“Well, you’ll have ample opportunity to repay the debt to my father,” Rory told her. Then he added to his sire: “Sit down, before you fall down.”
Chloe wasn’t so far gone that she misunderstood what he was saying about her debt. “You aren’t going to say anything to the sheriff about the family cemetery?” she asked MacGregor.
The two men stared at one another and then at her.
“No. We’re not,” Rory answered.
Chloe gazed at him, and for one instant wondered if the situation had been different—if one of them had found the body instead of her—would Isaac have been reburied and the police never called at all? That would certainly be the easiest thing for them. Rory’s voice was soft, and his actions had been almost sweet, but the sugarcoating did nothing to hide the steel will underneath. He was waiting for her answer to the unspoken plea.
“I understand,” she whispered. “There’s no need to say anything, is there? The . . . the body wasn’t anywhere near the family cemetery. It can have no bearing on the investigation.”
“No, it wasn’t anywhere near the other cemetery.”
“But the shovel and crowbar? They came from Botanics.” She went slowly, wanting this all to make sense.
“Probably.”
“And he was going to . . .”
“Obviously, he was going to rob the cemetery—just as MacGregor feared. Possibly he brought them with him. Or he might have taken them from the nursery. It would explain the break-in.”
Rory and his father again exchanged a look she couldn’t read.
“He was going to rob the slave cemetery.”
“So it would appear.”
Chloe tried to swallow this. It wasn’t going down smoothly. Why rob the slave cemetery? There was nothing there.
“And Claude stopped him?” Her brain tried on this concept, but in its damaged state, the idea didn’t fit quite right. Her reading of Claude’s character said that he was much more likely to have suggested that they both go and rob the family’s memento mori. There wasn’t enough of value in that poorer boneyard to make it worthwhile. She knew that, and they must have known it as well if they had any contact with the funerary thieves. They wouldn’t want those rotting old stones, and there wouldn’t be anything buried with the bodies. The only place that would interest the funerary brokers to the tune of twenty thousand dollars was in the family cemetery.
But perhaps she was simply so prejudiced against the missing Claude that she was misjudging his character. Maybe he actually shared the Patrick obsessive reverence for the dead. They had never really spoken together because of Chloe’s fear of Isaac Runyon. She should accept MacGregor’s and Rory’s judgment about their kinsman. Shouldn’t she?
“Apparently he did stop him,” Rory answered again. “Permanently.”
That part was indisputable.
“And then Claude just panicked? He took his car and ran away?” She turned to look at MacGregor. His gray face showed neither contradiction nor confirmation of her question.
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asked her on an odd note of pleading.
“And when they find Claude?” Chloe asked him softly. “What will happen then?”
MacGregor looked over at his son.
“If they find Claude,” Rory said, “then they’ll know exactly what happened.”
“If?”
“I think Claude is hidden away somewhere. I doubt that Sheriff Bell will ever find him.”
Hidden. Where the sheriff would never find him.
Chloe began to shiver beneath her afghan. She turned her eyes toward the window. She couldn’t bear the weight of the combined Patrick gazes. It seemed safer to stare into the night.
“Okay, I won’t say anything about the other cemetery either,” she whispered, unhappily committing herself to the collusion. “I don’t trust Bell at all.”
“Let me help you up to bed.” Rory’s hands were gentle as he raised her to her feet, and for a brief moment she allowed herself to lean into his strength and warmth.
It might have been her imagination longing for comfort, but it seemed to her that he dropped a kiss into her tangled hair and breathed a soft thank you.
Or maybe it was thank God.
The day which we fear as our last
is but the birthday of eternity.
—Seneca
Chapter Eight
Somehow Chloe managed to get through her interview with the police on the morning following the murder without breaking a sweat or giving anything away. It helped that the room where she was interviewed was air-conditioned to the point of causing frostbite, and that Rory and MacGregor were omnipresent and prepared to act as watchdogs against any less-than-gentle questioning by Sheriff Bell—though at moments, she honestly wondered if Rory was watching her more closely than the police.
This was an odd notion, but when she had been shown some of the crime scene photos, particularly the one with the pistol in it, Rory had all but pressed noses with her as he waited for her reaction. Maybe, after her hysterics the night before, he had been expecting her to faint.
Of course, she didn’t swoon. Didn’t even come conveniently close. For once in her life, Chloe was happy for the lingering vestiges of male chauvinism that haunted Riverview and its environs. She greatly appreciated the fact that Sheriff Bell obviously believed that old chestnut about females being fragile flowers and rather too inattentive to their surroundings to recall any useful details in moments of distress. This meant that he did not press her very hard when she pleaded faulty memory about certain facts and events and refused to look at any other photographs of the dead man because it upset her.
The excuse of a temporary memory failure wasn’t a complete lie. The details about the hours right after finding the body were a little hazy because they had gotten mixed up with her nightmare. However, the actual physical state of the corpse was branded into her brain. Remembering things—images seen through her camera—was part of her job.
