Chapter 21: Cooking Lessons
With firm plans established to what they were going to do with the place, the next task was to get the small lakeside cabin fixed up. Although Shana said it wouldn't disrupt anything if the Anderson family moved in while they were upstairs, Mr. Anderson firmly averred that it wasn't right and he would wait until Shana was out before moving in.
Mr. O'Hara took all of them into the city that morning. While Shana arranged for fifty grand of the money she'd received as restitution to be deposited into the account meant for Mr. Anderson to use to hire help and keep and maintain the bed and breakfast, Snake Eyes, Charlie, and Cam went shopping for things to stock the refrigerator.
Cam had had the three million in restitution placed in a separate account with a bank who had a branch in Gowanda, the closest town to where Charlie's parents would be building a house. She'd called Jennifer and informed her of what she'd done, why she'd done it, and asked Jennifer since she and Andy Lightfeather knew where the cabin was, could they take everything out of the basement of the cabin, throw it away or burn it, and make sure it was empty and Charlie's parents would know nothing about the history of the place and no indications that it had been a young girl's prison for three years. Jennifer had promised her it would get done.
The ten grand Allie and Conrad brought back for inserting her into the Amsterdam market had been added to her accounts, and while she refused to think about where it had come from and what she'd had to do to get it, she had no problem with spending it. It was blood money, and it was hers, fair and square.
She did some shopping while she was in Atlanta; she'd never been here before, and everything was new and different. Charlie shook his head when he saw her buying a wooden pen holder with a nice brass pen in it—and having 'General Abernathy' engraved on the side; a soft, cute little sock-monkey puppet for Liv; a genuine leather portfolio with brass corners for Alex's legal papers, a rose-satin floor-length nightgown for Allie that was embroidered with oriental designs and patterns in red and gold thread. Charlie urged her to spend some money on herself, and in a cutlery store she finally bought herself a new twin-blade baton with ebony handles and steel/silver fittings on the hilt. The only other money she spent on herself was to purchase one of the new electronic book readers onto which she could load books. Charlie then bought her a hundred-dollar gift card for her to buy the books she wanted; Snake Eyes bought her another one, from himself and Shana.
They got back to the house later that afternoon, and Shana tried to shoo the men out of the kitchen. "Out, both of you. Cam and I are going to cook tonight."
Snake Eyes grinned. Charlie groaned and covered his eyes.
"What?" Shana faced both of them, hands on her hips. "Think just because we're soldiers we can't cook? We cooked a couple of times on the Congo trip and you ate it!"
Charlie shook his head. "It's not that. Cam's great at field prep of scrounged food, great at field dressing and cooking of food she hunted herself, but for some reason she's completely hopeless in the kitchen."
"She's not hopeless. She's just never had someone show her how. Did you bother giving her lessons?"
Charlie nodded, trying to keep a straight face and failing. "I did. And it didn't help. Cam can't cook in a kitchen. Kitchens just don't like her."
"Then you didn't try hard enough or you didn't teach her right. I'll give her cooking lessons tonight. You go—do whatever."
"You can try," Charlie grinned as he and Snake Eyes escaped into the rec room, where Charlie promptly raided the small refrigerator for a couple of beers, handing one to Snake Eyes. "Sit back and listen to the show."
They turned the TV on, but it was hard to ignore the sounds coming from the kitchen. "No, no, not like that, Cam, like this. You have to rub the meat gently." Quiet mutters for a moment, then Shana spoke again. "Here, time to tenderize the roast. No, no, Cam, not like that! You don't want to beat the meat!"
Charlie thought his sides were going to burst. Snake Eyes' face was flushed red and he looked like he couldn't even get in a breath. Charlie fought down the sound of his laughter—he certainly wouldn't have missed this for the world. It was something he couldn't wait to tell Frank at base—Frank would never let Cam live it down.
"No, the nuts are the best part. Here, take a couple of those and slip them under the meat. Yes, I know it looks funny but believe me, you'll appreciate the results."
Charlie couldn't sit upright anymore. He sagged against Snake Eyes, face red, desperately trying to hold in the sound of his laughter. Snake Eyes didn't even have to try and keep his laughter silent, but there were tears of merriment streaming from his eyes.
"Cam I don't understand how you can be so good at field prepping and hopeless in the kitchen. Here, go boil these eggs so we can sprinkle some chopped egg on top of the salad. You can't possibly mess that up." A moment of silence. "No, just enough to cover them. You don't have to drown them." Then, "Grab that knife and chop up the carrots and cucumbers for the salad. Oh, and remember—it's a great way to blow off steam if you're ever mad at Charlie—chopping vegetables."
