by Nora Roberts
She was tired, too tired to concentrate well enough to fire up her torch again. In any case, nothing she’d begun in the past few weeks had turned out well. But she was much too restless to nap or to stretch out on the floor and devour some daytime television.
On impulse she rose and went to a large trunk that served as seat, table, and catch-all. Digging in, she riffled through an old prom dress, her graduation cap, her wedding veil, which aroused a trio of reactions—surprise, amusement, and regret—a pair of tennis shoes she’d thought were lost for good, and at last, a photo album.
She was lonely, Clare admitted as she took it with her to the window seat overlooking Canal Street. For her family. If they were all too far away to touch, at least she could reach them through old pictures.
The first snapshot made her smile. It was a muddy black-and-white Polaroid of herself and her twin brother, Blair, as infants. Blair and Clare, she thought with a sigh. How often had she and her twin groaned over their parents’ decision to name cute? The shot was fuzzily out of focus, her father’s handiwork. He’d never taken a clear picture in his life.
“I’m mechanically declined,” he’d always said. “Put anything with a button or a gear in my hands, and I’ll mess it up. But give me a handful of seeds and some dirt, and I’ll grow you the biggest flowers in the county.”
And it was true, Clare thought. Her mother was a natural tinkerer, fixing toasters and unstopping sinks, while Jack Kimball had wielded hoe and spade and clippers to turn their yard on the corner of Oak Leaf and Mountain View Lanes in Emmitsboro, Maryland, into a showplace.
There was proof here, in a picture her mother had taken. It was perfectly centered and in focus. The infant Kimball twins reclined on a blanket on close-cropped green grass. Behind them was a lush bank of spring blooms. Nodding columbine, bleeding hearts, lilies of the valley, impatiens, all orderly planted without being structured, all richly blossoming.
Here was a picture of her mother. With a jolt, Clare realized she was looking at a woman younger than herself. Rosemary Kimball’s hair was a dark honey blond, worn poufed and lacquered in the style of the early sixties. She was smiling, on the verge of a laugh as she held a baby on either hip.
How pretty she was, Clare thought. Despite the bowling ball of a hairdo and the overdone makeup of the times, Rosemary Kimball had been—and was still—a lovely woman. Blond hair, blue eyes, a petite, curvy figure, and delicate features.
There was Clare’s father, dressed in shorts with garden dirt on his knobby knees. He was leaning on his hoe, grinning self-consciously at the camera. His red hair was cropped in a crew cut, and his pale skin showed signs of sunburn. Though well out of adolescence, Jack Kimball had still been all legs and elbows. An awkward scarecrow of a man who had loved flowers.
Blinking back tears, Clare turned the next page in the album. There were Christmas pictures, she and Blair in front of a tilted Christmas tree. Toddlers on shiny red tricycles. Though they were twins, there was little family resemblance. Blair had taken his looks from their mother, Clare from their father, as though in the womb the babies had chosen sides. Blair was all angelic looks, from the top of his towhead to the tips of his red Keds. Clare’s hair ribbon was dangling. Her white leggings bagged under the stiff skirts of her organdy dress. She was the ugly duckling who had never quite managed to turn into a swan.
There were other pictures, cataloging a family growing up. Birthdays and picnics, vacations and quiet moments. Here and there were pictures of friends and relatives. Blair, in his spiffy band uniform, marching down Main Street in the Memorial Day parade. Clare with her arm around Pudge, the fat beagle who had been their pet for more than a decade. Pictures of the twins together in the pup tent their mother had set up in the backyard. Of her parents, dressed in their Sunday finest outside church one Easter Sunday after her father had turned dramatically back to the Catholic faith.
There were newspaper clippings as well. Jack Kimball being presented a plaque by the mayor of Emmitsboro in appreciation for his work for the community. A write-up on her father and Kimball Realty, citing it as a sterling example of the American dream, a one-man operation that had grown and prospered into a statewide organization with four branches.
