“They might’ve come back sick with the cure. Or he might’ve brought them here, after.”
“Well, you’ve got a wingman for a reason.” Zac’s hand went to the door.
“I’m no coward.” With the bitten words, a spike of emotion singed the air in the car.
Zac opened the driver’s door but didn’t get out. At last Finn rubbed his nose and gave a quiet, lost sigh.
“I have to do it,” he said.
A near echo of the words Zac had spoken at Colm’s grave, preparing to send him into it. But David had pried Zac’s fingers from the saber hilt, had shouldered the burden of executioner. A kindness Zac could never pay back but could, here and now, emulate in a small way.
“I’ll go first if you want. So you know what you’re walking into.”
Finn swallowed, nodded, but didn’t wait in the car. When Zac headed for the porch, Finn waved him to the two-car garage and entered the code, and the door rolled up. Inside sat a black pickup truck and a gray two-door, both dusty from the unpaved road.
“James’s truck, Anna’s car,” Finn said as he swiped a key on a leather fob from a pegboard on one wall. “My first warning. We’d been thinking they were off somewhere.”
“Anything else strange?”
“Just the letter.” He opened the door into the house, shut the garage, and nodded Zac inside.
Zac stepped into an immaculate laundry room. He inhaled through his nose but caught no odor other than a hint of vanilla and caramel room freshener. He stepped through to the kitchen. No dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter. He opened the refrigerator. Mostly empty, no leftovers in glassware, only reasonably long-lived items: plastic bottles of salad dressing, coffee creamer. Jars of pickles and pesto sauce. Nothing that would spoil in the next few days.
“You cleaned out the fridge?” he called to Finn, a question he might not have thought to ask if he hadn’t just done the same at Colm’s.
He wished he knew how long his thoughts would relate things to Colm. When they would stop. If there was a way to hurry them up.
“No,” Finn called.
Odd, because somebody must have. Zac passed into the living room. Not a throw pillow out of place. Had they resisted Doc, surely something would be overturned, displaced. Unless Doc had tidied up. After all, he hadn’t wanted his role revealed. Zac circled the lower level, peeked into the guest room. It was more of a study, with desk and bookshelves and upholstered rocking chair. Nothing amiss here either. He called back down the hall to Finn.
“Lower level is clear.”
Finn’s hikers scuffed over the kitchen tile. “Okay.”
Zac jogged upstairs, peeked into the bathroom and two small bedrooms. Nothing. He stepped into the master bedroom and froze. The comforter was stripped to the bottom of the bed, the sheets thrown aside. Zac’s gaze darted around the room. Ghosts were fictional, yet a chilled breath seemed to sigh on the back of his neck. If they were indeed dead, they might have died here side by side. And someone had taken their bodies from the bed and left it disheveled.
Or they’d left the bed unmade the last night they slept in it, and his deduction was a long leap. Simon would probably be able to reconstruct the whole story if he stood here.
Finn’s steps halted at the bottom of the stairs. “Anything?”
“Not really.”
Finn met him in the bedroom doorway and looked past him.
“Only room that isn’t spotless,” Zac said.
“Doesn’t mean anything.”
“Well, what sort of housekeepers were they?”
“Like this.” Finn gestured to the rest of the house. “Order.”
Then it did mean something.
“Maybe they never made the bed. Not like anyone saw if they did or not.”
Unless his lack of expression concealed it, the man wasn’t spooked. Zac shouldn’t be either. He watched Finn stop in the doorway of each room, satisfying himself, nodding, moving on, until he was ready to follow Zac downstairs.
“They haven’t been back here,” Finn said as they exited onto the back deck. “Not since I was here and found the letter.”
“Did you go upstairs then?”
“No. But the lower level, nothing’s been touched that I can see.”
“Did you …?” Zac’s fingers curled as the chill again found his neck.
Finn stopped halfway to the red pole barn to face him. “Did I what?”
