Chapter 4
Callahan did not show me the card again, but he told me what it said, and the words stayed with me all day. The card read "MEDICAL EXAMINER β CASE 07-218" in heavy laminate, with the examiner's lockup seal stamped beside the case number. A case number means a body, or at least a death that someone official decided was worth tracking. A medical examiner does not stamp a card like that for a property dispute. The card had been bound in black tape, face-down, and buried in the mud at the edge of my fence line, and no explanation Margaret offered afterward made that make sense.
Margaret's explanation, when it came, was that the easement along our boundary was unclear, and that the whole neighborhood's records were a mess because the township survey pins had been pulled in the '22 storm. She said pins had been washed out, reset by hand, and argued over ever since, and that anyone digging in this area was bound to turn up old junk. She said it with the air of a woman reciting something she had said many times before, to many people, and I believed that part of it was true. Storms do move things. What storms do not do is laminate a medical examiner's evidence card, bind it in tape, and bury it face-down beside a survey pin that someone has recently scraped bright with a tool.
I asked Callahan whether the case number meant anything to him, and he said he would have to check, which was the kind of answer that tells you nothing and buys time. I asked Margaret whether she knew anything about a case numbered 07-218, and she said she did not, too quickly, and then corrected herself and said there had been many cases over the years, and that numbers meant nothing without a name attached. That correction was interesting. A person who knows nothing about a case does not need to qualify their denial.
We stood there in a triangle around the fourth hole: me with mud on my knees, Margaret with her arms crossed tight against her chest, and Callahan with the evidence pouch in his hand. The cedar boards sat untouched in their pile. Nobody spoke for a while, and in that silence I could hear the wind moving through the hedge and a dog barking somewhere down the street, ordinary sounds that made the card in the pouch feel even more out of place. A laminated evidence card does not belong in a garden. It belongs in a locker, in a file, in a chain of custody that someone signs. Finding one in the mud means the chain broke somewhere, and broken chains do not break by accident. The fence, which had been the entire reason for the morning, had quietly stopped mattering. What mattered now was the card, and the pin, and the way the two of them seemed to be negotiating something in front of me without actually speaking about it.
Before Callahan left, he told me not to dig further, not to move the pin, and not to discuss the card with anyone until it was logged. It was a reasonable instruction from a police officer, and I nodded as if I intended to follow it. But as I watched his cruiser pull away, and as Margaret went back inside without another word, I understood that I had stumbled onto something that two people in this town very much wanted to stay buried.
That night I sat up late and thought about the '22 storm the way you think about a story that has been told too smoothly. Storms do pull pins and wash out roads, and everyone in this county remembered that storm, because it had knocked out power for days and flooded the low roads. But a storm does not sort its debris by case number. It does not laminate evidence cards and tape them face-down beside survey pins. The storm was real, I was sure of that, but it was also convenient, a true event being used as a blanket to cover something that had nothing to do with weather. And the more I thought about it, the more Margaret's version sounded like a story that had been built around a real storm the way a fence is built around a yard: to keep people from looking too closely at what is inside.
The card had a case number. Case numbers can be looked up. And I had just spent seven months living next door to a yard that held evidence of a death nobody had explained to me.