His biggest deal had been the sale of a one-hundred-fifty-acre farm to a building conglomerate that specialized in developing shopping centers. Some of the townspeople had griped about sacrificing the quiet seclusion of Emmitsboro to the coming of an eighty-unit motel, fast-food franchises, and department stores, but most had agreed that the growth was needed. More jobs, more conveniences.
Her father had been one of the town luminaries at the groundbreaking ceremony. Then he had begun drinking.
Not enough to notice at first. True, the scent of whiskey had hovered around him, but he had continued to work, continued to garden. The closer the shopping center had come to completion, the more he drank.
Two days after its grand opening, on a hot August night, he had emptied a bottle and tumbled, or jumped, from the third-story window.
No one had been home. Her mother had been enjoying her once-a-month girls’ night out of dinner and a movie and gossip. Blair had been camping with friends in the woods to the east of town. And Clare had been flushed and dizzy with the excitement of her first date.
With her eyes closed and the album clutched in her hands, she was a girl of fifteen again, tall for her age and skinny with it, her oversize eyes bright and giddy with the thrill of her night at the local carnival.
She’d been kissed on the Ferris wheel, her hand held. In her arms she had carried the small stuffed elephant that cost Bobby Meese seven dollars and fifty cents to win by knocking over a trio of wooden bottles.
The image in her mind was clear. Clare stopped hearing the chug of traffic along Canal and heard instead the quiet, country sounds of summer.
She was certain her father would be waiting for her. His eyes had misted over when she walked out with Bobby. She hoped she and her father would sit together on the old porch swing, as they often did, with moths flapping against the yellow lights and crickets singing in the grass, while she told him all about the adventure.
She climbed the stairs, her sneakers soundless on the gleaming wood. Even now she could feel that flush of excitement. The bedroom door was open, and she peeked in, calling his name.
“Daddy?”
In the slant of moonlight, she saw that her parents’ bed was still made. Turning, she started up to the third floor. He often worked late at night in his office. Or drank late at night. But she pushed that thought aside. If he’d been drinking, she would coax him downstairs, fix him coffee, and talk to him until his eyes lost that haunted look that had come into them lately. Before long he’d be laughing again, his arm slung around her shoulders.
She saw the light under his office door. She knocked first, an ingrained habit. As close a family as they were, they had been taught to respect the privacy of others.
“Daddy? I’m back.”
The lack of response disturbed her. For some reason, as she stood, hesitating, she was gripped by an unreasonable need to turn and run. A coppery flavor had filled her mouth, a taste of fear she didn’t recognize. She even took a step back before she shook off the feeling and reached for the doorknob.
“Dad?” She prayed she wouldn’t find him slumped over his desk, snoring drunk. The image made her take a firmer grip on the knob, angry all at once that he would spoil this most perfect evening of her life with whiskey. He was her father. He was supposed to be there for her. He wasn’t supposed to let her down. She shoved the door open.
At first she was only puzzled. The room was empty, though the light was on and the big portable fan stirred the hot air in the converted attic room. Her nose wrinkled at the smell—whiskey, strong and sour. As she stepped inside, her sneakers crunched over broken glass. She skirted around the remains of a bottle of Irish Mist.
Had he gone out? Had he drained the bottle, tossed it aside, then stumbled ou
t of the house?
Her first reaction was acute embarrassment, the kind only a teenager can feel. Someone might see him—her friends, their parents. In a small town like Emmitsboro, everyone knew everyone. She would die of shame if someone happened across her father, drunk and weaving.
Clutching her prized elephant, her first gift from a suitor, she stood in the center of the sloped-ceilinged room and agonized over what to do.
If her mother had been home, she thought, suddenly furious, if her mother had been home, he wouldn’t have wandered off. She would have soothed and calmed him and tucked him into bed. And Blair had gone off as well, camping with his jerky friends. Probably drinking Budweiser and reading Playboy by the campfire.
And she’d gone, too, she thought, near tears with the indecision. Should she stay and wait, or go out and search for him?
She would look. Her decision made, she moved to the desk to turn off the lamp. More glass crunched under her feet. It was odd, she thought. If the bottle had been broken by the door, how could there be so much glass here, behind the desk? Under the window?
