My Sister's Grave (44 page)

He squeezed her tight. “Sounds like she isn’t gone. Sounds like she’s still with you.”

She quickly raised her head and pulled back to consider him.

“What?” he asked.

“That’s the strange thing about it. I felt her, Dan. I felt her presence here with me. I felt her leading me to that spike. There’s no other way to explain why I dug in that exact spot.”

“I think you just did explain it.”

CHAPTER 72

T
he snowstorm had stranded the media, which had come from all over the country to attend the post-conviction relief hearing, in Cedar Grove and the nearby towns. When news broke about DeAngelo Finn and Parker House, and about what had happened in the Cedar Grove mine, reporters and their cameramen rushed from their hotels to their vans. Maria Vanpelt was in her glory, broadcasting from all over town and telling anyone who would listen that she had been first to break the story on
KRIX Undercover.

Tracy had watched the media frenzy unfold on the television from the comfort of Dan’s couch, Rex and Sherlock on the floor beside her as if to protect her from the horde of reporters who had camped outside Dan’s home. Knowing the media would not leave them alone until she had addressed them, Tracy sent word she would hold a press conference at the First Presbyterian Church, the only building in Cedar Grove big enough to accommodate the anticipated crowd. The church where they’d held her father’s funeral.

“I’m doing it to appease the brass,” she told Kins over the phone.

“Bullshit,” he said. “I’m not buying that for a second. If you’re doing it, you have an ulterior motive.”

Tracy and Dan stood in an alcove at the front of the church, hidden from the crowd that filled the pews and stood along the aisles.

“You did it again,” Dan said. “You’ve managed to make Cedar Grove relevant. I hear the mayor is telling anyone who’ll listen that Cedar Grove is a quaint little town full of opportunity and ripe for development. He’s even talking about reviving the long-abandoned plans for Cascadia.”

Tracy smiled. The old town deserved a second chance. They all did.

She peered out at the sea of faces, her gaze flowing over the standing-room-only crowd. The media throng sat up front with notepads and tape recorders. Cameramen had established positions in the aisles from which to film. The locals and the curious had also come, many of the same faces that had come to Sarah’s service and sat through the hearing. George Bovine sat in a pew near the front, his daughter Annabelle seated between him and a woman who was presumably his wife. He had told Dan over the phone that he thought the finality of the event, that knowing that Edmund House was indeed dead, might help his daughter finally find closure and begin to slowly move on with her life.

Sunnie Witherspoon and Darren Thorenson had also come, and toward the rear, Tracy saw Vic Fazzio’s unmistakable mug a foot above the crowd, along with Billy Williams and Kins.

“Wish me luck.” She stepped from the alcove into the clicking of dozens of cameras and whirl of flashing lights. The bouquet of microphones taped to the podium was even more substantial than the one that had greeted Edmund House at his post-hearing press conference at the jail.

“I’d like to keep this short,” Tracy said. She unfolded a sheet of paper containing her prepared notes. “Many of you are wondering what transpired following the hearing that culminated in the release of Edmund House. As it turns out, I was correct. Edmund House was wrongfully convicted. I was wrong, however, in thinking him innocent. Edmund House raped and murdered my sister, Sarah, just as he confessed to Sheriff Roy Calloway twenty years ago. But he did not kill or bury her right away. He kept Sarah captive for seven weeks in an abandoned mine in the mountains. Shortly before the Cascadia Falls Dam went online, he killed her and buried her body. The area flooded, seemingly covering his crime forever.”

She took a breath and gathered herself. “Many of you are wondering who was responsible for convicting Edmund House. I’ve wondered the same thing for twenty years. I now know that the person responsible was my father, James Crosswhite. For those of you who knew my father, I understand that this is probably hard to accept, but I ask you not to condemn him. My father loved Sarah and me with all his heart. When she disappeared, it broke him. He was never the same man.” Tracy looked to George Bovine. “What he did, he did out of love for her, and for every father who loves his daughter; he was determined to ensure that no father would ever suffer the grief that he and George Bovine had suffered because of Edmund House.”

She took another moment to gather her emotions. “The only logical and reasonable conclusion is that after Edmund House confessed to Chief Calloway, taunting him that they would never convict him without my sister’s body, my father gathered the strands of hair from the hairbrush in the bathroom that my sister and I shared in our childhood home, and placed that evidence in the Chevy stepside. And it was my father who hid Sarah’s earrings in a sock in a can in the toolshed on Parker House’s property. As a country doctor, my father made frequent house calls, including calls on Parker. It was my father who reviewed every tip received about Sarah and who called Paul Hagen and convinced Mr. Hagen that he’d seen the red Chevy that night he had driven through town. My father acted alone in doing these things. I want to emphasize that neither Roy Calloway, Vance Clark, nor anyone else, to my knowledge, played a part in my father’s wrongdoing. My father’s actions were born from grief, despair, and desperation. We can all question his actions, but hopefully you won’t question his motives.