And if she needed her memory refreshed, she had better means than the poor-quality police photos at hand to do it. The digital camera in her bag had a built-in display and could zoom in up to a 3 × enlargement of the photo. And the images would be even clearer once loaded onto the computer. If she loaded it onto the portable. Chloe was pretty certain that she had disabled the automatic backup software that would send her backlog of photos to the server at work when she returned to the office and docked the portable with the computer in the office. But, in this case, pretty certain wasn’t certain enough.
The interview wasn’t a long one, as no one had anything new to add to the previous day’s statements, and MacGregor wasn’t encouraging anyone to linger for coffee. Chloe was soon allowed to return to bed and sleep around the clock without interruption.
Now it was a new morning and she was still in her room, alone with her camera and a guilty conscience. Chloe slumped against her pillows and groaned at the thought of what was sitting in her bags.
Though she knew that everyone, from her police-friendly father right down to the less than stellar-intentioned Sheriff Bell, would say that she was wrong to hold back her own photographs of the crime scene, she did not mention them to either the police or the Patricks. She had taken the stick from the camera before going to bed that night and had put it away in a waterproof pouch where it would not get damaged or lost. It was a cowardly impulse, but she would have liked to have been rid of the horrid thing altogether. However, her conscience, which would not allow her to produce the documentary film, would not let her destroy it either.
For a time, in the dark stretches of the night when she had lain awake in a tranquilized haze trying to come to terms with what had happened, she toyed with printing out selected images onto photographic paper and bringing the sheriff the crime-scene photographs by themselves.
But once the police had those prints, they were probably just bright enough to ask for the original source material as well, and then she’d have to explain about the di
gital camera and the computer—where the family cemetery photos had been uploaded before she erased and reused the memory sticks—and she had promised MacGregor—twice—that she would never tell a soul about his cemetery.
“Damn,” she muttered.
There was probably a way to selectively delete photos from the computer without leaving obvious gaps in the memory, but she wasn’t at all sure how to completely get rid of all traces of the photos short of wiping the disk. And even if she reformatted the whole thing, she wasn’t certain that the images would be completely lost. She’d heard about computer experts being able to retrieve stuff from erased hard-drives.
And even if she hadn’t twice made that promise of secrecy, Chloe wasn’t certain that she would give up her film to Sheriff Bell anyway. She was still in some weird state of shock, but she was thinking clearly enough to know exactly what would happen if she revealed the family cemetery to this particular police force. Not mincing words, Bell was ambitious scum who couldn’t keep his mouth shut—and he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to look important in the world’s eyes. She was convinced that consideration for the Patrick family, or its treasures, would never sway him from seeking fame.
Indeed, since he seemed to actually dislike the Patricks, revelation of their secrets would in point of fact look twice as attractive to him. He would probably call the tabloids—she felt it likely that he was the type who had their numbers taped to the drawer in his desk, and that he’d had them there for years just waiting for his big moment to come—and The Treasures of the Lost Cemetery of Riverview where Family Curse Strikes Grave-robber would be an overnight sensation in both the printed press and shortly after in the small screen.
Well, Sheriff Bell could just take his ambitions and get real intimate with them!
If word of the cemetery got out, by dawn of the next day, every grave robber and reporter with access to CNN or a radio would be on a plane for Virginia, making plans on how to pick over the bones of the living and dead Patricks, their preference of targets depending upon whether they were tomb raiders or paparazzi.
Perhaps worse still were the possible machinations of the politicians. Granny Claire was nuts about some things, but her views about the state government had always seemed very coherent and unflattering. Chloe wouldn’t put it past the state to try to step in and declare that Riverview was some sort of state historical treasure and seize the land from MacGregor. She was a little hazy on the rules about eminent domain, but there had been some recent cases that went against landowners, and it seemed that the avaricious politicians would find some way to profit from the situation. It was the nature of the beast to lust after wealth—and there were millions upon millions of dollars just sitting there at Riverview, unprotected except for that antler hedge, some thorny creepers, and one old gate.
Of course, the Patricks could sue for damages to their property, but the art in their cemetery was irreplaceable, and there probably wasn’t enough money in the entire state—never mind the county—to compensate the family monetarily for the damage that would be done.
The bizarre story—and injury from sensation-seeking reporters—could spill over into Rory’s business as well. They would find some way to link the break-in at Botanics to their story. Curse of Riverview they would call it, or something equally lurid.
And that, of course, was the least of the losses the Patricks would sustain. Seeing his family’s graveyard disturbed by trespassers and robbers would probably kill MacGregor.
MacGregor might kill someone else, too, before he would let them near his Nancy.
Chloe rubbed her forehead, liking the last thought least of all. The image of a lonely MacGregor sitting at his wife’s grave would not leave her. But there was another vision there as well—a berserker MacGregor, standing on Nancy’s tomb and swinging at reporters with a battle axe.
And what was there to weigh against these awful potential happenings? What argument would convince her conscience to go to the police with her unneeded film?
Well, there was the law of the land, which insisted that a man—even an evil grave robber—had the right to justice when his life had been taken by another individual. And it had been banged into her head by her parents, and by her present employer, that it was the duty of every citizen to assist the police in their work whenever possible.
