I was still an outcast. I wondered if I’d still have my job soon. My father could only protect me so far. At first, I stayed near the barricade on the dirt road to keep the search area secure, but it was obvious that rumors had spread about me, too, and I heard an undercurrent of nasty gossip with my name on it. Ellen Sloan’s stare was icy, as if the loss of her son was my fault. I was upset to think she might not be entirely wrong. If I’d said something earlier, if I’d admitted the affair when we first began investigating Colleen’s murder, then maybe things would have turned out differently.
Eventually, I asked one of the other deputies to take my place, and I simply waited on the high fringe of Keith’s property to watch the evidence being gathered. The morning passed slowly, and so did half the afternoon. A spitting drizzle made the day miserable. My hair, my face, my uniform were all wet.
Still the FBI swept the land and carried out bags of material to be analyzed in their lab. I wasn’t sure if I was more concerned that they would find something or that they would find nothing at all.
Late in the day, my father came and found me on the hill. We hadn’t talked since my revelations the day before. I felt sick to my stomach about what he would say. He stood next to me as we observed the search going on below us, and I waited out his silence with desperate impatience.
“Am I fired?” I asked when I couldn’t take the tension anymore.
Dad tugged at his mustache. “What do you think? Should I fire you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to be fired?”
“No.”
“Well, take it easy. You’re not fired. I’ll have to reprimand you. A formal letter will go in your file. And I think a suspension of some kind is in order. You made a very serious mistake, Shelby. You concealed important information about a suspect in a murder investigation.”
“I know.”
“I expect better from you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“More to the point, you should expect better from yourself.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t have to. He knew I felt the sting of his words. And he wasn’t done with me.
“I’m not going to be sheriff forever, Shelby. We both know that. The next election is in November, and Violet has already suggested that I should step down gracefully. That’s what I’m inclined to do. You know I was hoping to be here long enough that you could run to succeed me, but obviously you’re not ready for that.”
The truth hurt.
“Obviously.”
“I love you, Shelby. I’m sorry.”
“I love you, too, Dad. Don’t be sorry. This was my screwup.”
My father walked away down the sloping grass. I watched him go, and I knew I would always remember how he looked at that moment, still in control of his world for a little while.
After he left, I couldn’t stay there. I had to go. I turned around and hiked through the long grass until I couldn’t see Keith’s house or barn anymore. His land went on for many more acres, but the woods took over. I saw a rough trail matted down in the underbrush, and I followed it. I knew where I was. I could keep going for less than a mile and arrive where the Sloans lived. This was the route Jeremiah would have taken, flashlight in hand, on November 14. I’d always thought of him as a shy follower, not a brave kid, but there he was, alone at night, out looking for the Ursulina. Just like I’d done at the same age.
I’d been on this trail many times myself over the years. Sometimes I’d come here alone, sometimes with Rose, sometimes with Trina and the rest of the Striker girls. I recognized old-growth trees that had been here my whole life. I saw glacial rocks where I used to sit and listen to the birds. If you dug down under the moss, you’d find places where I’d scratched my initials.
Another quarter mile took me to the place we called Black Lake. It was the haunted lake in the valley with the trees sprouting from the water, where we would dare each other to swim after we told scary stories about what was lurking below. The wind scraped low branches across the lake’s surface and caused ripples. By the shore, I saw a high boulder we used to climb to jump into the water. I could still hear the echo of our squeals and screams. I climbed the boulder again, like I used to do when I was a kid. It was high enough for you to think you were queen of the world up there. You could see the whole lake edge to edge, and it was really just a large pond, barely a hundred yards across. Part of me thought about taking off my clothes and jumping in the way I had years ago. But I didn’t.
Below me, I saw a clearing where we would lay after swimming. You couldn’t really call it a beach, because there was no sand, just a few feet of low weeds where we would spread out our towels.
When I looked closely, I saw something in the clearing.
What I saw made me jump down the sheer side of the boulder near the water, almost twisting my ankle in the process. I fought through an overgrown patch of snakeroot and broke into the open, and there they were.
Stones.
Towers of stones.
At least two dozen of them, made of the kind of flat gray rocks I’d seen in a plastic bucket in Jeremiah’s bedroom. Some of the towers were only a few inches high; others had tumbled over and lay in piles; others had somehow survived the wind and rain to stay standing a foot or more above the weeds. I knew what these were. These were cairns.
Built for the dead.
I had no doubt that Jeremiah had built them. He’d seen a woman killed on this land, and this was his way of making peace with it. But it wasn’t just the stones themselves that caught my eye. Something sparkled in the brush near one of the cairns, as if it had been placed atop the tower and fallen down. It was shiny even under the dark sky and the thick cover of trees. I knelt and stared at it. It was a ring, made of yellow gold, with a single large square-cut diamond mounted in the center.
A wedding ring.
I put on a plastic glove from my pocket and picked up the ring to examine it. There was no inscription. Nothing to identify its former owner. Even so, I knew whose finger it had been taken from. Hurriedly. In the dark. While her dead body was still warm.
When I looked at the still surface of the lake, I also knew what we would find when we searched under the water. The stories of Black Lake hiding something horrible were true.
Colleen Whalen’s jewelry had never been stolen by a burglar.
It had been here the whole time.
You see, Keith made a mistake.
Panicked people covering up crimes often do.
He’d put all of his wife’s jewelry in a plastic bag that night. His expensive dress watch, too. Maybe if he’d disposed of the pieces separately, we wouldn’t have found them, but when the FBI dragged the silty, muddy lake bed, they located the plastic bag, filled with water under its loose knot. Everything Keith had removed from their bedroom was still inside.
I imagined him frantically gathering up things that night to make us believe that a thief had killed Colleen. But would a thief leave her diamond ring behind? No. So he ripped it off her finger as he was heading for the woods and must have shoved it carelessly in his pocket. Somewhere on his way to the lake in the darkness, he’d lost the ring. And sometime after that, Jeremiah had found it.
But Colleen’s jewelry wasn’t the only thing that Keith had hidden to get away with murder and hide his guilt.
He’d put the gun in the bag, too.
The gun that killed her.