over the area. There was no limb lying nearby that might have fallen on her. In fact, there were no trees close to the path where we were. Also Martha couldn’t have stumbled and struck the back of her head, nor could the soft earth beneath the chicory and phlox and wild mustard have made that horrid gash.
The scene said foul play as clearly as if the weeds themselves could speak.
So I sat by Martha’s foot, careful not to touch her, feeling she deserved someone acting as honor guard or some such thing, though we were obviously too late to shield her from whomever had harmed her.
Suddenly it struck me that her neck had still been warm when I felt for a pulse. My back muscles contracted as I quickly scanned the edge of the woods that stood back about twenty feet from the trail. Dogwood and mountain laurel, their blossoms now gone, mixed with poplar, beech and oak. Whoever had struck Martha might still be nearby. Maybe they were watching me from behind the thicket of bushes? The summer foliage was dense enough to hide a small army if it chose to secret itself behind the trees. Certainly one murderer could be hiding there easily.
Oh, Lord, if he’s there, make him go away! I remembered my manners and quickly added, Please!
“They’re on their way,” Jo called as she raced back.
I breathed a relieved sigh. Help was coming and there was safety in numbers, even if the number was only two at the moment.
Jo shoved her picture phone at me. “Here, take a few shots before the crime-scene guys arrive and we won’t be allowed near Martha again.”
“I hate this part of being a reporter.” I climbed to my feet and took the phone.
“Mac would kill us if we missed the opportunity.” She heard herself and made a distressed noise as she looked down at Martha. “Poor choice of words.”
“Yeah.” Trying to be the uninvolved newspaper professional, I took several pictures. When the police arrived, I’d take a couple more of them at work and it would be one of those that actually got printed in the paper. We certainly wouldn’t print Martha, so defenseless, lying here. The pain that would give her family was unimaginable. But we would use them as a reference for whatever we wrote.
Jo stayed carefully on the path, but continued to stare at Martha, looking sad. “I went to school with her younger sister Tawny.”
“Tawny? Like the color of a lion?” It’s amazing the strange things your mind sticks on when reality is too terrible to contemplate.
“Yeah.”
“Interesting. Martha is such a traditional name, biblical and all. Tawny is one of those cutesy modern names.”
“Different moms. Martha’s mom took off when she was about three. Left her with her father. He remarried a couple of years later, and Tawny and Shawna come from the second marriage. Martha was four or five years ahead of Tawny and me, but I always thought she was so cool. She was a cheerleader, the real perky kind who does splits and tumbles. Mac was her tosser.”
“Mac?” I squeaked. “Our Mac?”
Mac Carnuccio was our editor at The News, and he was also Amhearst born and bred. He might be many things, but I’d never in a million years have pictured him as a cheerleader. The secrets that lurk in people’s pasts are amazing.
Jolene nodded. “Our Mac. He and Martha went together from high school until well into college. Then when he came back to town to work at The News, they dated again, sort of off and on when he wasn’t chasing someone else. He sort of broke her heart.”
That sounded like our Mac.
Jo shrugged and looked thoughtful, always a circumstance guaranteed to bring an unexpected insight. “Or maybe she broke his. Who knows? She dated other guys a lot.”
Now there was an interesting thought. Mac, a ladies’ man through and through, reaping his own whirlwind.
“And in a fit of frustrated passion—” she waved her arm in the air like she was banging something against the back of a head “—he…”
I frowned at her. “Don’t even go there, Jolene Marie. You know Mac is changing. And even the old Mac would never have done something so violent.”
Jo actually blushed. “Yeah, you’re right.” She leaned over Martha, I thought because she was too embarrassed to look at me. Accusing one’s boss, even in thoughtless speculation, isn’t the done thing.
Jo tensed. “Look. She’s got a tattoo on her left shoulder.”
I looked. Sure enough, sticking out from under the edge of her sleeveless running shirt was the curve of one side of a red heart.
“It has a name in it,” Jo said. Before I realized what she planned to do, she reached over and slid the shirt to the side.
“Jo! Don’t touch!” I could picture the unhappy face of Sergeant Poole of the Amhearst police.
Jolene ignored me just as she ignored anything she didn’t want to hear. “It says M-A-C. MAC.” She looked at me. “Our Mac?”
Yikes. The very thought made me uneasy.
“Even if it is, it doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Jolene hastened to say, obviously trying to undo her previous suspicious thoughts. “He’s going with Dawn Trauber now.”
He wishes. Dawn was the director of His House, a residential ministry to teen girls in trouble, most of them unwed mothers. She was also a strong Christian and Mac wasn’t. I didn’t think he was any kind of a believer, strong or weak, committed or un. Therein lay their problem. In spite of mutual attraction, Dawn was holding tough against too deep an emotional attachment. At least she was trying hard. It was a case of unequally yoked.
“It looks new, doesn’t it?” Jo asked, still studying the tattoo.
I knew nothing about tattoos except that they were permanent and that it hurt to get them. Oh, and that as you aged and your skin sagged, so did your tattoo.
The first response team arrived in an amazingly short time, swarming the area, cordoning off the crime scene with yellow tape. My friend Sergeant William Poole led the police contingent.
“What is it with you two?” he asked, his furrowed face curious as he studied Jo and me. “You turn up at an inordinate number of homicides, especially you, Merry.”
I gave him a sickly grin. “You think I enjoy it?”
He smiled kindly, his furrowed face wrinkling like a shar-pei’s. “Of course you don’t, any more than I do.” His eyes took on a teasing glint. “But I think you love the stories.”
I couldn’t deny that, ghoulish as it made me seem. For a reporter everything is a potential story and bomb-shells like local murders are guaranteed to interest readers. I looked at the crime-scene investigators hovering over Martha. “The stories may be great, William, but I’d rather not have them. They hurt too many people.”
I thought of Martha’s family. Were her father and stepmother about to be devastated? Or wouldn’t they care? Did she have more siblings than Tawny and Shawna, perhaps ones who shared the same mother? Had Martha been close to her much younger half
