After that, he didn’t speak another word.
The floor was abandoned in favor of the bed’s comfort. Chloe had always known of Rory’s strength. She had watched him lift and carry his father up a long flight of stairs, but it was still amazing when he stood up from the floor with her weight suspended in his arms and not giving so much as a grunt.
It was all in the configuration of tendons, she told herself. She could go to the gym and lift weights for a dozen years, but she would never have that kind of strength in her body. Her weaker joints would not allow it.
The sense of helplessness that being lifted into the air engendered was at once terrifying and also arousing. In punishment for causing her new fear, she bit Rory on the shoulder. He rolled, pulling her on top of him. The invitation was plain and she accepted gladly. Down she slid, enveloping him, taking him all the way into her and stretching her legs out until their pelvises ground together, increasing the pressure on her abdomen and in turn upon Rory.
Chloe laughed, this time breathlessly, and asked: “Did you ever name it?”
“It?” he asked.
“You membrum virile,” she said, contracting her inner muscles. “The one-eyed cyclops, the—”
“I follow you. I thought that you and Richard had been formally introduced.” He stopped speaking as she contracted her muscles again.
She laughed. “I’m afraid that he always left so hurriedly that I didn’t catch the name.”
“Well, he’s in no hurry tonight. At least, he wasn’t until just a couple of minutes ago.”
“But now?”
“Now I think that perhaps I had better be on top. You obviously don’t have the knack of this yet. We really do fit together if you do it right.”
“Rory!” But she didn’t fight when he rolled her under him and wrapped his fists in her hair.
“Did you know that the female pudenda used to be called Abraham’s bosom?” he asked as he rocked his hips against her, reversing the roles of torturer and victim.
“I thought you said his name was Richard.”
“Will you be upset if I call you Richard’s bosom?”
Chloe signed and lifted her hips. “Probably not if you whisper it in my ear, but at this point I think it would be better to just let Richard speak for himself.”
“Hell, yes! I couldn’t agree more. You want poetry or prose? Richard does both equally well.”
“Lyrical is nice, but let’s start with the short words—the four-letter kind.” She spread her hands over his flank and squeezed lightly. He shivered.
“If we start there it will end there,” he warned. “He doesn’t mix his messages.”
“Don’t worry. You’re young. We’ll just practice until Richard gets it right.”
Rory answered with his body. He slid up her belly until their loins met, proving that they did indeed fit together. He was showing off, the way he kept himself suspended above her on forearms the whole time, but she allowed it since he brought with him the fire she needed to burn off the last of her bitterness and distrust.
His body said what he had not been able to confess with words. He’d missed and wanted her. He trusted her, too—at least as much as he trusted anyone—and he had hope for their future. Surely this was what he meant. He wouldn’t have come to her otherwise.
Granny Claire might have been right. It was possible that Chloe could be happy—and safe—with Rory. Love, which would come with time, could be enough.
A man must serve his time in every trade
Save censure—Critics come all ready made.
—Lord Byron
Chapter Sixteen
The morning was hot and wet, washed over with lingering rain and uneasiness. That afternoon, she and Rory were to take MacGregor to his Nancy. But first there was something else they had to do. The dead would have to wait on the living.
Chloe woke first and slipped from her bed as quietly as she was able. It didn’t really matter if Rory woke up, but she wasn’t ready to face him in the light of morning when some conversation would be required. She didn’t want to face him with her dreams so close that they all but whispered in her ear.
Clothes were gathered before she glided into the bathroom to wash and dress. She wrote a note to leave on the bedside table telling Rory that she had to go into town for some film and wouldn’t be back until three o’clock.
The note was a lie, of course. It was also a test, a way of discovering what he knew and therefore what she should do. If he didn’t take the bait, then he was probably innocent. Chloe figured that if he was aware of what was in that tomb, then he needed to act now, while the river was in spate and would carry away the body. At least, that was what she would do if she wanted to get rid of a corpse—and she was fairly certain that Rory would want the body gone. He didn’t have any of MacGregor’s sentimentality, and he understood how the police worked.
