Dying Breath

by Heather Graham

  They hurried to the North Square area.

  When they reached it, at least a dozen police cars were already lining the street. Griffin showed his credentials to get through. On the corner, he met up with Jackson and Barnes.

  “What did you get from Hank Fremont?” Jackson asked.

  “Our June Jensen is the same woman who was seeing George Ballantine. Disappeared in the same way—same disconnected phone number.” He turned to Barnes. “Can you send an artist to this address? We’ll get sketches from both men, see how they compare—and get the picture out in the press,” Griffin said.

  “Right away,” Barnes said, taking down the address. He lifted a hand, calling over one of his officers, but before the man could reach them, he turned to Vickie.

  “North Square. Down the street from the Paul Revere house. Near the Ballantine house. You’ve got the Pierce-Hichborn house right next to the Paul Revere house. You’ve got the Mariner’s House, still operating as a hotel, but that’s later, right?”

  “Yes, 1800s,” Vickie murmured.

  Griffin watched as Vickie slowly looked around. She looked from house to house down the street.

  “We’ve got people going through the historic houses—management couldn’t be more helpful—everyone wants this stopped. But you’re free to go in anywhere you like, anywhere you think you may know something that someone else doesn’t, or might feel something, or...anything,” Barnes finished lamely.

  He turned to give the information regarding Hank and the sketch artist to one of his officers.

  Vickie still stood in the street.

  “Anything?” Griffin asked her softly.

  “I know the church stood there,” she said, pointing.

  “They’ve contacted the building manager. He’s on his way,” Jackson told her.

  “I keep thinking they find something different every time,” she said. “A Dumpster, a grave, a wall... Chrissy Ballantine’s own basement floor. This will be different. Not a forgotten grave on church land, not a wall...”

  She pointed suddenly, just half a block away, on the street.

  There were two barricades by the side of the street; they had been drawn there when road workmen had finished for the day.

  “What about...under the pavement somehow? People were just working there, right?”

  “A cable line was dug up in the area recently,” Barnes said.

  Vickie started walking that way.

  For a moment, Griffin watched her go.

  He felt something in the air, like a wisp of cloud. It slowly materialized.

  He saw it was the young woman in white. Darlene Dutton.

  Vickie seemed to start; to turn and see her. And, though he was now some distance, he was certain the ghostly apparition spoke, and Vickie heard her.

  He hurried to catch up with Vickie.

  As he did so, the very ethereal image of Darlene Dutton began to evaporate, and to disappear entirely.

  “Vickie, hey!” he murmured, catching her arm.

  She turned to look at him. “She tries so hard...she can’t seem to form words, and she can’t seem to stay, but she tries so hard to help. She may not always be seen or heard, but she is watching and listening as much as possible, as often as she can. She said smallpox, Griffin. ‘Remember, it was smallpox!’”

  “Does that mean we should be looking at Zabdiel Boylston?” Griffin asked.

  “I don’t know, Griffin, I don’t know. Boylston is buried in the Walnut Street Cemetery, in Brookline. I don’t think she’s going to be that far, but I don’t know—they left victims out of the city before.”

  “They talk about the waning of the hardcore Puritans. The year 1721 is considered to be the year the Age of Enlightenment began to arrive in the Americas. Hardcore Puritan—Cotton Mather?” Griffin asked.

  Vickie nodded. “Definitely...the son and grandson of hardcore Puritans. Beyond a doubt. And it all began to wane, and he really lost his position in life. But Darlene referred to smallpox and...oh, Griffin!”

  “What?”

  “There!”

  Griffin turned in the direction Vickie was pointing.

  A line of old broken road stones was piled up and surrounded by barricades—and a circle of rounded “no parking” stones.

  In the waving light, they appeared to be a pile of...

  Pustules!

  “Do you think...?” Vickie asked softly.

  “Yes, I think,” he said.

  Barnes came striding over to them, anxious. “Beneath those cement elephant turds?” he asked. “Hell, yeah, they look like giant pus caps in the shadows there.”

  He hurried on ahead of them, shouting for officers to help him.

  Griffin caught Vickie’s hand and they hurried after Barnes.

  Jackson and a dozen police left their positions and hurried over as well.

  Bit by bit, they dug through the pile.

  Old paving stones were hurled aside as well.

  Beneath it all was an old ice box, a chain wrapped heavily around it.

  Small! Griffin thought. Good Lord, too small to hold a human being.

  The box was locked, and by the grunts of the men trying to move it, apparently heavy.

  Someone hurried over with a large bolt cutter and broke the chain around the box, then they nearly tore off the door.

  Stuffed inside in a grotesque twist of humanity, there was indeed a woman.

  15

  Griffin and Jackson had gone on to the hospital; as impossible as it had seemed, fire rescue had moved in, gotten the folded and twisted body of Gail Holbrook out of the small box—and discovered that she was alive. Her pulse had been faint; her air so nearly gone. Had they been as much as another five or ten minutes in finding her, one of the young EMTs had told them, she wouldn’t have made it.

