed me on the cheek. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” I echoed and fastened my seatbelt. We rode for a few minutes in silence, and then I tried to lighten the mood. “So are you good cop, or bad cop?”

He cut me a glance from the corner of his eye and said, “This question implies that there are two cops in this car, and there is only one.” He grinned, but the tightness in his jaw told me he was mostly serious. “I’ll handle the questions, Pais, okay?”

I sighed. “You’re right. Okay. How can I help?” When his hand slid over mine, I let out a long breath.

“Both Frank and I will appreciate you being there. And we need your historical perspective to get this thing together. Be you, Pais. Just be you.” He lifted my fingers to his mouth and kissed them lightly.

I put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. It felt like it had been a long time since anyone just wanted me for me, not for how I could hold them up or get them chocolate milk or say what they wanted me to say. I knew Santi meant what he said, in this context and more broadly, too, but I had to make a very concerted effort to believe him.

Still, when we got to Frank’s beautiful farm on the edge of town, I felt calm and ready for whatever came, which was really saying something since we were here to talk about a murder.

Frank invited us into his cozy dining room, and we sat at the table while he poured us cups of coffee from his fancy pour-over carafe. “Nancy at school today?” Santi asked as he accepted the cream-colored mug that Frank handed him.

“Yep,” Frank said with a smile. “How she can enjoy teaching middle school science I will never know.” He handed me my own blue ceramic mug and sat down next to me. “It’s all hormones and body odor at that age.”

I laughed. “Maybe the smell of sulfur is an improvement, then?” Nancy O’Malley taught eighth grade chemistry at our county middle school. She’d been Teacher of the Year several times, and she had, without a doubt, more patience and good humor than anyone I’d ever met.

“Anything might be an improvement over hangdog yearning and the gap between never showering and always showering that seems to hit every pubescent boy at some point?” Santi snickered. “My mother has always marveled at how quickly I passed from hiding when it was time to shower to having to be forced out by a quick shutoff of the hot water valve.”

This image brought Santi’s mother to my mind. She was a stout, strong woman who had no trouble managing both her household and her business as the county’s best seamstress, and I admired all that about her. But more, I was enamored with her softness, the way her strength didn’t make her hard but instead seemed to allow her to ease in. Come to think of it, Frank’s wife had that quality, too. Strong but tender. I was going to have to ponder that some more.

Now, though, we had business to take care of, and when I looked over at Santi, he put his mug down and said, “Frank, we need to know if you had any idea that man’s body was in your cabin.”

Frank shook his head. “I didn’t. You have my word. I just can’t figure out why someone put him there.” He looked up at us. “That’s what you said, right? Someone put his body there?”

Santi nodded. “Looks like it. We think they might have come down from the Parkway on that logging road.”

A band of red began to rise above Frank’s collar, and I felt Santi tense beside me. “Something we need to know there, Frank?”

Frank let out a long sigh. “Everybody used to take that road to get in and out once we were up there. We’d take our UTVs behind our trucks and then go in and out that way. It’s just so much faster.”

Santiago sighed. “It’s not uncommon, Frank, and really, the Park Service is responsible for closing off access. My guess is that they don’t care that much.”

“Yeah, and given that they displaced us in the first place…” I could hear the tinge of anger behind Frank’s words, and I really couldn’t blame him. The government had taken his family’s land, their heritage in a sense.

“Frank,” I asked, “did you get a chance to look at the family tree I sent over?” When he nodded, I said, “Everything seem accurate?”

“As far as I know. The names are familiar, and the timeline looks good. Daddy never talked much about the older generations. I never knew if that was because he didn’t know anything or if the story of losing the cabin and farm just overwhelmed everything else.” Frank rubbed his forehead. “But yeah, what you sent looks right.”

I met his gaze. “I didn’t want to pry too much into the people alive now. I respect people’s privacy, but I did wonder who else might have a claim – if only in their hearts – to the cabin. Any cousins or anything?”

Santiago’s leg slid over against mine, a small affirmation that being me was just what he needed now.

As he raised his arms over his head and cradled them at the base of his skull, Frank looked up at the ceiling. “We are Irish Catholic, you know?” he said with a small smile. “There are O’Malleys everywhere. I probably have six thousand cousins that I’ve never met but who look just like me.” Frank sat forward. “Only three around here though that would, I’d guess, even know about the family cabin.”

Santi took his small notebook from his breast pocket. “I’ll need their names.”

