Bones and Drones Read online

  Bones & Drones

  K.A. Goodsell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Bones & Drones Blurb

  Pine Grove Map

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Coming Soon!

  Brooms & Tombs Blurb

  Acknowledgements

  About K.A. Goodsell

  Copyright

  This is work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright© K.A. Goodsell and Katie Goodsell, 2019 All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The publisher is not responsible for website (or their content) that are not own by the publisher. This eBook/Paperback is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook/Paperback may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

  www.kagoodsell.com

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  Cover Design by Sombras Blancas Art & Design

  Editing by Wicked Words Editing

  Format: K.A. Goodsell

  Bones & Drones Blurb

  Hanging out in a cemetery isn’t every girl’s idea of a good time, but for Paislee Grimes, the dead can be the best company.

  Raised in the sleepy Connecticut town of Pine Grove by an undertaker and a coroner, Paislee has seen more than her fair share of death, and she’s right at home amid the morbid and macabre.

  She’s happy enough to spend her last months before college cobbling together a history of the place she loves most and studying the lives of the people buried in her backyard, but when the body of a classmate turns up face down in the lake, it’s Paislee’s time to shine.

  Armed with a fierce drive and a gift for forensic anthropology, Paislee dives headfirst into the biggest shock Pine Grove has ever seen.

  Suddenly everyone is a suspect—friends, love interests, even the mayor. And in a community as tight-knit as hers, no one wants to believe the killer could be one of their own.

  But where there’s a murder, there’s a murderer, and with more questions than answers, it’s beginning to look like Paislee is the only one who can connect the dots.

  There has never been a sweeter sound than dry, rotten leaves blowing across the ground of Center Cemetery.

  The familiarity of fall—the natural array of warm colors showing up within the first week of October; the scent of pumpkin spice pouring out of the independent shops in the small town of Pine Grove, Connecticut—makes me feel at home for the first time in a year.

  I have always felt a draw to this season more than the others. I’m not a swim-in-the-grime-of-Driftwood-Lake kind of girl, so summer is out, and spring makes me sneeze. Winter brings buckets of snow, and even though the snow provides an excuse to stay inside and read, the cold is kind of dreadful. But fall? It’s perfect.

  My family’s small piece of land sits on the edge of railroad tracks used twice a day for moving lumber from one end of town to the other. On the other edge lies Center Cemetery: my favorite place.

  It’s one of the oldest family cemeteries in Pine Grove, and it’s the quietest since it’s on private property. As a child, I loved to walk through and hide behind the gravestones. The cemetery was a place where I could feel I was away from death. I wasn’t, as my parents both work within the death industry, but it helped to be with dead who weren’t fresh, at least. Later in life, it would become my spot for reading, listening to music, and working on school assignments. I found the location relaxing.

  When I was younger, my parents got me a pair of walkie talkies. I had missed dinner so many times that my parents were determined to make sure they could get in touch with me without having to hunt me down in the cemetery where time got away from me and pushed hunger from my mind.

  My parents would kill me if they knew I was outside tonight. My older brother, Nat, had caught me as I tried to sneak down the staircase. He’d told me he’d cover for me as long as I covered for him next time, he left unannounced. Deal.

  “I really like him,” I said to my friend Sarah now. It’s a phrase I’ve never said out loud. But I can trust Sarah not to tell anyone. “I just don’t know how to tell him. But I also don’t want to break up our friendship. I’ve known him all of my life. If tonight’s the night we discuss how we feel, then we’ll go there. But I don’t want to make a mistake I’ll regret.”

  I gripped my corduroy jacket closer to my chest as wind whipped leaves around the cemetery. The coat belonged to my mother when she was my age, and I loved the dark tan color and the fake shearling lining. It kept me warm on nights like this—especially nights when I’m not supposed to be standing out in the middle of the cemetery. I’m not even supposed to be outside the house this late. I looked at my brightly back-lit watch and saw it was around midnight.

  “I hope he gets here soon.” I looked around the cemetery and continued chatting to Sarah. “We’re going to the docks to talk. Hopefully, it’ll be nice near the water. All summer we’ve been going back and forth, almost kissing or almost holding hands. Then the other night at Duckpin Bowling he helped me get a strike and kissed me by accident when I turned around as I jumped up and down, not realizing my father’s bowling team sat across the room. My dad shouted, ‘No touching!’ and it got awkward. You already know about most of that based on our Saturday morning conversations. Did that ever happen to you? Or would it have been even worse if you kissed a boy outside of marriage? I know how religious your family is.”

