The workers didn’t pay any attention to her as she passed, which made it easy enough to slip out, skirt around the stables and head through the trees to the burial ground.
She’d been in the cemetery before, including for Amelia’s service, but today she was looking at tombs she had never really paid much attention to before. She bypassed the stones she had read a dozen times and skipped the family mausoleum. She forced her way through the overgrowth and took a closer look at some of the in-ground graves, especially those whose stones had been broken by the growing roots of large trees.
The cemetery looked strange. It had been dug up in places, and then dirt had been packed in little mounds over the graves again.
Aidan? It must have been Aidan or one of his brothers; she couldn’t imagine that he would have let anyone else dig up what was now his family cemetery.
She went from grave to grave, glad of the breeze coming up from the river, and even glad that she could hear the noise of hammers and saws, along with the shouts of the workmen.
She headed for the tomb that held Fiona MacFarlane Flynn.
And then she saw, just steps away, a sarcophagus she had never paid much attention to before; the etching in the stone was old, and time and lichen had obscured it.
Heedless of her fingernails, she worked at the old writing until it was finally legible, though still difficult to read. The burial had taken place in 1887. The inscription read Henry LeBlanc, and below that, “Savior of this House.”
She hesitated, sitting on the grave. The wind picked up suddenly, but she wasn’t afraid. “Either I’ve lost my mind, or you’re haunting this house, this city, and you know there’s a man here killing people again,” she said softly. “You wanted everyone to know the truth back then—that’s why you finished Fiona’s diary—and you want us to know the truth now, too, don’t you? Well, we do know the truth now, Henry. We know there’s a man killing women, and we’ll catch him. I promise.”
She stood up, surprised that she didn’t feel the ease and relief she had expected. The air turned cold, as if warning her that nothing at all had been solved.
Then it hit her. A bone-chilling fear, like the fear she had felt in her dream. There was something bad here, something evil.
She spun around, as if convinced an evil entity was there at that very moment, watching her every move.
Waiting. Crouched and ready to spring.
“Kendall?”
She jumped and spun around. Aidan was walking toward her. The chill, and the feeling of being watched, faded away.
He was staring at her strangely, but she forced a smile, her heart still thundering.
“I wanted to find Henry’s grave, and I did,” she told him.
He nodded, reaching out to her.
She took his hand and asked, “Aidan, were you in here, digging up graves?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Looking for bones.”
“Aidan, it’s a graveyard. Of course there are bones.”
He looked at her and smiled as he brushed her hair back from her forehead. “Actually, I was looking for disturbed bones, or a suspicious lack of bones.”
“Oh.”
He paused, staring around the cemetery. She realized that she must have looked around exactly the same way before, as if sure there were something there, something that just couldn’t be found.
“Let’s go. Everybody wants to go get some lunch. Hungry?” he asked her.
“Sure.”
They walked away holding hands, but when she looked back, a cloud had darkened the sun, casting the graveyard in shadow.
And in that shadow, she could have sworn she saw Henry. But he wasn’t standing by his own grave, nor by Fiona’s. He was standing in front of the Flynn family tomb and pointing to the door.
Then the clouds shifted, and he was gone.
18
The rest of Sunday proved to be uneventful.
They all went to lunch at an old house that had been turned into a restaurant, and as Aidan sat there, feeling warm and comfortable, he thought how nice it would be if only he could trust his own house.
It was a ridiculous thought, and it had come to him unbidden. He dismissed it quickly and turned his mind back to the conversation. With Vinnie and Mason there, it was his chance to see a whole different side of Kendall.
“I still think it’s a shame Kendall didn’t stick to her original plan,” Vinnie said.
“Plan?” Aidan asked her.
She flushed slightly. “I wanted to found a local theater. A place for adults and kids to take classes and perform, where new plays and new actors could all get a chance together, and people could learn stagecraft, set design…” She shrugged. “I never really fleshed it out.”
“It was still a great dream,” Vinnie said.
She shrugged. “We needed a venue. I had lots of friends who would have worked for nothing to get it off the ground, but the rents everywhere were astronomical. So…when the shop came up, I figured I could make it work. End of story.”