Paul and Laurel buried the partial remains of their daughter on a sunny afternoon at the tail end of an indolent Indian summer. They buried her femurs, her tibias, and most of her skull.
According to the forensics report, her daughter had been run over by a vehicle, her broken body then dragged some distance through the woodland, buried in a shallow grave, and left for animals to take her bones and scatter them through the woods. For days dogs had swarmed through the woods where she’d been found, looking for more pieces of their daughter, but they’d found nothing else.
The police trawled local garage records for cars that had been brought in with damage commensurate with hitting a body. They also leafleted the surrounding areas, asking if anyone remembered a female hitchhiker, a passenger on a bus, a young woman with a navy-blue rucksack; had she stayed in your hostel, your home; did you come upon her sleeping rough; do you recognize this face, this girl of fifteen years old, this computer-generated woman of twenty-five? Photos of Laurel’s candlesticks were circulated. Had anyone sold them, seen them, bought them? But no one came forward. No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. After a twelve-week flurry of activity everything went still again.
And now Ellie was dead. The possibility was gone. Laurel was alone. Her family was broken. There was nothing. Literally nothing.
Until one day, a month after Ellie’s funeral, Laurel met Floyd.
