Carnal Innocence by Nora Roberts Page A

she’d looked one long-ago Christmas when he and Susie had come across her in town. She’d have been no more than ten, mousy hair stringing down her back, patched dress hiking up too far at the side hem and drooping at the front. And her nose pressed up to Larsson’s window as she stared at a doll with a blue cape and rhinestone tiara.
    She’d just been a little girl then, wishing there was a Santa. Already knowing there wasn’t.
    He turned his head when he heard the rustle of brush. “Doc.” He blew out a stream of smoke on the word. “Christ.”
    Shays laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, squeezed once, then moved to the body. Death wasn’t a stranger to him, and he had come to know that death wasn’t only for the old, either. He could accept that the young were taken, through illness, through accident. But this mutilation, this wild destruction of a human being was beyond acceptance.
    Gently, he picked up one of the limp hands and studied the raw wrist. The same telltale signs braceletedthe ankles. It hurt him more somehow, this ring of broken skin and the hopelessness it represented, than the vicious slices on her torso.
    “She was one of the first babies I delivered when I came back to Innocence.” With a sigh he did what Burke had not been able to do. He reached down and shut Edda Lou’s eyes. “It’s hard for parents to bury their children. By Jesus, it’s hard for doctors, too.”
    “He messed her up pretty good,” Burke managed to say. “Just like the others.”
    He picked up the camera. They would need more pictures, and God knew he had to do something before the coroner came. He swallowed a hard knot of anger.
    “She was tied to that tree there. There’s blood dried on it. You can see from the scrapes on her back where she rubbed against it. Used clothesline. Pieces of it are still there.” He lowered the camera again, and his eyes were bright with fury. “What the hell was she doing here? Her car’s back in town.”
    “Can’t tell you that, Burke. Can’t tell you a hell of a lot. She was hit on the back of the head.” Shays’s hands were as soothing as they would have been had his patient been alive to feel them. “Maybe he hauled her out here. Maybe she came on her own and riled him up.”
    Struggling to hold on to his nerves, Burke nodded. He knew, just as everyone in town knew, who it was Edda Lou had riled up.
    Caroline paced the porch. If she could have worked up the courage, she’d have marched into the bayou and demanded information. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand this waiting. But she knew she’d never make it past the first stand of trees, not when she knew what was beyond them.
    She saw the dark sedan creep down the drive, followed by a white van. Coroner, she thought. When the men got out of the van with a stretcher and a thick black bag, she turned away. That bag, that long black bag not so different in shape and size from the kind people used to haul off things they no longer wanted,that bag reminded her much too forcibly that it wasn’t a person in the pond, it wasn’t a woman, it was only a body that wouldn’t suffer from the indignity of being taken away in a big piece of plastic.
    It was the living who suffered, and Caroline wondered who the woman had left behind to grieve and mourn and question.
    Her heart ached to make music, to make music so passionate it would drive away everything else. She could still do that, thank God she could still do that. Escape there when there was nowhere else to run.
    Leaning against the post, she closed her eyes and played it in her head, filled her mind with melody so rich she didn’t hear the next car jolt down the lane.
    “Hey there.” Josie slammed her car door, and finishing off the last of a cherry Popsicle, started toward the porch. “Hey,” she said again, and offered a friendly, curious smile when Caroline raised her head. “Y’all got a commotion here.” She licked the stick clean with a savoring