The Buried Truth

 

I was ready to call it a night when my phone rang. It was my brother-in-law, Carson; he was upset.

“Anna, Charlotte’s missing! Shannon said she left the office at 6, but she’s still not home.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll find her.”

I called the police station and alerted my partner David about the situation. We called her colleagues and friends, but no one knew a thing. Charlotte’s phone wasn’t working; we couldn’t even pinpoint her location using GPS. We could only assume that she had been abducted, or worse. I alerted the nearest police stations and checked CCTV camera footage surrounding her office, but found nothing. No one had seen her board any bus or train either.

The next day, we went through her client list. Being a divorce lawyer, Charlotte did make enemies every now and then, although they were never serious. However, we had to be sure. Soon, we found that two men had threatened to kill her in the past five months; they denied having any hand in her disappearance. Both of them had solid alibis.

I tried to hide the news of Charlotte’s disappearance from my ailing mother, but she found out about it and had a heart attack. She died that day. However, something happened afterward that I did not expect. On the day of my mother’s burial, I found out what happened to my sister. We found Charlotte’s body in our family burial plot. Her killer was likely to be someone close to her.

I got a call from Charlotte’s best friend, Shannon, that night. She said she suspected that Carson was behind the murder, and that Charlotte suspected that he was cheating on her recently. We could only assume that the prenup was the motivation for the crime. The lab reports stated that my sister died from blunt-force trauma to the head that was caused by a fall, not by a blow. We checked the CCTV footage around the cemetery and found Carson arriving at the scene the night Charlotte went missing. Shannon’s suspicions were correct.

We took Carson to the station and interrogated him. After a few minutes, he opened up about what happened that night. Carson said he never meant to hurt Charlotte, but that he pushed her during an argument and she hit her head on the edge of the table. He was put on trial and jailed a week later.