“Did you call out to them? I mean, call their names?”
His squint might indicate annoyance. “They obviously weren’t home.”
Then he plodded to the barn, and Zac followed. The barn too appeared undisturbed, mostly empty other than a John Deere lawn mower and a collection of garden utensils. Out the rear doors, past yard and field beyond, the view ended in a dense forest.
“Where’s their property line?” Zac said.
“Along the back of the field. And this direction …” He turned ninety degrees to point. Then he went still.
“Finn?”
Finn headed toward a small hill past the pole barn, not much of a rise but picturesque and planted with a single oak tree. His stride lengthened, and Zac hurried to keep pace.
On the hill lay two mounds about six feet long. A thin carpet grew over them: grass, petite wildflowers, taller weeds. A deliberate distance from them, two more mounds, similar in length and width, but coverless. Fresh earth. Finn stumbled to the new mounds and dropped to his knees between them. His arms stretched out to lay a hand on each grave.
Zac knelt where he was, fifty feet back from the mounds. Finn’s people. No, their people. Dead in the ground. Finn bowed his head. Zac looked out over the land, eyes open for the appearance of a neighbor, but the nearest houses were acres away. After a few minutes he approached and crouched on the other side of one of the mounds. Finn’s face was an utter blank.
“Finn.”
Finn closed his eyes, and his words slipped into each other, his tongue seeming to shuffle them. “God be here please now close by.”
The rockslide of a prayer seared Zac to his core. His own eyes closed, reflex or reverence, he couldn’t tell. He gripped his knees.
After a little while Finn pushed himself up from the ground, the rawness of the prayer gone from his eyes. Zac blinked at the shift in the man.
Finn gestured to the other graves, the two that might have been weeks old but no more. “Sean. Holly. We buried them. The four of us together.”
“You didn’t see this before? The others?”
Finn pressed his palm to his head. After a moment he turned back to the house, his eyes catching the bright white beam of the barn’s floodlight, activated by the waning day.
“I didn’t look.”
Not even after he’d found the note?
They trudged down the hill to the house. In the laundry room, Finn removed his shoes and then gave a fractured laugh.
“Guess it doesn’t matter anymore if I take my shoes off.”
Some door in the man swung on a precarious hinge, neither open nor closed, but he seemed to want to keep it open. Well, Zac would be the doorstop. He removed his shoes too.
“Anna?” Zac said.
“She was ridiculous about dirt. Clutter. All of it.”
Yet she hadn’t made the bed.
They hadn’t eaten in hours. Zac didn’t expect Finn to be hungry, but he was the one to suggest dinner. The fridge empty, they ordered delivery pizza with the toppings preferred by the carnivorous sex, which included every guy Zac had ever met until the asparagus-and-mushroom-craving David Galloway. The food was halfway eaten when Zac set his current slice aside. Time to talk.
Finn spoke before he could. “Doc ought to be lurking; he hasn’t finished the job.”
“Something’s off about this,” Zac said. “A lot of things, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“The scenario doesn’t work. He killed them in cold blood, and then he cleaned out the fridge. He forced the cur
e on them, and then he carefully buried them beside their family.”
“Maybe Anna cleaned.”
“Before or after he forced her to write the note?”
Finn shook his head.
“We have to consider everything.”
“So my friends chose the serum, knowing they’d probably die.”
Ouch. The stone face had just experienced a tremor. “It’s what you’ve believed the whole time.”
Finn stared down at the remaining pizza. “Cady being so sure … she made me wonder.”
“Well, Doc has answers. But I don’t know what to do about that. Not like we can inquire at the hotels.”
“There’s a dozen hotels in Warrenton. Could be in any one. And it’s been two days now since we left.”
“How old was he when you met him?” Zac said.
“Somewhere in his forties, I guess.”
That fit. Doc had been no more than five years older than Zac, in his thirties when he left Fisher Lake. So he hadn’t taken the serum yet when he went west instead of east. “Did he live there long?”
