Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Seventeen

Josie sat behind her desk at the station house, laptop open before her. Gretchen was off writing warrants to get the Department of Human Services foster care file on Belinda Rose. Noah was getting more coffee. Josie opened up the first of several databases to enter in Belinda Rose’s information, but her hands froze over the keyboard. Her scalp prickled. Once she started down this road, there would be no turning back. She had hoped to leave her mother firmly in her past, but that was impossible now. The Denton Police Department had a murder to solve. They needed to know who the girl buried in the woods had been. Since Josie’s mother had clearly stolen the girl’s identity sometime after her death, there was little choice but to track her down, or at least find a connection between the two women.

The door to her office swung open, and Noah stepped through, a steaming mug of coffee in one hand. She nearly lunged for it. He laughed. “Whoa! Feeling a little tired, are you?”

Curling both palms around the mug, she sat back down in her chair and sipped it. “Looking for a distraction,” she said. “Close the door.”

The sounds of her officers moving about in the bullpen outside receded as Noah clicked the door shut. He sat in the chair across from her and raised a brow. “What’s going on, Boss?”

“I’m trying to figure out a way to solve this murder without actually having to get back in contact with my mother.”

“Not sure that’s possible,” Noah said. “You know we have to follow all the leads, and if your mother was using this girl’s identity—not that long after the murder—that makes her a significant person of interest. I mean, Belinda Rose doesn’t show up on any of our missing persons lists, so how would your mother have known so soon after her death that she could use her identity?”

Josie put her mug down on the desk and traced the rim of it with her index finger, keeping her eyes on the steam rising from inside the mug instead of on Noah. “I understand what you’re saying.”

He waited a beat. Then he asked, “You have no interest in finding out who your mom really was?”

Josie met his eyes. Her fingers reached up and pulled her black hair down over the long scar on the right side of her face. She swallowed once to quell the dryness in her throat. “Oh, I know who she really was.”

But I don’t know if I want the rest of the world to know, she added silently.

“Boss,” Noah said.

“Yeah.”

“You know who you are too. Don’t forget that.”

It was exactly what she needed to hear, delivered perfectly.

“Thank you,” she said.

Noah leaned forward, pulled a rolled-up bunch of papers out of his back pocket, smoothed it out, and pushed it across her desk. “I already did a search using the name Belinda Rose with the October 15, 1966 birthdate to look for a last known address.”

Josie snapped her laptop closed and looked at the report. As her eyes roved over the addresses associated with Belinda Rose, Noah stood and moved around the desk next to her. He pointed to the first address, which Josie recognized immediately. “This was the foster home run by Maggie Smith,” he said. “We’re still trying to track her down. I’ve got Lamay running some searches. He’ll have something for us soon—as long as she’s still alive.”

Noah’s fingers continued moving down the list. “The next address was an apartment in Fairfield. The real Belinda Rose would have been eighteen when she lived there.”

“That’s almost an hour away from Bellewood, in Lenore County,” Josie said. “I wonder if she actually lived there, or if she was already dead by then. It might have been my mother living in that apartment under her name.”

“I’m sure we’ll be able to make a better guess as to when she died once we have the DHS file and once we talk with Smith,” Noah said.

“Look at this,” Josie said. She pointed below the Fairfield address. “She had a bunch of apartments throughout Alcott and Lenore Counties before she came to the trailer park—all of them at least forty miles away from Bellewood, if not more. Well before my mother came to the trailer park. I don’t think this is the real Belinda Rose.” Josie remembered vividly how often and how abruptly her mother came and went, abandoning her for months at a time and then returning when she least expected it like a tornado tearing through her life, destroying everything.

“Okay, so we know it was your mom who lived in the trailer park,” Noah said. “And you think these half-dozen apartments before that were probably her too. Should I have someone go out to these buildings and talk to landlords?”

Josie leaned back in her chair and took another swig of coffee. “I’m not sure it’s worth it,” she said. “That was over thirty years ago. Some of these places might not even be standing anymore.”

“Nosy neighbors?” Noah suggested.

“Make some inquiries,” Josie instructed. “You never know.”

“Is there anyone still living in the trailer park who would remember her?”

“I doubt it,” Josie said. “But you can send someone over to ask around.”

There is someone, she thought to herself, though he isn’t at the trailer park anymore. Josie didn’t even know if he was still alive; she hadn’t thought about Dexter McMann in sixteen years, had put that entire episode out of her mind, just as she tried to do with everything else connected to her mother. She doubted he would know more than she did anyway. She didn’t want to turn that slippery stone over unless she absolutely had to.

“I think we really need to look at where she went after the trailer park, and there’s only one address listed for Belinda Rose after that,” Josie said.

According to the report, the year that Josie turned fifteen, her mother had lived in an apartment in Philadelphia, two hours away from Denton. “After that, there’s nothing,” Josie added. “She used this identity until 2002, and then stopped.”

“Maybe she died,” Noah said.

“I wouldn’t be that lucky,” Josie mumbled.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, nothing. She must have found another identity to assume. Or went back to her real identity—whatever that is.”

“Did she have any family?” Noah asked.

Josie shook her head. “No. I mean, if she did, she never told me about them. I was a kid. I never asked her.” I tried not to talk to her at all.

“I’ll send someone to all the places on this list, see if we can come up with anything,” Noah said. “Even if we don’t find anything that way, we’ll dig into the real Belinda Rose’s life. Maybe they knew one another.”