What the Shovel Found

The police officer who took his report had kind eyes and a tired voice, and he wrote everything down the way you write down something you don't plan to act on.

"Sir, I understand you're concerned. But an adult woman not answering her phone for three weeks isn't a crime. Especially—" he glanced at his notes "—especially given the custody situation. This can look like a lot of things from where I'm sitting."

"Look at the yard," Callum said. "Look at the dirt."

"I can't get a warrant over a flower bed."

So Callum went back that night, alone, with a shovel from his own garage and a headlamp he used to wear duck hunting with his father. The gate was still chained. He went over it, the way Talia used to.

The soil in the rose bed gave easily, too easily, like it had been turned recently and never had the chance to pack down. He dug in careful rows the way you'd dig a garden, not the way you'd dig a grave, because some part of him was still refusing the second idea even as his hands kept moving toward it.

Eighteen inches down, the shovel changed sound.

Not the scrape of rock. Not the crunch of root. Something duller. Something that gave.

He stopped breathing before he stopped digging.

He knelt and used his hands instead, brushing dark soil aside with the same care Corinne used to brush hair off Talia's forehead, and the headlamp beam caught fabric — pale blue, a color he recognized, a color he'd bought at a store three years ago because Corinne said it matched her eyes.

He didn't dig any further that night. He couldn't. He sat back in the dirt with his hands shaking and called 911, and this time, when he said her name, nobody on the line told him it could look like a lot of things.

Behind him, in the dark, a light clicked on in an upstairs window of the house.

Someone was home.