In a way, she hoped that he wasn’t ignorant of what had happened. If he didn’t know what had occurred, then she would either have to leave him in darkness, with an unexploded bomb ticking away in tomb forty-six, or she would have to tell him—maybe even prove—the nightmare of what had really happened to Claude Patrick.
But if he did know, if he had in fact participated in—or, if her dream was correct, even perpetrated Claude’s demise . . . Well, she still didn’t know what she would do. If she could stay. That might be the one line that she could not cross.
Chloe stopped for some breakfast, eating quickly but thoroughly since she didn’t know when she would be back for another meal. Then, taking a blanket from the trunk of her car, she went to the cemetery.
It was an effort to climb the gate of the necropolis, but the vines aided her both with handholds and with cushioning from the spikes. It would have been easier to steal the keys from MacGregor’s desk, but she didn’t want any reason for Rory to be alerted to her presence in the cemetery.
She walked slowly, strolling through the disappearing park and appreciating the monuments for a last time. She was fairly certain that Rory would not want her to finish the job of cataloging the tombs, and she could understand why. After all, once the cemetery was added to the database—assuming that the database was actually secure, something that Chloe had come to doubt—then there would be a record, an official listing of the cemetery at Riverview.
Bell was like a dog with a bone. Once Claude Patrick’s manhunt wore down and there were still no clues to his whereabouts, that ambitious lawman might make the connection between one illegal burial and the other missing man. And he might start making enquires of other agencies.
It was only a slim chance that they would think to access this database—very few people knew of it—but with Isaac having been found in the slave cemetery, there was always the chance of someone looking up cemeteries and finding that Riverview had two.
And as for keeping copies of the cemetery photos with Digital Memories, that wasn’t an option either. If the police obtained a search warrant or subpoenaed Roland, he would have no choice but to turn over the photos.
Of course, if Claude were to disappear—really disappear—that would take care of any criminal charges ever being leveled against MacGregor or Rory. But it would still not prevent some eager beaver like Sheriff Bell from eventually electronically prying into Riverview out of sheer nosiness and revealing its contents to the world. And there was always that pesky lingering DNA evidence to worry about. It wasn’t likely that they would open up every tomb and search out every set of bones for testing, but still . . . statistical safety had been beaten out by fate more than once.
Chloe found a concealed spot on the far side of Edana and Calvin’s tomb and spread her blanket over the damp oak leaves. She lay down on her back and settled in to wait.
She smiled at the tomb’s decoration looming over her. It really was overbuilt by a Gothic imagination on steroids. It looked like a castle from a fairy tale—one of the darker tales, to be sure—but it was still beautiful in an otherworldly
way. All of Riverview was this way. She would miss it if she had to leave.
She closed her eyes and waited. She half expected to hear from Granny Claire, but the old lady stayed away. Maybe she could only visit when there was a storm. That was one more thing that Chloe needed to know about.
It wasn’t too many minutes later that she heard footsteps coming down the path. As she had half expected, she heard keys scraping in the mausoleum’s lock and the door being pushed open. Someone went inside.
She waited, breath held, to hear if the shoddy brick wall was battered by a mallet, but there was nothing. Just the normal silence filled with the droning of bees.
Chloe sat up. Finally decided and unable to wait, she rose to her feet and went to meet Rory.
Rory stepped back out into the daylight and was not at all surprised to see Chloe waiting for him. He turned and locked the tomb door, giving himself another moment before speaking.
When he again faced her, she looked briefly at his empty hands and then nodded once.
“I wondered if you would have a pick or mallet.” Her voice was quiet and neutral, as was her expression.
“Not in daylight. I . . . So you guessed after all,” he said, feeling suddenly bleak.
“Yes.”
