Leaving Time(146)

She starts to close the door, but I put my hand on it, pressing back to keep it open. “Would you?”

“Of course,” she says tightly.

“This isn’t any different,” I tell her.

Back in my car, I pull the ledger out of my purse and flip to the last page. Very slowly, like stitches being pulled, Jenna’s entry disappears.


As soon as I tell the desk sergeant that I’ve found human remains, I am ushered into a back room. I give the detective—a kid named Mills, who looks like he has to shave only twice a week, tops—as much information as I can. “If you look in your files, you’ll find a case from 2004 that involved a death there, back when it was an elephant sanctuary. I think this might be a second fatality.”

He looks at me curiously. “And you know this … why?”

If I tell him I am a psychic, I’m going to wind up in a room next to Thomas at the mental institution. Either that or he’ll slap handcuffs on me, sure I am a crackpot ready to confess to committing a homicide.

But Jenna and Virgil had seemed completely real to me. I had believed everything they said, when they spoke to me.

Goodness, child, isn’t that what a psychic is supposed to do?

The voice in my head is faint but familiar. That southern drawl, the way the sentence rises and falls like music. I would know Lucinda anywhere.


An hour later, I am escorted to the nature preserve by two officers. Escorted is a fancy word for stuffed in the back of a cop car because no one trusts you. I hike through the tall grass, off the beaten path, the way Jenna used to do. The policemen carry shovels and sifter screens. We pass the pond where we found Alice’s necklace, and after doubling back on a loop, I find the spot where the purple mushrooms have erupted beneath the oak tree.

“Here,” I say. “This is where I found the tooth.”

The cops have brought along a forensic expert. I don’t know what he does—soil analysis, maybe, or bones, or both—but he plucks the head off one of the mushrooms. “Laccaria amethystina,” he pronounces. “It’s an ammonia fungus. It grows on soil that has a high concentration of nitrogen.”

Goddamn Virgil, I think. He was right. “It only grows here,” I tell the expert. “Nowhere else in the preserve.”

“That’s consistent with a shallow grave.”

“An elephant calf was also buried here,” I say.

Detective Mills raises his brows. “You’re just a font of information, aren’t you?” The forensic expert directs two of the other officers, the ones who drove me here, to start digging systematically.

They begin on the other side of the tree, across from where Jenna and Virgil and I were yesterday, heaps of dirt shaking through the sifters to catch whatever decomposed fragments they might be lucky enough to unearth. I sit in the shade of the tree, watching the pile of soil rise higher. The policemen roll up their sleeves; one has to jump into the hole to toss the dirt out.

Detective Mills sits down beside me. “So,” he says. “Tell me again what you were doing here when you found the tooth?”

“Having a picnic,” I lie.

“By yourself?”

No. “Yes.”

“And the elephant calf? You know about that because …?”

“I’m an old friend of the family,” I say. “It’s why I also know that the Metcalfs’ child was never found. I think that girl deserves a burial, don’t you?”

“Detective?” One of the policemen waves Mills toward the pit that he’s been digging. There is a gash of white in the dark soil. “It’s too heavy to move,” he says.

“Then dig around it.”

I stand at the edge of the pit as the policemen swipe the dirt away from the bone by hand, like children making a sand castle when the water keeps rushing in to destroy their work. Finally, a shape emerges. The eye sockets. The holes where the tusks would have grown. The honeycomb skull, chipped off at the top. The symmetry, like a Rorschach blot. What do you see?

“I told you so,” I say.

After that, no one doubts my word. The dig systematically moves in quadrants, counterclockwise. In Quadrant 2, they find only a piece of rusted cutlery. In Quadrant 3, I am listening to the rhythmic pull and swish of soil being lifted and tossed when suddenly the noise stops.

I look up and see one of the policemen holding the small fan of a broken rib cage.

“Jenna,” I murmur, but all I hear in response is the wind.


For days, I try to find her on the other side. I imagine her upset and confused, and worst of all, alone. I beg Desmond and Lucinda to reach out to Jenna, too. Desmond tells me that Jenna will find me when she is ready. That she has a lot to process. Lucinda reminds me that the reason my spirit guides had been silent for seven years was because part of my journey was to believe in myself again.