Page 106 of Trouble Comes in Threes

“Agreed.”

After the service, I decided it wasn’t worth going home for lunch, only to come back into town right afterward, so I took the kids to Big Bob’s Burgers while Neely Kate ran Daisy home to eat lunch with Jed. The burger joint had recently added an indoor playground, and since it was still dreary and chilly outside, it was a way for the kids to burn off some energy before they went to the residential care center.

I was watching them play when my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. Since I got work calls on this phone too, I answered, “This is Rose.”

“Are you one of the ladies from the landscapin’ company askin’ around about the buried box?” a woman asked.

I sat up straighter. “Yes.”

“Was it dug up on Olive Street?”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you know anything?”

“I’m pretty sure it belonged to a girl named Sarah. She used to live there with her sister and father.”

“You knew her?”

“We were friends for a while when I was a teenager. My parents rented the house next door to her before they moved us. They didn’t like me being friends with her. They thought she was a bad influence.”

“Was she?” I asked before I could stop myself.

She laughed. “I didn’t think so at the time, of course, but in hindsight, she probably was. Her father was an angry drunkard, and rumor had it he’d beaten her mother to death when the girls were younger, so it was just the three of them. Them and all the people who hung out there with their drugs and drinking. I had my first drink at Sarah’s house. Tried pot there too.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen,” she said with a chuckle. “So now you can understand why my parents were upset.”

“I get it,” I said. “How old were Sarah and her sister?”

“Sarah was seventeen, and her sister was fifteen.”

“So older bad influences,” I teased.

She laughed. “Exactly.”

“So what makes you think the box belonged to Sarah?”

“Sarah always called herself a secret keeper. She hid things in the walls of the house and in the floorboards. It wouldn’t surprise me if she buried something in the ground. It definitely sounds like the kind of thing she’d do.”

“And she was living there when you left?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how much longer they lived there, but years later, I heard she’d died. I’m not sure how.”

Which meant I couldn’t talk to her.

“What about her sister?” I asked.

“Luna? I have no idea where she could be. She always said she was going out to California. I suspect you could find her there.”

“Do you know if Sarah or Luna had a boyfriend or girlfriend with the initial J?”

She was quiet for a moment. “They were never serious about anyone, so I don’t think so. Not that I remember anyway.”

“Was their dad judgmental about their boyfriends?”

She laughed. “He didn’t give a shit what they did or who they slept with.”

That didn’t fit with the note we’d found. J had said that S’s father didn’t approve. “Was there anyone that Sarah’s father didn’t approve of her hanging out with?” I asked. Especially someone with the initial J?”

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