There wasn’t much more to check. Phillip opened the pantry door and stepped inside. Nothing. Next we opened the kitchen door leading to the garage. Robin’s car was crowded in by mine, because it was supposed to rain while he was gone. His car was locked. I checked with my keypad to be sure my own car was, too.
I couldn’t imagine how anyone could open the automatic garage doors and then hide in my locked car—unless such a person came through the house and stole my keys—but I was compelled to verify it. Handing Sophie off to her uncle, I circled both vehicles, and I made sure they were both empty of everything but car seats and extra pacifiers. I stepped back inside the house, and I closed and locked the garage door before taking Sophie back from Phillip.
We’d been turning on lights as we moved around the house. Every corner was illuminated. We looked at each other, baffled.
“This is so weird,” Phillip said. “Did you see a note? Did she maybe leave a message on your phone?”
I hadn’t checked for a note. I’d never even thought of it. Now I made a quick tour of the obvious places Virginia might have left one. I fetched my cell phone from the bedroom charger and checked it.
No phone call was logged since Robin’s, and I didn’t have a text message. I glanced at the light on the answering machine attached to the landline, and it stared back at me without blinking.
Though I wanted to keep the baby near me, I could not carry her any longer. My arms were exhausted. Thank God, her eyes had fluttered shut.
After I put Sophie to bed (and made sure her window was locked), I made a detour to my room to collect the baby monitor. I also took a second to put on a dry nightgown and a different robe.
I think I was hoping—still—that we’d find Virginia asleep somewhere, and we’d all get to go back to bed, and everything would be okay. If I kept on my nightclothes, that would happen, right?
Phillip was pouring a glass of orange juice. He said, “Sorry, Sis. I just haven’t seen a thing. Have you checked to see if her car is parked on the street?”
“What does she drive?”
“A black Impreza.”
I must have looked blank.
“A small car,” he said, in an annoyingly tolerant way. “Not too expensive.”
I switched on the light over the front door, which just barely reached the curb. “A car’s out there,” I said. “I can’t tell what’s inside. We have to go see if … if she’s in there.”
Before I could say, “I’ll do it,” Phillip was out the door, walking across the grass with bare feet. He paused for a moment to look up. The sky flashed with distant lightning. There was a grumble of thunder.
Phillip had had the foresight to grab a flashlight from the coat stand by the door. Thanks to Robin’s flashlight fetish, we had one or two in every room of the house. This one was Robin’s favorite, one of the big lantern-style ones. Phillip swept the beam across the front yard as he moved slowly to the curb, checking the ground in front of his feet all the way. When he didn’t pause, I knew he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. At the curb, he directed the beam into the car.
I held my breath.
Phillip turned and shook his head.
No Virginia.
As he hurried back, I realized that the only place we hadn’t searched was the backyard. Since we lived in an area full of older homes, the yard was large, with a couple of big trees, a brick patio, a lot of grass, and a professionally planted bed of bushes and flowers softening the lines of the black aluminum fence, Robin’s pride.
I turned off the front door light and went to the back door, just in the hall leading back to our library/office, to switch on the back lights (which pretty much illuminated the patio and cast only a dim light on the grass around it). I moved to the living room picture window and stared out. Of course, I couldn’t see a thing.
With great intelligence, Phillip switched off every overhead light and lamp before he joined me at the window. We could see much better, naturally.
Sadly.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. I could just discern a dark mass partly hidden by the mimosa tree growing close to the southeast corner of the yard. I couldn’t make out what it was, exactly: it was as far from the light as anything could get in our yard. But whatever it was, it didn’t belong in our yard.
Phillip said something sharp and to the point.
“Yes,” I said, feeling incredibly weary. “I agree. I’m going outside.”
I was the older, and it was time for me to shoulder the burden. Drawing myself up to my full four feet, eleven inches, I jammed the baby monitor into the pocket of my robe. So far adrenaline had carried me along, but now it had become an effort to put one foot in front of the other. I was shamefully glad when Phillip followed me out the patio door.
