“And Stone didn’t leave a suicide note,” I go on, “which makes the whole thing extra suspect. Between that and Ellis dying, it looks like I’m picking off the Rutledges one at a time.”
“And my question still hasn’t been answered.” Raelean frowns.
A deputy mans the main road to keep the media and any lookie-loos from corrupting an active crime scene. We can get there from the backside, though, if we sneak across the abandoned pecan orchard. Raelean’s car squeaks and grumbles over potholes in the dirt road.
“Adaire said I had to find justice.”
“She specifically told you to go to the scene of the crime?” She raises a skeptical brow.
“No.” I roll my eyes at her. “But I have to start somewhere. She said I would need to be set free. And now they suspect me of murder.”
“She could have been a little more specific,” Raelean mumbles.
“I told you, it’s not an exact science. There’s not a map with a go to X and find the treasure. She’s shown snippets of things. They’re like puzzle pieces, and you have to interpret what they mean.”
“Maybe justice is simply that the bastard is dead.” Raelean shrugs like that’s good enough for her.
“It doesn’t feel like justice,” I complain to the window.
Weeds and scrub have reclaimed the field’s road. Sticks and branches from the narrowing path threaten to scratch up her paint job so she stops before we can get to the end. We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.
“It isn’t just about what Adaire saw,” I say as we high-step it through the weeds. “It’s also what Ellis said. She’s here. It makes me wonder if he was talking about Adaire, her spirit. Then he called my name, desperate, like he wanted to give me a message from her?”
“Why, though? Ellis probably didn’t know Adaire even existed.” Raelean’s logic stings. But still, something about it feels off and I want to find out what that is. “Look,” Raelean starts in, “even if there’s something to it, you can’t arrest a dead man. Especially not based on the rambling words of a dying boy or some vague clues from some ominous vision—not that I question Adaire’s abilities.” She raises an innocent hand. “I’m just saying.”
“It can’t hurt to look, now can it?” I duck down low behind a tree as we get to the side road. Raelean crouches next to me.
“No, not at all,” she whispers. “Why, what’s the worst that could happen? Oh, wait, you could get arrested for trespassing on a crime scene!” She bolts her eyes wide with a wild expression to exaggerate her point.
“Well, then you better shush so we don’t get caught!” I harshly whisper back.
From the scrub of weeds, we can see Deputy Billy Parnell blocking the end of the road with his vehicle. Billy totters around, attempting to juggle crab apples. He’s a dipshit. How he made the force is beyond me. Slim pickings, I’d guess. Raelean and I dart across the road, unseen, into the woods where Mr. Rutledge’s body was found.
“Don’t you think the cops have collected all the evidence already?” Raelean shuffles double-step to catch up with me. “What exactly are you hoping to find?”
“Justice,” I say dryly.
Raelean grumbles.
An octagon of yellow caution tape ropes off the main area, but nothing here looks any different than the rest of the forest.
“This must be where they found the burned crow.” Raelean points to a pile of ash that sits off to the side. The bones gone now, taken into evidence, I assume.
“Don’t you think it’s odd a man like Stone Rutledge would burn a crow before he hung himself?” I ask.
“Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was those punk-ass kids who said they saw you tiptoeing around the forest that morning. Kids are always setting shit on fire,” she says, shaking her head. It’s possible, but I don’t know how likely.
“What if something else was burned here?” Something about it don’t sit right with me.
“Like what?
“Evidence, maybe? I don’t know.”
“Whatever it was, it don’t look like much. What did Adaire tell you again? Specifically,” Raelean asks.
“That Bone Layer gave Aunt Violet this key.” I tug it out of my pocket to show her. I found it again in Adaire’s nightstand after her funeral. It felt too important to just leave there. I hang it around my neck for safekeeping. “He told her the truth will set me free.” I start from the center of the taped-off area and walk a spiral, searching for clues. Though Raelean is right; it’s been picked clean already. “Adaire could barely see anything past that Saturday, the day she died. Then she wrote this.” I pass to her the piece of paper.
“‘Find the scales of justice. She holds the truth,’” she reads aloud, then hands it back. “So you’ll go to jail and will need to be set free?”
“At the time, I thought Adaire might have been messing with me to teach me a lesson about the situation I’d gotten myself in and how I needed her help to get out of it. But then it consumed her, what the fogginess meant, and no matter how hard she tried, Adaire couldn’t see hardly anything past Saturday.”
For four days, she scried. At first, it was anything and everything surrounding Dickie and the race. When that came up dry, she started scrying with that bone-tooth key Bone Layer gave Aunt Violet for safekeeping. After that, she was on the trail of something. She refused to tell me what, though, until she knew more. Said I was static interference, whatever that meant. Now I think she only said that to spare me, because whatever she found out, I’m pretty sure it had something to do with her dying.
Raelean squints. “I still feel like she could have meant justice was had with Stone Rutledge dying.”
I shake my head. “No, it’s more than that. It was urgent for her to tell me this. Almost desperate. When I tried to get her to elaborate the next day, she just said she was looking into it.”
“Looking into what?”
I shrug, then stop as a pair of lines outside of the perimeter catch my attention. Fresh tire marks cut a trail through the mud. I follow the path of the rutted ground through the trees to see where it leads.
After a good piece, Raelean asks, “Is that a farmhouse?”
She points a sparkly blue fingernail. A sliver of white siding peeks out past the edge of the woods off in the distance.
Fear spikes inside me. The memory of this house and what happened to the twin babies that night was something I tried to forget. Sharp and cutting, it digs its way back to the surface.
He stepped into a hole, a grave or something.
