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Chapter 27

Too soon, Liz’s alarm announced it was 4:00 a.m. Time to swallow down some breakfast and get on the road to Plymouth. Coverage of 9/11–related stories still dominated television news. But on the radio, as Liz drove east, newscasters found time to vilify Erik as a jealous husband who most likely had known his wife was involved with a “Middle Eastern stranger.” They implied he must have done his wife and “her lover” in, and then placed calls from her phone to make it look like she was alive and well during the ensuing months.

Stopping for coffee, Liz bought a copy of the Banner. Under the headline, “CELL TO CELL,” her own report outlined the facts of the phone call and Erik’s arrest, while Dick Manning’s piece, headed “MYSTERY MAILS,” used a quote from Newton mail carrier Len Fenster to suggest that Erik pursued strange passions: “Imagine those ladybugs crawling all over a nice lady like that? Wouldn’t that give anybody the creeps? And she was always getting letters from the Middle East. Coulda’ been from that Arab guy who bled in her kitchen.”

Arriving at Forges Field just at sunrise, Liz found René DeZona already on the scene, strapped to the top section of a telephone pole and armed with a very long lens. Apparently the police who had been guarding the scene had not looked up: They seemed unaware the photographer was there. Following DeZona’s hand signals, Liz drew one police officer aside and loudly fired questions about the case at him, covering with her voice the sound of DeZona’s camera work. After a few minutes, DeZona pointed to a Porta-Potty nearby. As Liz approached the unit, she heard the sound of two small items dropping to the ground near her feet. Film cans. Stooping to tie a lace on her hiking boot, Liz pocketed the film. Minutes later, the police noticed the photographer and confiscated the film that was then in DeZona’s camera.

Just then John Sobel and Cormac Kinnaird arrived in separate vehicles. When Liz told them she needed to pass the film to René, Kinnaird surprised her by producing a pipe from his pocket. Taking the film, he approached the photographer and asked for a light. As the photographer fumbled for matches, Kinnaird passed the film to him. Film in hand, DeZona drove off, presumably headed for the newsroom.

As expected, the police prevented the reporter, teacher, and forensics man from entering the area they’d surrounded with crime scene tape. The trio hiked into the woods and then circled toward the vicinity of the crime scene.

“They’ve closed off a wide area around the remains,” the science teacher said.

“But that doesn’t mean they’ll find everything,” Cormac said. “That ME is green. And he’s rushing. I wonder if he’ll realize skeletal remains that have been there over time may have been disarticulated.”

“You mean taken apart?”

“That’s right, Liz. Scattered or even carried away into burrows by animals back when there was meat on those bones.”

Liz grimaced.

“It concerns me for another reason that this Stu Simmons seems in such haste to remove the bones. If they are kept in their position and context, it will be easier to evaluate the shower of organic material to which they have been exposed. In an area like this, we can tell quite a bit about the time of death—or at least the time when the bodies were placed here—by cataloging that organic material. Pollen found on the bones will tell us during which seasons they were exposed to the elements. Working back from that, and using insect evidence, we can make a remarkably accurate guess as to how long the body lay here before it was stripped of tissue by maggots and animals. These bones have been here for quite some time. Simmons is a fool if he thinks one more rainstorm will destroy the evidence they hold.”

Liz recalled the doctor’s scolding her about withholding the cigarette butt evidence months ago. “Even if we found a disarticulated bone or two, Cormac,” she asked, “wouldn’t you insist on turning it in to the police? What kind of advantage would that give us?”

“As much as I’m eager to see you get a scoop, we have to keep in mind that the search for the truth takes precedence.”

“But it sounds as if you’re better qualified to handle this scene, this evidence anyway. Doesn’t it look like the police will bungle this?”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t take a good look at anything we turn up before handing it over, but I would absolutely hand the evidence over. Even to a bungler. That’s the law.”

“Look here, Liz,” the science teacher said. “Here’s the opening to a fox den. No, I don’t see any human bones conveniently sticking out of it. But you should take a look anyway to help you find more animal abodes in the landscape. Do you see how the fox has taken advantage of the protection afforded by the tree stump? From the other side, the opening to its den is invisible.”

“That’s not very encouraging. Does this mean we’ll have to walk in circles around every tree stump?”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“We shouldn’t overestimate the likelihood of finding bones this far from the bodies, in any case,” Cormac cautioned.

The trio combed the woods for some forty minutes in silence. Then, the science teacher announced he would have to head for his classroom. Liz looked up to watch him as he trod reluctantly up the hill, leaving behind the most exciting nature scene he was likely to see in his lifetime.

