Tess Gerritsen - Bloodstream

“This is Damaris Home of the Weekly Informer. I’d really, really like to talk to Noah Elliot, if I could, about that amazing act of heroism today in the classroom. The whole country wants to hear about it, Noah. I’ll be staying at the Lakeside B and B, and I could offer some financial compensation for your time, if that would make it more worth your while..

“She’s offering to pay you just to talk?” asked Amelia.

“Crazy, isn’t it? My mom says it’s a sure sign I shouldn’t talk to that lady.”

“But people do want to hear about it. About what you did.”

What I did.

He gave a shrug, feeling unworthy of all the praise, of Amelia’s praise, most of all. He sat listening as the call ended. The silence returned, interrupted only by the soft beep of the message reminder.

“You can open it now. If you want,” said Amelia.

He looked down at the gift. Though the wrapping was plain brown paper, he took great effort not to tear it, because it seemed uncouth to go ripping it open in front of her. Gingerly he peeled off the tape and folded back the wrapping.

The pocket knife was neither large nor impressive. He saw scratches on the handle, and realized it was not even new. She’d given him a used knife.

“Wow,” he managed to say with some measure of enthusiasm. “This is a nice one.”

“It belonged to my dad.” She added, quietly: “My real dad.” He looked up as the implication of those words sank in. “Jack is my stepfather.” She uttered that last word as though it were an object of disgust.

“Then J.D. and Eddie..

“They’re not my real brothers. They’re Jack’s boys.”

“I guess I wondered about it. They don’t look like you.”

“Thank god.”

Noah laughed. “Yeah, that’s not a family resemblance I’d want to have, either.”

“I’m not even allowed to talk about my real dad, because it makes Jack mad. He hates to be reminded there was someone else before him. But I want people to know. I want them to know Jack has nothing to do with who I am.”

Gently he placed the knife back in her hand. “I can’t take this, Amelia.”

“I want you to.”

“But it’s got to mean a lot to you, if it belonged to him.”

“That’s why I want you to have it.” She touched the bandage on her temple, as though pointing to the evidence of her debt to him. “You were the only one who did anything. The only one who didn’t run.”

He didn’t confess the humiliating truth: I wanted to run, but I was so terrified I couldn’t move my legs.

She looked up at the kitchen clock. With a start of panic, she abruptly stood up. “I didn’t know it was so late.”

He followed her to the front door. Amelia had just stepped out when headlights suddenly cut through the trees. She spun around to face them, and then seemed to freeze as the pickup truck roared up the driveway.

The door swung open and Jack Reid stepped out, whippet thin and scowling. “Get in the truck, Amelia,” he said.

“Jack, how did you-”

“Eddie told me you’d be here.”

“I was just about to walk home.”

“Get in the truck now.”

Instantly she clammed up and obediently slid into the passenger seat. Her stepfather was about to climb back behind the wheel when he met Noah’s gaze.

“She doesn’t hang out with boys,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

“She only came by to say hello,” said Noah angrily. “What’s the big deal?”

“The deal, boy, is that my daughter’s off limits.” He climbed in and slammed the door.

“She’s not even your daughter!” Noah yelled, but he knew the man couldn’t hear him over the revving engine.

As the truck swung around in the driveway, Noah caught one last glimpse of Amelia’s profile, framed by the passenger window, her terrified gaze focused straight ahead.

The first snowflakes spiraled down through the bare branches and gently dusted the excavation site. Lucy Overlock glanced up at the sky and said, “This snow’s going to stop, isn’t it? It has to stop, or it’ll obscure everything.”

“It’s already melting,” said Lincoln. He sniffed the air and knew, by some instinct developed during a lifetime in these woods, that the Snow would not last long. These flakes were merely a whispered warning, deceptively gentle, of the wintry months to come. He did not mind the snow, did not even resent all the inconveniences that came With it, the shoveling, the plowing out, the nights without power When the lines went down from the weight of it. It was the darkness he disliked. Darkness fell so early these days. Already daylight was fading, and the trees were featureless black slashes against the sky.

“Well, we might as well pack it up for the day,” said Lucy. ‘And hope it’s not buried under a foot of snow by tomorrow.”

Now that the bones were no longer of interest to the police, Lucy and her grad students had assumed the responsibility of protecting the dig. The two students pulled a tarp over the excavation site and staked it in place. It was a futile precaution; a marauding raccoon could rip it away with one slash of its claws.

“When will you finish here?” asked Lincoln.

“I’d like to take several weeks,” said Lucy. “But with the weather turning bad, we’ll have to rush. One hard freeze, and that’s it for the season.”

Headlights flickered through the trees. Lincoln saw that another vehicle had pulled into Rachel Sorkin’s driveway.

He tramped back through the woods, toward the house. In the last few days, the front yard had become a parking lot. Next to Lincoln’s vehicle was Lucy Overlock’s Jeep and a beat-up Honda, which he assumed belonged to her grad student.

At the far end of the driveway, parked under the trees, was yet another vehicle-a dark blue Volvo. He recognized it, and he crossed the yard to the drivers side.

The window hummed open an inch. “Lincoln,” the woman said.

“Evening, Judge Keating."

“You have time to talk?” He heard the locks click open.

Lincoln circled to the passenger side and slid in, shutting the door. They sat for a moment, cocooned in silence.

“Have they found anything else?” she asked. She didn’t look at him but gazed straight ahead, her eyes focused somewhere among the trees. In the car’s gloom, she seemed younger than her sixty-six years, the lines in her face fading to uniform smoothness. Younger and not so formidable.

“There were only the two skeletons,” said Lincoln.

“Both were children?”

“Yes. Dr. Overlock estimates their ages at around nine or ten years old.”

“Not a natural death?”

“No. Both deaths were violent.”

There was a long pause. “And when did this happen?”

“That’s not so easy to determine. All they have to go on are some artifacts found with the remains. They’ve dug up some buttons, a coffin handle. Dr.

Overlock thinks it’s probably part of a family cemetery."

She took her time absorbing this information. Her next question came out softly tentative: “So the remains are quite old?”

“A hundred years, more or less.”

She released a deep breath. Was it Lincoln’s imagination or did the tension suddenly melt from her silhouette? She seemed to fail almost limp with relief, her head tilting back against the neck rest. “A hundred years,” she said. “Then it’s nothing to worry about. It’s not from-”

“No. It’s unrelated.”

She gazed ahead, at the congealing darkness. “Still, it’s such a strange coincidence, isn’t it? That very same part of the lake…“ She paused. “I wonder if it happened in the fall.”

“People die every day, Judge Keating. A century’s worth of skeletons-they all have to be buried somewhere.”