  “As it is, she’s got a dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs...not sure what else,” he told them. “Maybe it’s a darn good thing she was knocked out cold—and, as far as I can tell, she didn’t regain consciousness. If she’s lucky, she’ll never remember how she was in that box.”

  Forensic crews were going over the scene.

  With all the commotion, Vickie was afraid she’d be in the way. She knew the cop assigned to her—same guy she’d had the day she’d met the kids at Mario’s after they had gone to the Paul Revere house. He was young and sharp and she thought he seemed good at his job.

  Griffin, of course, had wanted her to stay with him, telling her that she was making him one hell of a liar.

  Truth was, as much as she wanted to be with him, she needed time alone. She wanted to go back over what she’d read about the murders in the south side in the late 1800s. And, she hoped maybe, if she was alone, the ghost of Darlene Dutton might appear again.

  The cop accompanied her into her apartment; as Griffin always did, he went through the apartment room by room, and reminded her to lock the door once he was out. She thanked him and did so.

  When he was gone, she headed for her desk—but then veered into her room, finding nightclothes and heading on into the shower. The street had been dusty and dirty, and the fall of steaming water was delicious.

  She half expected the ghost of Darlene Dutton to appear in the mist of the bathroom after her shower.

  Darlene did not.

  Refreshed, she headed out, made tea and went straight to her desk.

  Vickie logged on to the internet and looked up the pages that had been written about the notes in the diary of the nineteenth-century cop, Joseph MacDonald. Only two people had actually been mentioned by name—Mary, the prostitute. Flannigan, the day laborer. Then, of course, he’d talked about the doctor who had just disappeared.

  She was actually reading over the notes when she noticed she had me
ssages on one of her social websites. Some were from friends, a few were from her Grown Ups kids.

  The notes from the kids were nice—they were mostly thank-yous.

  But there was another note, and that one excited her. It was from Alex Maple.

  “Hey. Alex Maple here,” it read. “Would love to meet with you.” He’d left a phone number.

  She drummed her fingers on the table. It was late now; she figured she’d call him first thing in the morning. She wrote a note back to that effect. There was no reply. Morning would be good. She wasn’t even sure what she could glean from him. The murders had happened so long ago. The dead were in the hands of scientists; they would receive decent burials. Eventually. They couldn’t be avenged; it was far too late.

  They knew George Ballantine’s ancestors had lived near the Pine house. They knew Bertram Aldridge had come from the area. The police had positively cleared Pine himself of wrongdoing. What else could they learn?

  She wasn’t sure.

  But as she stared at the screen, she felt a presence, and she turned. Darlene Dutton was there. She appeared more solid than she had on the street.

  “Hello,” Vickie said very softly.

  Darlene nodded, a sad smile on her lips.

  “You saved her,” she said softly.

  “Darlene, were you there? You were right—we wouldn’t have found her without you, you know,” Vickie told her.

  “I’m so glad to have helped!”

  “But how did you know where she was? Did you see them put her there?”

  “I only saw the man leaving.”

  “What did the man look like?” Vickie asked, hopeful.

  But Darlene shook her head. “He was wearing blue, I know that. Blue jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt. The same sweatshirt every tourist in town seems to wear. I didn’t see his face. I didn’t even see the color of his hair, and I didn’t know what he was doing at first. I had come to the corner... I guess I was there because I had loved the Paul Revere house so much. And when I saw you... I figured you knew the woman was somewhere near and I’d seen the guy there, and those cement things looked so much like pustules... But I couldn’t seem to stay. I couldn’t seem to speak. I’m so glad you found her. So glad.”

  There was a knock at Vickie’s door. Darlene immediately began to fade.

  But it wasn’t a hard knock; it wasn’t a real knock.

  “Darlene, please, please stay. It’s Dylan. Dylan, come on in!” Vickie said.

  And Dylan appeared. For a moment, the image of Darlene faded.

  Then it solidified.

  “Vickie, they thought my dad did it! Okay, so I know he strayed. But...you know? Thank you! They made up tonight. I mean, I didn’t hang around for the whole thing, but you should have seen my dad. I never saw him so humble in my life! So good to my mom, really. And she’s the best person in the world. She forgave him.” He suddenly seemed to realize that Darlene was in the room. “Hi, Darlene,” he said softly. “Did you know anything, did you see anything?”

  Darlene managed another sad smile. She repeated what she’d told Vickie, and Dylan listened gravely.

  “Ah. But Vickie, my dad told a cop what the strange woman—June Jensen—looked like. It sounds as if she may be involved.”

  “Maybe. I know the police have another person who knew her. Between the two images, it’s likely they’ll get something useful!” Vickie said.

  “I’m going back to my house,” Dylan said. “I just wanted to check on you. I’m not ignoring you, Vickie, I swear. It’s just that my family...”

  “You do need to watch over your family, Dylan. Noah—Noah needs you now,” Vickie said. She smiled. Her ghost was apologizing to her for not “haunting” her. Nice.

  Dylan stretched out a hand to Darlene. “Want to come with me? We’ll just check up on my house and then maybe, if you can, walk around the area. See if we can find anything that might help as well.”

