The Last Girl of Gatlinburg

The rain had been pelting the window for nearly twenty minutes now, and Sadie Kincaid still hadn't moved from the saucer chair. Outside, the drops raced each other down the glass in crooked lines, drawing stick figures that danced and collapsed and drew themselves again. She used to think it was silly to watch the rain like that. Now it was the only thing that kept her hands from shaking while she read the crime scene file. 

Sadie was a former Memphis police officer who left the force after her father, a legendary detective, was killed in the line of duty under mysterious circumstances. She moved to Gatlinburg for a quieter life but opened her own private investigation firm. She has spent years studying forensic pathology on her own, giving her an edge over local law enforcement. G.P.D was known to use Saide as a consultant from time to time on cases, but not this case.  This file was sent to her in secret.  

Carol Yates stared up at her from the crime scene photo in her lap, twenty-six years old, mouth slightly parted, eyes gone the flat gray of spent light bulbs. The bruising around her throat formed a pattern Sadie had seen twice before this year, a thumbprint low on the left side and four fingers curling up the right, the kind of grip that meant the killer had stood behind his victim and pulled her back against his chest like he was dipping her for a dance.

Three women now. Three necks. Gatlinburg wasn't supposed to have a season for this.

Sadie set the photo on top of the stack and rubbed at her eyes until spots bloomed behind her lids. She'd been at this file since six that morning, ever since Margot had sent over the digital copies with a note attached that read simply: You'll want to see the lividity. Margot Stearling, a former medical examiner from Nashville who moved to Gatlinburg to work as a freelance consultant. Sadie and Margot bonded a few years ago.  She is the one person that Sadie completely trusts in this town. If she said anything, it was direct and to the point.  There was no gray area with her. 

Her phone buzzed against the arm of the chair. She let it go once, twice, before she picked it up, and when she saw the name on the screen, something in her chest loosened without her permission.

Dusty, followed by three small red hearts.

She smiled despite herself, despite the photograph of a strangled woman still lying face-up on her thigh. That was the strange arithmetic of it, she thought. A man's name could do that to her even with death spread out across her lap like a hand of cards nobody wanted to be dealt.

Bringing dinner over tonight, darlin. You've been living on coffee and stubbornness for too long. See you at seven.

She typed back a single word. Okay. Then, because that felt too clipped for a man whose voice alone made her shoulders drop an inch, she added a heart of her own before she could second-guess it.

She looked back down at Carol Yates and felt the smile fade the way morning fog burns off a ridge, slow and then all at once.

By four thirty the rain had thinned to a mist, and Sadie pulled her Bronco into the gravel lot behind the old diner on Route 321, the one that had been serving biscuits and gossip since before she was born. Elias Halloway's unmarked cruiser sat where it always sat, tucked behind the dumpster where the security camera couldn't reach, engine idling, exhaust curling up into the wet gray air like a ghost trying to decide whether it wanted to haunt the place.

Elias Halloway, know simpley as Huck, was a grizzly bear of a man and a veteran deputy in the Gatlinburg Police Department and Sadie's father's former partner in Nashville. He followed Sadie to Gatlinburg after her father's death. 

She slid into the passenger seat, and the smell of stale coffee and wintergreen toothpicks hit her before Huck even said a word.

"You're late," he said, not looking at her, eyes fixed on the diner's back door like he expected the sheriff himself to walk out of it.

"Traffic," Sadie said.

"There's no traffic in this town, Kincaid."

"Then I was busy hating my life. Pick whichever excuse makes you feel better."

Huck grunted, which was as close to a laugh as he ever came these days, and reached across her to pop open the glove box. He drew out a thin manila envelope, the kind that had been folded and refolded until the crease had gone soft, and set it on her knee like it might bite him.

"Autopsy notes on Yates," he said. "Officially, that envelope doesn't exist. Officially, I never left the station tonight, and you and me haven't spoken since your daddy's funeral."

Sadie opened the flap enough to see the first page, Margot's clean, precise handwriting in the margins where she'd added her own notes over the official ones. "You're a real romantic, Huck."

"I'm a man who wants to keep his pension." He chewed the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. "Sheriff Pruett's been on my ass all week. Tourist season's coming up in six weeks and he wants these cases quiet as church mice till after Labor Day. He's already floated the idea of calling Yates an accidental asphyxiation. Some kinda rope swing gone wrong."

