Page 45 of You'll Be Sorry

“The insole’s a fitted piece of cardboard.” Raquel glanced up at her. “Old trick for extending wear, especially in the cold.”

Mandy knew that. She was a little startled Mrs. Back Bay Boston did as well. She contemplated the area around them. “Nearest neighbor I can think of is a couple miles away,” she mused.

“Do they have kids?”

“No, older couple.”

“The dog disappeared along with the girl. Do you think…do you think she came to get him?”

There was a trace of hurt in Raquel’s voice. So maybe the woman wasn’t as unaffected by the stray mutt as she pretended to be.

Mandy considered the matter. “People think of the mountains as being postcard perfect,” she stated after a moment, pointing at the forlorn boot and its crude cardboard reinforcement. “But even a quaint New England village suffers from its fair share of homelessness, addiction, and abuse. We simply have enough real estate to make those problems easier to hide.

“Truth is, there are plenty of individuals living hand to mouth in these parts. Families living in broken-down trailers with tarpscovering the holes in the roof, shower curtains blocking off the rooms, and a plastic bucket serving as a latrine. I hear enough stories from the social workers to know it’s not all Norman Rockwell out there.”

“You’re saying this boot…it might come from a situation like that, near here. How near here?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily know,” Mandy admitted. “I keep my pulse on the situation best I can, but this is the ‘Live Free or Die’ state. For some, my uniform makes me part of the ‘or Die’ side of the equation. I know some folks I can ask, though.”

Raquel seemed to be considering many things at once. “The skeleton from the well,” she asked at last. “Is it historic?”

Mandy watched the woman’s fingers resume their anxious thrumming.

“Postmortem interval is going to require more testing. At the moment, the forensic anthro is willing to concede the remains belong to a female, approximately eighteen to twenty-five years of age. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the origins of the well, would you? Your husband said he didn’t remember anything being on the site map.”

“I’ve been reviewing property docs going back to 1765. So far, I can’t find any indication of the well, which is frankly odd. Access to water has always mattered. For there to be no record of a wellhead for the first hundred-plus years…”

“That doesn’t track,” Mandy filled in. “Meaning the well was never documented?”

“Or eliminated from the records.”

That caught Mandy off guard. For historic documents to be lacking was one thing. But to say those records had been manipulated or even falsified…

She found herself looking at the barely weather-tight boot, so ill-fitting the wearer had managed to run right out of it.

“This damn property,” she sighed.

“One misfortune after another,” Raquel agreed.

“You really going to open a B and B?” Mandy asked bluntly.

“I doubt it.”

“Make this into your summer home? Fix it up for profit?”

“Probably not.”

“So you bought an infamous, abandoned lodge because…”

Raquel finally smiled. “When I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.” Then the woman turned back for the driveway, leaving Mandy standing in the middle of the woods with an abandoned boot in her hand and a million questions still buzzing in her mind.

17

There was a homeless girl on our property? And she stole our dog?”

“There was a young woman with worn-out boots fleeing through the woods, who may be the actual owner of the dog,” Raquel answered testily.

“I haven’t noticed any encampments around or anything, have you?”