A choked giggle escaped Charlie's lips; fortunately drowned out by Cam's explosion of laughter from inside the kitchen. The rest of the meal prep went in much the same way, and when Charlie and Snake Eyes came into the kitchen, poker-faced, to sit in the breakfast nook for dinner, Shana was looking puzzled—and, by the looks of the bottle of whiskey sitting on the table, on her way to being drunk.
"I don't understand it," Shana said as she sat at the table, staring at her glass. "She's great with a sword and she can cook out in the field, but she can't cook in a kitchen."
Any comment on that might have gotten Charlie smacked by Cam, glaring at him across the table, so he looked around quickly for something to focus on and saw a bowl with a couple of eggs in it, When he picked one up it was heavy, so he figured these were the eggs that Cam had boiled, and he pressed a finger against a shell to peel it even as Shana looked up and yelped, "Don't! Those aren't—"
Bright yellow egg yolk fountained up from the collapsed center of the egg; the whites had cooked, but the yolk was still raw. Charlie quickly stood over the sink and ran water over his hands as Shana shook her head at the bowl. "I told her to boil the eggs. Really simple. Put eggs in pot, put water in pot, turn on heat until water boils and boil for three minutes, and turn off heat then let stand in cold water before peeling." She hiccupped. "It should have worked. But you saw the result. I even tried boiling a couple on my own using the same instructions I gave her. They came out perfect." She indicated a bowl of boiled chopped egg on the table ready to be sprinkled on a salad. "I don't know what went wrong."
"I told you she couldn't cook," Charlie admonished as he dried his hands in the kitchen towel. "Cam is a wonderful woman, she's talented at a great many things, but cooking is not one of them. " His warm smile at his wife took the sting out of his words. "That's okay. I didn't marry her for her domestic skills."
Snake Eyes grinned. No, she married you because you have nuts under the meat. Both he and Charlie burst into laughter.
Shana and Cam looked at each other, puzzled, then shrugged. "Males," Shana said finally, rolling her eyes. "Can't figure them out sometimes. Come on, let's eat." And they all sat down to a dinner of beef roast prepared with herbs and nuts, salad, and steamed asparagus.
The next day Shana, Mr. O'Hara, Mr. Anderson, and Snake Eyes went out to the lakeside cabin to look at it; Charlie and Cam opted to take the horses, who didn't seem to have a problem with the noisy ATV's, and they all met by the lake. Cam was entranced with the tiny silver fingerlings darting through the shallows, and the beauty and peace of the scene appealed to Snake eyes immediately.
The cabin was just that; a cabin. One floor, a sitting room in front, a kitchen/dining room in the back, a short hallway past a bathroom with two rooms on either side, rooms just large enough for a queen bed and a dresser. "It has definite potential," Shana said finally, "but it needs to be expanded. The rooms need to be bigger, I want a separate dining room, and the bathroom needs to be upgraded. But there's good foundation here, and it's not hopeless."
"It's really lovely. I wouldn't have two rooms expanded, Shana, why not just knock out a wall between the two bedrooms and make it one large one?"
"Because Snake Eyes and I, although we love the two of you, don't want to share a bedroom with you. The noises the two of you make…"
"Shana!" Mr. O'Hara sounded shocked, but Shana just shrugged.
"Come on, Dad, I know how I got here. And Brian and Frank and Sean and even Siobhan. And if I ever have kids you'll know exactly where they came from too." Shana grinned at him and kissed his cheek affectionately, then looked at Cam's shocked face. "What?"
"You…said…"
"Yes, I know what I said, and I meant it too. This place is as much yours as it is mine, you'll be using it and living here when you're on furlough and visiting family—because you are family. And Dad will love being able to give you dancing lessons."
"I'm going to love getting them. It's a completely new discipline, it's simpler and less strenuous than ballet but it's kinda more fun." She grinned. "So this is going to be our home as well as yours?"
"Absolutely. We're not always going to get to go on leave together, this time was only because we got married at the same time so next time you're going to get to decide where you want to go, and not just wait for me and Snake Eyes to decide where we all go."
They were on their way back to the main house along the paths when Shana spotted something in the underbrush and stopped, going over to investigate. There had been a bad storm the night before, though they'd all barely noticed it, being busy with other things, but the wind and rain had blown over a tree and taken a huge tangle of kudzu vines over along with it and something caught Shana's eye. Something urged her to investigate; some inner prompting she couldn't name, couldn't place, but obeyed nevertheless.
She reached for the thing that had caught her eye; something red, shiny; it stood out against the dark brown and black leaf litter and soil of the Georgia forest, and after a little digging she managed to unearth the object.
A little girl's shoe.
