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They kept walking. Searching. Near the rear of the graveyard, off to the left, with weeds dangerously encroaching, she found it.
She found the woman who’d given her life.
Who’d given herPen.
If nothing else, Denise had given her the sister she adored. Zoey would never forget that at all.
But it wasn’t Denise she was looking for.
There it was, next to three far, far older graves marked Coleson.
That was a name they’d found sprinkled throughout the stones. No surprise. They were in Coleson Hollow.
It had once been known as Coleson, Texas, with a post office and mercantile, and even a small hospital until about thirty years ago. That was all gone now.
Just…ghosts to haunt, really.
Denise Daviess's final resting place.
Denise’s birthdate was right there on the stone. As was the day she died. The first week of November. Denise had been fifty-three when she'd died, according to the headstone. Zoey didn’t even know if that was true.
Fifty-three wasn't that old. At all. Denise had still had so many years left. Until they had been brutally taken from her.
Zoey felt the pain of that death to her soul. But it wasn't the grief of a daughter.She didn’t think. She knelt down, pulled some of the weeds back.
No. She couldn't love this woman. Not after what Denise had done. She couldn’t even miss anidealizedversion of her mother. Not with what she knew now. She’d left a baby outside in the cold like Pen hadn’t mattered to her at all. Zoey could never forgive that.
"So who are we looking for?" Murdoch asked, one strong hand on her shoulder now. She looked at him.
It was hard not to just watch him sometimes. Pitiful. Just because he looked like he'd be every woman's fantasy didn’t mean he was. He was mostly a real pain in the ass.
Real.
There was that. Murdoch wasrealright now.
A tangible link to hernow—and not the past. That mattered. Maybe she wasn’t too bothered by him being there today, after all.
She wasn’t alone with the ghosts.
Other than a bratty kid, sometimes it felt like Zoey had been mostly aloneher entire life. Even though she knew that wasn’t the truth now—for so many years, that was exactly how she lived.
So…defectiveeven her own mother hadn’t wanted her.
Words a foster mother had told her when she’d been all of eight years old and had made that woman angry.
“What exactly is it you're hoping to find?”
The woman in the photo. Zoey wanted to know whoshewas. More than anyone else in those photos, Zoey wanted to know that woman’s story.
“A starting point." Zoey made a decision in that moment. He was an outside set of eyes. And whether she liked him on a personal level, she trusted him on a professional level. More so than she did most other men with the TSP. There was no denying that. "She kept my brother Luc, and my sister Paige, for several years. But...there were others between them. And after Paige. I'm trying to find them."
"Here?" Skepticism was hard to miss. “On Old Coleson Hospital Road. Where maybe sixty people have ever lived. Total. Since the time of Moses, probably.”
"More like two hundred and sixty. Right here. I have birth certificates. And a death certificate of a possible connection. Now I want to see the graves.” Because until she saw those, she wasn't going to believe anything written anywhere.
Sydney had called her again on the drive to Garrity—the younger woman was getting cranky. Even her skills as the queen of ferrets hadn’t found anything to prove or disprove that birth certificate Zoey had found. Sydney had found a possible grave. Here.
Some things were just not adding up.So much conflicting information. Why? How? Zoey hadn’t answered either of those questions yet.
