Jeannie got a handkerchief from her purse and handed it to Marcy, who began to wipe at her eyes with trance-like slowness.
‘I didn’t know what I should … I was just … you know, stunned … trying to get my head around the idea that he was gone. The funeral director, Mr Donelli, suggested Memorial because Hillview is almost full … and on the other side of town, besides …’
Stop her, Ralph wanted to say to Howie. It’s painful and pointless. It doesn’t matter where he’s buried, except to Marcy and her daughters.
But once more he kept silent and took it, because it was another kind of scolding, wasn’t it? Even if Marcy Maitland might not mean it that way. He told himself this would be over eventually, leaving him free to discover a life beyond Terry fucking Maitland. He had to believe there would be one.
‘I knew about the other place,’ Marcy went on, ‘of course I did, but I never thought of mentioning it to Mr Donelli. Terry took me there once, but it’s so far out of town … and so lonely …’
‘What other place would that have been?’ Holly asked.
A picture rose unbidden in Ralph’s mind – six cowboy pallbearers carrying a plank coffin. He sensed the arrival of another confluence.
‘The old graveyard in Canning Township,’ Marcy said. ‘Terry took me out once, and it looked like nobody had been buried there for a long time, or even visited. There were no flowers or memorial flags. Just some crumbling grave markers. You couldn’t read the names on most of them.’
Startled, Ralph glanced at Yune, who nodded slightly.
‘That’s why he was interested in that book in the newsstand,’ Bill Samuels said in a low voice. ‘A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township.’
Marcy continued to wipe her eyes with Jeannie’s handkerchief. ‘Of course he would have been interested in a book like that. There have been Maitlands in this part of the state ever since the Land Rush of 1889. Terry’s great-great-grandparents – or maybe even a generation greater than that, I don’t know for sure – settled in Canning.’
‘Not in Flint City?’ Alec asked.
‘There was no Flint City back then. Just a little village called Flint, a wide spot in the road. Until statehood, in the early twentieth century, Canning was the biggest town in the area. Named after the biggest landowner, of course. When it came to acreage, the Maitlands were second or third. Canning was an important town until the big dust storms came in the twenties and thirties, when most of the good topsoil blew away. These days there’s nothing out there but a store and a church hardly anyone goes to.’
‘And the graveyard,’ Alec said. ‘Where people did their burying until the town dried up. Including a bunch of Terry’s ancestors.’
Marcy smiled wanly. ‘That graveyard … I thought it was awful. Like an empty house nobody cares about.’
Yune said, ‘If this outsider was absorbing Terry’s thoughts and memories as the transformation progressed, then he would have known about the graveyard.’ He was looking at one of the pictures on the wall now, but Ralph had a good idea what was going through his mind. It was going through his, as well. The barn. The discarded clothes.
‘According to the legends – there are dozens about El Cuco online – these creatures like places of death,’ Holly said. ‘It’s where they feel most at home.’
‘If there are creatures who eat sadness,’ Jeannie mused, ‘a graveyard would make a nice cafeteria, wouldn’t it?’
Ralph wished mightily that his wife hadn’t come. If not for her, he would have been out the door ten minutes ago. Yes, the barn where the clothes had been found was near that dusty old boneyard. Yes, the goo that had turned the hay black was puzzling, and yes, perhaps there had been an outsider. That was a theory he was willing to accept, at least for the time being. It explained a lot. An outsider who was consciously re-creating a Mexican legend would explain even more … but it didn’t explain the disappearing man at the courthouse, or how Terry Maitland could have been in two places at the same time. He kept coming up against those things; they were like pebbles lodged in his throat.
Holly said, ‘Let me show you some pictures I took at another graveyard. They may open a line of more normal investigation. If either Detective Anderson or Lieutenant Sablo is willing to talk to the police in Montgomery County, Ohio, that is.’
Yune said, ‘At this point I’d talk to the pope, if it would help to clear this up.’
One by one, Holly projected the photos on the screen: the train station, the factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side, the deserted car wash.
‘I took these from the parking lot of the Peaceful Rest Cemetery in Regis. It’s where Heath Holmes is buried with his parents.’
She cycled through the pictures again: train station, factory, car wash.
‘I think the outsider took the van he stole from the lot in Dayton to one of these places, and I think if you could persuade the Montgomery County police to search them, some trace of it might still be there. The police might even find some trace of him. There, or maybe here.’
This time she projected the photograph of the boxcars, sitting lonely and deserted on their siding. ‘He couldn’t have hidden the van in either of those, but he might have stayed in one of them. They’re even closer to the cemetery.’
Here at last was something Ralph could take hold of. Something real. ‘Sheltered places. There could be traces. Even after three months.’
‘Tire tracks,’ Yune said. ‘Maybe more discarded clothes.’
‘Or other stuff,’ Holly said. ‘Will you check? And they should be prepared to do an acid phosphate test.’
Semen stains, Ralph thought, and remembered the goo in the barn. What had Yune said about those? A nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records, wasn’t that it?
Yune sounded admiring. ‘You know your stuff, ma’am.’
Color rose in her cheeks, and she looked down. ‘Bill Hodges was very good at his job. He taught me a lot.’
‘I can call the Montgomery County prosecutor, if you want,’ Samuels said. ‘Get somebody from whatever police department has jurisdiction in that town – Regis? – to coordinate with the Staties. Given what that Elfman kid found in that barn in Canning Township, it’s worth looking into.’
‘What?’ Holly asked, immediately alight. ‘What did he find, beside the belt buckle with the prints on it?’
‘A pile of clothes,’ Samuels said. ‘Pants, underwear shorts, sneakers. There was some kind of goo on them, also on the hay. It turned the hay black.’ He paused. ‘No shirt, though. The shirt was missing.’
Yune said, ‘That shirt might have been what the burned man was wearing on his head like a do-rag when we saw him at the courthouse.’
‘How far is this barn from the graveyard?’ Holly asked.
‘Less than half a mile,’ Yune said. ‘The residue on the clothes looked like semen. Is that what you’re thinking, Ms Gibney? Is that why you want the Ohio cops to do an acid phosphate test?’
‘Can’t have been semen,’ Ralph said. ‘There was too much of it.’
Yune ignored this. He was staring at Holly, as if fascinated with her. ‘Are you thinking the stuff in the barn is a kind of residue from the change? We’re having samples checked, but the results haven’t come back yet.’
‘I don’t know what I’m thinking,’ Holly said. ‘My research about El Cuco so far amounts to a few legends I read while I was flying down here, and they’re not reliable. They were passed down orally, generation to generation, long before forensic science existed. I’m just saying that the police in Ohio should check the places in my photographs. They might not find anything … but I think they will. I hope they will. Traces, as Detective Anderson said.’
‘Are you done, Ms Gibney?’ Howie asked.
‘Yes, I think so.’ She sat down. Ralph thought she looked exhausted, and why not? She’d had a busy few days. In addition to that, being crazy had to wear a person out.