“Sure,” Finn said. “Ten years or so.”
“And he got older.”
“His hair grayed a lot. And he got thinner with the illness, so if it was terminal, the serum wasn’t in him to cure it.”
Yet at some point he must have taken it. Not that Zac had expected to discover Doc’s trail if the guy was trying not to leave one, especially in the age of privacy rights, but if they couldn’t offer a description, that ended all possibility.
He kept working on the pizza. He’d been ignoring food too often lately.
Neither of them spoke for a while, and then Finn said, “I’ll have to tell the neighbors there was an accident.”
“Okay.”
“And I want to see the Wisters, friends of ours from way back.”
“How far back are we talking about?”
“About thirty years.”
Zac’s shoulders tensed. He tried to nod, but the motion was stiff.
“We’ve been trusting them a long time.” When Zac didn’t answer, Finn tilted his head. “No mortals like that with y’all?”
“Not currently. There’s Tiana, David’s girl, but I’ve known her only a few weeks.”
Zac got up, stretched, and moved to the window. All this uncertainty, and now Finn wanted to go talk to some mortals who knew their greatest strength and vulnerability. His limbs itched for some kind of exertion, some way to shed the last day.
“They don’t have to know you’re Elderfolk,” Finn said.
“Definitely not.” Zac ran his thumb along the window frame. “Simon’s wife, Beth, died a few years back … shoot, eleven years now. It doesn’t feel that long. Anyway, until Tiana, she was the last mortal in our circle.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Finn was watching him, studying.
“I’m friendly with mortals, neighbors in my Denver apartment, a few friends I camp with, you know. Online I interact with strangers all the time. But …”
“I get it,” Finn said. “And I guess it’s different for you, being sort of a celebrity. That whole thing is weird to me.”
“My typical day doesn’t include paparazzi.”
“But hasn’t it shifted things for you?”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. Just seems it would.”
“I’m having a great time with it, honestly.” A smile tugged Zac’s mouth. “And I’ve seen ways to do good with it. Trying to fulfill that as long as people still want selfies with me.”
“Guess it doesn’t make them any younger. Or us any older.”
“We’re not so old.”
Finn huffed. “Depends on the day.”
Zac shut up. He was wrong to talk about age to a guy who’d seen it blow into his friends like a north wind and steal their souls from suddenly crumbling bodies.
“The Wisters have a condo about twenty minutes away,” Finn said. “We meet for dinner once or twice a month. We moved here a year after they did, figured we’d stay as long as they lived.”
Zac nodded.
“Sure didn’t figure on …” Finn ducked his head and pushed the pizza box across the table.
Over the next hour, the pizza disappeared. Finn cleaned up, waving off Zac’s move to help. Not much to do, but he was meticulous about it. As he threw away the pizza carton and hand-washed the plates, the sense took hold of Zac again that Finn’s expressions and body language would never reveal his real self. The heaviness on him weighted the air, and something else lurked too. Something unique to Finn, something that left an occasional buzz, like an electrical current with a short.
Zac paced. A problem was poking his brain. He couldn’t fall asleep and let Finn witness a night attack.
“I’ll keep watch,” he said. “In case Cady’s right.”
Finn frowned. “She never said he broke in and injected them in their sleep.”
“Might as well play it safe.”
A long sigh, a palm to his forehead. “Stay up all you want. I can’t.”
Fair enough. One of them might as well be rested in the morning.
TWELVE
They packed a few things from the house, including James’s laptop, which Finn said held all the information they’d compiled on themselves. Unlike Fisher Lake, Doc didn’t leave his second group of ageless patients with the research journal pertaining to them. Maybe he’d started to realize how powerful his serum was, wanted to protect it from the wrong hands.
