Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Sixty-Four

From the Eudora, Josie drove to Heinrich’s auto body shop, but the entire building was cordoned off with police caution tape, and a patrol car sat outside. Of course. Tara knew Josie’s first instinct would be to go to the scene herself and investigate. She pulled away and drove through town, pushing back the strange mixture of relief and emptiness that had come over her since she’d heard about Heinrich’s death. She tried to figure out her next move. She kept coming back to Trinity. The reporter had left her hotel room willingly. There was no one with her, no gun to her head. She must have gone to meet with Lila, and from there, stolen Josie’s car, driven to Heinrich’s, murdered him, and then left—alone—to return Josie’s Escape to the street outside Noah’s house.

But if Trinity had driven the Escape back to Noah’s house, why was the seat pushed all the way back? Trinity was the same size as Josie. She would have no reason to adjust the seat. Which meant that somewhere between the body shop and Noah’s house, Trinity had met up with someone and turned Josie’s car over to them. Someone taller than both Trinity and Lila. Lila was even shorter than Josie, so she wouldn’t have pushed the seat back.

So, who had been in her car?

Josie pulled over and took her phone out. She started to text Gretchen about the car but then realized that her Evidence Response Team would print the car anyway. If the person who had driven it had left prints, they would be found. Josie put her phone away and pulled back into traffic, the need to keep moving consuming her.

Where was Trinity now? she wondered. Was she hiding because she had killed a man, or was Lila holding her somewhere? Josie had no doubt that Lila was behind Heinrich’s murder somehow, and that Trinity had gone to meet Lila because Lila had promised her a story. But what would make Trinity kill a man so willingly? Josie thought about what it would take for her to throw away her life and career and commit a murder. What would make her desperate enough to do that? Not a threat against her own life. She’d rather die than go down and lose everything. But would she trade her career and her morality to save someone she loved? It was then that Josie realized she didn’t know Trinity at all. She knew nothing personal about the reporter, her life, her family, her loved ones.

Josie turned the vehicle around and headed back to her home. She hadn’t been inside for days, and the rooms had an empty, sterile feeling to them—as if they weren’t really hers anymore. She hoped that one day it would feel like a safe place again. But until then, she would startle at every little noise, like she did when she was in the spare room booting up her laptop and her neighbor’s garage door screeched open. Bringing her laptop down to the kitchen, she made herself a pot of coffee, still unable to shake the feeling that she was in someone else’s space now.

As the coffee brewed, Josie pulled up her internet browser and typed in Trinity Payne’s name. The search returned more results than Josie could possibly sift through in a few hours, or even a week, so she typed in Trinity Payne biography, and that narrowed it down somewhat. She clicked through several sites, turning up the same information again and again. She had gone to NYU, where she’d graduated summa cum laude with a degree in journalism. She started out as a roving reporter for WYEP in the Denton area, then she moved quickly to the network’s morning magazine show in New York City, working as a national correspondent until a source gave her a bad story. Her fall from grace had landed her back at WYEP, until she had helped Josie crack the missing girls case two years earlier, and the network wanted her back on the national stage.

Josie knew all this. She clicked through the sites faster, skimming over repeat information, looking for something more. Finally, on an NYU alumni website, she found a more detailed article about Trinity, written three months earlier—

NYU Journalism Alum Rises from Tragedy to Network Royalty.

The first paragraph read:

Network darling Trinity Payne is no stranger to controversy. Her travails with bad sources as well as her recent rise to fame helping to crack some of the biggest criminal cases in the history of her home state are well documented. What most people don’t know about Payne is that her life was inexorably marked by tragedy when she was only a few weeks old. Her young parents were both employed by pharmaceutical giant Quarmark—Christian as the head of marketing and Shannon as a rising chemist. With their careers on track, their next goal was to settle down and have children. They found their dream home quickly—a two-story Tudor-style mansion in a small town named Callowhill. They got pregnant on the first try—with twins. “They were classic overachievers,” Trinity relates, smiling.

“Twins?” Josie muttered. She had no idea that Trinity had a twin. She had known that Trinity grew up in Callowhill. It was a small town a couple of hours away, on the other side of Bellewood. In fact, the county seat was just about equidistant from both Denton and Callowhill. Josie stood and hastily prepared a cup of coffee for herself, returning to her laptop.

While many first-time parents might have been intimidated by twins, Shannon Payne says she and her husband never once worried how they would handle two newborns. “The day our girls were born was one of the happiest days of our lives.”

The day our girls were born. Something gnawed at the back of Josie’s mind, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

She read on:

Tragedy struck just a few weeks after the twins were born when a house fire destroyed their four-bedroom home. Their nanny was home with the twins at the time, but was only able to save one of them—Trinity.

“My God,” Josie said.

She skimmed over the rest of it—how the Paynes had never truly recovered from the loss of Trinity’s twin sister, and how Trinity was glad she didn’t remember anything because it would be too painful. A shiver ran down Josie’s spine. She didn’t know how a person could ever recover from the loss of a child. There was no doubt in her mind that it was an open wound that Shannon and Christian Payne would take to their graves. Josie felt a wave of sympathy for Trinity, and yet, she couldn’t help but wonder if Trinity would have turned out less mercenary had she had the influence of a sister. Now they would never know.

She skimmed the rest of the article, but the only other new piece of information was that Trinity had a much younger brother called Patrick, who was still in high school in Callowhill. There was no mention of any love interests. Trinity didn’t strike Josie as the type who would have time for a boyfriend. Josie had what she needed though—the names of Trinity’s immediate family members. She opened a new tab and searched for a phone number for the Payne family in Callowhill. It was unlisted. Of course, with a daughter as famous as Trinity, the Paynes wouldn’t want their number so easily accessible to the public.

Josie had only been suspended for a few hours. It was quite possible that no one at Denton PD had revoked her access to the police databases. Logging in to one of them, Josie pumped her fist in the air as her credentials were accepted. She searched for Shannon Payne first, banking on the hope that the Paynes still had a landline because cell service was spotty in the more remote areas of Pennsylvania. Luck was with her today.

Josie punched the number into her cell phone and listened to it ring eight times before the call went to voicemail, a female voice that sounded similar to Trinity’s urging her to leave a message. At the beep, Josie said, “This is Josie Quinn. I’m the chief of police in Denton. I’m calling about your daughter, Trinity. It is very important that you call me back as soon as you get this message.” She then left her number and hung up.

As she went to close out the browser on her laptop, the last paragraph of the alumni magazine article caught Josie’s eye.

When asked if the tragedy of her sister’s death has influenced her as a journalist, Payne smiles bravely, and a faraway look creeps into her eyes. “I think never knowing what really happened—who set the fire—will haunt my family forever and has definitely made me more diligent in my reporting. I will never stop until I have all the answers. It’s just something that’s in me.”

Josie looked at her cell phone and, realizing she had nothing to do while she waited for the Paynes to call her back, she opened another tab, pulled up a search engine, and typed in Payne Callowhill house fire. There were results with Payne and Callowhill in them, and Callowhill and house fire, but none with all three terms. Of course, Josie knew that Trinity was around the same age as she was, and if the fire had taken place a few weeks after her birth, that meant it would have happened in the late ’80s—before the internet was a staple of daily existence. Back then, if the fire had made the news, it would have been in one of the county newspapers.

She finished her coffee and set off for the library.