All We Buried Read online

  ALL WE BURIED

  A Sheriff Bet Rivers Mystery

  Elena Taylor

  For my darling hubby, JD Hammerly

  Acknowledgments

  A writer never works alone. I rely on experts for their insights, the professional writing community for the publishing process, fellow writers and readers for feedback, and friends and family for emotional support.

  I love research, and one of my favorite parts is talking to experts in various fields. First and foremost, I thank Diego Zanella, my go-to expert on police procedures and homicide investigations. I treasure your friendship. To Paul Goldenberger, who really can save people from helicopters; Officer Jennifer Rogers; Nick Henderson, Kittitas County Coroner; Alison Duvall, assistant professor, Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington; and everyone at Adventure Protection, especially Curtis Bingham, for teaching me about firearms and answering my sometimes random questions about guns.

  Any errors of fact in this novel are solely mine.

  I’m very grateful to my agent, Madelyn Burt at Stonesong Literary Agency. I’m looking forward to many years and many books together. To everyone at Crooked Lane Books, especially my amazing editor Jenny Chen, Rachel Keith, Ashley Di Dio, Sophie Green, and Nicole Lecht.

  Thanks to developmental editor Erin Brown for her belief in the viability of a very early draft of this novel. You can check her out at erinedits.com. To my longtime writing partner, Andrea Karin Nelson—I hope I never, ever have to write a book without you. You can learn more about her at Allegoryediting.com. To author Sheila Sobel, the best beta reader I could ask for. And to Sherry Hartwell, who fits into two categories: first, my favorite proofreader, and second, my mom.

  Which leads me to the last group: the friends and family who have helped me build a writer’s life. Special thanks to the two stalwarts in my corner: my mom, Sherry, and my husband, JD Hammerly. There are too many other people to list, so let me just say I hope you know who you are, and I hope you know how you have enriched my life and made all the hard work pay off.

  Last, to my father, Steven Hartwell, who died October 19, 2019. I wish you had lived to see this novel on the shelf at the bookstore. I’m glad you were able to see the artwork, and I will never forget your words: “That’s the most beautiful cover I have ever seen.”

  My father taught me how important stories are to understanding the human condition. Though he was never much of a fiction reader himself—nonfiction was more his style—he read out loud every night of my childhood. From fairy tales to C.S. Lewis to J.R.R. Tolkien, even now, when I think of the greatest literature I’ve ever known, I hear my father’s voice.

  I’m grateful to have been with him in his final days, when I read to him, as he did to me so many years ago.

  I love you, Pop. A part of you is in every word I write.

  EMHT

  Hapuna Beach, Hawai’i

  December 5, 2019

  ONE

  Sheriff Bet Rivers leaned back in her chair and gazed out the office window at the shifting light on Lake Collier. Bright sunlight cast up sparkling diamonds as a late-summer breeze chopped the surface—turquoise-blue and silver. The fragment of a song from her childhood teased her mind—silver, blue, and gold. She hummed the tune under her breath.

  Red and yellow leaves turned the maple trees in the park across the street into Jackson Pollock paintings. Hard to believe Labor Day weekend ended tonight. Somehow summer had slipped by and fall had snuck up on her as she tended to her new position.

  If she had still been in Los Angeles, she’d have been a detective by now. Instead, she was back in her tiny hometown with a job her father had tricked her into taking.

  “I need you to cover for me while I get chemo,” he said. “It’s just for a few months. I’m going to be fine.”

  With the detective exam available only once every two years, it meant putting her career on hold. But her father had never asked her for anything; how could she say no?

  He never said he would die, turning her “interim sheriff” position into something more permanent.

  Her father always knew what cards to play. Competition. Family. Responsibility. Loyalty. Collier. A perfect straight. He’d used them all this time, as if he’d known it would be his last hand.

  No easy way to extricate herself now, short of gnawing off her own foot.

  The sound of instruments tuning up pulled her attention to a trio set up at a bench outside the market across the street. The raised sidewalk and false front of the old building made the perfect backdrop for their performance. Collier relied on tourism for much of its income, and the local musicians encouraged visitors to stay longer and spend more.

  A beat of silence followed by a quick intake of breath, the unspoken communication of musicians well attuned to one another, and the trio launched into song.

  Church of a different sort. Bet could hear her father’s words. I don’t know if there’s a God, Bet, but I do believe in bluegrass.

  The music produced a soundtrack to her grief. The banjo player favored the fingerpicking style of the great Earl Scruggs. Loss etched in the sound of three-part harmony, Earle Rivers’s death still a wound that wouldn’t close.

  She recognized the fiddle player. She’d babysat him years ago. It made her feel old. Not yet thirty, she wasn’t, but as the last generation of Lake Collier Riverses, the weight of history fell heavy on her shoulders. In a line of sheriffs stretching back to the town’s founding, she was the bitter end.

  Looking down at her desk, Bet eyed the new fly she’d tied. The small, barbless hook would work well for the catch-and-release fishing she did, and the bright yellow and green feathers pleased her. The only thing she’d missed while living in California. Surf fishing wasn’t the same.

