After Barnes finished reading the next article, he moved on to another, then another. Most of what appeared in print, the police had already told him. Nothing seemed enlightening, but he took notes anyway. Maybe later some detail might take on added significance.
He could only hope.
Later, Barnes met Claire for lunch at Mississippi’s, a deli in Kenmore Square, not far from Fenway Park. The restaurant offered dozens of sandwiches on eight different types of bread. Named after famous Americans, the sandwiches included every imaginable deli meat and vegetable, and toppings ranging from marshmallow fluff to caviar.
“When we’re done here,” Barnes said, setting their tray on a small table, “I’m going to go to the cemetery to visit Elizabeth.” He handed Claire her plate and drink and sat across from her. She wore a gray business suit with a pink blouse that brought out the color in her cheeks. She was the type of woman men notice, and although that was immediately obvious to Barnes, the other male patrons confirmed it for him. She had hair the color of Elizabeth’s, but much longer, and her aquamarine eyes seemed to reflect both intellect and compassion.
“Would you like for me to come along?” she asked, and she took a sip of tea. Her voice had the same breathy quality he’d always noticed over the phone.
“That would be good if you can find the time.” He unfolded a napkin. “It’s going to be depressing as . . .” He suppressed the profanity. “It’s going to be hard.”
“I know.” Her eyes looked deep into his, and her gaze felt, for an instant, like Elizabeth’s. Comforting. “How well did you know Elizabeth?” he asked.
She took another sip of tea. “Very well. We would finish each other’s sentences. There were times when we wouldn’t see each other for many months, but I’ve known her since college.”
“It seems strange that you and I never met.”
“I know. That’s my fault.”
“How is it your fault?” he asked.
“Elizabeth suggested it several times, but I just . . . well, it doesn’t matter. It was just me.”
“What does that mean?”
She looked at him earnestly. “You didn’t come here to talk about me, did you? I’m really not that interesting.”
“If you say so.” He didn’t want to press her, at least not about this. Better to focus on more important things. “Did you know many of the people at the funeral?”
“No, but I introduced myself to many of them.”
“Were any of them, I don’t know, suspicious or noteworthy?”
“Nobody seemed suspicious, but I did meet a neighbor of yours.”
“Really? I don’t know my neighbors. Who was it?”
“A man named Marshall. I can’t remember his last name.”
“Coburn,” said Barnes.
“Yes, I believe that’s right. So you do know at least one of your neighbors.”
“No. I’ve never met him. Elizabeth did once or twice, walking the dog.” Why would the man come to her funeral if he met her only once or twice? Barnes wondered. He wrote a note and added that he should find out more about how well Coburn knew Elizabeth.
“Did you meet anyone else noteworthy?”
“Not that I can remember. People in the orthopedics department. Medical students. And patients—a lot of them.”
“Well, let me know if you think of anyone else who might have any insight into Elizabeth.”
“Of course.”
“On a different note, can you tell me where Rex is buried? Eventually I’d like to try to get some closure with him, too, if that’s possible.”
She frowned. “I guess no one told you.”
“Told me what?”
“I had him cremated. I didn’t know what you would want, and that’s what my veterinarian suggested.”
“Uh-huh.” What veterinarian in his right mind would recommend that, he thought. You don’t cremate an animal when it can provide evidence in a murder investigation. If it’s buried, the pet’s remains can always be exhumed if necessary. He’d hate to see that happen with Rex, but it could provide key information if the police decided to look for gunshot residue or if they wanted to study the trajectory of the bullets.
He took out a pen and paper and jotted down what Claire had told him.
“Was that a mistake?” she asked.
“I’d have preferred a burial.”
“Well, I did what my veterinarian recommended.”
Your veterinarian is an idiot, Barnes thought. “How about what the police recommended?”
“The police didn’t say anything about it. I assumed they took photographs of the crime scene, examined Rex’s body, and that was all they needed.”
He said nothing and instead continued taking notes about Rex.
“Do you mind my asking why you’re writing that?” Claire asked.
“Because otherwise I’ll wonder about it later.”
She hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry if I made the wrong choice. Personally I don’t think it matters what you do after they die. What counts is how you treat them when they’re alive.”
Barnes said nothing.
“It’s the same with people. You loved Elizabeth, and she knew it. That’s what matters. Not the funeral or her headstone or all the flowers people sent. Simply the fact that you loved her and she loved you. Nobody can take that away.”
He wasn’t so sure. “Did she talk to you about any problems she was having with me? I can’t remember anything specific, but apparently just last month I moved out of the house for a short while.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that, but it would explain why she seemed preoccupied. I remember she threw away most of her lunch.”
“So she didn’t say anything specific, like ‘Chris did whatever’ or that we argued about, I don’t know, having a baby?”
“No, I wish I had tried harder to find out, but I can tell when Elizabeth wants to talk about something, and she didn’t seem to want to talk that day. Maybe that’s when you moved out.”
He just nodded.
Her eyes glazed over. “I miss her.”
“I do, too . . . more than I’ve ever missed anyone.” That much was true. “I don’t know whether I can function without her.”
