The Bones She Buried

Twenty-Two

Noah’s house was dark when Josie slipped inside. Her skin pricked as she moved from the foyer, past the living room and into the kitchen. They had been attacked in these rooms only months ago. It was still difficult for her, but he refused to move. They’d been spending most of their time at her house, but not since Colette’s death. Josie flicked on the kitchen light and saw the note he had left her on the fridge.

Got you something to eat. Exhausted. Went to bed. N.

She opened the fridge and smiled, a bit of relief pushing aside the sadness weighing her down since Colette’s murder. Noah always made sure she ate. The delicious smell of perfectly grilled steak wafted from a takeout container on the top shelf. Josie sat at the table and wolfed it down before heading up to Noah’s bedroom. She still had clothes there so she changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, brushed her teeth and slipped into bed beside him. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she watched his bare chest rise and fall. She ran her fingers through his hair and planted a kiss on his cheek, but he didn’t stir.

Exhaustion made her limbs heavy but after minutes tossing and turning, she knew sleep was beyond her. She snatched up her phone from the nightstand and texted her sister, Trinity.

You up?

Trinity’s response came back a few minutes later.

Always for you, sister. What’s going on? How’s Noah?

Devastated. Hey, you covered the Drew Pratt disappearance when you were still a local reporter. Do you remember?

Only one of the biggest cases in PA. Of course. Has there been a development?

Sort of, I can’t say right now. Just wondering what you think happened to him.

There was a delay. For a moment, Josie thought perhaps Trinity had fallen asleep, but then her response popped up.

I think someone killed him. Someone Patti Snyder either knew or hired. You know who she is?

Yes. Well aware. Why do you think it was Snyder?

It’s the only thing that makes sense given the mystery woman. The police let me see the video when I did my story for the local news station. I think Snyder told him what was going on and when he chose not to pursue it, she had him killed. She’ll never talk though. Then she’d have to give up the killer.

Well, thanks.

Trinity texted back almost immediately.

I want to know if there are any developments!!! FIRST.

Josie chuckled and put her phone back on the nightstand. She lay back on her pillow next to Noah, inhaling his familiar, comforting scent. Her mind swirled with questions. After twenty minutes more of tossing and turning, sleep eluding her, she picked up her phone again and googled Patti Snyder. The woman had been a single mom working as a bank teller and raising her only son when in 2002 he was arrested for simple assault after getting into a scuffle with another teenage boy. The fight had happened on the football field during a game between rival high schools and was part of a larger brawl among the players. It had been caught on tape which someone in the press dug up after the Kickbacks for Kids scandal broke, and from what Josie could see from the grainy, far-off footage—the fight between Snyder’s son and the other boy was highlighted with a circle of light—there wasn’t anything particularly brutal about it.

However, Judge Eugene Sanders sentenced Patti Snyder’s son to nearly two years at Wood Creek. His public defender had tried to enter a plea deal, but Sanders had rejected it. Snyder’s son did his time at Wood Creek and, according to his mother, came out a shell of the person he’d been when he went in. He never fully recovered, Snyder said at her trial. Nothing lifted him out of his depression, and she was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy trying to get him the help he needed. Then one day in 2005 while she was at work, he hung himself in their backyard. At her trial, Patti Snyder described finding him and cutting him down. There wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom.

But she still got life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Patti Snyder had suspicions about Wood Creek pretty early on. The investigating she did at the bank where she worked—which was illegal—turned up what she believed was confirmation. She claimed that she had tried to blow the whistle on the operation multiple times, but that no one would listen to her. Then when the story broke in 2010, all the men involved got high-priced attorneys. There was talk in the press that most of the men involved were going to take plea deals to avoid prison time. Snyder went to the home of one of the Wood Creek Associates’ financiers, knocked on his door, and when he answered, she shot him in the chest and left him there to die.

Noah shifted onto his side, the sudden movement startling Josie. Her phone fell from her grip and into her lap. She dug it from the covers and put it back on the nightstand, hooking up the charger. It was enough for one night. Tomorrow, Gretchen would work on getting an interview with Patti Snyder, and hopefully, the woman would shed some light on just how much Drew Pratt knew about the Kickbacks scandal before his disappearance—and if she was the mystery woman who spoke to him at the craft fair or not.

Josie fell into a fitful sleep and woke a few hours later to daylight shining around the edges of Noah’s shades and his arm slung across her waist. His body fitted snugly against hers, spooning her. When she stirred, so did he. Their hands sleepily explored one another, bodies warming with need and urgency, finding a sweet release in one another that left them both breathless and sweaty. Josie was just dozing in Noah’s arms, ready now to sleep for several solid hours, when a knock at Noah’s front door startled them both.

They waited, bodies tensing, to see if the knock would come again and it did.

“I’ll get it,” Noah told her. “Stay here.”

Josie watched as he threw on some clothes and disappeared into the hall. She listened to his footsteps and the sound of his front door creaking open. Then a female voice. Josie stood and pulled on her own clothes, padding downstairs after him. By the time she reached the foyer, he had closed the door. In his arms was a large casserole dish with a card taped to its lid.

Noah smiled at her. “A lady from my mom’s church,” he explained. “They thought I might need some nourishment.”

Josie followed him into the kitchen. “That’s so nice.”

“She said to put it in the oven for twenty-five minutes at 350 degrees,” Noah mumbled as he found a place for it in his freezer. He came to the table with the card in his hand, tearing off the envelope and opening the card. He read it quickly and then handed it to her before heading back to the fridge to look for something to make for breakfast. “They’re really good people,” he said over his shoulder.

