Jeffery Deaver - A Maiden's Grave

This was the room where the animals had been killed.

Cold wind blows, it isn't kind.

Kielle grabbed Melanie's arm and pressed against her. Mrs. Harstrawn and Susan embraced the other girls, Susan gazing with raw hatred at whichever of the men happened to catch her eye. Jocylyn sobbed, the twins too. Beverly struggled for breath.

Eight gray birds with nowhere to go.

They huddled in a cluster on the cold, damp floor. A rat scurried away, his fur dull, like a piece of old meat. Then the door opened again. Melanie shielded her eyes against the glare.

He stood in the cold light of the doorway.

Short and thin.

Neither bald nor long-haired but with shaggy, dirty-blond strands framing a gaunt face. Unlike the others he wore only a T-shirt, on which was stenciled the name L. Handy. But to her he wasn't a Handy at all – and definitely not a Larry or a Lou. She thought immediately of the actor in the Kansas State Theater of the Deaf who had played Brutus in a recent production of Julius Caesar .

He pushed inside and carefully placed two heavy canvas bags on the floor. The door swung shut and once the ashen light vanished she could see his pale eyes and thin mouth.

Melanie saw Bear say, "Why… here, man? No fucking way out."

Then, as if she could hear perfectly, Brutus's words sounded clearly in her mind, the phantom voice that deaf people hear sometimes – a human voice yet with no real human sound. "It don't matter," he said slowly. "Nope. Don't matter at all."

Melanie was the one he looked at when he said this and it was to her that he offered a faint smile before he pointed to several rusty iron bars and ordered the other two men to wedge the doors tightly shut.

He'd never forgotten an anniversary in twenty-three years.

Here's a husband for you.

Arthur Potter folded back the paper surrounding the roses – effervescent flowers, orange and yellow – mostly open, the petals perfect, floppy, billowing. He smelled them. Marian's favorite. Vibrant colors. Never white or red.

The stoplight changed. He set the bouquet carefully on the seat beside him and accelerated through the intersection. His hand strayed to his belly, which pressed hard against his waistband. He screwed up his face. His belt was a barometer; it was hooked through the second-to-the-last hole in the worn leather. Diet on Monday, he told himself cheerfully. He'd be back in D.C. then, his cousin's fine cooking long digested, and could concentrate on counting grams of fat once more.

It was Linden 's fault. Let's see… last night she'd made corned beef, buttered potatoes, buttered cabbage, soda bread (butter optional, and he'd opted), lima beans, grilled tomatoes, chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. Linden was Marian's cousin, in the lineage of the McGillis forebear Sean, whose two sons, Eamon and Hardy, came over in steerage, married within the same year and whose wives gave birth to daughters, ten and eleven months, respectively, after the vows.

Arthur Potter, an only child orphaned at thirteen, son of only children, had enthusiastically adopted his wife's family and had spent years plotting the genealogy of the McGillises. Through elaborate correspondence (handwritten on fine stationery; he did not own a word processor) Potter kept up religiously, almost superstitiously, with the meanderings of the clan.

Congress Expressway west. Then south. Hands at ten to two, hunched forward, glasses perched on his pale fleshy nose, Potter cruised through working-class Chicago, the tenements and flats and two-family row houses lit by the midwestern summer light, pale in the overcast.

The quality of light in different cities, he thought. Arthur Potter had been around the world many times and had a huge stockpile of ideas for travel articles he would never write. Genealogy notes and memos for his job, from which he was soon to retire, would probably be the only Potter literary legacy.

Turn here, turn there. He drove automatically and somewhat carelessly. He was by nature impatient but had long ago overcome that vice, if a vice it was, and he never strayed above the posted limit.

Turning the rented Ford onto Austin Avenue, he glanced in his rear-view mirror and noticed the car.

The men were in a blue-gray sedan, as nondescript as could be. Two clean-shaven, clean-living, clean-conscienced young men, and they were tailing him.

They had Federal Agent printed on their foreheads.

Potter's heart thudded. "Damn," he muttered in his low baritone. Furious, he tugged at a jowl and then wrapped the green paper tighter around the flowers as if anticipating a high-speed chase. When he found the street he sought, however, and made the turn, he was doing seven cautious miles per hour. His wife's bouquet rolled against his ample thigh.

No, he didn't speed. His strategy was to decide that he was mistaken, that the car contained two businessmen on their way to sell computers or printing services and that it would turn off on its own route soon.

And leave me in peace.

But the car didn't do any such thing. The men maintained an innocuous distance, traveling at the identical, irritatingly slow speed of Potter's Ford.

He pulled into the familiar driveway and continued a lengthy distance, then rolled to a stop. Potter climbed out of his car quickly, cradling the flowers to his chest and waddling up the walk – defiantly, he hoped, daring the agents to stop him here.

How had they found him?

He'd been so clever. Parking the car three blocks from Linden 's apartment. Asking her not to answer the phone and to leave her machine off. The fifty-one-year-old woman, who'd be a Gypsy if she could have rearranged her genes (so different from Marian, despite their common blood), excitedly accepted his instructions. She was used to the inexplicable ways of her cousin-in-law. She believed his manner was somewhat dangerous, if not sinister, and he could hardly dissuade her of that, for so it was.

The agents parked their car behind Potter's and climbed out. He heard their footsteps on the gravel behind him.

They didn't hurry; they could find him anywhere, and they knew it. He could never get away.

I'm yours, you self-confident sons of bitches.

"Mr. Potter."

No, no, go away! Not today. Today is special. It's my wedding anniversary. Twenty-three years. When you're as old as I am you'll understand.

Leave. Me. Alone.

"Mr. Potter?"

The young men were interchangeable. He ignored one and thus he ignored both.

He walked over the lawn toward his wife. Marian, he thought, I'm sorry for this. I've brought trouble with me. I am sorry.

"Leave me alone," he whispered. And suddenly, as if they'd heard, both men stopped, these two somber men, in dark suits, with pale complexions. Potter knelt and laid the flowers on the grave. He began to peel back the green paper but he could still see the young men in the corner of his eye and he paused, squeezing his eyes closed and pressing his hands to his face.

He wasn't praying. Arthur Potter never prayed. He used to. Occasionally. Although his livelihood entitled him to some secret, personal superstitions he'd stopped praying thirteen years ago, the day Marian the living became Marian the dead, passing away in front of his joined fingertips as he happened to be in the middle of an elaborate negotiation with the God he had, all his life, more or less believed existed. The address he'd been sending his offers to turned out to be empty as a rusted can. He was neither surprised nor disillusioned. Still, he gave up praying.

Now, eyes closed, he lifted those same fingertips and gave a backhanded wave, warding off the indistinguishable men.

And federal agents, yes, but God-fearing agents perhaps (many of them were), they kept their distance.