“Oh, we’ve discussed it,” Samuels said. “Except that’s not quite right. She discussed and I listened. She thinks I played a part in getting Maitland killed, and she’s not entirely wrong.” He tried to smile and couldn’t quite make it. “But how were we to know, Ralph? Tell me that. It was a slam-dunk, wasn’t it? Looking back . . . knowing all we did . . . can you honestly say you would have done anything different?”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “I wouldn’t have arrested him in front of the whole fucking town, and I would have made sure he went into the courthouse by the back door. Come on, let’s go. We’re going to be late.”
MACY’S TELLS GIMBELS
July 25th
1
As it turned out, Holly did not fly business class, although she could have if she had opted for the 10:15 Delta flight, which would have put her in Cap City at 12:30. Because she wanted some extra time in Ohio, however, she booked an arduous three-stage trip on puddle-jumpers that would probably bounce her all over the uneasy July air. Cramped and not particularly pleasant, but bearable. What she found less bearable was the knowledge that she wouldn’t arrive in Flint City until six PM, and that was if all her arrangements worked out perfectly. The meeting at Attorney Gold’s office was scheduled for seven, and if there was one thing Holly hated above all others, it was being late for a scheduled appointment. Being late was the wrong way to get off on the right foot.
She packed her few things, checked out of the hotel, and drove the thirty miles to Regis. She went first to the house where Heath Holmes had been staying with his mother on his vacation. It was closed up, the windows boarded across, likely because vandals had been using them for target practice. On the lawn, which badly needed mowing, was a sign that read FOR SALE CONTACT FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF DAYTON.
Holly looked at the house, knew that the local kids would soon be whispering that it was haunted (if they weren’t already), and mused on the nature of tragedy. Like measles, mumps, or rubella, tragedy was contagious. Unlike those diseases, there was no vaccine. The death of Frank Peterson in Flint City had infected his unfortunate family and spread through the entire town. She doubted if that was quite the case in this suburban community, where fewer people had long-term ties, but the Holmes family was certainly gone; nothing left of them but this empty house.
She debated taking a photo of the boarded-up house with the FOR SALE sign in the foreground—a picture of sorrow and loss if there ever was one—and decided not to. Some of the people she was going to meet might understand, might feel those things, but most of them probably would not. To them it would just be a picture.
She drove from the Holmes residence to the Peaceful Rest Cemetery, on the outskirts of town. Here she found the family reunited: father, mother, and only son. There were no flowers, and the stone marking the resting place of Heath Holmes had been pushed over. She imagined the same thing might have happened to Terry Maitland’s stone. Sorrow was catching; so was anger. His was a small marker, nothing on it but the name, the dates, and a bit of dried scum that might have been the residue of a thrown egg. With some effort, she set it up again. She had no illusions that it would stay that way, but a person did what a person could.
“You didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Holmes, did you? You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She found some posies on a nearby grave, and borrowed a few to scatter on Heath’s. Picked flowers were a poor remembrance—they died—but better than nothing. “You’re stuck with it, though. Nobody here would ever believe the truth. I don’t think the people I’m going to meet tonight will believe it, either.”
She would try to convince them, just the same. A person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.
Holly looked around and saw a vault on a nearby low hill (in this part of Ohio, all the hills were low). She walked to it, gazed at the name chiseled in the granite over the lintel—GRAVES, how appropriate—and walked down the three stone steps. She peered inside at the stone benches, where one could sit and meditate on the Graves of yesteryear here entombed. Had the outsider hidden here after his filthy work was done? She didn’t believe so, because anyone—maybe even one of the vandals who had pushed over Heath Holmes’s stone—might wander over for a peek inside. Also, the sun would shine into the meditation area for an hour or two in the afternoons, giving it a bit of fugitive warmth. If the outsider was what she believed he was, he would prefer darkness. Not always, no, but for certain periods of time. Certain crucial periods. She hadn’t finished her research yet, but she was almost sure of that much. And something else: murder might be its life’s work, but sorrow was its food. Sorrow and anger.
No, it hadn’t taken its rest in this vault, but she believed it had been in this cemetery, perhaps even before the deaths of Mavis Holmes and her son. Holly thought (she knew it might only be a fancy) she could smell its presence. Brady Hartsfield had had that same smell about him, the stink of the unnatural. Bill had known it; the nurses who had cared for Hartsfield had known it, too, even though he was supposedly in a state of semi-catatonia.
She walked slowly to the little parking lot outside the cemetery gates with her bag banging against her hip. Her Prius waited alone in the sizzling summer heat. She walked past it, then turned a slow three-sixty, studying every aspect of the surrounding area. She was close to farm country—she could smell the fertilizer—but this was a transitional belt of industrial abandonment, ugly and barren. There would be no pictures of it in the Chamber of Commerce promotional brochures (assuming Regis had a Chamber of Commerce). There were no points of interest. There was nothing to attract the eye; it was repelled instead, as if the very earth was saying go away, there is nothing for you here, goodbye, don’t come again. Well, there was the cemetery, but few people would visit Peaceful Rest once winter came, and the north wind would freeze those few away after the briefest of visits to make their manners to the dead.
Yonder to the north were train tracks, but the rails were rusty and there were weeds growing up between the crossties. There was a long-deserted train station, its windows boarded up like those of the Holmes house. Beyond it, on a spur, stood two lonely boxcars, their wheels buried in vines. They looked as if they had been there since the Vietnam era. Near the deserted station were long-abandoned storage facilities and what she assumed were obsolete repair sheds. Beyond those, a broken factory stood hip-deep in sunflowers and bushes. A swastika had been spray-painted on crumbling pink bricks that had been red a long, long time ago. On one side of the highway that would take her back to town, a leaning billboard proclaimed ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART! CHOOSE LIFE! On the other side was a long low building with a sign on its roof reading SPE DY ROBO CAR WASH. In its empty parking lot was another sign, one she’d seen once already today: FOR SALE CONTACT FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF DAYTON.
I think you were here. Not in the vault, but close by. Where you could smell tears when the wind was right. Where you could hear the laughter of the men or boys who pushed over Heath Holmes’s stone and then likely urinated on his grave.