“Yesterday, you said you expected to see chickadees in the hollow,” Liz called out to him. “Why there and not right here, for instance?”

The bird-lover turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. “The hollow is the site of an ephemeral pond or vernal pool. Dry now, of course, but a few feet deep after the snow melts in springtime.”

Cormac Kinnaird stood stock still. “That changes everything,” he said. “If your photographer has been able to zoom in on that scene, or if I can get into that scene soon, we’ve got an advantage, Liz,” he said. “A big one.” With that, he took Liz’s hand and led her up the hill to their parked cars, whistling an Irish reel all the way.

Since the police on the crime scene would not offer comments, Liz drove to Plymouth Police Headquarters to see if she could get an official statement on the case. It was early in the day and things might change before her afternoon deadline, but it didn’t hurt to be thorough. Plymouth Police Chief Martin Oliver curtailed repeated inquiries by promising a midafternoon press conference. Returning to Forges Field, Liz found police personnel adamant that nothing would be revealed until the press conference, so she drove to the newsroom to find DeZona.

“Your friend the forensics guy said he’d appreciate having copies of these,” the photographer said. “Not that they show much of anything.” The eight-by-ten photos taken from the telephone pole perch showed the bent backs of police officers gathered around what looked like some dark sticks. Presumably, they were pieces of the discolored skeleton. Much was obscured by branches of trees located between the photographer and his quarry.

DeZona slipped the photos into a manila envelope and handed them to Liz. “See you in Plymouth later?” he asked. “I hear we’re to cover the press conference.”

“You bet,” Liz said. Then, she returned to her desk, called a courier, and arranged for the photos to be delivered to Dr. Kinnaird’s university office.

With hours to kill before the press conference, Liz gave Tom a call, leaving a message on his answering machine. Then, she decided to drive out to the Wellesley College campus, which seemed an ideal place to think things through. Parking her car at the Faculty Club, she took a leisurely walk along Lake Waban in the direction of the Pinetum. This time, she was not alone. About twenty yards ahead of her, two young women walked along, lost in animated conversation about a “hot” professor. As she followed them through the Pinetum and the students emerged into the more open area of the topiary garden, one of the young women turned around to face Liz.

“Would you take a photo of Florrie and I, please?”

Can these be the nation’s best and brightest? Liz asked herself, cringing at the grammar. “‘Of Florrie and me,’ ” she said, realizing even as she said it how schoolmarmish she must sound to them.

But Florrie and her friend were not annoyed.

“My English Comp prof is always telling me the same thing,” the poor grammarian said.

Liz cringed again when the girls arranged themselves on the grass between two topiary trees.

“Don’t you see the sign?” she asked. “It says to stay off the grass.”

“It’s only for a photo,” Florrie said as Liz stepped back into the shade at the edge of the Pinetum to shoot a backlit picture without having direct sunlight on the lens.

Liz heard one of the young women exclaim delightedly, “Look, Ellen! A chocolate Lab, just like my dog at home.”

Liz followed Florrie’s gaze. At the far end of the topiary garden, Olga Swenson froze in the act of throwing a toy to her dog, Hershey. At the sound of her daughter’s name on another’s lips, her face collapsed into an expression of excruciating pain. Deciding that Olga did not need the intrusion of a reporter at that moment, Liz handed back the camera, turned around in the shade of the conifer collection, and walked back to her car.

At Plymouth Police Headquarters later that afternoon, the press conference offered little new information. Police Chief Martin Oliver reiterated how the remains had been found and declared that the skeletons appeared to be those of a male and a female whose bones had lain in the hollow for some years. Although no flesh remained on the bones, strands of hair found there indicated both victims were dark-haired. Pressed by Liz and her colleagues, he said there was dentition under examination, but it did not match any dental records for unsolved crimes currently in the database. Asked specifically if the remains could be those of the missing Newton mom, he said the apparent age of the bones, the hair color, and the lack of a dental match made it look extremely unlikely.

After the press conference, Liz decided to heed her hunger pangs, but not before purchasing a postcard for Nadia. Fortunately, in this vacation haven “gifte shoppes” were located cheek-by-jowl with restaurants. After buying a postcard picturing a cranberry bog in a shop called “Plymouth Rocks!”, she took a window seat in a waterfront eatery called the Mayflower Café. There, she ordered a special called Pilgrim’s Progress: a turkey and cranberry sauce sandwich followed by a bowl of Indian pudding à la mode. While looking out the window at the tourist-magnet Mayflower II sailing ship, she took out the postcard.

