She has an immediate sense of dread. In the garden.
“What are they looking for?”
“He loved you so much,” Phyllis says, avoiding the question.
“What are they looking for?” Ella repeats, more urgently.
Phyllis hesitates for a moment. “When they released that boy from jail—it released something in your father. I’d never seen him like that. You were still recovering and it was just too much for your father to take.”
“What are they looking for?” Ella asks a third time, her voice quivering because she thinks she knows.
“That night, I heard him on the phone talking to the other fathers. The religious one always got your father fired up.” Her mother coughs a laugh. “Your father didn’t spend a day in church in all the years we were married, but that man with his eye-for-an-eye scripture talk…”
Ella braces for the devastating news she knows is coming.
“All I know is, the night before that boy supposedly ran off your father and some men were in the garden.”
“What men?”
Phyllis simply looks at her. “He came inside late, covered in dirt, drenched in sweat. Like he’d been—”
“Digging.” Ella’s own voice sounds hollow and distant.
“I should’ve done more. After you left for college, your father fell into another depression. He came to me, said he was going to turn himself in,” her mother says. “He couldn’t live with the guilt of what they’d done.”
Ella is having a hard time processing.
Her mother continues, “I told him it would devastate you, that you couldn’t take any more. I begged him not to turn himself in.”
“And he didn’t,” Ella says. “He took his own life.”
“He did that to protect you. He must’ve thought it was the only way to end the pain, to protect you from knowing what he’d done.”
Ella stares at her mother with disgust.
“I had no idea he would … I was desperate, Eloise. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to get your father to talk to a psychiatrist, to talk to his brother. I even called that teacher you worshipped so much and asked him to try to talk some sense into your father. To explain what turning himself in would do to you.”
Ella does a double take. “You mean Mr. Steadman? He talked to Dad about—”
There’s a loud knock on the library door.
It’s an agent. The pregnant woman Ella met at Corky’s. Agent Keller. They’ve found what they were digging for. She’s not smug, she looks more sad than anything.
“Ms. Monroe, I’d like to ask you some questions,” the agent says to Ella’s mother.
This time the lawyer interjects. “Phyllis, I strongly advise you to not answer any questions. At least right now,” he adds.
“What he said,” Phyllis tells the agent.
Keller nods. “How about you, Ella?”
As she asks this, Chris walks into the library. He’s not looking well. His skin is ashen, beaded in sweat, and he winces at the light. But he manages to get out the words: “She has nothing to say.”
The agent gazes at Chris. “I know you think you’re helping, Christopher, but I don’t think you’re in the best position to—”
“It’s my brother’s body you just found in an unmarked grave, so I’m in the absolute best position to say whatever I want.” He reaches out for Ella’s hand, and she takes it. “We’re leaving.”
For a moment, Ella’s back on the sidewalk near Coney Island, the last time a man took her hand in the face of a threat. But this time she’s not the one being protected.
She’s the protector.
CHAPTER 66
KELLER
Keller and Arpeggio stand under the artificial light outside a taped-off perimeter surrounding the dig site. The FBI’s Emergency Response Team members look like space travelers in their white coveralls, orange duct tape sealing the seams between the suits and their gloves and rubber boots. Keller remembers wearing a similar getup during her forensic training in Tennessee at the Body Farm. The team has set up a grid and is slowly excavating the soil, layer by layer, sifting dirt through a large, boxlike sieve for evidence.
Skeletal remains are visible now, elevated, as the ERT slowly searches the levels below.
It’s a slow process, recovering every bone fragment, every thread of clothing, every piece of trace evidence.
“I’d love to see Rusty Whitaker’s face when he learns we found his son,” Joe Arpeggio says. “He almost got a sweetheart deal.”