“Yes, they are,” Josie agreed as she read the card. It was a pretty standard sympathy card. Rather than having the congregants each sign it, someone with flowery script had written:

Please let us know if you need anything. Keeping you in our prayers. Your family at St. Mary’s Episcopal.

“I thought you said your mom was Catholic,” Josie said.

“What’s that?” Noah said, closing the door to the fridge with only a carton of orange juice in hand.

“I thought your mom was Catholic. She went to an Episcopal church?”

He took a swig of the orange juice, directly from the carton, and said, “So?”

“So an Episcopal church is not the same as a Catholic church, and there are four Catholic churches in Denton, one of which is closer to her house than St. Mary’s Episcopal,” Josie pointed out.

“Josie, who cares what church my mom went to?”

“How long did she go to St. Mary’s?”

He gave a sigh of frustration and said, “I don’t know. She always went there.”

Which meant as long as Noah could remember. Josie rose from the kitchen table and went to the counter where his coffeemaker sat, getting the filters and coffee grounds from the cabinet above it. “Noah,” she said. “Those things we found in your mother’s sewing machine—”

The orange juice carton slammed onto the kitchen table. Josie turned and stared at him. “Why do you keep going on about those things? I told you, it’s some kind of mistake. They’re not important. A couple of old trinkets and a flash drive some lawyer had.”

Josie turned her entire body toward him. “Not ‘some lawyer’, Noah. Drew Pratt. The assistant district attorney who disappeared twelve years ago. Yesterday, Drew Pratt’s daughter was murdered. In very similar fashion to your mother. Suffocated in her own home. Whoever did it was looking for something because her house had been ransacked. We had to talk to her cousin, Mason, after she died. Mettner showed him the arrowhead, and he says it belonged to his dad.”

“So what?”

“So his dad is dead, too.”

Josie could see some of the irritation in Noah’s tense shoulders bleed away. “What?”

She gave him a brief rundown of everything she, Gretchen and Mettner had learned about the Pratt brothers.

“My mom didn’t know those men,” he said.

“How do you know she didn’t?” Josie prodded. “You couldn’t have known everything about her.”

“I knew enough about her. I’m telling you, she didn’t know those men.”

“Then how did she get their possessions?” Josie asked.

“It’s some kind of a mistake,” Noah said, his voice rising.

“I’m sorry, Noah, but I don’t think it is. Two men, one dead and one missing—brothers, no less—and your mother had their personal property hidden in her house. You don’t think she was hiding something?”

He walked toward her, stopping so close that Josie could see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “Like what?” Noah asked. “What could she possibly have been hiding?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

He pointed a finger at her chest. “You’re trying to figure out what my mother was lying about when you should be trying to figure out who killed her.”

Josie placed a palm on her sternum. “Because I think whatever she was hiding is what got her killed, Noah.”

“What could she possibly be hiding? What? You think she was some kind of serial killer? Drowning men in rivers? Making it look like they killed themselves? Is that what you think?”

Josie’s back slid along the counter as she inched away from him. “I never said that. But Noah, she had secrets. Surely you recognize that.”

His face twisted into an expression that was unrecognizable to her. When he unleashed his next words she realized why; he’d never once been cruel to her. Then again, he had never been this traumatized, this off-kilter. He said, “I know you were raised by a woman who might as well have been Satan’s sister, and she’s the only example you have, but normal mothers don’t keep secrets, and my mom was normal. You have no frame of reference for normal, so maybe that’s why you don’t get it, why you’re not listening to me. With my mom, what you saw, you got. She wouldn’t have gotten caught up in anything like what you’re talking about. I don’t know where those things came from or how they got into her sewing machine, but she didn’t do anything wrong.”

Josie kept her voice calm and reasonable. “Noah, I didn’t say she did something wrong. I just said there were some things she was keeping secret. Those secrets may have gotten her killed.”

“My mother didn’t have secrets. I know that you and your grandmother and that evil bitch who raised you all had more secrets than you could keep track of, but—”

Josie cut him off. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you were raised by a pack of liars. Everything about your life was a lie. Now you see things through that filter. You see things that aren’t there. Not every person is lying and devious like what you’re used to. My mother was—”

Josie couldn’t keep her anger in check any longer. She stepped toward him and thrust her chin forward. “Your mother was what? A perfect saint? You think she never told a lie in her entire life?”

“Don’t talk about my mother,” he shouted.

Josie didn’t back down. “Noah, another innocent woman is dead. Like it or not, there is a killer loose in this city. We need to find him.”

He turned away from her.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

He paused at the doorway but didn’t look at her.

“Why are you doing this?” Josie said, the words slipping out high-pitched and filled with emotion before she could snatch them back. “Why are you acting like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like you don’t care that someone killed your mother?”

He turned back, tears in his eyes. “Of course I care that someone killed her. It’s all I can think about. But please, I’m begging you, don’t shit on my mother’s memory.”

“Oh, Noah, I would never—”

He held up a hand to silence her. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Maybe you should go home.”

Tears stung the backs of her eyes, but she bit them back. Afraid anything else she said would only lead to more fighting, she murmured, “If that’s what you want.”

He said nothing. She stood frozen in the kitchen, listening to him move around the house. She heard the jangle of his keys and then the front door close. When his car roared to life out front, she let herself cry.