Page 49 of Husband Missing

“She stayed in the lean-to during the decomposition process. The smell, the insect activity—it would have made the shack uninhabitable for some time.”

Trinity sucked in a breath. “Good lord.”

Quickly, Josie shoved the photo—and the others like it—into the back of the file, out of sight, and turned her focus back tofiguring out how Roe had ended up in the woods and how long she’d suffered from the effects of her head injury.

“Based on all this,” Josie said, “she knew how to start a fire, how to forage, to trap, to field dress, prepare and cook what she trapped. I don’t think her parents dumped her in the woods at a young age and left her there to survive on her own. However she ended up out there, she already had some knowledge of how to survive.”

If she was continuing to do so when she was found, it meant that the skull fracture had left certain parts of her brain intact. Josie made a mental note to research aphasia. She had some rudimentary knowledge of it from when Lisette lived at the nursing home. Several Rockview residents had had it. From what Josie understood, it was a communication disorder that impaired a person’s ability to speak and sometimes to write, read, or even to comprehend language. She knew there were different types and that it affected people differently, but she had met residents at Rockview whose minds were completely intact—they remembered and understood everything and had no difficulty carrying out their activities of daily living—but simply could not express themselves verbally. Had that been the case for Roe? Or had her type of aphasia or even her brain injury affected more than just speech?

“There’s no way for us to even guess if she got that skull fracture before she was in the woods or sometime afterward,” Trinity said with a sigh of frustration. “So let’s move on. She must have been raised by someone who hunted and trapped regularly. I’m surprised no one ever tried to find her family that way.”

Josie thumbed through more pages. Without the benefit of DNA testing, law enforcement could have requested records from the Game Commission listing everyone who had purchased a hunting license in the years before Roe was found, starting inBradford County, and then expanding outward. It would have been tedious and required a lot of manpower to track each of those people down and interview them, which was probably why no one had done it.

“You don’t have to live in the county where your hunting license is issued,” Josie said. “Someone in Pittsburgh could conceivably get a tag for Bradford County. A search like that—potentially one that spanned the entire state—was probably beyond the scope of authorities at that time. Plus, you know as well as I do just how many hunters there are in Pennsylvania. Lots of kids grow up doing it alongside their parents.”

“But this was the nineteen fifties and sixties,” Trinity pointed out. “Did dads really teach their little girls to hunt and trap back then?”

“Not many did, I imagine,” Josie conceded. “But if she was living on a ranch or a farm or some fairly remote area then she might have been taught those things out of necessity.”

Trinity eyed her. “Isn’t it more likely that someone helped Roe Hoyt out in those woods?”

“Sure,” Josie replied. “If she was pregnant six times, she clearly had contact with someone, maybe more than one person.”

Trinity arched a brow. “I’m hearing a but…”

Josie smiled. “Take Trout again and give me your laptop.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Once they made the exchange, Josie pulled up the internet browser and used the information in the file to try to narrow down the approximate location of Roe’s shack on a map and added a pushpin. Clicking over to terrain, miles and miles of forest filled the screen. “Here,” she said, pointing to a ribbon of road barely visible through the trees. “This is Hoyt Road. If you draw a straight line from the shack to the road, it’s about ten miles.”

Trinity leaned in closer, eyes dancing from the pin to the road before taking in the entirety of the map. “There’s nothing around. No houses. No towns. Nothing. Just that—is that a parking lot?”

“I think so, yeah. The nearest town is…” Josie pinched her fingers together on the screen, zooming out. “Here. Almost twenty miles away. There are other towns but all fifteen to twenty miles from the shack. Trin, this is recent. There are no houses, farms, or residences of any kind for miles. The state game land is protected from development but the land surrounding it isn’t.”

“You’re saying this area is essentially unchanged from the sixties.”

“Yeah. Roe Hoyt wouldn’t have been able to go back and forth from a town or a house or any semblance of civilization on foot. Not easily, anyway. Even if she routinely hiked out to the road, it’s not like she had any way to communicate with people. There wasn’t a way for her to call someone to ask them to meet her. She was living out there. If she had help, it wasn’t reliable. Also, look at these pictures.” Josie set the laptop aside and lined up the photos of Roe’s meager supplies. “What don’t you see?”

Trinity rolled her lips together. Trout stirred on her lap, lifting his head to look at both of them before dropping it back onto Trinity’s leg with a heavy sigh. “No wrappers. No cans. A couple of plastic containers but no store bags of any kind. Nobody was bringing her supplies.”

“Right. If she was getting help, it wasn’t very much.”

“Is that how the first five babies died? The conditions?”

“No. They didn’t die from exposure,” Josie said, paging through more of the file.

Trinity held a hand up. “I don’t want to see the photos again.”

“Me either,” said Josie. It was already seared into her brain. Plucking another report from the pile, she scanned it, confirming that her conclusion was correct. “They had skull fractures.”

“Oh God.”

Trout’s head popped up again. This time, his eyes were wider, more alert, and his ears formed two perfect steeples.

“From a small, unknown blunt object.”

Trinity stroked between Trout’s ears, trying to get him to go back to sleep, but he continued to watch them warily. “That’s…listen, I’m not a newbie journalist. I’ve covered a lot of pretty horrific stuff. Gory, nightmarish crimes. Victims of every age.”

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