Until this incident, she had always believed that this was true, wise, and a just policy—that rights or property should never be placed above the rights of people.
But now she was faced with a real-life conundrum, and she was discovering that this long-held belief wasn’t as absolute as she had imagined. She was stacking up Isaac Runyon’s lost life against MacGregor’s well-being—and, she had to be honest, the treasures of Riverview—and not coming down squarely on the side of disclosure, law and order.
She was on the side of justice perhaps, but not that of the law. In fact, she almost wished that the police hadn’t been called. That Rory had found the body and just covered it back up again.
“You don’t mean that,” she whispered, but her voice lacked conviction.
Things would be simpler if she could lay the matter before Roland Lachaise and ask his opinion of what to do, but there was no way that she could do this without betraying MacGregor’s trust. It was highly unlikely that Roland would take matters into his own hands and betray his friend’s secret cemetery to the police, but it was still a remote possibility and Chloe couldn’t risk it.
Anyway, there wasn’t any hope of ever convincing the world—outside of Granny Claire, perhaps—of the evil taint that had surrounded the dead man. And there was the crux of Chloe’s other problem. She had been pretending that everything was okay, that her dreams were simply about being stressed and that there were no bogeymen lurking in the closets of her brain. And who could blame her? To admit to the possibility of anything else was all but unthinkable. It would make her like Granny Claire, the most miserable and mean human being she had ever met. But to deny the nature of her dreams now would be an act of stupidity, and there was no one other than her grandmother she could talk to about this.
Chloe’s mind skipped back to another unpleasant memory. Granny Claire had been “helping” her curious granddaughter to “focus” her abilities. Unfortunately, her notion of the perfect place for concentration was a pitch-black basement full of things that rustled and squirmed. Chloe had screamed and screamed—at first in anger but then in fear—but her grandmother had not relented until a few minutes before her mother was set to return to the cottage. Chloe had been seven then. Of course, she was all grown up now, bigger and stronger than her grandmother. But even thinking about the old lady made gooseflesh break out on her skin.
Chloe took a gulp of coffee from the mug on her unexpected breakfast tray and stared out her bedroom window. The three-petaled trillium in the window box screened out most of the morning sun with its lacy pink petals. But Chloe knew that the day was advancing, seen or not, and that she needed to make some decisions.
If only her brain could lose its focus on this horrible event . . . but it simply kept returning to the same old problem and turning it over and over in her head, trying to make everything fit together in a single, neat solution. The brain and the gut battled endlessly. Instinct said one thing, societal conditioning another.
“Damn.” It was ridiculous to feel guilty for doing what was right, even if it wasn’t exactly legal, she assured herself. What could her photos possibly show the police that they didn’t see for themselves when they’d arrived on the scene just a little while later? Rory surely wouldn’t have touched anything once he saw the body—it wasn’t like there was any doubt about whether he should have rendered first aid to the corpse!
Nor was it as if she had photographed a monogrammed handkerchief with Claude’s name on it, or the murderer lurking in the bushes—if this even was murder. It was just barely possible that it had been an accident as MacGregor suggested. Not a hunting accident, but some other kind. Until the
pathologist made his report, they wouldn’t know for certain what had happened. The sheriff could have been wrong about the cause of death. Isaac’s body had been . . . Chloe swallowed hard. It had been gotten at by things. It would take an expert to sort the remains out.
Why couldn’t his death be an accident or at least self-defense? Maybe there hadn’t been a shotgun, just the handgun they found with the body. And maybe there had been a struggle over the gun and it had gone off, and then Claude had just panicked. . . .
Well, that was a little unlikely as a scenario. If one accidentally shot someone, the first step was nearly always to summon help, not to bury the victim. Of course, they were talking about Claude, who in Chloe’s opinion was only marginally entitled to the classification of human being. He might very well have shot someone and then run away in a panic.
But even with this rationalization, the scenario failed on another front. Isaac would have won any physical struggle against the smaller man. The weasel, Claude, would never have wrestled for the gun. He would have just turned tail and run if things had gotten sticky. He couldn’t have come up behind Isaac and surprised him. The cemetery was full of dried leaves that crackled when you stepped on them.
It was also ignoring the evidence of her own dream.
Chloe sighed. She knew what she needed to do. Somehow, she had to find the fortitude to load up those images on the computer and look at them. Once she was certain that they had no evidence in them, she could erase the images and forget about it.
Yes, that was all she needed to do, a small, routine act of some five minutes effort. That was all. And she just wouldn’t go anywhere near the Internet in case somehow the files were being saved in a backup program.
“No way,” she whispered, looking at her camera bag and shaking her head. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
Chloe shuddered. Looking at the images might be what she should do—but she simply couldn’t face it. Not yet. She would give herself another day for her brain to return to normal before asking it to look again at those scenes of violent death, or to make any major decisions about what she should do in the unlikely event that there was something in the photographs.
Writ on Water Page 15