  Our weekly meetings included Earl Grey tea, fresh sesame seed bagels from Grover’s Market, and a new playlist I ripped from my father’s vinyl collection every Friday night.

  Did I mention Sarah died over two hundred years ago?

  Sarah is one of my favorite people in Pine Grove, even if she is nine feet underneath topsoil and clearly has no idea who I am or any knowledge of our conversations.

  I made my way over to my usual spot, sitting down against Sarah’s gravestone and looking up at the sky. I did this often, questioning my beliefs and trying to find the answers to questions I didn’t even know to ask yet.

  It’d be great if they could communicate. Even just for an hour, just so I could hear their voices and learn, even a fraction, about what their lives were like before they died—directly from the source, not journals, notebooks, or documentation in the Pine Grove archives.

  When I discovered Sarah’s grave five years ago, it had hidden in mud and broken tree branches. I’d wager I was the only person in my generation who knew she existed, which was sad since she walked this land before all of us. The thought few people knew her resting place was disappointing and one reason I wanted to go into archaeology, to show people the hidden stories of our past, no matter how good or how bad they are. But we won’t know that until we discover them, will we?

  Any passerby could re
ad on her gravestone this basic knowledge:

  As a teen, Sarah lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, before getting married and relocating to Pine Grove, a mere thirty minutes away by automobile or two days by horse carriage. She died two years later in 1753 when she was eighteen. We’re birthday buddies, as I was also born on the 5th of October — just a couple of centuries later.

  Sarah’s husband, Daniel Sturges, was born on November 8th, 1733, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He ended up in our small town, where he also bit the dust—you know, died. Whatever phrase tickles your imagination.

  And that was it. That was all you’d learn about her if you only referred to her gravestone.

  For me, that wasn’t enough. Who was she? What was her life like? What was her favorite color? Did she like broccoli?

  If you dove deeper, you’d get a better picture of her, but she’s a tough one to research in our library’s archives.

  There’s no history of her before coming to Pine Grove until she married Daniel Sturges when she was sixteen—a fact that blows my mind to this day.

  She was younger than me when she said “I do” and chose someone to be married to until death did them part—which was, give or take, less than a year and a half later. Still, I couldn’t fathom being married to someone now.

  I’d had an AP chemistry exam last week that took up a lot of my time. What if I’d had a husband, too? Would I have chosen atoms over a date night? Impossible.

  Even more astoundingly, Sarah and Daniel had had a child.

  A kid. At sixteen! Granted, her husband was older, and back in that era they didn’t have birth control, but ding dang.

  Our world is so different today.

  But what makes Sarah and Daniel so unique is not their love story, but the plot holes in Pine Grove’s historical documents about their lives. The records stopped roughly two years after the town’s establishment, leaving a five-year gap between the journal detailing settlement and the time a different settler wrote about cattle ranching.

  What happened in between?

  There isn’t any documentation of what year Daniel Sturges died, how he died, or even how Sarah died. Our archivist at the library thinks she died from complications relating to childbirth. But that would have been odd since the child would have been over two-years-old at that point. Something tells me not to believe that theory.

  In the journal are notes about how Daniel Sturges was one of two people who established Pine Grove when he was eighteen. In 1751, his horse fell down the edge of Philo River when a bridge collapsed, leaving Daniel stuck, so he made a life work where he was stranded and created a town, like any other eighteen-year-old would do, right? It was better than I could have done. I would have called AAA if my car landed in a river. But they didn’t have roadside service back then—or phones—and the nearest town was a five-day walk in the snow. Hard pass. He made the right choice.

  The cofounder of Pine Grove was Daniel Lockwood, a twenty-year-old hired to make sure that Daniel Sturges made it safely to his destination. That didn’t happen, but he helped establish the town, which boomed in over a year due to weary travelers seeing there was no way over the river and not wanting to travel between the mountain ranges on either side of the valley during the winter months. One of those travelers happened to be Sarah, who was on her way home from visiting family in Lyme, Connecticut. A year later, the town’s population surpassed fifty, and events noted in the journal included the installation of a new bridge, multiple births and deaths, and a witch hunt.

  This is all the information we had when we learned about our town in history class. Our town motto is “Welcome to the gap.” You’ll get stuck in the gap, as most of our townspeople have, and never leave. Plus, we have a gap of information where we have no idea what happened to either of the town’s founders. We don’t even know if Daniel Lockwood is buried in town—we have yet to find a gravestone or documents suggesting he stayed in the area until his death. Maybe he was one of the few ones to leave. Good for him.