I looked up to see how full the moon was, but a distant bolt of lightning showed me the sky was full of heavy clouds, moving fast. As we stepped onto the grass, a slight breeze picked up locks of my tangled hair, and I had to hold it off my face. There was another ominous rumble.
“Smells like rain,” Phillip said quietly.
I felt a terrible impulse to turn back; but of course, we had to keep going. If we were seeing a person, that person needed help. We had to check. Too soon, we passed the mimosa tree and looked behind it. Phillip aimed the beam of the lantern, and all too clearly we saw the woman.
Phillip said, “This is big trouble.”
I had to agree.
She was wearing tight jeans, loafers, and a sweatshirt. Her body lay on its back, with her arms flung out to the side and her knees slightly bent. With a shiver of revulsion, I realized the body’s posture mimicked Sophie’s as she lay sprawled in sleep, her little arms thrown out, her head turned to the side, and her legs slightly akimbo.
But this woman wasn’t sleeping. She was dead.
And she wasn’t Virginia Mitchell.
Chapter Six
Though her face was turned away from us, and the light wasn’t good, there was no mistaking the fact that this woman was a few things Virginia was not: white, full-figured, and blond.
“What the hell?” Phillip said very quietly, a beat before I said exactly the same thing.
Phillip’s flashlight was wavering in his hand, so the beam trembled in a disconcerting way. Still, I could tell the woman’s skull was not shaped like a skull should be. The flashlight grazed her hands, and I could see her fingernails were painted green. Somehow, that just tore me apart. I saw that something glinted in the grass beside her right hand, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and at the moment I didn’t care.
Phillip made a noise that expressed disgust and distress, all at once. He handed me the flashlight, and took two big steps to squat next to her.
“Don’t touch her, Phillip!” I sounded like death was contagious. I meant that he should not lay a finger on her, that the police would take care of her, but it didn’t come out that way.
“I have to make sure she’s dead.” Phillip sounded far more reasonable than I did.
“You’re right.” I felt guilty. I should be doing the checking.
Phillip laid his fingers on her neck. After maybe a minute—a very long minute—he said, “No pulse, at least none I can feel.”
“Her chest isn’t moving at all.” I’d kept a sharp eye on her. I felt a weird impulse to put my hand on her chest, as I did Sophie’s. In fact, I moved forward, despite my previous advice to Phillip. He said, “She’s gone, Roe. No breathing.”
He rose to his feet.
We looked at each other for a long moment. Phillip said, “I hate to confess this, and I know you won’t fall for it … but after the trouble last year, I feel like dumping her over the fence. So she’d be in someone else’s yard.”
“I wish we could, too,” I said, and I meant it. “But you know we can’t. Of course, it would be wrong. For another thing, I bet we’d get caught.”
Phillip looked regretful. “So … where is the babysitter?” My brother said this as if he were
sure I knew the answer.
“I’m totally at a loss.” I’d thought of, and rejected, a dozen possible scenarios. Maybe Virginia had gotten an emergency phone call from her mother and this woman had coincidentally happened to die in our yard. Or maybe Virginia had suddenly developed appendicitis, and this woman had tried to stop her from going to the hospital.…
“I can’t think of any reason she’d leave. Can you?” He looked down at me. “Do you think Virginia might be dead, too?”
I shook my head drearily. “She’s missing, and a body’s here. I don’t know what to make of it. We’d better go call the police.”
As we trudged back to the door, accompanied by the grumble of thunder not quite so distant, I said, “I am way more familiar than I want to be with the law enforcement people of Lawrenceton and Sparling County.”
“Me, too.” My brother had had to undergo intensive debriefings with the locals and the FBI after he’d survived the kidnapping, and the experience was still fresh in his mind.
