Without even realizing it, she picked up the keys. But she didn’t have her ID. Her wallet and credentials had been soaked in the river. Noah had laid everything on the kitchen table to dry out. Josie turned away from the front door to go get her ID, but the doorbell rang. Trout and Pepper jumped up from their spots and ran to the door, barking furiously until Josie opened the door and saw Gretchen and Dr. Feist standing on her doorstep. Gretchen was freshly showered and dry in a pair of jeans and a white tank top under a light sweater. Dr. Feist wore khakis and a blue button-down blouse, her silver-blonde hair loose around her shoulders. A small laptop was tucked beneath her arm. Gretchen thrust a box of pizza into Josie’s hands. “I was going to call,” she said. “But we’ve got no phones.”
Josie stepped aside and let them in. They congregated in the living room, eating the pizza right from the box. Josie sat on the couch with Dr. Feist beside her. Gretchen disappeared momentarily and returned with napkins and three bottles of water, which she set on the coffee table next to the pizza and Dr. Feist’s laptop. “I couldn’t stay at home. Too antsy.” She sat cross-legged on the floor facing them.
Dr. Feist wiped a splotch of sauce from the corner of her mouth with a napkin and said, “She showed up at the morgue asking if I’d finished Vera’s autopsy.”
Josie laughed but it came out sounding nervous. She should have been the one showing up unannounced at the morgue looking for information about Vera Urban. Instead, all she could think about was Wild Turkey. If Gretchen noticed anything off, she didn’t point it out. Instead, she said, “Then I thought you would want to hear whatever Dr. Feist had to say, so I convinced her to come over here with me.”
“And we figured you’d be starving,” Dr. Feist added. “So here we are.”
Somehow, Josie didn’t feel hungry at all, but she took a slice of pizza anyway. “Thank you,” she said. “What can you tell us about Vera Urban?”
The doctor opened her laptop, clicked a few times, and then began to read off some of her findings. “I estimate her age to be between fifty and sixty.”
“That tracks,” Josie said. “She was fifty-eight.”
Dr. Feist nodded. “The cause of death was the gunshot wound to her abdomen. Her lungs weighed more than expected and when I opened her up, they were somewhat overinflated, indicating that she had taken in some water before she died, but based on the damage in her abdominal cavity, I believe she died before she had a chance to drown.”
Josie put her half-finished pizza back into the box and leaned back into the couch. Trout jumped up and crawled into her lap, whining. Absently, she stroked the back of his neck. Gretchen said, “We did everything we could, boss.”
“Did we?” Josie asked. “We should have brought some kind of backup. Going there alone was stupid.”
Gretchen said, “To meet one person with information about a sixteen-year-old murder? There was nothing to indicate we needed to bring in an army to meet with Vera Urban. We didn’t even know it was her when we went there. We only knew we were meeting a woman named Alice.”
“She told us—she told me—that it wasn’t safe, and I didn’t take her seriously enough. She was right, and now she’s dead.”
“That’s not your fault,” Gretchen told her.
Dr. Feist said, “Josie, if it helps, I don’t believe she would have survived long enough to make it to the hospital. Even if you had been able to move her to safety and wait for an ambulance, she would have died before she made it to the ER, and Denton Memorial is not a trauma center.”
Josie shook her head, fighting tears. “I should never have put any of us in a position where someone was shooting at us—she was shot because of me.”
“She was shot because she’s mixed up in something she shouldn’t be,” Gretchen argued. “She knew her daughter was murdered, and she hid that for sixteen years, boss. If she didn’t get shot before our eyes, she might have been killed some other way at some other time by whoever was after her.”
Silence descended over the room as the full weight of the violence of Vera Urban’s death and the gravity of what she’d been hiding from set in.