Hard Truth (3 page)

The phone started to ring again while Lorna was setting the television onto a kitchen counter, and she grabbed it on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“So how is it?” True to form, Lorna’s sister, Andrea, didn’t bother to identify herself, but jumped immediately into conversation. “What’s it like there?”

“Quiet.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Still in the back of the car.”

“You haven’t scattered the ashes yet?”

“Christ, Andi, I’ve only been here a few hours.” Lorna was grateful that her sister couldn’t see her face at that moment. “Let me get unpacked, okay?”

“Well, I’d have thought that would have been the priority.”

Easy for you to say, since you’re there and I’m here.

“My priority was unlocking the front door, getting something to eat and something cold to drink. There’s no air-conditioning here, you might recall, and the temperature is—”

“Okay, okay, so you’ll take care of it tomorrow. I don’t know how you can stand having them just sit there. The whole idea makes my skin crawl. I wish she had wanted to be buried, like Dad did.”

“Well, she didn’t, so we have to respect that, don’t we?” Lorna replied tersely.

“I suppose.” Andrea sighed as if somehow she’d made a huge concession on Lorna’s behalf. “Where are you sleeping tonight?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Is Uncle Will still there?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been here long enough to find out.”

“Let me know if he prowls around tonight. He might not like anyone being in the house, now that he’s had it to himself all this time.”

“I doubt he’ll notice.”

“Are you all right there by yourself?”

“Sure. I’ll be fine.”

“Is there anything I can do for you while you’re there?”

“I don’t know what you could do from Oklahoma, Andi.”

“What do the new houses look like?” Andrea said, changing the subject abruptly.

“I haven’t seen them yet. I thought I’d walk across the field tomorrow and take a look.”

“I hope they’re not tacky boxes.”

“I doubt they are. The builder told Mom they’d be selling for a lot of money.”

“That’s good. How was the ride to Callen?”

“Long and hot. I’d forgotten how far a drive it is.”

“You figure out yet how long you’re going to stay?”

“I have no idea. Andi, we talked about all this. I don’t know what’s the best thing to do with the farm. I hate to sell it, but none of us wants to live here. You have your home and your family out there in Oklahoma, and Rob has his life in L.A. I have my business out in the western part of the state—”

“Which you can run from Callen. You do it from home, as it is. Why can’t you run it from Callen?”

“I can, and I will, for a while. But just because I don’t have a husband and family in Woodboro, or because I don’t have to go into an office every day, doesn’t mean I don’t have a life there. I have friends, I have a social life, and I’d appreciate it if you’d respect that.”

“I do respect that,” Andrea soothed. “I just meant that right now, you’re the logical one to deal with all this. Neither Rob nor I are in a position to take off for a few weeks. We’re lucky that your accounting business is such that you can work from anywhere.”

“Oh, the wonders of technology and computer systems that interface.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You said your computer hooks into your clients’, so you can travel back and forth. When was the last time you went into any of your clients’ offices?”

“I do an in-house audit twice a year for each client.”

“And you have how many clients?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well, there you go, then. Your business is a success, you only have about a month and a half when you need to be on-site. The rest of the time, you can work from Callen.”

“I don’t plan on being here long enough to worry about it. You wouldn’t be having second thoughts about selling the farm, would you?”

Andrea’s hesitation spoke volumes.

“I just want what’s best for everyone,” she said. “Maybe we could keep the house and a few acres.”

“I thought we already agreed that it would be best for everyone if we sold the entire property.”

“I think we need to discuss it a little more.”

“If you were undecided, you should have said something before I drove across the state to get the ball rolling on the sale.”

“I simply think we shouldn’t be too hasty.”

“Andrea, I will stay here long enough to take care of our business and to carry out Mom’s last wishes. But I have a life in Woodboro, and I intend to return to it. This is a temporary stop for me. If you want to hold on to the farm, I suggest you and Jerry find a way to buy both my and Rob’s shares and move yourselves out here.”

“You know we’re not in a position to do that.”

“Well, neither am I.”

“But—”

“Enough, Andrea. I’m exhausted. I’m not going to continue this discussion anymore tonight.”

“Well, fine, Lorna. We’ll talk about it after you’ve had a few days to rest up from your trip. Maybe you’ll feel differently after being there. Let me know when you’ve put Mom to rest.”

Andrea hung up before Lorna could respond.

“And thanks for your support,” Lorna muttered as she dropped the receiver in its cradle.