A little red slip-on with an elastic strap over it, like Cam's ballet slippers, but this was a regular shoe with a hard sole, and it was covered over with red sequins like Dorothy's ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz. One of those cheap mass-produced items that cropped up in supercenter general stores everywhere but that enchanted a little girl who watched the old movie.
"This has been buried in the dirt a while," Shana said as Cam, Charlie, Snake Eyes, Mr. Anderson, and Mr. O'Hara walked up to her. The horses stood placidly chewing their bits, not seeming to be really concerned at all, and in fact Cam and Charlie forgot about them altogether as they leaned over the shoe.
"We're miles away from the roads, and few kids come this way anyway, the branches are too low to ride bikes. So I wonder how this got here?" Anderson wondered, but Cam and Shana were already looking at each other, the same realization in their eyes, and then Cam and Charlie started grabbing handfuls of vine and branches and brush, laying bare the soil that had been covered for years.
Once they had a good five square feet of ground uncovered they set to work, digging through the top layers of dirt. A foot down. Then two. And suddenly there was a brilliant flash of red sequins through grime and dirt.
They pulled the other shoe out and laid it on the ground next to the other one, and Mr Anderson and Mr. O'Hara stared at it. "You don't think that missin' Sarah's buried here, do you?" Mr. Anderson said slowly.
"I can't ignore the possibility," Shana said grimly. "How old was she when she went missing?"
"About thirteen, I think I heard," Mr. Anderson said.
"The size inside the shoe says it's a two," Cam said, pointing to gold lettering stamped inside the shoe. "A thirteen year old could be wearing a shoe that size." She knelt and started to dig again, grimly, silently.
Mr. Anderson wiped his brow. "I can't believe someone woulda killed that little girl and buried her here. No wonder no one ever found the body, Mr. Kennedy was that strict on not lettin' nobody on the property—"
Just then a strangled sound came from Shana, standing at the bottom of a three foot hole, and both Mr. Anderson and Mr. O'Hara looked down. She was holding the tattered remains of a little blue dress, a white and blue checked gingham such as a little girl might have worn if playing dress up as Dorothy. And in the dirt under her, having fallen out of the dress, was a long white bone.
"I'm goin' to call the police!" Mr. Anderson whipped out his cell phone.
It was somewhat more complicated than that; they were far into the woods, and not near a road, one of the most isolated spots on the entire plantation. Mr. Anderson finally got on one of the ATV's and went to meet the police at the closest road, then led them back.
Despite the temptation to keep digging until they found the whole body, Charlie, Cam, Snake Eyes, and Shana climbed out of the hole and wisely waited until the police got there, then moved the ATV's and the horses back for a police jeep to come down the path. By the time the medical examiners and forensics teams were dispatched, Mr. Anderson figured out the best way to get the large coroner's van and other police equipment into the area, and Shana gave permission for a couple of the firemen ground crews to use axes on some of the smaller trees to clear a path to what was now obviously the burial site of a little girl.
One by one the bones started coming out. The long bone that Shana had found was the first one out, laid on a stretcher beside the two red shoes and the tattered bit of dress; then another long bone, which the medical examiner indicated was a thigh bone; two shorter, thinner bones from the lower leg. A ribcage, with several of the tiny, thin bones broken and crushed; a spine, an upper arm, a lower arm with two bones; several people came out with what looked like large pasta colanders to Shana, and started sifting through shovelfuls of dirt. This yielded a handful of bones that the ME grimly declared were finger bones, and were laid on the stretcher in the approximate positions where they would be if the body had still been whole.
By the time the shadows grew long and they had to stop because the light was fading, they had what looked definitely like most of a skeleton; both legs, complete; ankle bones, kneecaps, even some of the tiny foot and toe bones. Pelvis, intact; spine, intact; ribcage, with several of the fragile ribs crushed, one upper arm, one lower arm.
What they hadn't found yet, and what everyone had been looking for, was a skull. None had yet been found, and the ME had been examining the end of the spine where the head would have joined the neck, and finally as they wrapped up for the day and the techs spread tarps over the whole scene to preserve it from rain or insects until they could excavate more the following day, the ME joined them. "We'll wrap this up tomorrow. There's only a few more bones to find, and we're not going to find the skull. I looked at the neck, there are kerf marks—places where it looks like a saw was used to cut the head from the body."
Mr. O'Hara winced and looked green.
"Are you sure?" Shana frowned. "You can tell?"
"I'm pretty sure the head won't be here. Sometimes a killer will keep parts of his victims as souvenirs, and I'm thinking this would be the case here. Thank you for keeping a sharp eye out and spotting that first shoe; now maybe if you can keep an eye out for the skull, we might be able to solve the case."