“Dear Nadia,” she wrote on it. “Here I am in Plymouth, Massachusetts, covering a crime in cranberry bog country. There are two victims, but the age of the remains seems to eliminate Ellen.”

What a strange thing to write on a postcard! Liz shook her head.

She changed the period at the end of the second sentence to a comma and added, “fortunately, your pen pal remains much on my mind.” She turned over the card and examined it, then turned it over again. “On this card,” she continued, “you can see the bright red cranberries, as well as the colored leaves typical of an autumn landscape in eastern Massachu— ”

Abruptly, Liz stopped writing. She wished she had not sent DeZona’s photos to Cormac Kinnaird before studying them better, for suddenly she called to mind something in the wrong color family that appeared in the foreground of a couple of the photographs. Now she realized that when she had scrutinized the pictures to get a glimpse of the remains, she had not looked carefully at the out-of-focus elements in the photos’ foregrounds.

Signaling the waitress, Liz paid her bill and made haste to Forges Field Recreational Area. By the time she arrived there, she had to phone in the press conference story to the city desk, cursing the fading afternoon light all the while. With the story filed, she strode over to DeZona’s telephone pole. Standing at the base of it, she realized she needed to climb the pole to get the correct angle on the scene. The pole must be climbable if DeZona had managed it. But Liz was not so skilled, nor did she have the telephone company–issue climbing belt that had helped DeZona clamber up the pole. Giving up on scaling the pole, she moved her car next to it and stood on its roof. She saw nothing out of place in the scene. That was not surprising, since the car’s roof was nowhere near as high as DeZona’s perch had been.

If she could not look down on the scene from above, there was one more option: walk into the scene and look up. But how would she ensure that she did not get lost as dusk fell completely while she was in the hollow? Returning to the car, Liz grabbed an extra reporter’s notebook and a flashlight. Then, she stepped into the woods. When her car was nearly out of sight, she attached a page from the notebook to the branch of a tree at eye level. She marked more trees and shrubs this way as she worked her way into the depression from which the police had so recently removed the remains.

Liz made it to the base of the hollow—the place where the deer had taken their rest so close to those human bones—without seeing anything out of the ordinary on the way down. In the heart of the hollow, she paused and shivered. It seemed only right to do something to honor the pair who’d met their ends here, whoever they were. But the light was fading and there was a hint of pink in the sky, signaling sunset. There was no time to linger. Very quietly humming the hymn “Amazing Grace,” Liz stood quite still as she regarded the reddening sky. She asked herself which way felt right for retracing her steps and pointed her arm in that direction. Dropping her eyes to look, she saw that, without her paper markers, she would have walked into the woods in a direction that was about thirty degrees off from the correct one.

Thanking herself for marking the path, Liz made her way up the slope again. It was an easier task to remove than to attach the papers to the trees, so Liz was able to concentrate better on examining the branches above her. When she came to the end of “Amazing Grace,” she hummed it again, a little more loudly. This time, she was humming it as much for reassurance as to honor the dead. She longed to share the intensely lonely scene with something living, even a chickadee. But there was no sign of the little birds, not even the sound of their distinctive call, chicka-dee-dee-dee.

But it soon became evident that Liz was not alone in the darkening hollow. Suddenly, the silent woods did produce a noise sounding, for all the world, like an old biddy shrieking, “Drink your tea!” There it was again, “Drink your tea!”

As a branch moved off to her left, Liz realized the noise had been a birdcall. She could not call to mind the name of the bird, which she now saw possessed an iridescent black body and a brown head. The bird dropped to the ground, poking its beak at the underbrush. Liz looked away from the bird, scanning the landscape.

And then she saw it. The same metallic red color she’d seen in the blurry foreground of DeZona’s photo. A synthetic strand of knitting material, worked into a bird’s nest on the ground. But it was the tree branches, not the ground, that must have formed the foreground to DeZona’s photos. Had the nest fallen from a tree? No, it looked as though it had been built where it lay, nestled into the twigs and leaves there. Liz shone her flashlight on the nest. It also contained some finer strands of strawberry-blonde human hair.

Grasping the sap-covered trunk of a young pitch pine for support, Liz heard a sound she recognized. The same kind of keening she’d heard from Veronica when the child flew across the Newton City Hall Common and threw herself into Liz’s arms. This time, however, the sound came from Liz’s own throat.

She turned her eyes to a sky that had turned the color of flame. And as she did, she saw the glint of another piece of synthetic yarn snagged on a tree branch, the kind of yarn that might well be knitted into the nose of a reindeer in a Christmas-patterned sweater.