  I should name it in your memory, Dad. The Earle fly. Her grandfather had named him after Scruggs, but her grandmother added the e because she liked how it looked.

  Bet imagined her father’s critical response to her work, the size of the hook too dainty for his memorial.

  Bet “spoke” with her father more now, four months after his death, than she’d ever done when he lived. Another burden she carried. The conversations they’d never had. Things she should have asked but didn’t.

  She took a deep breath of the dry, pine scent that drifted in through the open windows, filling the room with a heady summer perfume. She should get up and walk around, let the community see she was on the job, but her body felt leaden. And it wasn’t like anyone would notice. She could vanish for hours and it wouldn’t matter to Collier; no one required her attention. Not like they had depended on her father. His death still hung over town like a malaise, her presence an insufficient cure no matter what Earle might have believed when he called her home.

  Before her father’s illness, she’d had a plan. First the police academy, then patrol officer, proving she could make it in Los Angeles as a cop. She’d envisioned at least twenty years in LA, moving up the ranks—something with Chief in the title—returning home with a long, impressive career before stepping into Earle’s shoes.

  Too late, she’d realized he wouldn’t get better. He’d brought her home for good.

  * * *

  Stretching her arms above her head, she walked her fingers up the wall behind her, tapping to the beat of the music. Anything to shake off the drowsiness brought on by the hot, quiet day and long nights of uneasy sleep.

  The coffee stand beckoned from across the street, but the sound of the front door opening and the low, throaty voice of the department’s secretary, Alma, stopped her from voyaging out. A two-pack-a-day smoker for almost forty years, Alma sounded a lot like Lauren Bacall after a night of heavy drinking. She’d given up smoking more than twenty years ago, but e
ven now, as she edged into her seventies, Alma’s voice clung to the roughness like a dying man to a life preserver. Bet hoped the visitor only wanted information about the community and Alma could answer.

  No such luck. The efficient clop of Alma’s square-heeled shoes clumped down the scarred floors of the hallway, a counterpoint to another set of feet. Bet brought her hands down off the wall and automatically tucked a wayward curl of her auburn hair back up under her hat before Alma arrived, poking her birdlike head around the wooden frame of the door. Gray hair teased tall, as if that would give her five-foot frame a couple extra inches.

  “Bet?” Alma always said her name as though it might not be Bet Rivers sitting behind the enormous sheriff’s desk. Bet assumed Alma wished to find Earle Rivers there. She wondered how long that would last. If Bet threw the upcoming election and fled back to Southern California, leaving her deputy to pick up the reins, maybe everyone would be better off, no matter what her father wanted.

  “Yes, Alma?”

  “I think you’d better listen to what this young man has to say.”

  The “young man” in question could be anywhere under the age of sixty in Alma’s book, and as he stood out of sight down the hallway, Bet had little to go on.

  “Okay,” Bet said.

  “I think it’s important.” Alma waited for Bet to show appropriate attention.

  “Okay.”

  “Seems he found a dead body floating in the lake.”

  TWO

  Bet clunked her chair back down, her body no longer leaden. It wouldn’t be the first death to occur in Lake Collier. Ominously dark due to depth, the waters were rarely calm, the rough water ill-suited for recreation. Lakers went other places for boating and swimming. Visitors found it difficult to access the shore. Daredevils had occasionally come to bad ends over the years, prompting the danger signs posted at the few public-access points.

  But people still ignored the warnings and accidents happened. With four years of experience under her belt, Bet had performed death notifications before, the worst part of a law enforcement officer’s job. A fatality in the lake would likely be a tourist, and the next of kin would have to be tracked down. Lakers knew to stay out of the water.

  She swept the fly-making materials off the desktop and into the center drawer.

  “Guess you’d better come in,” Bet said to the shadow in the hall, wondering who would walk through her door.

  As the “young man” came into the room, Bet guessed his age to be midforties. He was an awkward stick figure of a person; a few inches over six feet tall, but carrying all the bulk of a scarecrow missing his stuffing. An unruly mop of hair in a remarkable shade of orange rounded out his appearance. Wearing a neat, white, button-down shirt and tan cargo pants with one leg tucked into his sock, he looked a lot like Beaker from the Muppets, and Bet had the fleeting thought he might open his mouth and nothing but “Beeep beep, mmeeeep meep” would come out.

  “Peter Malone,” he said in perfectly understandable English. He shook Bet’s hand with a firmer grip than she’d expected from such a slender man. His handshake was warm and slightly damp. As if he’d just come out of the restroom after using one of the air dryers put in to save trees.

  “Doctor Malone,” Alma said, “is a college professor.”

  “I’m not a medical doctor, but I could play one on TV.” Peter forced a laugh.

  “How’s that?” Bet asked.

  “Just a little academic humor. PhD, not MD. I’m a scientist, really.” Peter’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry, this is a bit outside my comfort zone.” The professor shifted his bicycle helmet from one hand to the other.

  Bet wondered if “this” was finding a dead body or reporting it.

  Peter’s eyes flicked up past Bet to the photo of her father in his sheriff’s uniform, standing next to an American flag. The small metal plate at the bottom of the frame emblazoned with SHERIFF RIVERS.