What had gotten into Andrea, she wondered. Two weeks ago she thought selling the property was the best thing to do. She and Rob had both agreed that, with no one in the family interested in running the farm, the smart thing would be to sell it off, pay the taxes, and split the proceeds three ways, as Mom’s will had decreed they should do if and when they decided to sell. Why the sudden change of heart on Andrea’s part?

“Well, no change of heart for me,” Lorna said, reminding herself to call a Realtor tomorrow and make an appointment to have the property appraised. She had no idea what it was worth, but she suspected it would be quite substantial.

She started to lock the front door, then remembered the three urns in the back of the car. She went outside and lifted the box gently, carefully carrying it up the front steps and setting it down on the top of her grandmother’s piano. She didn’t know what to do with it overnight, though, so she locked the front door, turned out all but the hall lights, and carried the box holding her mother’s ashes up to the second floor. She placed it beside her mother’s favorite chair.

“Sorry, Mom. I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing.” Somehow, she knew her mother would be amused.

But when it came time to sleep, Lorna lay on her old bed in the room she’d shared with Andrea from the time they were little until Lorna had left for college. The pillow felt like a rock, the mattress like a bed of nails. After an hour of tossing and turning, she went down the hall in the dark to her mother’s room, and climbed into her mother’s bed.

You are ridiculous,
she told herself.
Thirty-four years old, and you’re curled up clutching your momma’s pillow.

But in spite of her best efforts to shame herself into returning to her own bed, somehow it felt right. Within minutes, Lorna was sound asleep, and if Uncle Will was on the prowl, he didn’t bother to disturb her.

T
wo

Lorna woke to the sound of voices being carried from a distance. She roused herself and went to the window and leaned out. At the far end of the property—the parcel that had been sold—three police cars were lined up along the side of the field.

The builder must have forgotten to apply for his permits, she thought. God knows, anything passes for high drama in Callen.

She pulled on a pair of gray knit shorts and a red tank top, and tried to brush her light brown hair into submission. Finally she pulled it back into a ponytail and searched her suitcase for her flip-flops. Before she went downstairs, she peered out the window again. An ambulance was just pulling up beside the cruisers.

One of the workmen at the development must have gotten injured somehow was her first thought. She took the stairs two at a time and went into the kitchen to look for coffee, but came up empty. The convenience store a mile down the road sold coffee, she recalled from her last trip home, so she grabbed her purse and headed out the front door. She could deal with just about anything if she had her coffee first.

Twelve minutes later, Lorna was returning home, a twenty-ounce cup of coffee in hand, when a black car bearing the words
County Medical Examiner
on the door sped by. She pulled over to the side of the road and watched the car turn right onto Conway Road, the road that ran behind the farm. The road one took to reach the new development that was growing across the field.

She hesitated only a moment before heading toward Conway. If there had been an accident of some sort on her property—on what had once been her property—she wanted to know. She made the right turn, then followed the narrow two lanes around to the entrance of the development.

Welcome to the Estates at Palmers Woods.

Ugh,
she thought. She wished they hadn’t done that. Then again, the builder had bought and paid for it. He could call it anything he wanted. She slowed at the foot of the service road and watched the county car disappear in a cloud of dust on the unpaved road.

“Sorry, miss, you can’t— Hey, Lorna, that you? Lorna Stiles?” The police officer walking toward her car removed his sunglasses as he drew near.

“Brad Walker, a cop?” She grinned. “I’d heard the rumors, but of course I didn’t believe them.”

“Yeah, well, it’s sort of the family business.”

“Your dad still chief of police?”

“Still chief.” He nodded and leaned into the car window. “How you doing, Lori?”

“It’s been a long time since anyone outside the family has called me that,” she told him.

“Seems like a long time since you’ve been back.” He patted her on the arm. “Hey, I was sorry to hear about your mom. She was a real nice lady.”

“Thanks, Brad. I appreciate that.”

“Guess you’re home to settle up things?”

She nodded and tried to be subtle about the fact that she was trying to look over and behind him.

“Oh, you’re wondering what’s going on back there?” He turned in the direction of the field.

“Well, yeah. I saw the cruisers out by the field, then the ambulance. But when I saw the medical examiner fly past, I got really concerned. This being our old property and all.” She took a sip of the coffee. Still too hot. She put it back in the cup holder. “Please tell me that no one’s been killed.”

“No, no—well, not recently, anyway. The guy operating the backhoe found a bunch of bones, and he—”

“Bones? Out here?” She frowned. “Human bones?”

He nodded confidently. “Yeah. I saw them myself. They’re definitely human. They’ve been there awhile, though. The clothes are just about disintegrated.”