Sadie's stomach turned over, slow and cold. "She was strangled by hand, Huck. There's no rope on this earth that leaves finger bruising like that."

"I know it. You know it. Pruett knows it too, but knowing it and saying it out loud to the Chamber of Commerce are two different animals." He finally looked at her, and his bloodshot eyes carried something heavier than exhaustion. "Just be careful with what's in that envelope. If it walks, it walks back to me."

"It won't walk."

"See that it doesn't." He tapped the dashboard twice, a habit she recognized as the closest thing the man had to a nervous tic. "Your old man used to say something to me, back when we were coming up together. He said the department protects its reputation first and its victims second, and God help you if you ever forget which order that runs in."

Sadie's throat tightened at the mention of her father, the way it always did, a small hitch she'd learned to breathe through rather than fight. "He was usually right about people."

"Usually," Huck agreed. "Go on, get outta here before somebody sees my cruiser parked next to your ridiculous truck."

She climbed out into the mist, envelope tucked inside her coat against her ribs like contraband, and didn't look back until she heard the cruiser pull away, tires hissing over the wet gravel toward the station.

By the time Dusty knocked on her door that evening, the rain had stopped, and the whole town smelled like wet cedar and asphalt cooling after a long day. Sadie had already stuffed the manila envelope beneath a loose floorboard under her bed, a hiding spot her father had taught her when she was nine years old and obsessed with keeping her diary from her brother's prying hands. Some habits never really left a person.

"Hey, Sadie girl." Dusty stood in her doorway with two paper bags from the barbecue place on Parkway, his hair still damp and curling at the ends the way it did after a day working outside, sun-bleached even in the gray light of a rainy afternoon. His smile reached his eyes the way it always did, easy and unhurried, like he had nowhere else on earth he'd rather be standing.

"You didn't have to do all this," she said, stepping aside to let him in.

"Didn't have to. Wanted to." He set the bags on her small kitchen counter and started unpacking them with the kind of casual competence that made her wonder, not for the first time, how a man built like a linebacker could move through a room so quietly. "Pulled pork, coleslaw, and those hush puppies you like. Figured you needed something in your stomach besides caffeine and bad news."

"Is that a professional diagnosis?"

"Contractor's diagnosis. I know a load-bearing wall about to crack when I see one." He tapped two fingers gently against her temple, and she swatted his hand away, though not before the warmth of it lingered on her skin.

They ate at her small table by the window, the one that looked out over Main Street where the shop lights had started to flicker on against the coming dark. Sadie kept the murder file closed on the counter, out of sight but not out of mind, and she noticed the way Dusty's eyes flicked toward it once, twice, before settling back on her face.

"You look tired," he said.

"I look like I always look."

"No." He set down his fork, considered her the way he considered a house he was about to renovate, cataloging every crack before he ever picked up a hammer. "You look like you're carrying something heavy. You want to talk about it?"

She thought about the finger bruising on Carol Yates's throat, the lividity notes waiting under her floorboard, the sheriff who wanted to call a murder an accident. She thought about how good it would feel to say all of it out loud to someone who wasn't Margot or Huck, someone who might just hold her hand and tell her it was going to be all right, whether or not that was true.

"Just work," she said instead. "You know how it is."

"I know how it is with you." He reached across the table and took her hand, thumb tracing slow circles over her knuckles. "You chew on things till there's nothing left of the bone. I worry about you, Sadie."

"You don't have to worry about me."

"Somebody's gotta." His voice had gone soft, low, the register he used when he wanted to soothe something skittish. "Come here. Let me work some of that out of your shoulders before it turns into a permanent condition."

She let him pull her chair around, let him stand behind her and press his thumbs into the muscle along her spine until she felt something in her chest unknot for the first time in days. His hands were rough, calloused from years of framing houses and hauling lumber, but he was gentle with her, careful in a way that made her want to lean back into him and stay there.

"You're good at this," she murmured, eyes closing.

"Lots of practice on stubborn two-by-fours." His laugh rumbled through his chest, and she felt it more than heard it, his body close behind hers, warm through the thin cotton of her shirt.

That was when she caught it, faint beneath the woodsmoke and clean sweat smell she'd already come to associate with him. Something underneath it, earthy and green, a smell like turned soil and pine needles crushed underfoot. She almost didn't register it as strange. Almost.