“After what you’ve been through . . . What a horrible situation. But you should have faith in yourself, and you should lean on your friends. It’s times like these when you learn who they really are.”
“That’s probably true.”
“It is. And I’m sure you’ll find you have many.”
Not likely, he thought, but he said simply, “We’ll see.” He took a bite of his sandwich. At the moment he couldn’t think of any, except for one. Maybe Claire was right. Maybe he should lean on Denny.
Chapter 35
After lunch, Claire drove Barnes to the cemetery. They took her car. The drive was only a short distance, but to Barnes it felt interminable. Sitting next to Claire, he tried to imagine Elizabeth in the backseat. He needed to picture her somewhere other than in the ground. Yes, he was heading to her gravesite, but he didn’t want to think of her buried there. The last place she belonged was in a coffin under six feet of cold dirt.
They finished the drive in silence. Barnes no longer felt any emotional support having Claire with him. She might as well have been a taxi driver.
At the cemetery they walked the lonely stretch of blacktop from the parking lot to the stone-marked fields, their silence broken only by the rhythmic clapping of their footsteps and the mournful whistle of wind through barren trees—nature’s dirge.
Claire guided Barnes to Elizabeth’s gravesite. They stood together before her headstone, braving the gusting wind and freezing drizzle. The inscription on the white marble read: “In loving memory of my wife, Elizabeth Kramer Barnes.”
“I didn’t know what exactly to write,” Claire said, looking at the words. “I hope this is okay.”
“It’s fine.” A sense of loss weighed on him like the earth over Elizabeth.
>
“You can replace it with something else if you like,” she offered.
“No, it’s fine.” He’d never had a chance to say good-bye, not even at her funeral. Only now. He reached out and touched the etched stone. “Elizabeth always liked white. Thanks for this.”
“It was the least I could do.” Her voice was trembling, and she crossed her arms, as if to hold herself together.
He turned to her. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last month.” Then she added, “You already asked me that, and you wrote it in your notes.”
“Oh.” He took out his list and, reading it, shielded the paper as best he could from the wind and spattering of rain.
“We ate at Faneuil Hall.”
“I can’t remember the last time I saw her,” he said. “It must have been the day I left for the conference in Toronto, but no matter how hard I try, all I recall are bits and pieces of that day and the day before.”
“That must be frustrating.”
“You have no idea. It’s like I’m disconnected from the rest of the world. With this memory problem, in some ways I feel like an outcast.”
“I can relate to that.”
“You? I find that hard to believe.”
“Obviously Elizabeth didn’t tell you much about me.”
He said nothing, waiting for her to explain.
“I’m in a profession that’s an old-boys’ network, and my situation is complicated because I have a nontraditional lifestyle. Some people have a problem with that, which means I have a problem with some people. So I can relate, at least a little, to what you’re saying about being an outcast.”
“Nontraditional lifestyle,” he said. “What does that mean?”
“It means . . .” She was trembling, he guessed from the cold. “. . . I have a same-sex partner.”
Barnes tried to wrap his head around that—not the notion that Claire was a lesbian but the fact that Elizabeth had hidden this from him. He didn’t like secrets. Often, behind them was something bigger. He now wondered whether he was seeing only part of the picture with Claire and Elizabeth. “Were you and Elizabeth ever, you know . . . Is that why we haven’t met?”
“No.” She answered too quickly, as if anticipating the question. Then she added, “Elizabeth was always more interested in men.”
“Uh-huh.” He jotted a note—Claire, Elizabeth’s attorney friend, is gay. He wanted to write that Claire might have been involved with Elizabeth, but the paper was getting damp and the pen wasn’t working well. He folded up his list and returned it to his pocket.
“I hope this doesn’t change your opinion of me, Chris.”
“No, it doesn’t.” But that didn’t sound convincing, even to him. He dug into his coat pocket for a cigarette. Nicotine always had a way of sharpening his focus. No luck. He tried his other pockets. No cigarettes anywhere. “I’m just a little surprised,” he added.
She forced a smile. “Well, you’re not the first.” She looked back at the tombstone. “One of the things I loved about Elizabeth is that she wasn’t judgmental.”
“No. I try not to be, either.”
He shouldn’t have invited her along. This time should be spent alone with Elizabeth, engaging her in silent conversation, not talking to Claire about her sexual orientation.
“I need a few minutes by myself,” he said.
“Of course. I’ll wait in the car.” She touched his arm. “Whenever you feel like it, just come to the parking lot and we’ll leave. Take all the time you need. I don’t have any meetings scheduled.”
He thanked her and watched her walk away, then when she was out of earshot, turned back to Elizabeth’s grave. “I miss you,” he said to her. He touched the inscription carved in the cold marble, and for a moment it became blurry as he fought back tears. “I’ll find out who did this to you. I promise.”
He wasn’t a religious man, but he said a silent prayer. He hadn’t prayed since elementary school when Brillo, the family’s cocker spaniel, was diagnosed with cancer and given less than a month to live. When his mother told him the news, he prayed every night for two weeks. Then his father took the dog to the vet to be put down.