  I had at least a thousand questions I wanted to ask, and I wished for once Sarah would somehow tell me the truth of what everyone was missing. I was sure nothing exciting had gone on in the gap of five years, but who knows? There could have been huge discoveries we don’t know about. What happened with the witch hunt? Was there a flesh-eating bacteria outbreak? Or maybe aliens? Come on. You never know.

  There had to be a reason the journal entries stopped, and I would be the person to find out why. I wanted people to look at cemeteries and gravestones—just like Sarah’s—and know their stories instead of only their birth and death dates and the names of their spouses.

  For that isn’t their story. That’s just the beginning.

  On the road that leads up to my parent’s driveway, headlights pulled up, and the car parked in the small dirt driveway of the cemetery. I watched Elgort O’Moore walk down the road toward my house. He wore dark jeans and a black T-shirt that featured Johns Hopkins University in bright, white lettering across his chest. It is difficult to explain how this T-shirt made me feel. Was it hope that he wanted to go to such an exceptional school, a faint glimmer of the idea that he wanted to be a doctor, or was it some shirt he threw on for the time being because it was clean? These answers were unknown.

  Elgort, as always, wandered across the street towards our driveway in a way that seemed slightly accelerated, but not enough to care if a car was near him. His scuffed Converse high-tops moved quickly enough, but his gait still seemed calm.

  His gray-blue eyes always seemed to pierce even when he was sad, like they gave his thoughts and actions more meaning and description.

  Elgort approached me, wrapping his arms around me with a huge smile. Something surprised me he came over in only a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He had a Knicks baseball hat on, but that was it, and the beginning of October isn’t exactly warm in Connecticut.

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “No, I’m okay,” Elgort shook his head. “You can keep me warm.”

  “I think I might have one of your sweatshirts in my car.” I hesitated on my words and relaxed into the padding of his warm body. Okay, he was warm.

  “Let’s go to the docks,” he said, breath warm against my earlobe, making the hairs on my neck rise. “Want to walk over?”

  The lake is only a ten-minute walk from my house. Cut through the neighbor’s property, but that’s not an issue.

  “I’ll drive,” I told him as we broke our hug. “My car’s quieter.” It was true. My vintage VW Beetle was quieter than his Mustang convertible. Both were vintage, but mine didn’t sound like a jet plane landing. Over the summer it was so loud that his dad made him turn the engine off if he came home later than nine at night and coast down the street to their house. If he put it in neutral at my driveway, he had just enough momentum to pull the car into his driveway half a mile down the road.

  “Bye, Sarah,” I whispered as we walked toward my car.

  The interior was dark, but I could see the green Legend of Zelda sweatshirt hanging over the backseat. From the moment I’d grabbed it, I had been asking myself if I wanted to give him back his sweatshirt or keep it and say that I thought I had one of his. But I figured I’d held it captive long enough.

  “Ah, I’ve been looking for this.” He smiled, took one sniff of the sweatshirt and looked back up at me. “Smells like you.”

  “Sorry.”

  I didn’t know whether to be offended or take it as a compliment. His expression wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me either way, unfortunately.

  “No, no, it’s fine.” He zipped it up without looking away from me.

  We drove in silence for most of the ride toward Driftwood Lake. As we pulled onto the dirt road, we noticed a deputy’s car from the Sheriff’s office parked at the corner near the entrance, the lights on. That was odd.

  “Do they close the docks down now or something?” I asked Elgort, who was leaning up to look around the area. “Whose car is that?”

  H
e studied the deputy’s car. “It’s number 28. That’s Tag’s squad car. I wonder why he’s here. Docks are open all the time except in the winter. We’re not there yet seasonally.”

  We pulled into a spot where only a few cars were left. Some people were packing up their inflatable beds, beach blankets, and folding chairs. One group was loading coolers and food from the Railroad Diner into the trunk of a VW bus. Tag stood nearby and watched as they closed the doors and drove off.

  “I may have nothing fancy, but I have this,” Elgort said as he opened his backpack and pulled out my red plaid blanket. How had he gotten that? I’d seen it in my room earlier in the day.

  He took a moment to figure out why my eyes were so wide, but he coughed at the realization. “Sorry, your mom shoved it at me. I was also looking for your sweatshirt.” He pulled at the sweatshirt he was wearing.

  “Your sweatshirt.” I corrected him.

  He coughed again. “Sorry, yeah, my sweatshirt.”

  I touched his arm. “It’s all good. It’s a nice blanket. Perfect for watching the stars at the dock.”

  We stepped out of the car and I locked the driver’s side door from the inside, the only way to lock it lately.

  When we stepped out, Tag passed the back of the Beetle toward a white pickup truck and approached a man in a cowboy hat walking around the side.