Slowly, she looked up from the jagged shards at her feet to the tall, narrow window behind her father’s desk. It was not open, but broken. Vicious slices of glass still clung to the frame. With watery legs she took a step forward, then another. And looked down to where her father lay faceup on the flagstone patio, impaled through the chest by the round of garden stakes he had set there that same afternoon.
She remembered running. The scream locked in her chest. Stumbling on the stairs, falling, scrambling up and running again, down the long hall, slamming into the swinging door at the kitchen, through the screen that led outside.
He was bleeding, broken, his mouth open as if he were about to speak. Or scream. Through his chest the sharp-ended stakes sliced, soaked with blood and gore.
His eyes stared at her, but he didn’t see. She shook him, shouted, tried to drag him up. She pleaded and begged and promised, but he only stared at her. She could smell the blood, his blood, and the heavy scent of summer roses he loved.
Then she screamed. She kept screaming until the neighbors found them.
Chapter 2
Cameron Rafferty hated cemeteries. It wasn’t superstition. He wasn’t the kind of man who avoided black cats or knocked on wood. It was the confrontation with his own mortality he abhorred. He knew he couldn’t live forever—as a cop he was aware he took more risks with death than most. That was a job, just as life was a job and death was its retirement.
But he was damned if he liked to be reminded of it by granite headstones and bunches of withered flowers.
He had come to look at a grave, however, and most graves tended to draw in company and turn into cemeteries. This one was attached to Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church and was set on a rambling slope of land in the shadow of the old belfry. The stone church was small but sturdy, having survived weather and sin for a hundred and twenty-three years. The plot of land reserved for Catholics gone to glory was hugged by a wrought-iron fence. Most of the spikes were rusted, and many were missing. Nobody much noticed.
These days, most of the townspeople were split between the nondenominational Church of God on Main and the First Lutheran just around the corner on Poplar, with some holdouts for the Wayside Church of the Brethren on the south side of town and the Catholics—the Brethren having the edge.
Since the membership had fallen off in the seventies, Our Lady of Mercy had dropped back to one Sunday mass. The priests of St. Anne’s in Hagerstown were on an informal rotation, and one of them popped down for religion classes and the nine o’clock mass that followed them. Otherwise, Our Lady didn’t do a lot of business, except around Easter and Christmas. And, of course, weddings and funerals. No matter how far her faithful strayed, they came back to Our Lady to be planted.
It wasn’t a thought that gave Cam, who’d been baptized at the font, right in front of the tall, serene statue of the Virgin, any comfort.
It was a pretty night, a little chill, a little breezy, but the sky was diamond clear. He would have preferred to have been sitting on his deck with a cold bottle of Rolling Rock, looking at the stars through his telescope. The truth was, he would have preferred to have been chasing a homicidal junkie down a dark alley. When you were chasing down possible death with a gun in your hand, the adrenaline pumped fast and kept you from dwelling on the reality. But picking your way over decomposing bodies kind of knocked you over the head with your own ultimate destiny.
An owl hooted, causing Deputy Bud Hewitt, who walked beside Cam, to jolt. The deputy grinned sheepishly and cleared his throat.
“Spooky place, huh, Sheriff?”
Cam gave a noncommittal grunt. At thirty, he was only three years Bud’s senior and had grown up on the same stretch of Dog Run Road. He’d dated Bud’s sister, Sarah, for a wild and rocky three months during his senior year at Emmitsboro High and had been present when Bud had thrown up his first six-pack of beer. But he knew Bud got a charge out of calling him sheriff.
“Don’t think too much of it during the day,” Bud went on. He had a young, simple face, all curves and rosy skin. His hair was the color of straw and stuck up at odd angles no matter how often he wet his comb and fought it down. “But at night it makes you think about all those vampire movies.”
“These people aren’t undead, they’re just dead.”
“Right.” But Bud wished he had a silver bullet instead of regulation .38 slugs in his revolver. “It’s over here, Sheriff.”