Barnes knew his prayers wouldn’t be answered this time, either, but desperate moments offer limited options. He prayed that there had been some sort of mix-up, that somehow Elizabeth had survived and someone else had been mistaken for her. After all, he had never seen her body after the murder. Anything was possible.
This could even be simply a nightmare. He’d certainly had bizarre dreams before, and they were often as believable as real life. This could be another, induced by sleeping pills or happenstance. He prayed for that, prayed he would wake up to find everything back to normal.
But he knew that would never happen. Elizabeth would be alive again only in the moments when the memory of her death escaped him. Perhaps, in a small way, his inability to remember was a blessing. But then he would have to relive the loss. Every day.
He spoke to Elizabeth silently for a while, then touched her tombstone one last time before turning away from the gravesite. “I’ll be back,” he promised.
The cemetery suddenly appeared vast and unfamiliar, as though it had grown and reshaped itself.
A knot formed in his throat. How was he supposed to get back to the car, if there even was a car to get back to? He shuffled through the notes in his pocket. Nothing useful.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught movement, and he turned to see a vortex of starlings swirl skyward like autumn leaves caught in a whirlwind. How different this was from where Elizabeth would have chosen to be. Overlooking a beach—that’s where she belonged. She’d always loved the sand and the ocean. Even in the rain.
The starlings vanished as quickly as they’d appeared, and in their place Barnes pictured solitary gulls in the gray sky, floating like kites in an updraft. Elizabeth would have liked that.
Then he remembered his predicament, being stranded in a cemetery. His car must be parked nearby. How else could he have gotten there? Probably not by taking the subway. A graveyard wouldn’t be a logical stop for a transit system. Except in Paris. In that city, he recalled, the Metro did stop at the Père Lachaise Cemetery on the outskirts of town. But regardless of which cemetery this was, he would have needed directions to find it, and there weren’t any in his pockets.
“It’s not a problem,” he said out loud, forcing himself to think of alternatives. Chances were someone had accompanied him. One more time he sifted through his notes. Lunch with Claire. That must have been recent. Most likely she was sitting in his car or hers, waiting for him nearby.
He followed a winding path over a hill and came across a parking lot with only a half-dozen cars in it. None of them was his, but in one he saw movement, and he headed toward it. A woman sat in the driver’s seat. He tried to convince himself that he recognized her, that it was Claire. But it could have been anyone. She would have to recognize him.
He approached from the front. And then she saw him—a wave and a smile. She leaned to her right and opened the passenger-side door.
Getting into the car, Barnes wondered whether Claire had noticed his confusion. “I hope I didn’t make you wait too long,” he said.
“No, that’s okay. I was just catching up on work.”
He recognized her voice.
She took some papers and a legal pad off her lap and put them into a briefcase. Her head bowed, she seemed to be avoiding eye contact. “How are you holding up?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just hard to get used to.”
“I know.” She started the car and put it into gear, still not looking at him.
And then he realized why. Her eyes were filled with tears.
“You know she valued your friendship,” he said. “And I’m grateful for that, too.”
She started driving out of the parking lot, eyes front. A tear rolled down her cheek; she took one hand off the steering wheel to wipe it away.
Then, in a voice as faint as a whisper, she said to him, or to herself, “I know.”
After Claire dropped off Barnes at his car, she drove back to the office and tried to make a dent in the pile of papers on her desk.
How do I ever get anything done here? she asked herself, looking about her cluttered cubicle. She worked as an associate in a firm with six other attorneys who were senior to her, and a lot of the research and background assignments for cases ended up on her desk. That was all right. Litigation and the limelight didn’t hold the allure for her that it did for the others. She preferred working behind the scenes.
Of course, litigation did have its rewards. That’s how she’d met Darcia, arguing a case of a woman arrested for assaulting her boyfriend with a crowbar. She lost the case but won the judge. That had been both good and bad.
The bad came when Darcia felt threatened, and that happened most of the times when Claire went to lunch with other women. Especially with Elizabeth.
“If we’re a couple, you shouldn’t need to go out with other women,” Darcia argued.
“I’m not going out with them like a date. We’re just having lunch. I don’t see anything objectionable about having lunch with a friend.”
“A young female friend who just happens to be a size two?”
“Most of my friends are female and about my age. Yes, that makes them younger than you. I admit it. I have friends who are younger than you.”
Age was a touchy subject. Darcia had turned forty over the summer, and although she dyed her hair the color of her judge’s robe, she couldn’t hide the crows’ feet around her eyes, or the extra ten pounds on her hips.
Claire loved her despite her wrinkles, muffin top, and temperament. And recently, with the death of Elizabeth, Darcia had offered a much-needed shoulder to cry on.
She wondered who would do that for Barnes. He had lost a big part of who he was, and coming to terms with that would be no small feat. He probably wouldn’t be able to do it alone, and even with help it probably wouldn’t happen anytime soon. But she had to try to be there for him. She would be there.
She owed at least that much to Elizabeth.
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