“Can’t help but think that they want you, too,” Dylan said.
“They have Alex. He truly is brilliant,” Vickie said. “I think he’d made some kind of a super research find the night...the night he disappeared, when he didn’t meet with me and Roxanne.”
“But maybe having Alex wasn’t enough,” Dylan said.
They looked at each other again. “We were, uh, kind of hanging around eavesdropping,” Dylan said to her.
“We heard Griffin say that you needed to...well, to get away from all this,” Darlene said.
“Just saying!” Dylan put in quickly, apparently seeing the set in her expression. “Yup, heading down to the sofa now,” Dylan said.
“Yes, sadly, no television there, but...” Darlene said.
“We do have each other!” Dylan said.
“I really do wish I could just get the two of you a room!” Vickie said. “Good night, then. I’ll tell Griffin what you’ve told me.”
She waved to the two of them as they made their ghostly way—disappearing as they raced down the stairs, hand in hand.
She walked into her room.
Griffin wasn’t exactly dressed, but he was down to boxers. The minute she came in, he walked over to the door, closed it, locked it and even slid a chair before it.
“You can never be too safe,” he told her. Then he smiled. “I heard you with Dylan and Darlene. What’s going on? Oh, by the way, Robert Merton is coming out here tomorrow. He called Barnes and told him that he actually took some personal time. He wanted to help Charlie Oakley. Barnes doesn’t know Oakley, but Merton thought that it was important that we all know what’s going on and who is where.”
“Well. That’s the big news I was just about to tell you. Dylan and Darlene have been following Charlie and Isaac Sherman around all day.”
“And they knew about Merton coming?”
“Dylan followed Charlie Oakley. Oakley had a conversation with Merton on the phone,” Vickie said.
“So that’s why he’s coming out here,” Griffin said. He hesitated. “This has to be... Whatever the plan between them, I imagine, it has to be really careful. They have to have their actions synced and coordinated. Whoever is involved in all this.”
“So you do believe that Hanson might have something to do with it?” Vickie asked him.
“I’m not saying that he didn’t. Vickie, we don’t know.”
She hesitated and then told him, “They saw the blonde woman—a dead one.”
“And who was she?”
“They don’t know. Griffin, she’s the woman I see in my dreams. I’m certain.”
He took her into his arms. “Tomorrow,” he said softly. “It’s late. Let’s take tonight.”
He pulled her close. She quickly smiled, feeling his arousal grow as he helped strip her of her clothing.
“The walls are paper-thin,” she murmured.
“Nah, not that thin.”
“Pretty thin.”
“So we’ll be kind of quiet!” he said.
And of course they were. Quiet.
Kind of...
But with or without sound, it was certainly a wonderful night.
*
“I had to come,” Robert Merton said, standing by Griffin as the machinery worked to extract Brenda Noonan’s coffin from the ground. His voice was quiet and his gaze was sad as he focused on the work being done.
Griffin looked around the cemetery. It appeared as any other; the situation of graves might have been a natural one. But graves had been moved here from eight cemeteries affected by the flooding. There was really nothing at all haphazard about the place.
Or the group of people milling about as the morning faded to noon, and the machinations of getting the buried out of the ground went on.
Griffin couldn’t help but wonder how many stones were actually over the remains of those they commemorated. They ranged from slate to marble; cherubs, angels and other funerary art manifested here and there. The cemetery was an homage to lives that had been led in places that had become nonexistent.
Brenda Noonan was in a section where a number of graves—dated from the early 1800s into the early 1900s—bore her family name.
The coffin was out of the ground; there was shouting among the workers as it was first set down and then hiked onto the vehicle that would carry it back to the morgue. Comparisons would be made to the wounds on the bodies that had been found in the Quabbin.
Griffin looked across the cemetery. Vickie and Devin had wandered off; they were reading old stones and pointing at epitaphs here and there.
Isaac Sherman was standing a few feet away, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched the action. Charlie Oakley was just a few feet away from him, watching alongside Rocky.
And now, Robert Merton. Here. Along with Charlie Oakley.
Why?
“I had to be here,” Merton repeated, and Griffin wasn’t sure if he was speaking to him—or to himself. But Merton looked over at him then. “I remember her, too, you know. I remember Sheena Petrie. I remember what the case did to Charlie. And now...now Helena,” he said.
“They’re doing DNA testing, but they’ve made comparisons,” Griffin said. “Neither of the bodies found in the Quabbin has been identified as Helena. There is still the remote possibility that she’s alive.”
Dr. Evan Graves, who had stood like the grand conductor of the action, came over to Griffin. “We’re heading to the morgue now, if you want to make your way there.”
Griffin found himself looking around the Quabbin cemetery again.
There seemed to be something infinitely sad about it. All these graves brought here...and yet, so many lost, so many stones and monuments moved...
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Nothing of the mortal coil lasted forever.
And looking across the slopes of the landscape, Griffin wondered if he wouldn’t see something, someone, a whisper of the past, of those who had come before. But there was nothing—no one.
Vickie and Devin were walking back toward them.
The empty hole of Brenda Noonan’s grave seemed to gape like a mouth that screamed a silent protest.
“You’re going into the morgue?” Vickie asked him.
It was as if they were all trying not to look at the gaping hole.
He nodded to her. “I know what they’re going to find. That’s part of the process, though. It will only take a few hours.”
“Devin and I are going to drive around the Quabbin, heading out on Route 9. Angela got my map from the book and a more current map superimposed,” Vickie told him. She paused, looking around the cemetery, as well, speaking softly as she added, “We’re not getting anywhere here.”
Charlie Oakley, Robert Merton and Isaac Sherman were now standing together, watching as the ambulance drivers closed up the doors on the vehicle that would bear Brenda’s remains to the morgue, second time around.
“I know that Devin will be with you, but stay in the car, please? If you find the landmark that you’re looking for, call me. Rocky and I will run out of the autopsy—out of anything—to be with you, okay?” he asked her.
She smiled and nodded.
“Don’t get out of the car, even if you see your blonde woman,” he said. “Promise me. I still think that you should be heading out of town today, going as far as you can go.”
“I will not get out of the car. I promise—pinkie promise, promise on the lives of all I love and so on. Okay?”
“Okay,” Griffin agreed.
Merton came striding over to them. “We’ll be out here. Call us if...anything,” he said. He lowered his voice, looking at Griffin, and then Rocky, who was moving their way, as well. “Isaac Sherman, Charlie and me. We’ll be searching the Quabbin. I hear that Wendell Harper has his boys—whoops, sorry, Miss Preston—his men and women out searching for whatever can be found also.”
Griffin looked at him unhappily. “Be careful,” he said.
“I’m an old warhorse, Special Agent Pryce. I’ll be fine,” Merton told him. “I’m out of my district, but I am a cop.”
“With Charlie and Isaac,” Vickie said.
“Charlie is solid—and Isaac seems to be steady enough,” Merton said.