Frank listed three of the most Irish names I’d ever heard – well, besides Frank O’Malley – and I grinned as I got a silly image of Frank and his cousins Irish dancing at the county fair. Given that Frank was wearing mud-caked workboots instead of lightweight dancing shoes, I couldn’t really see him leaning into that part of his cultural heritage, but I was enjoying the thought.

Apparently, I was enjoying it too much because Santi said, “What are you smirking about?”

I blushed and then confessed my strange imagining. “Sorry. I’ve been watching too much of these Irish brothers dancing on TikTok.”

“The Gardiner Brothers,” Frank said without hesitation. “They’re amazing. Almost make me want to put tips on my boots.” He laughed out loud then, and something of the tension in the room dissipated. “But my cousin Patrick” – he tapped a finger on Santi’s notebook next to his cousin’s name – “he does that kind of thing. All into the Irish heritage.”

Santi nodded. “Well, that’s good to know. Might be an icebreaker when I talk to him.”

“If you can put in on a wee Irish accent that’ll help, too, lad,” Frank said in his own mock brogue. “He’s all in for Irish stuff.”

“I feel like I might slip and start sounding like my mother, and Mexican English and Irish English probably don’t sound alike.” Santi laughed. “But thanks for the tip.”

I glanced over at Santiago, and then said, “Frank, did you know someone was camping up above the cabin? Looks like they’ve been there a while.”

This time a flush traveled all the way up to the roots of Frank’s dark hair, and I knew we were on to something.

“I wondered if you’d find her. She okay?” Frank said.

“Find who?” Santiago asked. “The campsite was abandoned.”

A look of alarm flashed over Frank’s face. “Oh no,” he said. “That’s not good.” He started to stand up and head toward the rotary phone on the wall. “Sorry, I have to make a call.”

Santiago started to rise, to stop him I expected, but then he sat back down and took a sip of his coffee.

“Harriet, it’s Frank O’Malley. Could you ask Nancy to call me as soon as possible?” He paused a moment. “Thanks.”

Frank sat back down. “I really need Nancy to explain the situation to you since it’s about one of her former students.” He pulled his hands through his hair. “This isn’t good.”

I am not, by nature, a patient person, and I was about to ask Frank to tell us what he did know when the phone on the wall rang. Frank leaped up and answered. “Nancy, Santiago Shifflett and Paisley Sutton are here. They saw Katherine’s campsite. She’s not there.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay. We’ll be here.” He hung up the phone and turned to us. “Nancy will be home in ten minutes. She’s going to need to file a missing persons report.”

I was rifling through the approximately twenty million questions in my head, but given the way that both Santiago and Frank had gone into that type of male silence that feels like a locked bank safe, I figured I was going to have to wait.

So I did what all my Southern upbringing had taught me to do. I made myself at home, started a fresh pot of coffee, and opened cabinets until I found a tub of biscotti to put out with them. From the look on Frank’s face and Nancy’s willingness to leave school at a moment’s notice, I figured we were going to need both caffeine and sustenance for the rest of the day.

Less than ten minutes later – Nancy must have been hauling in her little purple Prius – we were all seated at the table with fresh mugs of coffee and a biscotti each. As one who never could turn down anything with even a smidge of sugar, I was already crunching away when Nancy began to tell us about the woman from the campsite.

“Her name is Katherine Forester. She graduated last year from Octonia High. I’ve known her since she was thirteen years old. Great kid...horrible home life.” Nancy took a deep breath. “She held out until she was eighteen just because she didn’t want to end up in the system and couldn’t afford the legal fees to emancipate, but she’s been basically living with friends since she was twelve.”

I shuddered. “It was that bad at home?”

“Worse than you can imagine. Her dad and stepmom had major issues, but not the kind people really saw. No addictions or anything that could be treated. Just absolute ugliness in their souls.” Nancy cracked her knuckles as she took another deep breath. “Mind you, I don’t like to talk ugly about anyone, but these people, well, they are monsters.”

It was only at that moment that I realized Santiago hadn’t moved a muscle since Nancy started talking. I looked over at him, and all the color had drained from his face. “Santi?” I said as I put a hand on his arm.

“We’ve been trying to help Katherine for almost a decade,” Santiago said. “But nothing stuck to her parents. Teachers – you included, Nancy – filed reports, and neighbors sent us pictures of what looked like Katherine being smacked around.” Santiago let out a long sigh. “Millicent and Robert Forester are just as slick as spring mud. Every time we’d bring them in, they’d spin some story about what the neighbors ‘must have thought’ was going on. They’d talk about how they appreciated all the concern for their daughter but that she just had an ‘overactive imagination.’”

