“I mean, she found her in the cabin. Sophia was playing in the woods and opened the cabin door and saw Rosemary’s body.”
Jude noted his hesitation, but let it go.
“Rosemary was under a blanket and Sophia pulled it off. I guess she panicked. She picked up the knife laying there and ran back to the house. She told us what happened, and Mom called the sheriff. He came out right away.”
“Sophia picked up the knife?” Jude asked, frowning. Thirty years earlier crime investigation was barely a thing. And they could hardly blame a thirteen-year-old girl who found her friend murdered for corrupting the scene.
“Yeah, it was a bad move, but she panicked. That night Rosemary’s family and some other townsfolk showed up at our door. They wanted to question Sophia themselves. That’s when the Sheriff walked into the barn and came out with the knife. Our mother about fainted right on the spot.”
“Where was Sophia?”
“Up in a tree in the woods. I told her to go because our big brother, Timothy asked me to. He could tell people were gettin’ riled up. He didn’t want her caught in the middle.”
“Did she run away?”
Grimmel’s eyes darted to the side and Jude realized he was about to tell her a lie.
“Yeah. She ran away. We never saw her again.”
Jude bit her lip and stared at him, hard.
“You’re telling me, you let your thirteen-year-old sister disappear into the same woods where another little girl was murdered? And you called her a runaway?”
“Hey now, wait just a minute. We would never have put Sophia in danger. It was Mama’s idea and…” he stopped, closing his mouth hard.
Jude contemplated her next question.
“Grimmel, I don’t believe for a second that Sophia hurt that little girl. And I also don’t believe Sophia ran away. Let’s talk off the record, okay? I swear it won’t get out.”
Grimmel frowned.
“I was never good at keeping secrets,” he confessed. “My mom was so scared I’d spill the beans to my friends or a girlfriend. I never did though. Course now it’s been thirty years, and in the end, they got her, didn’t they?”
“Our conversation isn’t leaving this cemetery, Grimmel. I need to know.”
Grimmel sighed and rubbed his face, freshly shaved, but prickly and red looking. He had Peter’s sensitive skin.
Never had she wanted so much to open up to a stranger. Grimmel was so much like her twin brother she felt it was him she was talking to.
“Did you help her run away?” Jude asked.
Grimmel fidgeted, pulling his truck keys from his pocket and then shoving them back in.
“You swear this ain’t gettin’ printed?”
“I swear.” Jude put her hand over her heart.
“My mama helped her. Our daddy had died the fall before. Worst year of my life that was, for all of us, I guess. Anyway, my dad had a friend from childhood. Man had grown up to be real wealthy, a lawyer who had connections, never did know what they were, political maybe. My ma reached out to him. She called him up and told him what had happened. He offered to take Sophia, raise her up.”
Jude frowned.
“Just like that? Your mom gave away your sister?”
“Hell no!” Grimmel practically shouted. “You didn’t see the look in those people’s eyes. They were fit to kill our little Sophia. At the very least she was gettin’ blamed for that murder.”
“But she was a juvenile. She would have been out in two years,” Jude argued.
“I thought about that later on,” he admitted. “We all did, but at the moment it felt like life or death. And Rosemary’s granddaddy was a judge. Ma was convinced they’d find a way to get her locked up forever. You see, Sophia…” He stopped as if only just realizing how much he’d already revealed.
“Please,” Jude urged. “Tell me the rest.”
“It’s weird, you know?” He said cocking his head and looking at her. “You remind me of Sophia.”
“I do?” Jude asked self-consciously touching her cheek. Hattie had always looked like their mother - long and willowy and waif thin. But her father too had commented more than once that Jude had her mother’s smile.
“Yeah, it’s strange,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Somethin’ in your…” He gestured at his own face but didn’t elaborate. “She saw things. Sophia saw things that weren’t there, that couldn’t be there.”
Jude thought of Hattie and her ghosts as Peter had often referred to them as if they were a gang.
“Ghosts?” Jude asked, though if she’d heard the way she uttered the word, she would have kicked herself. When had she ever believed such nonsense?
Grimmel nodded.
“That’s the real truth. Sophia didn’t find Rosemary in the cabin. She saw her walking in the woods, dead.”
Chapter 22
The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane
September 1965
Sophia
“Just breathe,” Kent told Sophia, holding tight to her hand, grown clammy as they entered the tunnel.
“Someone died down here,” she whispered, bracing her hand against the limestone wall.
The tunnel opened before them. A long, round corridor of brick illuminated by bare light-bulbs suspended overhead. The bulbs did little to cast out the darkness. Everywhere shadows lay. Steam pipes echoed and clanged, hissed with the energy passing through.
“It’s okay, Sophia, you can do this.”
Yes, she had to. Except the dead girl, a child, murdered, flitted in and out of her vision. A white, blood-soaked nightgown, bare feet caked with dirt, dark hair in tangles.
“Marybelle,” she whispered. “Marybelle needs our help.”
Kent tightened his grip and Sophia saw a flash of horror cloud his eyes. He blinked and pulled her forward.
“She’s dead, Sophia. Long dead and we can’t help her now.”
Again the little girl, maybe eight or nine, appeared. She held out a hand, fingernails torn away. Sophia stumbled and fell, nearly took Kent with her, but he yanked hard and pulled her to her feet.
“There’s not time. No time, Sophia,” he grunted and overhead the lights flickered. He stopped and stared desperately around the tunnel. They had two choices, forwards or backwards, he pulled her along.
By now, someone would have noticed her absence. One of the orderlies, or Kaiser’s nurse, Alice who frequently checked on her.
Kent, supposedly washing out the solitary confinement rooms would hopefully not be missed.
The lights flickered a second time.
“Run,” Kent whispered, as if afraid the dead girl would hear him.
Sophia’s bare feet slapped the grimy brick floor. Her hair pulled loose from her ponytail and her breasts bouncing tenderly beneath her thin nightgown. Her thighs burned after years of walking and sitting with little chance for strenuous activity. She slowed them both down, but Kent, powerful and frightened, surged forward.
“This way,” he breathed and turned down a tunnel leading to their left.
He slowed as they came to a large gray metal door, and fumbled in his pocket for a set of keys, glancing behind them. He shoved the door open, and they stumbled into another tunnel, this one square. They hurried down it and up a short flight of concrete stairs.
“We made it,” Kent murmured, shoving through another door.
The darkness of early morning greeted them.