  “You’re Sheriff Rivers?” His tone made it unclear if that was a statement or a question.

  Before Bet could respond, her father’s Anatolian shepherd, Schweitzer, squeezed his large body past the two standing in the doorway and stood between the strange man and Bet. The dog dropped to a sitting position, placing his sizable head level with the man’s waist.

  “I am.” Bet watched Peter eye the big dog. She gave him points for not flinching when Schweitzer started to pant, showing teeth the size of a great white shark’s not six inches from his belt buckle.

  “Down,” Bet said to the dog. He lay at Peter’s feet with a low whine. “Good boy.” She was pleased he responded so quickly to her command. After her father’s death, Bet had become a dog owner overnight. She’d grown up around dogs, but Schweitzer was a one-person dog, and a working dog at that. The transition to Bet as his person hadn’t been easy for either of them. She wasn’t yet fluent in the language her father had developed with Schweitzer. As with many unfinished threads, he hadn’t left behind an instruction manual.

  She returned her attention to the man. “You found a body in the lake?”

  “I did.”

  “Anyone you know?”

  The question appeared to surprise him. “I don’t think so.”

  “You aren’t sure?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s because …”

  Peter turned pale. “It’s all so surreal. I found her … wrapped up in canvas.”

  Wrapped up in canvas. Something more than an accident, then. Unbidden, a recurring nightmare surfaced in Bet’s mind. An object, the shape of a person, slipped through a hole chipped into the ice of the lake. Like a burial at sea, the shrouded figure vanishing into the water while Bet watched from the trees. Bet felt chills even in the heat of the room. She shook off the image. It didn’t belong on the job.

  “If it was wrapped up, what made you so sure of what was inside?”

  Peter swallowed hard, an expression of anguish twisting his elongated features.

  “I could see her hair.”

  Alma’s hand flew up to cover her mouth and she shook her head, as if the action could change Peter’s story. Peter swayed slightly, and Bet brought a chair over next to him. He thanked her and dropped into it, took a deep breath, and continued.

  “I couldn’t lift her in without tipping my canoe over, so I towed her back to my campsite. I beached my boat and hauled her up onto dry ground. I had to see if she … I had the thought it could be a hoax, you know, a dummy or something. I cut the fabric open. I think she’s been dead a while, her face … No. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before.”

  Bet thought about the contamination of evidence but couldn’t blame the man for his actions. She would have done the same thing. She didn’t follow up on what the girl looked like. It would be better to see for herself. He explained there were no apparent injuries to her face or head and that he’d looked no further once he’d seen she was dead.

  “Let’s keep this quiet,” Bet said to Alma on her way out the door with Peter. “I don’t want people to get panicked or curious until I know what’s what.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” Alma asked quietly after Peter went out the door. “Maybe people need to be careful.”

  “It’s not a shooting spree, Alma,” Bet said. “We have no reason to think anyone else is in danger. We don’t know yet how the woman died. It could have been an accident and someone tried to get rid of her body.”

  Disapproval showed on Alma’s face. Bet resented that a secretary could make her question her own decisions, but Alma had decades of service in this office. She’d worked for Bet’s grandfather first, then her father. She’d watched Bet grow up, so both of them were making the shift.

  Sometimes Alma and Schweitzer looked at her with identical expressions. As if she were an imposter and they wanted Earle Rivers to come home and straighten things out.

  “We have a town full of tourists,” Bet reminded her. “The last thing we need is a story going viral about a body in the lake.”


  Alma pursed her lips. “As long as the upcoming election isn’t why you don’t want people to know.”

  Bet felt like she’d been slapped. She almost said the damn election was more important to Alma than it was to her, so of course it wasn’t what she was thinking about. But that wasn’t something she could admit out loud. She couldn’t tell the community she’d been deceiving them for the last four months and all she wanted to do was fly south like the migrating birds.

  “It’s what Dad would do,” Bet said, her voice hard as she started to leave.

  Schweitzer stood at her side. His willingness to go with her made Bet happy, but she rubbed his ears and told him to stay at the station. It hurt to see the disappointment in his rich brown eyes, but with Peter’s bike, there wouldn’t be room for him in the SUV. Lately it felt like every time she turned around, she disappointed someone. She left without making further eye contact with Alma or the dog and found Peter at the bike rack. He’d unlocked his bike, and they loaded it into her vehicle.

  “That must have been quite a shock for you,” she said as he sat without speaking.

  “It was … it is. It doesn’t feel real. Even sitting here with you.”

  Bet knew firsthand how hard it could be to look at the face of a dead person. As a patrol officer in South Los Angeles, she’d attended numerous crime scenes. Even if she’d only done crowd control and taken witness statements, she’d observed the aftermath of vicious crimes, the images permanently carved into her memory.

  Bet determined that Peter hadn’t seen any people or vehicles near the lake since he arrived, then let him steer the conversation to get a better feel for the man. Malone explained he taught at the University of Washington, a top-ranked research institution out in Seattle.

  “I’m a geomorphologist.”

  “Geo, earth. Morph … change?”

  “Give the lady a gold star. I study the processes that change the earth’s surface.”