“For those of you who knew my father, I ask that you remember that man—a faithful husband, a loving father, a loyal friend.” She folded her notes and looked up. “I will be happy to answer your questions.”

And the questions came in a flurry. Tracy bobbed and weaved around them, answering what she could, deflecting others, and pleading ignorance when necessary. After ten minutes, Finlay Armstrong, the Acting Sheriff of Cedar Grove, stepped forward and ended the conference. Then he provided Tracy and Dan a police escort out of the church and back to Dan’s home, where they again went into seclusion, protected by the best security system in town.

The following day, Tracy walked into Roy Calloway’s room in the Cascade County Hospital. She found Calloway sitting up, though leaning back at a forty-five-degree incline with his leg suspended in a sling above the bed. “Hey, Chief.”

He shook his head. “Not anymore. I’m retired.”

“Did hell freeze over?”

“For three days,” he said.

She smiled. “You got that right. How’s the leg?”

“Doctor says I get to keep it after a few more surgeries. I’ll walk with a limp and need a cane, but he said it won’t keep me out of the streams.”

She took his hand. “I’m sorry I put you through this, Roy. I know my dad told you not to say anything, and when I kept pushing for answers, I put you in a situation where you felt the need to protect Vance and DeAngelo and try to convince me to let it go and just leave.”

“Don’t go making me out to be some hero,” he said. “I was covering my ass too. You know, I thought about telling you.”

“I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said.

“That’s what I figured. That’s why I didn’t try. You’d made up your mind, and I knew you were as stubborn as your old man.”

She smiled. “More.”

“He didn’t want you suffering any more than you already were, Tracy. He’d lost Sarah. He didn’t want to lose you too. He was afraid that the guilt would be too much for you to live with. He didn’t want that, Tracy. He didn’t want you thinking Sarah died because of you. She didn’t, you know. House was a psychopath. He killed her because he got the chance. But I guess I don’t need to tell you that. I imagine you get a fair share more of those types of killers than we get here in Cedar Grove.”

“What do you think happened to him, Roy?”

“Who? Your father?”

“You knew him as well as anyone. What do you think happened?”

Calloway seemed to give his answer some thought. “I think he just couldn’t get past the loss. He couldn’t get over the grief. He loved you both so much. He felt so much guilt because he wasn’t here. You know how he was. He thought if he had just been here, he could have stopped it somehow. It hurt their marriage, you know?”

“I figured it did.”

“He blamed her for him not being here, for them being in Hawaii. He didn’t, but . . . he did. And then when he thought that we weren’t going to be able to get justice for Sarah, I think it just kind of put him over the edge and it snowballed on him. He was a man of such high character. I’m sure that planting the evidence just weighed on him even more. Don’t judge him, Tracy. Your father was a great man. He didn’t kill himself. The grief did that.”

“I know.”

Calloway took a deep breath and let out a sigh. “Thanks for what you did at the news conference.”

“I just told the truth,” she said, unable to suppress a grin.

Calloway chuckled. “I’m not sure it will satisfy the Department of Justice.”

“They’ve got bigger fish to fry,” she said. Besides, Tracy thought there was merit to what DeAngelo Finn had said to her, about people not always being entitled to the answers, not when those answers could do more harm than good. She felt no guilt blaming her father. “My father would have wanted it this way,” she said.

“He had broad shoulders.” Calloway reached for a glass on a table next to his bed, took a sip of juice through a straw, and set the glass back down. “So, will you be leaving?”

“Still anxious to get rid of me, aren’t you?”

“Actually, no. It’s been too long.”

“I’ll be back to visit.”

“It won’t be easy.”

“You can’t bury the ghosts if you don’t confront them,” she said. “And now I know I don’t have to let Sarah go, or my dad, or Cedar Grove. They’ll always be a part of me.”

“Dan’s a good man,” Calloway said.

She smiled. “Like I said. I’ll take it slow.”

“So, you’re going to be okay with it, knowing?” he asked. “If you ever have a need to talk, you call me.”

“It’s going to take time,” she said.

“For all of us,” he said.

DeAngelo Finn was just as philosophical when she visited his room.

“I would have been with my Millie,” he said. “And that’s not such a bad thing, you know.”

“Where will you go?” she asked.

“I have a nephew near Portland who says he has a vegetable garden in need of weeding.”