Page 35

THIRTY-FOUR

“We don’t even know how long she was living out in the woods.” Trinity tossed the radiology report aside. “She was living there, right? If she had six children and she was only twenty-five-ish, does that mean she was living out there since she was a kid?”

“I’m not sure she would have survived if that was the case.” Josie abandoned the medical reports and used both hands to pet Trout’s silky coat. He rewarded her with a contented sigh. “The winters would have killed her, and that’s assuming she would have known how to find food and a reliable water source.”

Trinity frowned. “Maybe she was coming back and forth from somewhere? Or she went to live out there when she was old enough to survive but someone was helping her?”

Another pass through the file and Josie found the crime scene reports and photos. From the exterior, the shack looked like it might have been quaint at one time with its little porch, complete with a built-in bench and an awning that had sagged from age and decay. By the time Roe was discovered, the wood was the color of ash, faded, splintered in some places and warped in others. The inside consisted of a single room with a crumbling stone fireplace. Along the floor were piles of sleeping bags and blankets, some in fairly good shape but most threadbare, their colors faded. Once removed, they’d been analyzed to see if their origin could be determined. The ones that had tags still on them were sold so widely, there was no way to track down who had purchased them. It appeared that Roe had torn some of them into pieces and tied them together to make a sort of dress for herself.

There were also some camping supplies. A dented green Coleman lantern with no oil to fuel it. Aluminum pans, cups, and battered utensils. Plastic jugs filled with dirty water. A rusty folding shovel that looked like the kind the military used to dig trenches decades ago. Two canteens sporting faded logos from different manufacturers. A thermos. Half a dozen Zippo lighters. A hatchet.

Trinity said, “Did she bring that stuff with her when she went out there or did someone bring it to her?”

“She stole it,” Josie said. “Look at this stuff. It’s mismatched, in bad shape. Torn. Faded. Dented. Rusted. She was on state game land. Lots of hunters and campers frequented the area almost year-round. I think she scavenged campsites for these supplies. Look at these lighters—Zippos. The Zippo Manufacturing Company is in Bradford County. Plenty of locals would have had these on them out in the woods.”

“Okay, she was resourceful,” Trinity said. “And somehow managed not to get caught stealing. But what the hell did she eat? What did she feed little Lila?”

Trinity kept reading through the reports while Josie studied the rest of the photos. Among Roe’s collection was a worn hunting knife she’d used to stab one of the hunters. Apparently, her hand tremor didn’t stop her from trying to kill people. Then again, it probably had the most profound effect on her fine motor skills. Lunging, punching, and other big movements might not have proved as difficult as drawing or writing.

Outside, next to the shack, she had fashioned a crude version of a root cellar and filled it with berries and plants. Nearby was a small ring of stones where she’d had fires. Further from the shack, rudimentary animal traps were found.

“Small game,” Josie said. “Squirrels, rabbits.”

Trinity wrinkled her nose. “That’s gross.”

Near the root cellar, Roe had also constructed a lean-to which she’d fortified with a large piece of canvas that likely came from a tent. The fabric was in bad shape. There was no way to know if the tent had been Roe’s, if someone had given it to her, or if she’d found it in the woods. Given its condition, Josie guessed she’d found it in the woods like everything else. Inside the lean-to were more blankets.

“What did she need that for when she had the shack?” asked Trinity. “Houseguests? Someone helping her? Or was it to be close to the fire in the winter?”

“She had a source of heat in the shack.”

Josie fanned the photos out. Her fingers stilled over a picture of the children’s delicate remains hidden in the floor of the shack. Roe had kept them. She’d had a shovel. It would have been easy enough to bury them. Perhaps no one would have known about them if she had. Except that she was in a remote area of the wilderness. Even if she’d buried them fairly deep, it was almost a given that animals would dig them up. The shack was the place where they were least likely to be disturbed. Nausea swirled in Josie’s stomach.

“She stayed in the lean-to during the decomposition process. The smell, the insect activity—it would have made the shack uninhabitable for some time.”

Trinity sucked in a breath. “Good lord.”

Quickly, Josie shoved the photo—and the others like it—into the back of the file, out of sight, and turned her focus back to figuring out how Roe had ended up in the woods and how long she’d suffered from the effects of her head injury.

“Based on all this,” Josie said, “she knew how to start a fire, how to forage, to trap, to field dress, prepare and cook what she trapped. I don’t think her parents dumped her in the woods at a young age and left her there to survive on her own. However she ended up out there, she already had some knowledge of how to survive.”

If she was continuing to do so when she was found, it meant that the skull fracture had left certain parts of her brain intact. Josie made a mental note to research aphasia. She had some rudimentary knowledge of it from when Lisette lived at the nursing home. Several Rockview residents had had it. From what Josie understood, it was a communication disorder that impaired a person’s ability to speak and sometimes to write, read, or even to comprehend language. She knew there were different types and that it affected people differently, but she had met residents at Rockview whose minds were completely intact—they remembered and understood everything and had no difficulty carrying out their activities of daily living—but simply could not express themselves verbally. Had that been the case for Roe? Or had her type of aphasia or even her brain injury affected more than just speech?

“There’s no way for us to even guess if she got that skull fracture before she was in the woods or sometime afterward,” Trinity said with a sigh of frustration. “So let’s move on. She must have been raised by someone who hunted and trapped regularly. I’m surprised no one ever tried to find her family that way.”

Josie thumbed through more pages. Without the benefit of DNA testing, law enforcement could have requested records from the Game Commission listing everyone who had purchased a hunting license in the years before Roe was found, starting in Bradford County, and then expanding outward. It would have been tedious and required a lot of manpower to track each of those people down and interview them, which was probably why no one had done it.

“You don’t have to live in the county where your hunting license is issued,” Josie said. “Someone in Pittsburgh could conceivably get a tag for Bradford County. A search like that—potentially one that spanned the entire state—was probably beyond the scope of authorities at that time. Plus, you know as well as I do just how many hunters there are in Pennsylvania. Lots of kids grow up doing it alongside their parents.”

“But this was the nineteen fifties and sixties,” Trinity pointed out. “Did dads really teach their little girls to hunt and trap back then?”

“Not many did, I imagine,” Josie conceded. “But if she was living on a ranch or a farm or some fairly remote area then she might have been taught those things out of necessity.”

Trinity eyed her. “Isn’t it more likely that someone helped Roe Hoyt out in those woods?”

“Sure,” Josie replied. “If she was pregnant six times, she clearly had contact with someone, maybe more than one person.”

Trinity arched a brow. “I’m hearing a but…”

Josie smiled. “Take Trout again and give me your laptop.”