“Sit down, join me. I’m going through Sheila’s files.”
There was a box of disposable gloves on Hal’s desk, the kind cops had to wear when handling evidence, but they made Aidan remember that whoever had bought the voodoo dolls had been wearing black latex gloves.
He drew up a chair next to Hal’s, they both put on gloves, and together they started going through Sheila’s files in search of something—anything—that might give them a clue as to who had killed her. After a while, Hal excused himself to go get coffee.
He’d been gone a few minutes when Aidan got the creeping feeling at the back of his neck that he was being watched.
He looked up to see…
The woman in white.
Her face was tense with anxiety, and she was beckoning to him.
He stood up, not daring to blink, and started toward the door—and she faded into nothing just as Hal walked back into the office.
“What’s the matter with you, Flynn? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I have to go,” Aidan said.
“What?”
“I’ve got to get out to the house.”
Without another word, he hurried out to his car.
When Kendall and Vinnie arrived at the house, she thought it had never looked more beautiful than it did now, rising mysteriously from the mist. The last coat of paint was complete, and the columns were strong and white and tall.
“Isn’t Aidan meeting us here?” Vinnie asked, sounding nervous.
“No.”
“Maybe you should call him.”
She hesitated. Aidan was going to be angry. She hadn’t meant to come out here in the dark without him, but it had still been daylight when she had hatched her plan. Even now, it was only the fog that was making it so dark, wasn’t it? Then she looked at the clock and realized it was after five. He would be getting to the store soon, and he wasn’t going to be happy when he didn’t find here there. “You call him, Vinnie. Tell him to come straight out here when he’s done with whatever he’s doing. I’m sorry. I’m going to make you really late for work, but you can take my car.”
“It’s okay. The world won’t end.”
She got out of the car and took the first wreath, the one she had gotten for Henry.
“Give Aidan a call, then grab those flowers over there. They’re for Amelia.”
Kendall started walking toward the cemetery. She looked up and saw that the clouds were darkening and massing overhead. She almost turned back. But it wasn’t the ghosts she was afraid of.
The cemetery had never appeared more ethereal. The fog curled around weeping cherubs and praying angels. It cast pale gray shadows upon ancient stone monuments, and snaked through the pathways between the sarcophagi. Now and then it seemed to be gently hiding a broken stone, as if shielding the dead from the intrusion of the living.
She quickened her pace, watching as the gray mist parted for her footsteps, and headed for Henry’s grave, where she tenderly placed the flowers. “You were a good man, Henry. Thank you. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have Aidan. And I’m listening to you. I know you’re watching for the killer, that you’re trying to warn people at the bar.”
She touched the stone, said a little prayer and looked up.
Henry was there.
He was tall, his features bearing the hallmark of both sorrow and strength. His eyes were dark and knowing, caring. Suddenly he started gesturing wildly.
She frowned. “They’re flowers, Henry. A thank-you,” she said.
He was trying to shout, but his voice was just a whisper that mixed with the gray swirl of the fog.
Get out. Hurry.
She turned around, the hair rising at her nape. Someone was there. It was Vinnie, she decided, Vinnie being a jerk. He was wearing his stage costume, the hood of his cape pulled up to hide his face, and he was carrying a plastic Halloween knife that must have fallen out of one of the boxes she’d brought out last night. He wasn’t slashing it up and down, though, like a maddened movie monster. He was carrying it low and stalking her.
He moved slowly through the fog, as if this were a dream. He was being a showman, as always. But the dark and the mist were far too real, and she felt anger and fear mingling inside her.
“Vinnie, quit it!” she yelled, furious.
He was still coming for her, slowly, and she took a step backward and tripped over something, almost falling.
She looked down, trying to see what she had stumbled over, but the mist was heavy now, dark gray, making it hard to see. Whatever it was, it had been softer than a headstone or a tree root.
She peered through the mist, and there, beneath a weeping cherub and an angel with its face turned desperately up to the dark heavens, lay Vinnie, draped over a broken tombstone, like a piece of funerary statuary.
Like the weeping cherub.
And the praying angel.
Blood was trickling down his forehead.