  Darlene looked at Dylan’s hand for a minute. “I’m not... I’m not good, like you are, at staying...at staying around,” she said.

  “You’ll learn. You’re really great!” he told her.

  Darlene took his hand.

  Dylan looked at Vickie again.

  “I’m okay. Go.”

  The two of them seemed to dematerialize as one. She smiled, watching them go. She rose, and as she did so her phone rang.

  It was Griffin, telling her he was just outside.

  She ran to the door and let him in, looking at him anxiously.

  “Gail Holbrook is hanging on,” he told her. “They’re pretty sure she’ll survive. She’ll be in a few casts, but she’s not in a coma—just heavily sedated. It will be a while before we can talk to her.”

  “But she is hanging in.”

  “Yes.”

  Vickie threw her arms around him. He pulled her to him and held her tight.

  They were still so new...

  She couldn’t just be held. She kissed him. And touched him.

  “You smell deliciously like a summer’s day,” he told her. “And I’m a mess.”

  “And I don’t care,” she said.

  “I can shower.”

  “Tonight, that will take too long,” she said.

  And it would. She slid out of her robe and tee with his help, turned her hands to his clothing, pausing to walk backward to the bed, kissing him in between steps, feeling his hands on her, so seductive in their need.

  As always, he paused to carefully place his gun and holster down.

  Then he crushed her to him, still half-dressed, and made love while he was still crawling out of his clothing. And only when it seemed they were both assured that they were still touching, breathing, together, did they pause long enough to talk again.

  “Dylan came by. He said his dad has been great—he’s very happy. He said the cop came and the sketch was done. I should turn the TV on—they were going to put the sketch out tonight.”

  Griffin sighed impatiently.

  “What? What happened?”

  “Well, we got two sketches, you know. One from George Ballantine—and one from Hank Fremont.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, we expected they’d come out very similar. They didn’t. The artists are going back to both men tomorrow. They’re going to try and see if they can make them combine. There are techs down at the station, too, trying to see if the compositions are close.”

  “There can’t be two different women using the same name—and using men in the same way, disappearing in the same way!” Vickie said.

  “I agree. I’m sure we’ll still have something by tomorrow.”

  “By the way, I got a message back from Alex Maple.”

  “Who?”

  “Alex Maple. The Harvard grad who did a great paper on the old South Boston cop, MacDonald. He’s the one who wrote about the people who had disappeared—those who are probably the victims found at the Pine house.”

  “Ah.”

  She knew that he was wondering if anything from that far in the past could help. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, and pulled her closer to him.

  “Can’t hurt to find out what he can tell us,” he said.

  “To be honest, he sounds like someone I’d really like to meet anyway—he did some pretty cool research to come up with all the information he did. A lot of people rehash what’s already known in history—he went out in the field and found new information.”

  Griffin was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “We’ve really got to be exceptionally careful now—if we don’t get one composite sketch out by the morning, we’ll use both of them. I really believe this woman—this June Jensen—got close to both George Ballantine and Hank Fremont to get closer to the old situation. I think, for some reason i
n his twisted head, Bertram Aldridge had it out for George Ballantine. That’s why he nearly killed you and Noah in the house. And June Jensen’s affair with George now would have given her all the information needed to get in the house and attack Chrissy Ballantine.” He paused a minute. “Getting close to Hank Fremont meant that she could get closer to you—get information on you. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re coming close to an end—and that scares me. You’ve got to be careful with everything that you do.”

  “Hey,” she said, rolling up on an elbow to look down at him. “Not to worry. I don’t try to shake my good cops—I try to buy them cappuccino! I am careful—not afraid or alarmed at having help close at hand. I am careful—you know it. Absolutely careful.”

  “I know. But be really hypervigilant, okay? If you meet with Alex Maple, you even want to let the cop on duty join you for coffee or lunch or whatever. Have someone with you at all times.”

  “Absolutely,” she promised.

  He smiled, reached for her, and pulled her down to him for a kiss. She wondered if—had the time come when they’d been together forever—they might have given in to exhaustion and slept then. Not in a bad way; just in a comfortable sleep-is-necessary survivor way.

  But it was all still so new. And so they made love again. And finally slept, and when the sun rose and Vickie stretched her arm across the bed, Griffin was gone.

  There was a note on his pillow.

  She smiled. It didn’t say “I love you” and it wasn’t accompanied by a rose. The note said, “Hypervigilant!”

  And it was accompanied by a time for when they’d meet at a gun range that night, and a P.S.: “Don’t worry. The cop will know the way!”

  “Actually, that is an ‘I love you’ from Griffin,” she murmured aloud, and she rose, anxious to get the day going and hopefully meet up with Alex Maple. And, of course, later that afternoon, she’d have her excursion to the New England Aquarium with her Grown Ups group.

  * * *

  George Ballantine’s June Jensen had a headful of short dark curls, wide lips and blue eyes.

  Hank Fremont’s June Jensen had a sleek bob of rich auburn hair. Her mouth was large and generous, and her eyes were dark brown. Fremont’s girl was sketched as wearing a well-tailored shirt and business jacket; Ballantine’s June had on a frilly, low-cut blouse.