Nancy groaned and said, “When I found a row of inch-long burns along Katherine’s arms one day, they told me she’d been climbing the chain-link fence at the park and that it was just hot enough from the sun to burn her that way.”

I cringed. Sawyer climbed every metal structure in the world, and even when the slide, or the fence, or whatever it was, burned to the touch, it never left him with visible burn marks. Never. This story was getting worse and worse. “What did Katherine say happened?”

“She didn’t. Most of the time she simply parroted whatever story her parents had given her to say. She was scared.” Nancy wrung her fingers together. “Once, though, when I saw a long bruise across her back when she bent over to tie her shoe and I asked her about it, she said her stepmom hadn’t liked the way she was watering the garden and smacked her with the hose.”

I gasped and wiped the tears that welled in my eyes away. This wasn’t the time for me to get emotional. “That is so horrible.” My words felt so weak in the light of what had happened to this child. “So when she could get away…”

“She did. She didn’t have much money, but she was the most resourceful person I knew.” Nancy looked at Frank. “I took her class up to the cabin once to look at native plants, and Katherine had loved it up there. She went up the mountain anytime she could, with us sometimes but often by herself.”

“So when she was legally an adult, she decided to live in the woods?” Santiago asked.

Frank nodded. “She asked permission from us, and we were glad to give it. We kept an eye on her, took her food from time to time, but she had a job down here in town at the grocery store and never needed much.”

“It was the happiest I’d ever seen her,” Nancy said. “She thrived up there.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” Santiago asked.

Nancy said, without hesitation, “Last Tuesday. That’s when you took up those pots you found at the SPCA thrift, right?”

Frank nodded. “Yeah, Katherine had mentioned a few weeks ago that she had cooked through the bottom of her saucepan, so I grabbed a couple of cheap ones to take to her. Tuesday the weather was so nice that I made the trek up.”

“And she was there?” I asked as I found myself thoroughly caught up in this young woman’s story.

“Yep. On her day off from the store and busy dyeing yarn made from some of the fleece I’d given her. She was quite the spinner, and she hoped to sell some of her yarn to that store in town.” Frank gazed across the room. “She had used purple asters to produce the dye, and it was lovely. I can say that even though I’m not a man that into yellow.” Frank gave us a half-smile.

I swallowed hard and hoped this young woman would get a chance to have Mika stock her yarn. I knew my best friend would love to help someone out, but she also loved a good hand-dyed yarn and could sell it at a premium during the summer season. It was then that something struck me. “I didn’t see any yarn in her tent, did you?”

Santiago shook his head. “No. I wasn’t looking for that, but I expect I would have noticed if skeins were hanging up around a tent. And I know you would have noticed.”

I nodded vehemently. “Definitely.” I looked over at Nancy. “Do you think she might have gathered enough of a lot to be bringing it down to sell?”

Nancy shrugged. “Maybe. She spun with a drop spindle, so she wasn’t fast. But she didn’t have much else to do up there, so maybe.”

I met Santiago’s eyes, and when he nodded, I said, “My best friend Mika runs the yarn shop in town. We’ll go check with her, see if she saw Katherine.”

When I looked over at Nancy, I saw tears in her eyes. “Thank you. And what do I do to formally file a report?” She looked over at Santiago.

“Nothing further, except if you have a recent picture, I could use that. I’ll put out the word. She hasn’t been up there in a few days at least,” he said gently, “so it’s time for us to begin searching.”

We all stood up then, and I hugged Nancy tight. “I’ll tell you as much as I can as we go, okay?”

Santiago smiled at me and then at them. “We both will.” He shook Frank’s hand. “If you think of anything else that’s relevant about the cabin, you’ll let me know?”

Frank nodded. “Of course, and do you want me to give my cousins a heads-up that you’ll be calling or just leave that be?”

“Not trying to sneak up on anyone, but let’s leave it be. Sometimes people can be more honest when they don’t have time to overthink things,” Santiago said with a small smile. “Thanks for asking that.”

“Understood,” Frank said as he held the back door open for us. “We’ll let you know what we find, too.”

Santi paused and looked at the couple. “Just be careful, okay? Someone has been killed. Be smart.”

Nancy nodded. “Always am, Sheriff.” She smiled and then watched us walk around the house to Santiago’s car.

Once we were on the road, I said, “Mika or the grocery store first?”

“Both. You okay talking to Mika on your own?” He grinned at me. “She can be a hard nut to crack.”

“I think I can handle her,” I said. And I hoped I was right.