Though the baby monitor had remained silent, I quickened my steps to be closer to Sophie. While my baby had been inside our house, unguarded, while I was asleep, while Phillip slept, someone had murdered a woman just yards away. The realization and its implications were becoming clear to me.
Since Virginia, my baby’s caregiver, had vanished, she was a prime candidate for the role of murderer.
When the dispatcher answered, I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t know where to start. “I’m Aurora Teagarden, I live at 1100 McBride. There’s a dead woman in my backyard,” I said, since that was my most serious problem. “And my babysitter is missing. And … could you not turn on the sirens? My baby’s asleep. I don’t want to sound self-centered, but the body’s not going anywhere.”
There was a moment of silence. “All right, Roe, gotcha,” said the dispatcher. “Dead woman, missing woman, baby.” Though I couldn’t place her voice, I was certain it was someone I’d been in calculus with, or someone whose brother I had dated, or someone who sat three rows behind me in church (or all of the above). “Someone will roll up within five minutes. Don’t leave the house.”
Too late for that. “Thanks,” I said politely, and hung up.
Though I desperately needed to sit, I had to return to Sophie’s room to lay eyes on her … on her back, arms flung out, legs slightly akimbo. This time, I did put my hand gently on her chest, and I was reassured to feel its rise and fall.
I would kill anyone who tried to harm her. I would give my life for her.
And for the first time in this terrible night, tears ran down my cheeks.
I struggled to get back on an even keel. The police would be here any minute.
I had just rejoined Phillip in the living room and collapsed on a couch when the first knock came at the door. Sure enough, it was discreet. Phillip opened it to admit a uniformed patrol officer, Susan Crawford. I had sent her a card when I’d heard she was pregnant a couple of months ago.
“Where’s the body?” Susan asked. She might be thicker about the middle, but she was all cop. “Why are your lights off in here?”
Phillip took her to the picture window and pointed. “We turned the lights off so we could see outside. See the body? By the mimosa tree?”
I could tell when Susan spotted it, because she took a deep breath. “Go outside to check her, or wait for the EMT?” she asked herself in a whisper. While she tried to remember procedure, the decision was taken out of her hands. The lights of the ambulance flashed across the front windows.
“Susan, there’s a gate into the backyard to the left of the house,” I said. “That will save you time.” She dashed out of the front door to guide the EMTs to the body, her dilemma solved.
“Good thinking,” Phillip said. “They won’t have to come through the house. You better stay down on the couch. You don’t look good, Roe.”
I couldn’t count the times people had told me that during the past two days. I stayed down, and covered myself with the fuzzy afghan I kept thrown across the back of the couch from September through March. Phillip sat by me, his phone in hand, his thumbs flying. He was texting away.
“Who’s up at this hour?” Even as I spoke, I realized it was an absurd question. Phillip slept with his phone, so I had to assume a lot of other teens did.
“You going to call Robin now?” He was trying to sound casual, but I wasn’t fooled. He thought Robin needed to be here.
“Not right now,” I said. “There’s no point waking him up, assuming he’s even left the hotel bar. We don’t really know anything yet.”
“We know there’s a dead woman in the backyard. That’s pretty major.”
I couldn’t deny it. “Robin’s catching a flight at noon tomorrow. I doubt he could get here any faster even if I called him, and he’d just worry the whole time.”
Phillip didn’t look convinced, but he let it go.
The whole sad procedure—with which I was already too familiar—played out in the next forty-five minutes, while the storm advanced with ominous sound effects and dark clouds scudding across the moon. I was surprised the rain had held off this long. I was sure the police were hurrying with whatever they had to accomplish, before the rain washed the yard clean.
The yard was now lit up like a runway. With the curtains open and the inside light dim, I watched a trail of people enter and leave the yard. Most of the visitors wore dark windbreakers with “LPD” in big bright yellow letters on the back. I recognized almost all of them.
