Jonah saw the mother grimace, but she didn’t try to deny it.
“Hiding can be fun,” he said. “That hollow under the tree. That was already there? You didn’t have to dig it?”
Jessie shook her head. “I just got in and sat down. There was something poking me, so I pulled it out.”
Jonah nodded. “Naturally. And it came out easily?”
“Yes. I thought—I thought it was a root, and then maybe a plant because I grabbed a handful. But then I realized it was a finger.”
“Well done,” he said, nodding. “Not everybody would have realized.”
Jessie nodded, gave a small smile, and stood up. Her mother pulled her into a brief hug.
“I’d like them not to talk to their school friends about this for a few days,” Jonah said to Mrs. Miller, once she’d let go of her daughter.
“It’s OK, they’re not seeing any for a few weeks. We thought we’d carry on the trip, but somewhere else.”
Privately educated kids, he realized. They were already on vacation, a good month before the regular schools broke up.
“Good. It would be better if this wasn’t talked about just yet.”
“Of course.”
He heard Dr. Miller’s footsteps.
“Are we done? It’s a beautiful day and I don’t think we have much to add.”
“Yes, we’re all done. Thanks for your patience.”
Jonah stood, and the doctor was already giving his children orders to get packed up.
He hurried them over to the tent, and Jonah found himself watching until Mrs. Miller rose and began to pick up a few half-eaten packs of raisins and a cup.
“I’m sorry your vacation got interrupted,” he said.
“It’s fine,” she said with a brief wave of her hand, and glanced at her husband. “Martin’s just…It’s not great for him.” This in a low voice. “This was supposed to be a time where he could forget…He’s been very unwell. They only gave him a fifty percent chance of living past Christmas.”
Jonah nodded, wondering whether she was used to apologizing for her husband. But he understood that she meant cancer; that those bones had been a little handful of mortality. He felt a trace of sympathy.
* * *
—
AN HOUR AND a half of excavation. Dozens of photographs. A tent set up and eight bags of carefully labeled bone fragments.
Everyone was getting hot and irritable. Jonah’s mouth was beginning to taste like bitter, hours-old coffee. His feet were fractious, impossible to keep still. And he had the kind of energy-sapping hunger that made it hard to focus.
“Anything yet?” Hanson asked, after wandering up to the car park and back a few times.
Excitement had turned into boredom, the one reliable constant in the emotional range of every detective.
“I think it’ll be a while,” Jonah said. “It’s an old corpse…time-consuming job.”
“Is there anything we can be…?”
“We can be here when they want to talk to us,” he said with a half smile.
Some twenty minutes later, Linda McCullough, the scene-of-crime officer, stepped carefully up out of the dip and approached him. He was glad it was McCullough. You needed someone obsessively careful on a site that would have only the barest traces of data left.
“How goes it, Linda?”
“We’re going to be bagging this up for some time.” She lifted her mask and let it sit on the top of her white hood. Her weathered face was wet with sweat, as anyone’s would have been if they’d been wearing overalls in that weather. But McCullough seemed not to notice it. “But as initial feedback, it’s a pubescent female, in an advanced state of decay.”
“How advanced?”
“Rough estimate only, but more than ten years. Fewer than fifty.”
Thirty years, he thought. Thirty.
He found it hard, momentarily, to believe that so much time had passed. A feeling that he must be Rip Van Winkle, and have slept through much of his life, ran through him. Rip Van Winkle must have felt this strange mixture of anger and guilt, too.
“Linda!”
McCullough turned, shielding her eyes from the sun. Another white bio-suit was leaning out of the tent to call to her.
“I’m uncovering other materials. Can I get your opinion?”
“Sure.”
She replaced her mask and climbed carefully back to the site, disappearing into the tent.
“So if it’s murder, it’s an old one,” Hanson said, and Jonah was half-blinded by the white of the paper as she flipped her notebook to write in it. She sounded disappointed. Unaware of the huge implications behind those numbers. “And a teenage girl.”
“It’s thirty years old,” he said. “And it’s Aurora Jackson.”
2
Aurora
Friday, July 22, 1983, 5:30 P.M.
Light, dark, light, dark.
Every tree was a shadowy pulse as they flashed past it. It was a soothing rhythm. She rested her head on the car door and watched her hair flicking and snapping out. She thought about drifting on the hot wind, away from here, to somewhere the light was golden-orange all day.
“Where were you last night? I tried calling your house a few times.” It was Topaz, sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair as she leaned forward from the backseat. She wasn’t talking to Aurora, of course.
Aurora wished Brett hadn’t been kind to her and let her ride shotgun. She could tell that Topaz wanted to be there. Her sister was angry that she’d been relegated—angry with Aurora. Connor had been angry, too. He didn’t like that Brett had offered to drive the three of them while he’d been left to cycle with the others.
“Huh? Oh. I went to a film.” Brett shifted gears as he spoke. His hand brushed Aurora’s flimsy skirt. “Sorry,” he muttered.
Aurora moved a little, shrugging. “My fault. I’m in the way.”
“What film? Something scary?” Topaz asked, almost over the top of her.
“Blue Thunder.”
“Again?” Topaz laughed, and pushed his shoulder lightly. “You must have seen that twenty times.”
“Just three,” Brett replied. “It’s a great film. It knocks a lot of the stuff this year out of the water.” A brief pause to overtake a caravan. “What kind of films do you like, Aurora?”