"You smell like a Christmas tree lot," she said, half teasing, eyes still closed.

His hands paused for half a second on her shoulders, so brief she might have imagined it if she hadn't spent her whole career trained to notice the half seconds. Then his thumbs resumed their slow circles, unhurried as before.

"Spent the afternoon out at a job site up past the ridge," he said. "Clearing brush for a new foundation. Whole property's nothing but pine and red dirt." His voice stayed even, warm, exactly the register it had been a moment ago. "Guess it followed me home."

"Guess so." She let it go, let the tension bleed back out of her shoulders under his hands, and told herself it was nothing. Contractors smelled like job sites. That was simply the arithmetic of the profession, as ordinary as flour on a baker's apron.

They finished the evening on her small couch, her legal pad of case notes shoved under a throw pillow where he wouldn't see it, his arm draped along the back of the cushions behind her. He told her about a bathroom remodel gone wrong over on Cherokee Orchard Road, about an old woman who'd tried to pay him in canned tomatoes instead of cash, and she laughed for the first time all day, a real laugh that surprised her with how easily it came around him.

"I like this," she admitted, somewhere close to nine, her head against his shoulder, the cedarwood smell of him settled now over whatever had been beneath it. "This normal thing we're doing."

"I like it too." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and his voice, when it came again, had gone quiet in a way that felt almost careful. "You deserve normal, Sadie. After everything with your daddy, after everything you carry around in that head of yours. You deserve somebody who's just gonna feed you and rub your shoulders and not ask you to be anything but tired."

She wanted to believe that was all it was. She wanted it so badly that she let herself believe it for the length of one more kiss, one more hour on the couch with the rain long gone and the streetlights throwing gold across her ceiling.

He left a little after ten, promising to call her tomorrow, his flannel shirt still faintly damp at the collar, and she stood in her doorway and watched his truck pull away from the curb until its taillights disappeared around the corner onto North Union Street.

Then she went back inside, locked the door, and pulled the manila envelope out from under her floorboard.

The apartment felt different once he was gone, quieter in a way that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the shift from warm to clinical, from his hands on her shoulders to her own hands spreading autopsy photographs across the coffee table where his empty barbecue containers had sat an hour before.

She read Margot's notes twice through before the significance of them settled into her bones.

Lividity fixed in a pattern inconsistent with recovery position, Margot had written in her tight, surgical hand. Pooling present along the posterior thighs and buttocks, consistent with several hours in a seated or reclined position postmortem. Body recovered in a supine position along the trail, lividity blanchable in dorsal areas but fixed in the posterior. Time of death approximately eleven p.m. Body discovered at seven fifteen a.m. Discrepancy suggests remains were relocated between six and eight hours after death.

Sadie sat back against the cushions, the photograph of Carol Yates's discolored skin blurring slightly as her mind ran the math.

If lividity had fixed while the body sat upright somewhere else, somewhere with enough time and privacy for blood to pool and settle in the buttocks and thighs, then Carol Yates hadn't died on that trail at all. Someone had kept her body for hours after her heart stopped beating, sitting her somewhere quiet and dark, before carrying her out to the park and laying her down like a stage prop for the joggers to find.

This wasn't rage. This wasn't a crime of passion, some argument gone wrong in the heat of a moment and regretted the second the body went still. This was patience. This was a man who had strangled a woman, then waited, then moved her, then arranged her with the same care Dusty had used arranging the takeout containers on her counter an hour ago.

The thought made something cold slide down the back of her neck, and she glanced, unbidden, toward her window, toward the dark street where his truck had disappeared not so long ago.

She shook the thought off before it could take root. That was paranoia talking, the kind of thing that crept in after too many hours with dead women's photographs and not enough sleep. Dusty smelled like pine because he'd cleared brush on a job site. Men who brought her barbecue and rubbed the knots out of her shoulders were not the same men who sat strangled bodies upright in the dark and waited for the blood to settle where they wanted it to settle.

Still, she found herself writing it down anyway, in the margin of her own legal pad, beneath Margot's clinical language.

Choreographed disposal. Not impulse. Someone with time, privacy, and the patience to wait. Someone who knew this trail well enough to place her exactly where she'd be found, and not a foot further.

Outside, the rain had started again, soft against the glass, and the stick figures began their slow dance across the window one more time. Sadie watched them for a long moment, the photograph of Carol Yates still warm from her lap, and did not smile.