Rory looked up at the bower overhead. Everything was so peaceful. It didn’t seem possible that his nightmare had finally happened and that this place would soon be invaded by outsiders. His father would be rolling in his grave—supposing he was ever permitted to be interred in one.
“So what now?” he asked finally. It took an effort not to rub at his chest, so heavy was the ache behind his sternum.
“Nothing.”
Rory lowered his gaze to his lover’s face and stared, disbelieving.
“Nothing?” he asked, not persuaded that his ears had heard correctly.
“I’ve thought about it from every angle. Bottom line, I promised your dad that I wouldn’t say anything about Claude, you, or this cemetery. In fact, his last words to me were that I should look after you and see that you didn’t move Claude.”
“You knew even then?” he asked, stunned and disoriented.
“No. I didn’t understand what he meant. I didn’t know for certain until yesterday when I came out to the tomb, but . . .” She trailed off.
“But you knew something was wrong? You’ve sensed it all along.”
She nodded, eyes watchful.
“My Granny Claire says I have the Sight, an affinity for the dead. Maybe I do. It certainly runs in our family. I kept having these dreams.”
He digested this, uncertain if he could believe this.
“I didn’t know what MacGregor had done until after you found Isaac’s body. He told me then.” Rory shrugged, unable to explain his actions. “He was terribly sorry that you found the body—that you were upset. I . . . I am damned sorry too. We never meant for you to get messed up in this.”
“I know. MacGregor said that when we were at the hospital.”
“You were hoping that Isaac killed Claude and MacGregor only killed Isaac in retaliation, weren’t you?”
She shook her head.
“That was one possibility that never occurred to me. . . . I wonder why? I think MacGregor could have done something like that.”
“It could have happened that way. MacGregor never said for sure.”
“Yes, it could have happened like that,” she said kindly. But she didn’t believe that, and he knew better.
Chloe suddenly offered her hand. It was a tentative gesture, her palm turned up with fingers curved inward, as though she were uncertain that he would want to touch her and was prepared to curl up and withdraw the offer at any sign of hostility.
Rory stared at her extended hand, also uncertain of what to do. It seemed impossible that she could want to touch him, that she wasn’t reviling him for being a liar and the son of a murderer. Or worse. Among the thoughts that hadn’t occurred to her was that he might have committed the murders himself. In some ways, that made more sense than suspecting his father. MacGregor was old and had a bad heart. Hauling around a bunch of bodies should have been beyond him.
“I don’t know what to say,” he confessed. “I want you too much to know what is best to do.”
Chloe took a slow breath and then said deliberately: “I think that right now we should take your father to his Nancy. It would be wisest to move Claude, but I don’t think we will. In spite of what he and Isaac tried to do, MacGregor wanted him here with family. If there is never any record of it, we can just let the cemetery grow over and forget about doing anything with the photographs. In five years, there won’t be a single trace of it visible, not even from the air. And by then the mortar will have aged enough that no one will ever guess it wasn’t original . . . if we decide to open the cemetery back up again some day.”
Her words were a gift, perhaps the most precious Rory would ever receive.
He exhaled and took her hand. His own fingers were trembling with the aftermath of emotion—with relief. He squeezed gently as he laced their fingers.
“What about Roland?”
“You’ll just have to hire me to work on your catalogue if he sacks me—and he probably will when I tell him that I think I’m done with graveyards.”
“It’s a deal.” Rory took a breath, feeling mal-adroit but also compelled to confess. “This is one hell of a time to tell you this, but I love you. I would have told you before, but I couldn’t, not under the circumstances. I didn’t let myself think about it—not when I wasn’t being honest with you and didn’t know what would happen.”
Chloe nodded and smiled a little. “I love you, too, you know. That’s still surprising.”
“You must love me. No one who wasn’t completely over the moon would do anything this outrageous.” He laughed a little. Relief made him giddy.
“No? Not even a Patrick?”
Rory shook his head. “We weren’t all that insane. MacGregor was a throwback.”
