“Don’t know yet,” Mak said. “But that woman has a daughter, who has been waiting for answers for seventeen years. I wouldn’t want her to hear from somebody’s Instagram page that her mother’s body was found in a septic tank. You wouldn’t want that either, right?”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the crowd.
* * *
Hattie sat on the steps of the back porch, watching as a Tybee Island police cruiser pulled up, followed by an ambulance. Mo sat down, too, and offered her a cold bottle of water.
She uncapped it and took a sip. “I’m glad you sent everyone home. It seems … ghoulish to have people working while they bring up that body.”
“Screws up our schedule in a major way,” Mo pointed out.
“What’s Rebecca going to say about that?”
“She’s not gonna be happy. But there’s nothing to be done. Hopefully she’ll be appeased by the Headline Hollywood piece.”
Hattie picked at the paper label on the water bottle. “Did you look? At the remains?”
“Yeah. I did. Really, all I could see was—”
She clamped her hands over her ears. “Please don’t. I can’t bear to think of her like that. If it’s her. And who else would it be?”
“Sorry,” Mo said. “You know, you don’t have to hang around here if you don’t want to. I’m gonna ask Makarowicz to keep someone posted there until I can get one of your guys to put up a temporary gate.”
He paused. “If I’d done that two weeks ago, maybe we wouldn’t have had a dumpster fire with thousands of dollars’ worth of damages to the house.”
“But then we never would have found Lanier Ragan’s body,” she reminded him. “I guess things happen for a reason.”
Mo sighed. “This was not an accident. Someone killed her and put the body there.”
“Someone who knew that manhole cover was there,” Hattie said. “I sure didn’t know it was there, and I’ve probably walked across it fifty times in the past two weeks.” She shuddered as she considered the thought that she’d literally been walking across her old teacher’s grave.
“Tell me more about the family that used to own this place,” Mo said. “I know you said the son is a jerk, but is he capable of something like this?”
The crew members were packing up their gear and heading toward their vehicles. Hattie lowered her voice to make sure she couldn’t be overheard. “Mak, I mean, Detective Makarowicz, has been looking into the names of the football players who were being tutored by Lanier that fall, including Little Holl.”
“Huh. Is it possible it was one of the other guys?”
“There were a couple more names, but how would someone who wasn’t familiar with this property know about that septic tank?”
“Didn’t someone also say the family threw big parties for the football team out here?” Mo asked.
“Well, yeah. But can you imagine a party where ‘hey, we’ve got an old septic tank buried out there’ is part of the cocktail chatter?”
“Weirder things have come up with a bunch of testosterone-crazed teenagers,” Mo said.
She cocked her head and appraised him for a moment. “You ever play a sport, Mo?”
“I ran track when I was a sophomore. I sucked at it. But my parents insisted I had to have an extracurricular activity that wasn’t playing Dungeons and Dragons in the basement all day, so I joined the drama club.”
“You wanted to be an actor? Really?”
“No, I just wanted to hang out with hot, loose chicks, and in my warped mind, that’s who belonged to drama club.”
“Did it work out? Did you get many dates?”
“That part of my plan failed miserably,” Mo said. “But drama club got me interested in storytelling, which eventually led me to go to film school at USC.”
“Storytelling?”
“That’s what entertainment is, when you boil it all down. I liked to write, still do, but I’m more of a visual storyteller, so television is the perfect medium for me.”
“How did you end up doing this kind ofwork?”
“Worked my way up. My first job out of film school was working as an assistant news producer at a local television station in Fresno. Then a friend told me about a job opening working on a pilot for a do-it-yourself craft show that never got off the ground, and while I was working on that, I dated a girl whose brother knew someone at HPTV, and he got me an interview. Later I left and started my own production company.”