The two teenagers who had chosen the cemetery to neck in gestured him along. They’d been spooked when they’d come squealing up his lane and banging on his door, but now they were running on panicked excitement. And loving it.
“Right here.” The boy, seventeen and sporting a denim jacket and scuffed Air Jordans, pointed. He wore a small gold stud in his left ear—a sign of stupidity or bravery in a town like Emmitsboro. At his side the girl, a cuddly cheerleader with doe brown eyes, gave a little shudder. They both knew they’d be the stars of Emmitsboro High on Monday.
Cam shined his light on the overturned marker. The grave was that of John Robert Hardy, 1881–1882, an infant who had lived one brief year and been dead more than a hundred. Below the fallen marker, the grave yawned wide, a dark, empty pit.
“See? It’s just like we told you.” The boy swallowed audibly. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the shadowed light. “Somebody dug it up.”
“I can see that, Josh.” Cam stooped down to shine his light into the hole. There was nothing there but dirt and the smell of old death.
“You think it was grave robbers, Sheriff?” Excitement throbbed in Josh’s voice. He was ashamed of the fact that he’d scrambled and bolted like a rabbit after he and Sally had all but tumbled into the yawning grave while rolling on the wild grass. He preferred to remember that he’d had his hand up her shirt. He wanted her to remember it too, so he spoke with authority. “I read about how they dig up graves looking for jewelry and body parts. They sell the body parts for experiments and stuff.”
“I don’t think they’d have found much here.” Cam straightened. Though he considered himself a sensible man, peering into the open grave gave him the willies. “You run along, see Sally home. We’ll take it from here.”
Sally looked up at him with huge eyes. She had a secret crush on Sheriff Rafferty. She’d heard her mother gossiping about him with a neighbor, chattering about his wild days as a teenager in Emmitsboro when he’d worn a leather jacket and driven a motorcycle and busted up Clyde’s Tavern in a fight over a girl.
He still had a motorcycle and looked to her as if he could still be wild if he wanted. He was six two with a ready, wiry build. He didn’t wear a dumb khaki uniform like Bud Hewitt, but snug jeans and a cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows. His hair was jet black and curled over his ears and the collar of his shirt. His face was long and lean, and now the moonlight accented the fascinating shadows under his cheekbones and made her seventeen-year-old
heart flutter. In Sally’s opinion, he had the sexiest blue eyes—dark and deep and a little broody.
“Are you going to call in the FBI?” she asked him.
“We’ll take it under advisement.” God, to be seventeen again, he thought, then immediately: Unh-uh, no thanks. “Thanks for your help. The next time you want to make out, go someplace else.”
Sally blushed prettily. The night wind ruffled her hair around her guileless face. “We were only talking, Sheriff.”
And heifers jump over the moon. “Whatever. You go on home now.”
He watched them walk away, among the headstones and markers, over plots of soft, sunken dirt and clumps of wild grass. Hip to hip, they were already talking in excited whispers. Sally let out a squeal and giggle, and glanced over her shoulder once to get a last look at Cam. Kids, he thought with a shake of his head as the wind flapped a loose shingle of the roof of the old church. Don’t know a damn thing about ambience.
“I’m going to want some pictures of this, Bud. Tonight. And we’d best rope it off and post a sign or two. Come morning, everyone in town will have heard about it.”
“Can’t see grave robbers in Emmitsboro.” Bud squinted his eyes and tried to look official. The graveyard was a pretty creepy place, but on the other hand, this was the most excitement they’d had since Billy Reardon had hotwired his father’s pickup and gone joyriding around the county with that big-breasted Gladhill girl and a six-pack of Miller. “Vandals, more like. Bunch of kids with a sick sense of humor.”
“More than likely,” Cam murmured, but he crouched by the grave again as Bud walked to the cruiser to get the camera. It didn’t feel like vandals. Where was the graffiti, the senseless destruction?
The grave had been neatly—systematically, he thought—dug up. The surrounding headstones hadn’t been disturbed. It was only this one small grave that had been touched.