They also packed a few items Finn said Cady would want. To the car Zac carried a handmade quilt from the guest room bed, squares of ivory and pink and orange bordered in yellow. Under one arm Finn tucked an oatmeal-colored throw pillow from the couch, embroidered with a pine tree and script that read GET OUTDOORS. In his free hand he held a framed cross-stitch square. The design was a brown bird sitting on a nest and above it carefully stitched words: FEAR NOT, THEREFORE; YOU ARE OF MORE VALUE THAN MANY SPARROWS. MATTHEW 10:31.
They stowed the items in the back seat, and Finn drove down the gravel driveway.
“Did they believe too?” Zac said.
“In God?”
Zac gestured at the cross-stitch lying on the dashboard. “In the whole scripture. In who Christ is.”
“Yeah. They did.”
“What about Holly and Sean?”
Finn was quiet until they reached the nearest neighbors, a couple named the Rooneys. As he pressed their doorbell he said, “No.”
No one came to the door. As they left, Finn said, “Sean was the most confident atheist I ever met. Holly called herself a spiritual person. Whenever it came up, she told me to relax. She said she loved the people and animals of the world, and at the end of our lives, whatever gods exist would see that.”
The second house belonged to a woman named Nicole, who Finn said had known the four longevites for a few months, just moved up from Florida. She came to the door with her phone in her hand and her purse on her shoulder.
“Oh Finn, hi. You just caught me on my way out the door. Got an interpreting job in an hour.”
“You have to go?”
“I have a few minutes.” She adjusted her purse strap and held out her hand to Zac. “Hi, I’m Nicole.”
Zac shook her hand. “Zac. We won’t keep you, but we do need a few minutes.”
“Are you a police officer?”
What on earth made her ask that? Their somber expressions probably. “Just a friend.”
“What’s going on?”
“This past Monday,” Finn said, “James and Anna were out in California, visiting friends of ours. They were in a car accident.”
“Oh, that’s awful. Are they in the hospital out there? Let them know I can water Anna’s flowers until she’s back. I have once before—I know exactly what to do.”
Finn blinked as if her words left him lost, but his voice didn’t waver. “They died, Nicole.”
“They … what?”
“They’re gone
.”
Her purse slid down her arm and dropped to the porch. “I … I … they’re both gone?”
“Yes.” If his expression could flatten further, it was doing so now.
“Finn, I’m so sorry. When is the service?”
“I’m flying out there with Cady. Nothing’s sure yet. I just wanted you to know why they’re … why you won’t …”
One second Finn was carrying the act without a flinch. The next his words seemed to stall. Zac stepped nearer.
“There’s something you can do, Nicole.”
She picked up her purse and fingered the strap. “What’s that?”
Zac pointed to the house between. “Those are the Rooneys?”
“Yeah, Jimmy and Jill.”
“We’re flying out today. Would you let them know what’s happened? And any other neighbors who need to know?”
“Oh, of course. I’m so sorry for your loss, Finn. And Zac—you knew them?”
Best to keep it simple. He nodded.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Their lights were on last evening. Were you there late?”
“That was us. You didn’t see anyone lurking the last couple days, did you?” Zac feigned a shrug. “I’m just concerned about the house being vacant. I expect it will be for a while.”
“Oh, there’s been nobody that I saw. I didn’t even realize they’d gone anywhere, but now that I think of it, I guess I didn’t see them come home the last few days. The garage has been shut too. But crime out here is minimal. Let that be the last thing you worry about right now.”
“That’s good to know. Thanks.”
“Thanks,” Finn said then turned and walked down the porch steps back to the car.
“What a terrible loss,” Nicole said, watching him. “It comes in waves, I know. I lost my brother a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Zac said.
She blinked, tears surfacing. “They were good neighbors.”
They said goodbye, and Zac went to the car. Finn had put the key in the ignition but sat in the passenger seat this time. Zac got in behind the wheel.
“Drive,” Finn said.
Zac obliged. With no other destination, he began to turn into James and Anna’s driveway.
From Sky to Sky Page 10