Finally, everyone reacted when a man I didn’t know appeared in the yard. His jacket read “CORONER.” I saw a head of dark curly hair, and I caught the glint of a pair of glasses. Arnie Petrosian. I’d voted for him in the last election, but I’d never met him face-to-face.
And I’d sure never imagined he’d be in my backyard.
It was like watching a movie with the sound turned off. The coroner knelt, checked the pulse and respiration, and pulled down the eyelids, which made me squeamish.
“Yuck,” said Phillip.
Petrosian rose, nodded in the general direction of all the police in the yard, and moved out of my sight as briskly as he’d arrived. That formality over, everyone flew into action. The urgency was underlined by a crack of lightning that made everyone jump, myself included. Phillip called up the weather screen on his phone, and we were able to watch the front approach minute by minute.
Soon, the body was removed in a black bag, with a patrolman at each end. The bag hung between the men, limp and formless. What had been a human being was now a limp tube of flesh and bone.
“Where will they take her?” Phillip said.
“To the GBI medical examiners in Decatur,” I told him.
There was a moment of silence, and I thought Phillip might have dozed off. Just then, he glanced at the screen of his phone. “Storm’s almost here,” he said. “I hope they’ve got all their pictures and found all their clues.”
The mimosa tree where we’d found the body was rippling in the wind. Even the short bushes were tossing their heads.
The night actually could get worse.
A quiet knock made my head snap to the front door. Phillip popped up from the couch to answer it.
“Ms. Teagarden available?” said an unfamiliar voice.
Phillip said, “She’s in here. But can you keep it short? She’s been really sick.”
I was surprised—to the extent I could feel surprise anymore—when the coroner himself stepped into my line of vision. He stood by the couch awkwardly. I could see the deep lines around his eyes. I decided he must be close to fifty. He shook my hand very lightly, as though my bones would break if he squeezed.
“Ardos Petrosian,” he said. “Call me Arnie. Ms. Teagarden?”
“Yes. Would you care to sit down?”
“Thanks, I will. You look unwell, if you don’t mind me saying.”
When a coroner says you look bad, that’s pretty dire. “Flu,” I explained.
Phillip silently ha
nded Petrosian a little bottle of hand sanitizer that had been on the side table. It wasn’t mine. Virginia’s? Petrosian, opposite me, lost no time in squirting some on his hands and rubbing it in vigorously. I hoped he’d used some after touching the dead woman.
Phillip sat by my feet, I guess so he could tackle the coroner if he tried to assault me. My brother was earning stars in heaven tonight.
“The police will be in soon to talk to you about your missing person. I’d sure like to put a name to the body. You sure the dead woman is not your babysitter?”
That would have been neat and tidy.
“Definitely not. Virginia is African American, she’s very slim, her hair is short, and she wasn’t dressed anything like the dead woman.”
Arnie Petrosian looked grim. He had a woman’s body without a name, and we were missing a woman whose name we knew. The fact that they didn’t match was baffling.
Petrosian took a long look around him, which I thought was odd. “I used to come here all the time when the previous owners lived here.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I simply nodded.
The coroner thanked me, though I wasn’t sure what for, and took his departure.
Our lot had never been lit up like this. I thought, You can probably see our backyard from the moon. A huge exaggeration, of course—but still, it was plenty bright, and crammed with people searching every inch of the ground.
“Maybe they’ll get done in time,” Phillip said, though the last word was drowned out by a roll of thunder. “You want something to eat?”
My growing brother. “No, thanks,” I said. “I wouldn’t turn down a drink, though. Some fruit juice?”
The crime scene investigators and the other official people were not making any effort to keep quiet, naturally enough. This was a death investigation. The termination of a human being took priority over keeping the peace and quiet of the neighborhood. This was not much better than sirens.
I confess that my heart sank because of this petty issue. Though none of this was my fault, my neighbors were not going to be happy about this disruption on our placid street. I couldn’t imagine how the Herman sisters were reacting. I knew the Cohens would be livid.