It was Chloe’s turn to laugh.
“Yes, you were all insane. I’ve been reading the diaries. Your relatives were absolutely nuts. All of them. And that’s okay. I have some things to tell you about my family too. For starters, I have a grandmother who is a real, live witch. And not a nice one either.” She looked dead serious as she said this.
“A witch?” He found this as hard to believe as her belief in divination through dreams. It sounded a bit mad. But perhaps only a crazy woman would be able to know the truth and to love him.
“You think I’m kidding?”
“No, but we can talk about it another day. I’m more interested in us. What do you think we should do now? About being in love, I mean,” he asked, dropping an arm over her shoulders and pulling her against him. He was awed and humbled. This should never have happened. He had truly believed that he would never hold her in his arms again.
“I don’t know. This happened awfully fast,” she answered, wrapping her arms about his waist and laying her cheek against his shoulder. She sighed. “Let’s just take care of business as it comes, hang around for the summer, shoot pictures for your catalogue and see what happens in the fall?”
Rory nodded and then buried his face in her hair. Hr breathed deeply, loving the scent.
“Okay. We’ll just wait and see what happens.” But he was lying again. He knew what he wanted and would be working toward his goal. It was Chloe’s fault if she ended up legally tied to him. She should know better than to trust him.
Epilogue
That night Chloe dreamed. At first she wasn’t aware that she slumbered. Granny Claire’s voice was as clear as the telephone as it shrilled in her ear, demanding her attention as she swayed back and forth in the old rocking chair in Rory’s bedroom.
“So, you figured it out. But are you going to admit what you know? Of course not,” the voice nagged. “You’re in love and would rather trust yourself to a murderer than face up to what the Sight has shown you. How am I ever going to train you if
you remain deliberately obtuse?”
“You’re not training me. Now go away. It’s the middle of the night,” Chloe muttered. Then, annoyed: “And what do you mean I’d rather trust myself to a murderer? MacGregor’s dead. It doesn’t matter if I trusted him. Anyway, he would never have hurt me.”
“Stupid girl. I’m not talking about MacGregor. Like all the rest, he’s gone and no more important than anyone else whose name was writ on water.”
Chloe’s eyes opened. Angered, she rose quickly. It was only when she got up from the rocking chair and saw her body still snoozing in the bed that she realized she wasn’t truly awake.
“I said I’m not talking about MacGregor.” The tone was louder and crueler. Chloe turned toward her angry grandmother, but before she could respond another voice answered this accusation. It offered a fair imitation of the good witch, Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz.
“Be gone, evil one, before someone drops a house on you too,” the poisonously sweet voice ululated. “I cast you out, unclean spirit!” Something that looked like raindrops flew through the air and landed on the old lady with a fizzing hiss that made Granny Claire shriek and twirl about.
“Fool—you won’t get anywhere without me,” the woman swore as she spun, but the fizzing sound grew stronger and whorls of smoke began to rise from her body. Chloe watched in horrified fascination as the head began to inflate. Granny Claire’s face grimaced as it stretched to twice its natural size and then popped like a balloon. The old lady was gone, leaving only a faint whiff of sulfur in the air.
“Wow. That’s a neat trick. Was that holy water?” Chloe asked.
“Of a sort,” she heard her own voice reply, and she turned toward the dresser where another Chloe stood. This one was dressed in an enormous pink ball-gown and wore a gold and crystal crown, just like Glinda. She laid her scepter on the dresser and tugged at the bodice of her gown. “Hello. I thought it was time that we meet formally.”
Not knowing what else to say, Chloe said hello back.
“Do you know who I am?” the second Chloe asked, and when Chloe didn’t reply, her doppelganger said: “I’m the shadow you. The Other. The Knowing. The Sight. I’d like to be friends, but you’ll have to be a little patient with me as I’m only just waking up. Sorry about your grandma disturbing your sleep. I’ll be more diligent from now on.”
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