“How could bones . . .?” Lorna was still frowning. “There’s a family burial plot on the farm, but that’s way over on the other side, I doubt the bones could be from there.”

She pointed to the opposite end of the field. “And it has a fence around it. As far as I know, no one’s ever been buried outside the fence.”

“No telling how old they are just by looking at them, but the medical examiner is going to take the bones back to the morgue and he’ll look them over.”

“But you took pictures, right? Before the bones were taken out of the ground?”

Before she could prod further, he said, “Oh, wait. Let me guess. You’re a graduate of the CSI School of Forensics. And here I thought you were still an accountant.”

She colored slightly. “Ouch. I deserved that. And you’re right. I watch entirely too much TV. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” He turned back to the field, where someone from the county was trying to slip the skeleton onto a large piece of plastic. “I think I need to check on what’s what back there. Good seeing you, Lori. Maybe I’ll get a chance to see you again while you’re in town.”

“I’ll be around for a while. Don’t forget to give my best to Liz. I’ll try to run over and visit with her while I’m home. I still haven’t met your baby.”

“The baby isn’t a baby anymore. She’s five, going to kindergarten already. I’ll tell Liz you’ll be giving her a call.”

Lorna waved as he walked away, then sat for another minute, craning her neck, trying to see over the crowd of law enforcement and county personnel who’d gathered around the remains of . . .
Who?
she wondered.

She drove back to the house, still wondering. How long had the bones been buried on the Palmer farm? Whose bones were they, and how did they get there?

Lorna parked in her drive and emptied the rest of her belongings from the back of the car. She stacked everything near the front door, then took her coffee and walked to the edge of the field. From this vantage point, she couldn’t see across to the Conway Road side, though years ago she could have. Over the past decade, a small grove of trees had sprouted up along the right-side property line, and in order to see past them, she had to walk out into the field.

The weeds were waist-high, and the dirt was dry from lack of rain. She stumbled in the rutted furrows, bumpy reminders of the last tractor to have plowed over the field. After the death of her father, her mother and grandmother had agreed to lease out the back fields to a farmer down the road to put in corn, a popular cash crop. They’d been happy to see the fields productive again, and had welcomed the extra money at a time when money had been tight. Back then, when her grandmother had been alive, there had been no talk of selling off any of the Palmer land.

Lorna paused at the top of a rise and looked down to her left, to where the field sloped gently and row after row after row of white trellises lined up like headstones in an unkempt graveyard. A mass of vines and weeds overgrew all, making Uncle Will’s fabled attempt at establishing a vineyard one big wild tangle.

Lorna had heard the story of the vineyard from her grandmother, Will’s sister, about how a young Will Palmer served in France during World War II, where after having been injured and taken to a nearby farm to recover, he had met the love of his life. The daughter of the owner of a vineyard, the equally young Marie-Terese Boulard, had agreed to marry her suitor and come to the States after the war. Before Will left to return home, Marie-Terese’s father had given him cuttings from several of his prized grapevines, having talked his future son-in-law into trying to establish vineyards of his own on American soil.

It hadn’t been so far-fetched an idea, Will had told his parents upon his arrival back in Callen. He’d done some research, and he’d found that the first commercial vineyards in America had been in Pennsylvania. “Why not now, why not here, in Callen?” he’d asked.

Grateful that their son had survived his injuries, and delighted that the once wild child was not only willing to settle down, but to settle down there on the farm, his father gave Will his blessing and offered him thirty acres to experiment with. Will returned to France to make Marie-Terese his bride, and while he was gone, his father built them a cottage overlooking the future vineyard. Will spent almost two years in France, learning all his in-laws could teach him about grapes and winemaking. When he and Marie-Terese came back to Callen, they brought with them more cuttings and their infant son. The grapes flourished in the southeastern Pennsylvania climate, but in 1948, Marie-Terese and their son were stricken with a dreaded virus that had been making a lot of news. Before the year came to a close, both Marie-Terese and the child succumbed to polio. A broken Will lost all interest in his grapes, and late in the summer of 1949, he lay down on his wife’s grave and shot himself in the head. The would-be vineyard was forgotten, and the thirty acres of grapes soon grew wild.

Lorna wondered what her great-uncle would think of the decision to sell it all.

It can’t be helped. There’s nothing else to do,
Lorna reminded herself.

All the same, it still bothered her, still made her feel guilty, as if somehow she’d let down generations of Palmers who must be, at this moment, frowning down upon her and wringing their hands.

