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I lift my eyebrows. “You met me?”
“Until I met the infamous Rake-a-teer.” She smiles. “As much as I hate to admit it, I think you’re right. I certainly didn’t set out to fall in love with you.”
“Sweetheart, I didn’t set out to fall in love with you either.”
“Maybe we’re both romantics. Maybe we just never knew it. Maybe it just took the right person to turn us both into mush.”
I grab her hand and squeeze it. “I love you, sweetheart, but do not ever refer to me as mush again.”
She giggles, places all the books—with the exception of my mother’s—back into the box, and grabs another.
Meanwhile, I’m still going through my box, which is mostly old clothes. Another dead end.
“Bingo!” Rory pulls out an old shoebox. “It even has Patty written on it in permanent marker.” She begins to lift the lid.
But I stop her, placing my hand on hers. “Wait a minute.”
“Why?”
“I feel like we should have a moment of silence or something. I feel like we’re disturbing this woman’s grave.”
“I hate to tell you, Brock, but if those bones you found on your property are hers? Her grave was disturbed long ago.”
She’s right of course. But for some reason, I feel like this is a sacred moment. I’m not a religious person, but shouldn’t we say a few words?
I’m being silly, I know. For all we know, the disappearance and death of Patty Watson has nothing to do with what’s going on with my family now. With the dead bodies, the GPS coordinates left for Donny, the sudden reappearance and then disappearance of a ring that once belonged to my grandmother, and the various documents found at Brendan Murphy’s place.
But perhaps we can at least give Ennis Ainsley some peace. It’s a long shot, but if there’s something in this box that can tie those bones to Patty, he will finally be able to say goodbye.
I move my hand from Rory’s. “Go ahead.”
She pulls the lid off the box. The first thing she pulls out is a pair of white cotton panties. She grimaces. “I don’t want to think of Ennis Ainsley as a dirty old man or a panty sniffer, but this is kind of…you know.”
“He wasn’t a dirty old man when he kept these,” I say. “He was a dirtyyoungman. Except that that’s not such a dirty thing. If I lost you tomorrow, sweetheart, I would need something to remember you by, and…your scent would be on your panties. It’s not like he pays to sniff women’s underwear. This is a memento. Something that probably gave him a little bit of comfort at the time.”
“If you say so.” She sets the panties down and takes the next item from the box. “What do you know? It’s an old cassette tape.”
“Say what?”
Rory holds it up. “My dad has a few of these that were my grandfather’s. They’re audio recordings. There’s writing on the top. It saysPatty’s favorites.”
“Music she liked?”
“Most likely. We can ask Ennis, although I don’t know that we’d get any clues from her favorite tune.” Rory pulls out the next item. “Here’s the perfume he mentioned. It’s calledFresh and Light.” She spritzes a little into her wrist and sniffs. “Ugh. Smells mostly like alcohol.”
“Well, it’s over half a century old.”
She sets the perfume aside and pulls out the next item. “Eureka! It’s a hair tie…and there are a few red hairs on it.”
“Are you kidding?” My heart jumps.
“Nope.” She hands it to me.
“This is a hair tie?” It’s made out of a thin elastic type material, and it has two plastic balls on each end.
“Yeah,” she says. “I had to think for a second, but yeah, it’s a hair tie. First of all, it has red hairs on it, and second of all, I remember my mom talking about hair ties like this when she was a kid. She said my grandma would pull her hair back into a tight ponytail, and sometimes she’d lose hold of the tie, and the plastic balls would hit Mom in the head. She said it hurt like hell.”
“And they don’t make these anymore?” I ask.
