“Will do,” Griffin said quietly.
He headed back inside. Conversations about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence were still going on, but breakfast was over.
They weren’t going to stay another night; Griffin was pretty sure that they’d gotten what they could from Fall River. But they had an appointment with Charlie Oakley to go out to the site where Sheena Petrie’s body had been found. They had records; they’d had their conversations with the people involved. And if Alex Maple’s phone had been found in the west of the state, it was time to return to Boston and check out what leads had been generated by the pictures in the media, and then to head out to Jehovah—or, as best as had ever been fathomed, where Jehovah had been.
*
By ten o’clock, they were checking out and ready to head out, and they were due to pick up Charlie Oakley at eleven.
“We found out in conversation this morning that Sheena Petrie is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery. She’s not far from the Borden graves. I thought we might stop by,” Vickie said.
“Not a bad idea,” Griffin determined. He was driving now; Rocky and Devin were pouring over files in the back seat. “Has anyone had a sense of anything?” Griffin asked pointedly.
“No,” Devin said.
“No. Which isn’t a bad thing, is it?” Vickie asked. “I mean, I’m sorry, it always seems so sad when someone is lingering years after a horrible event.”
Griffin nodded, smiling at her. “But then,” he reminded her, “you have those incredible souls like Dylan Ballantine. He’s strong, he stays to help.”
“He saved my life,” Vickie agreed. “And he and Darlene...love after death. Very nice, I...guess?”
“The cemetery is quite pretty, anyway,” Devin told them. “And, Vickie, I know you love the history in cemeteries. This one is lovely and intriguing.”
The cemetery was beautiful. Griffin drove through gates that informed them they had reached Oak Grove.
Devin pointed out the building that once been the “ladies’ comfort station” where Mr. and Mrs. Borden had received their second autopsies—and had their heads removed—prior to their burial.
“Death, and the investigation of it, has never been pretty,” Griffin commented.
“Crazy, though, huh? They kept the bodies in the house all night and the first autopsies were done on them there—with Lizzie in the house!” Vickie said. “It seems...barbaric.”
Griffin thought of many times he’d watched during an autopsy.
There was just no way to nicely rip up the human body.
“Maybe, years to come, there will be all new science—and they’ll look back at us as barbaric,” Griffin told her.
“Maybe we are barbaric,” she murmured.
Devin knew exactly where the Borden family was buried. They respectfully went to the graves; there, they talked about the fact that the wife of a Borden ancestor—years prior to the murders of Andrew and Abby—had gone into a terrible depression and tried to drown her children before killing herself. Two had drowned in the well; one had survived.
Naturally, the children were rumored to haunt the Borden house, next door to where their home had once been.
“So sad!” Vickie sad.
“The poor woman might have had help today. Those in the know seem to believe that she had postpartum depression. Medicine might have helped her.”
“Maybe,” Vickie murmured.
Griffin noticed the way that she looked out across the graveyard, as though she was expecting to see someone else there.
Vickie had discovered her own talent, curse, gift or ability when she had nearly been the victim of an escaped serial killer when she had been a teenager. The ghost of Dylan Ballantine, watching over his baby brother when Vickie was babysitting, had saved her life. And, in doing, opened a new world for her.
The world of the dead.
And now Vickie often saw the dead.
She had told him that the hundreds-of-years-old cemeteries of Boston weren’t actually all that haunted, but sometimes she did come upon a lively discussion between spirits, or, now and then, an old-timer complaining about the way the world had gone.
He did, of course, know the dead himself. He’d learned to deal with it as a child.
And Devin and Rocky had their experiences, as well.
But that day, he didn’t sense anything in the cemetery. He watched the others; Rocky noticed the way that he was looking at him and just shook his head.
Rocky had been a teenager, too, just about to graduate high school, when he’d heard a call in the night.
And found that a friend had been murdered, and that her cries had led him right to her.
Devin had grown up in what the neighbors had always considered to be a “witch” house, but she had actually been an adult when she had discovered what she was capable of seeing—who and what.
Vickie shielded her eyes from the sun looming above the cemetery.
She frowned and started walking.
“Vickie?” he murmured, starting after her.
Rocky caught his arm gently. He looked at his friend and fellow agent and nodded. He needed to let Vickie follow her own path.
They passed by an odd assortment of tombstones. Angels and cherubs.
The cemetery had been founded in the Victorian era; the art tended more toward the beautiful and ornate than the dire and horrible.
Vickie kept moving and they all followed at a distance, none of them seeing what she saw.
Then she stopped. She turned back to him, shaking her head.
“I don’t understand. I saw...someone. Someone beautiful and blonde hurrying this way. She turned and looked at me. She was so sad! And then...she was gone. Just gone.”
“Have you seen her before?” Devin asked.
“I think so. Yes. But...” Vickie said.
“But what?” Griffin asked her.
“This sounds crazy. I don’t know. They all seem to be beautiful blondes with heart-shaped or oval faces. Am I seeing one woman, or more than one woman? I don’t know!”
“Look where we’re standing,” Rocky said.
There was a beautiful marble angel in the center of the little hillock Vickie had come to, but the graves were all different, modern; none of them were ornate.
“Read the plaque,” Devin said dryly.
And they did. The angel was watching over victims. She had been purchased by the law officers of Bristol Country, Massachusetts.
A very simple grave with nothing but a name and dates lay before them.
The name upon it was Sheena Petrie.
*
Griffin stood a slight distance away from the others, watching the river roll by. He kept thinking about Vickie’s dreams.
Water seemed very important in the dreams. A large body of water.
The river was a large body of water, of course.
And Sheena Petrie had died here.
“A long time has gone by, but there are things you never forget,” Charlie Oakley told them. They were down on the bank of the river. The highway wasn’t far off; they could see bridges in the background, hear the rush of traffic from every direction. “Sheena Petrie lay right there. You can still see some of the landmarks in the crime scene photos. But if you couldn’t, well, I’d know where she was found. And the writing...they’ve widened the highway since she was killed, but we’re walking now where the words were written.”
Griffin held up the crime scene photos and compared them to the landscape that they saw. He could well imagine that Charlie Oakley had been haunted all his life by the scene he had encountered.
Devin, Rocky and Vickie looked over his shoulder, studying the photos, and then the landscape.
“Even now, with the highway widened, with cars here and there,” Rocky said, hunkering down where the letters had once scarred the earth, “this isn’t a bad place to leave a body. The trees along the embankment are still thick in places. We’re at a slope, and I think we’re about a mile out of town. By night, he could easily manage all this without being seen.”