Mo smiled.
“What is it?” Aidan asked.
“He’s here—and they’ve seen each other,” Mo whispered.
“Ah.”
“Oh, Aidan, it’s really lovely. Try to see.”
He did see...something. Two indistinct shapes. The one shape he’d come to know—and another. It almost seemed as if light clouds circled each other—and finally came together.
He couldn’t tell if he simply heard Mo’s description of the two of them embracing—or if he actually saw them, a man and a woman meeting after a very long time.
He waited before he whispered to Mo, “Can she take us to her daughter’s grave? I don’t mean to be callous, but...time’s slipping away.”
She turned to him. “You can ask her, Aidan.”
He shook his head. “I know they’re there,” he said. “But I can’t see their faces. I just have what everyone has, Mo. The sense of someone else there.”
She studied him for a minute and he found himself caught in the beauty of her eyes. He stood very still; something in her made him want to reach out, to touch her—hold her as he believed Andre held his precious Lizzie. But he had to keep his distance. He’d touched her once and it had been wrong. He was an agent, here for a short time, working a case. They seemed to share some kind of attraction—physical, yes, but more than that. She aroused his instincts and his feelings. He forced himself not to think about caressing her face or kissing her lips. The thought was enough to arouse all those male instincts and this definitely wasn’t the time or place.
“You knew something when you came here, when you first came to Sleepy Hollow,” she said.
He nodded. “I knew that Richard was dead.”
“How?”
“I dreamed about him coming to tell me.”
She nodded with a grim smile.
“Yeah. Too bad he didn’t tell me who did it, right?” he asked, his tone harsher than he would have liked.
“He came to you because he knew you’d pursue his murderer. That you’d achieve justice,” she told him. Then she stepped forward and spoke gently with the ghosts he couldn’t quite see.
“We can go to the cemetery now,” she said a minute or two later. They thanked Sondra for letting them in and left, with Mo promising she’d be back in plenty of time for costuming and makeup for the night’s event.
He drove them toward the Old Dutch Church and turned onto the road by the graveyard, along the border of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. He parked as close as he could to the site where St. Andrew’s Church had once stood. Where they’d found the bodies of Richard Highsmith and Wendy Appleby and the vault where they’d been beheaded.
The killer’s lair, Aidan thought.
When they were out of the car, Rollo barked and wagged his tail. But he wasn’t following a scent; he followed in the wake of the ghosts.
They climbed uphill and came to the vaults. They passed the tomb where Wendy Appleby’s form had pointed the way to the inner sanctum.
They came to another vault deep in the recesses of a hill.
Aidan noted that the name in worn stone atop the vault was Bakker.
“That’s Lizzie’s cousin’s married name,” Mo said.
“And Lizzie’s daughter is buried there?” Aidan asked.
“Yes,” Mo told him after conferring with the ghost.
Aidan walked up to the heavy brass gate that guarded what appeared to be an old seal. To his surprise, when he set his hand on the lever to open the gate, it gave. He pushed at what should have been a two-hundred-year-old seal.
It, too, gave.
He pulled a penlight from his pocket and ran its beam over the inside of the tomb as he entered. He felt Rollo come up to him and knew that Mo was directly behind.
Inside was an altar. To either side were rows and rows of dead but the seals seemed to be mostly intact.
The vault was very dark, and his penlight did little to illuminate the space. He heard a squeal, but it was just a rat racing by. The dog barked his disapproval. Mo, however, didn’t react.
Then he felt as if he’d been touched again. Someone urged him to turn, to follow. At the back of the tomb was a sarcophagus in heavy stone with a name deeply engraved in it. “Elizabeth Bakker Highsmith.”
“Highsmith!” he said, his voice choked. He looked at Mo.
“What do you think it means?” she asked.
“I’m assuming it means that Richard was tracing his family tree. That he found out somehow that he’d had a relative he hadn’t known about who’d lived back in the Revolutionary days. What I can’t figure out is how it could be connected to his death.”
“But he was from here, isn’t that right?”
Aidan nodded. “But...time passes. And if he’d learned about this grave being here, he probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Everyone from this area has ancestors buried in one or more of these cemeteries.”