Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Thirteen

Josie watched Noah circle her Ford Escape, leaning over to get a good look at the shit caked under her door handles. He wrinkled his nose, snapped some photos with his phone, and turned to her. “Want to send a sample to the lab? See if it’s human?”

Her stomach turned. “No,” she answered. “I’m not spending department money on a bad joke.”

“How long is the backlash to Lloyd Todd’s arrest going to last?” Noah asked.

“Hard to say. Hopefully not much longer. We’ll take your car. I want to get back to the station before my latte gets cold.”

Noah smiled. “And leave this crap caked under the handles all day? I don’t think so. I’ll clean this up for you while you tell me about your mom.”

Josie stood in her driveway, arms crossed over her chest, while Noah moved in and out of her house gathering latex gloves, paper towels, surface cleaner, and a plastic bag. He went to work on the driver’s door first, talking as he cleaned. “So your mom’s name was Belinda Rose.”

Josie didn’t answer.

Once he got all the sludge out from under the handle using paper towels, he sprayed it with disinfectant and used more paper towels to wipe away the remnants, depositing all the dirty towels into the plastic bag. The smell wafted over to where Josie stood. Her nose wrinkled, but Noah seemed unaffected.

“Used to dealing with crap, are you?” she asked.

He smiled. “Don’t change the subject.”

“It’s just that the smell at the morgue turns you green in seconds, but you’re practically face-deep over there, and it’s not bothering you at all.”

“There could be more than one Belinda Rose,” he pointed out, moving to the next handle.

“With the same birthday?”

“I thought your maiden name was Matson, not Rose,” Noah said.

“It was. Matson was my dad’s last name. My parents never got married.”

“Where’s your mother now?”

Josie’s chin dropped to her chest. She didn’t like talking about her mother; she’d been actively trying not to think about the woman for the past sixteen years. Her mother had taken enough from her. She didn’t deserve any more of Josie’s time or mental energy. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since I was fourteen. She left.”

Noah turned and looked at her, one brow raised. “You never tried to find her?”

Josie’s hands found the lapels of her jacket and tugged them closer together. Her eyes drifted away from Noah. “She’s not the kind of person you go looking for.”

“How tall is she?” he asked, and Josie knew he was thinking of their post-autopsy meeting with Dr. Feist.

She sighed. “Tall enough to have hit this girl over the head with a hammer or tire iron. Probably about five four.”

“Do you have a picture of her? We could work from that.”

“No, I don’t.”

“That bad, huh?”

You have no idea, Josie said silently. Out loud, she told him, “She destroyed every picture there was of her in the house before she left.”

At the time, Josie had thought it was exactly in keeping with the kind of spiteful, vengeful monster her mother had always been—mostly because the only photos Josie had of her mother also had her father in them. Josie remembered coming home to find the whole trailer smelling of smoke, and finding the last slivers of photographs in a pile of ashes in the stainless-steel kitchen sink. Belinda hadn’t left Josie a single photo of her father. Back then, Josie figured her mother was just trying to hurt her, like she always did, but now she wondered if there was a more sinister reason for destroying the photos. It sure didn’t make Josie’s job of tracking her down any easier.

“What about your dad?” Noah asked. “Would he have any?”

“He passed away when I was six.”

She waited for more questions, and her body went loose with relief when they didn’t come. Instead, moving to the other side of the car and starting on the handles there, Noah said, “I’m sorry to hear that. Well, look, we can talk more about your mom later if it turns out we need to find her. Right now, I think the first order of business is to confirm the dental records. We’ll have a look at the chart Gretchen’s pulling and go from there.”