But this time the chain didn’t rattle. There were odd sounds from the far end of the room, but that was it. Once the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut, she reached out toward the neighboring blanket and whispered Amelia’s name, but there was no answer. Alone in the basement for the very first time, Latisha cried herself to sleep.
She had awakened much later to what she thought was the distant sound of thunder and the scratching of the rats. At least that’s what she told herself in the middle of the night when she first heard them, but now she knew the truth about those awful sounds. The Boss had locked Amelia inside that freezer and left her to die. The dull poundings and frantic clawings that had awakened Latisha had been Amelia’s desperate attempts to escape. Eventually the sounds had faded away to nothing—at least in the basement, but not in Latisha’s heart and soul, because she heard them still, every time she closed her eyes, and they haunted every moment of Latisha’s restless sleep.
All of that had happened days ago now. The next morning, or maybe the one after that, when the door at the top of the stairs opened once again, Latisha had shivered with dread, expecting that the Boss was coming for her this time. Instead he stopped beside the freezer, dropped a tarp on the earthen floor, and spread it open.
With Latisha peeking out from under her blanket, he unlocked the padlock and then wrestled Amelia’s crouching, frozen body out of the freezer. Once he had her loose, he dropped her onto the tarp and then rolled it into a bundle. When he picked up the tarp, the shape of her frozen flesh made for an unwieldy, awkward load, and it was a struggle for him to lug it upstairs. That time he left the basement without bothering to turn off the light. A few minutes later, he returned, coming back down the stairs with another Ziploc container loaded with kibble.
“I’ll be gone for a couple of days, so you need to make this last,” he told her, placing it at the end of Latisha’s mattress. “I’m going hunting. I’ll be bringing back a new friend for both of us.”
And then he was gone. He disappeared upstairs, the light went off, and Latisha heard the door being bolted shut. Heavy footsteps trod across the plank flooring, and another door slammed shut. A few minutes later, she heard the sound of a vehicle starting up and driving away.
Long after the Boss had left, Latisha lay on the bed drowning in despair and wallowing in grief. She wept for herself and for Amelia, for Sandra and for Sadie and for however many others there might have been before and however many others might come later. When her tears were finally exhausted and the racking sobs subsided, just one sound remained in her universe—the nightmare hum of the freezer, still plugged in and still running—switching on, switching off. In the overpowering darkness that was the only thing still there—the sound of the freezer. It had killed Amelia, and Latisha was pretty sure it would kill her, too.
Chapter 6
THAT SATURDAY EVENING JOANNA MANAGED TO HAVE BOTH KIDS down and asleep before Butch called after his Friends of the Library dinner event in Oklahoma City. He was off on what most people would regard as an exotic book tour, but as he and Joanna talked about the kids and what was happening at High Lonesome Ranch, Joanna could tell he was homesick. The tour was going fine, but Butch was ready to be home, and the time between Friday and Wednesday, when he was scheduled to return, seemed like forever away.
“How are things going at work?” he asked finally.
“After all that mess with the carload of dead illegals, Tom Hadlock got hit over the head with another homicide case just this afternoon.”
“What happened?”
“A kid from Douglas turned up at the Justice Center late today lugging an old bowling bag with a skull inside it—a human skull showing signs of a single bullet hole. According to the kid, he and a buddy found it a couple of months ago when they were out in the Peloncillos shooting quail. Rather than reporting what they’d seen, the kid brought the skull home and hid it in his closet. That lasted until this morning, when his mother found it and frog-marched her son into the department to report it.”
“Good mom,” Butch breathed in clear admiration.
Joanna laughed. “I guess,” she said. “According to Tom, the mother is a piece of work. She brought the kid in and had him confess to finding the skull before Tom had any idea about what was going on. Since he had no way of knowing that a crime had been committed, he hadn’t bothered to read the kid his rights.”
“Shrewd move on the mother’s part, because that makes whatever the kid said to him totally inadmissible.”
“Exactly,” Joanna agreed. “Tom’s having Deb Howell take the lead on the investigation, because he thinks she’ll be able to handle the mother in a way Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal probably couldn’t. Deb is supposed to pick up the kid and his mother and drive them out to the scene tomorrow to get a better idea of what’s there. Tom says he’s making arrangements for the M.E. and the crime-scene folks to tag along.”
“I trust none of this is making you feel as though you need to jump right back in the saddle?” Butch asked.
“Not so far,” Joanna answered with a laugh. “I think Tom has a pretty good handle on things. It all happened late this afternoon, but he’s already delivered the skull, bowling bag and all, to the M.E.’s office uptown. Kendra Baldwin will be bringing her team along to the Peloncillos tomorrow in case there are more remains out there in addition to the skull. But don’t worry about me. I have no intention of going. Lugging an infant around a crime scene just isn’t in the cards.”
“Glad to hear it,” Butch said, sounding relieved. “You had me worried for a minute.”
There was a sudden pause in the conversation, something Butch picked up on. “Is there anything else?” he asked.
Joanna took a deep breath. “Actually, there is,” she said at last. “I had no idea both my dad and my mother grieved so much over giving that first baby up for adoption.”
“You’ve started reading your father’s diaries.” It was a statement—a confirmation rather than a question.
“Yes,” Joanna answered. “From the way Mother reacted when Bob Brundage finally came looking for his birth family, I knew how much she must have grieved over having to give him up, but until now I never knew that my father grieved, too. I can’t help but wish that Dad had had the chance to meet that long-lost boy of his.”
“Why wouldn’t your father grieve?” Butch asked. “Isn’t it a little sexist on your part to think he wouldn’t have been as affected by the loss of his son as she was?”
“Guilty as charged,” Joanna admitted, “but I still wish you had mentioned some of it.”
“It was a part of your history I didn’t think you were ready to hear.”
“And I may not be even now,” Joanna added. “I’m still on the first volume—the one from 1967. Obviously Dad didn’t get the diary-writing memo that says you’re supposed to keep track of the dates. So it’s just stream of consciousness, and you have to pick up from context what time of year it is. His birthday was in April, and the journal was a present from my mom, so I guess he started writing sometime after that. But it’s weird. Reading the journal entries, I feel like I’m doing time travel and eavesdropping on my parents’ private lives long before I was even a blip on their radar.”