Page 120 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

The north end of the pond had been lowered by twenty feet, and two wreckers had towed the muck-encrusted Mustang to the shore.

As I worked my way through the flash mob of onlookers, emergency vehicles, and media trucks, I could make out two men at the center of it all—Van and my father.

My mind flashed back to that night on Crystal Avenue when Misty and I drove home drunk from the midnight rave at the Pits, and we were confronted with the aftermath of Arnold Sinclair’s insanity. And just as I did then, I called out to the one person I trusted to help me make sense of a world turned upside down.

“Daaa-aaaad,” I yelled, running toward him.

“Maggie,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “This is insane. It’s Mom’s car. Connie... she just drove...” He stopped, unable to put a coherent sentence together.

“Is it Connie?” I asked Van.

“We went through the purse,” Van said. “The driver’s license and credit cards are still legible, and they’re all in the name of Constance Gilchrist, but we won’t be able to ID the remains until we get it to the lab.”

“I don’t need the lab to tell me who it is,” my father said. “It’s her.”

There was a commotion in the crowd, and Van yelled out to his officers. “Hey, hey, move those people back. This is a crime scene.”

I’d almost forgotten. I’d spent so much of my day anticipating the moment of discovery that I hadn’t thought a lot about the investigation that would follow.

But Johnny and I had discussed it at length once we knew the pond would be dredged.

Eventually the medical examiner would conclude that the bones behind the wheel belonged to Connie. He’d see her cracked skull where she’d hit the stone fireplace, but there wouldn’t be enough left of her to determine whether that happened before or after the car plunged into the water.

The crime scene team would find Connie’s suitcases in the trunk, packed with as many of her clothes as I could jam in, and they’d conclude that she was planning to leave Heartstone permanently. They’d also find my mother’s missing jewelry, carefully wrapped in plastic. It would be nice to get them back after all these years. I couldn’t wait to show my daughter the pink-sapphire-and-diamond teardrop earrings that one day would be hers.

“Maggie! Dad!”

It was Lizzie. Van gave a wave, and the cops let her through.

“This is insane,” she said, using the very words my father had used. And while I can’t be positive, I suspect they were the same words I’d said when Johnny and I launched the Mustang into the pond on that frigid November night a quarter of a century ago.

Johnny. I scanned the crowd. He’d be there. Looking curious and blending in with all the other fascinated spectators.

And then I spotted him standing silently behind the barricade. Several hundred yards behind him was another set of bones—the steel skeleton of the new building that would one day become the Dr. Alex Dillon Dunn Trauma Center at Heartstone Medical Center.

Despite what was going on at the pond, the construction site was still a beehive of activity. The cement trucks were lined up, their drums rotating, as one by one they continued their round-the-clock pour, dumping thousands of tons of concrete into the vast cavities that were becoming the impenetrable foundation, walls, and subfloors of the building Alex had fought so hard to see completed.

Johnny saw what I was staring at, and he gave me a subtle smile. I smiled back, remembering the last words he had said to me as I climbed aboard the sailboat, my dead husband’s wallet, cell phone, key fob, and ID badge in my gloved hand.

“Don’t worry, Maggie. In another few weeks, they’ll find Connie,” he said, his rubber work boots splattered with cement. “But they’ll never find Alex.”