She hoped Uncle Will wasn’t one of them.

That afternoon, Lorna sat on one of the rockers she’d found in the barn. After she’d cleaned it up and dragged it to the front porch, she had sat and rocked mindlessly for a while, listening to the birds chatter in the hedge and wishing she hadn’t made the trip to Callen alone. Why hadn’t she insisted on Andrea or Rob taking a week off from their lives to come home with her? Why had it all fallen to her to make the decisions and tend to the family business?

She knew the answer. She was the oldest. She had the most flexible life—no husband, no babies, no budding career on the opposite side of the country. Andrea had been totally appalled at their mother’s decision to be cremated and had wanted nothing to do with the ashes. Rob, self-centered and spoiled, had left home years ago and had never looked back. He’d already told her to just mail him a check once the property was sold. He wouldn’t be coming back to the East Coast anytime soon.

The soothing back-and-forth motion of the chair served as a reminder of why rockers were so popular. She went back to the barn and brought out the other one, hosed it down, and set it in the sun to dry. If anyone ever stopped by, it would be nice to be able to invite them to sit for a while. It was certainly way too hot to invite someone inside the house.

If anyone ever stopped by.

Out on the road, a police car went past, and she thought again of the bones that had been found that morning. She wondered how long before the bones would be identified. She wished she’d asked whether they appeared to be those of a child or those of an adult.

What if it turned out to be Melinda, she wondered. Melinda Eagan, her best friend in fourth grade, who had disappeared in the blink of an eye on her way home from Lorna’s house after celebrating her ninth birthday. Melinda, who hadn’t been at the bus stop the following morning, or any other morning.

It didn’t take much to recall the shock and sense of the surreal she’d felt when, as a child, she’d been told that Melinda had disappeared. Just thinking about that night brought back the fist-to-the-gut feeling you get when something is too terrible to be true.

Melinda’s mother had called the Stiles’ house around six-thirty that night, looking for her daughter. Lorna was in the dining room clearing the dinner table when the phone rang, and her mother answered it. She walked toward the kitchen, and heard her mother say, “Jason stopped by for her around five. I offered to drive them, but he said . . . Are you saying she hasn’t arrived there yet?”

Lorna went into the kitchen. Her mother stood at the back door, looking out into the growing darkness.

“What did Jason say?”

Lorna set the dishes on the counter and watched her mother’s face. “Billie, I’m going outside to take a look around. Maybe she forgot something and doubled back and got disoriented in the dark. I’ll bring her home if I find her.”

Mary Beth hung up the phone, a very worried look on her face.

“What happened to Mellie, Mom?” Lorna had asked.

“She must have gotten distracted by something, someplace between here and there, because her mother says she hasn’t gotten home yet. She said that Jason told her Mellie ran ahead of him through the field and he thought she went straight home, so he stopped off behind the Conrads’ house to talk to his friend Matt. But when he got home, she wasn’t there.”

“Did he go look for her?”

“Billie—Mrs. Eagan—says they looked over on their side of the field, but she wasn’t there. Or maybe she’s there and just doesn’t want to be found.”

Lorna watched her mother grab a jacket from a hook near the back door.

“Maybe it has something to do with the dress . . . maybe Mellie’s trying to hide the bag so her mother won’t know she took the dress out of the house. Who knows what that child is thinking?” She turned in the doorway and looked at Lorna. “Can you think of any place she might have gone? Any place she likes to hide, or someplace she goes when she wants to be alone?”

Right then, Lorna’s father came into the kitchen.

“Mary Beth, where are you going?” he asked.

“Melinda hasn’t arrived home and her mother is worried. I thought I’d take a look around the barn.”

He glanced at his watch.

“She left around five, right?” He frowned. “It’s been an hour and a half already. Billie’s just looking for her now?”

“She’s been looking on their side of the field.” Lorna’s mother opened the door and went outside. “I’m thinking maybe she’s hiding here, on our property. I won’t be long.”

“I’ll come with you. And here, Mary Beth, we need light.” Lorna’s father took two flashlights from the closet and followed her mother outside.

Lorna had leaned against the windowpane and watched the twin yellow circles of light from the flashlights glide across the yard and disappear into the barn. All the while, she was biting her bottom lip, wondering if she should tell about the secret place where she and Mellie sometimes went to read or to be alone and talk. If she told now, and Mellie wasn’t there, then everyone would always know their secret, and if Mellie came back, she’d be mad that now everyone knew and she’d have to look for a new hiding place.