Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

Then everyone drove to the veterans’ cemetery in the town of Bourne, half an hour away. It was a lushly landscaped nature preserve. There, they gave Sean a military burial. Four young army soldiers, in their dress blues, draped Sean’s casket with an American flag. As we carried the casket to the grave site, a few among the gathering saluted. Vets, they had to be.

One woman stood out from the other mourners. She was a hippieish woman in her thirties, wearing a busily colored fringed, crochet-knit shawl over a black dress. I’d noticed her before, at the church, sitting off by herself. I remembered the shawl. Now she was standing alone in the third ring of mourners around the grave. She didn’t look like she came from here. I couldn’t figure her out. My first thought was that she was a journalist, but then I ruled that out — she was dressed too nicely. I also had the strong feeling she’d been looking at me.

The brief burial service began, led by their local priest, who had silver hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Two servicemen, dressed in blues, took the flag off Sean’s casket and proceeded to fold it crisply and carefully. Each fold represented something. When they were finished, only the stars showed. One member of the honor guard presented the flag to Patty. He spoke the memorized line: “On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

Her eyes pooled with tears, which streamed down her face as she accepted the flag.

They fired three shots in the air. Then one of them pulled out a bugle and put it to his mouth. Taps issued from a boom box while he pretended to play the tune. Merlin and I and a couple of other guys saluted as the casket was lowered into the grave. I gave Patty a hug and then her kids, and then I backed away to let others greet her.

People drifted away. Merlin put a hand on my shoulder. “I thought he was in rehab.”

“He was for a while.”

Merlin fidgeted, then looked over at the grave site, where the casket had just been lowered into the ground. “What a great guy he was. Just — I mean, he never settled for the easy way out, did he? Always volunteered for the hard schools, wanted to be on point. The lead climber. The jumpmaster.”

“That was Sean,” I said. He’d always gravitated to the more dangerous jobs in training. Always volunteered to run the rifle range, which is a lousy job. When we did training jumps from the C-130, he was the guy who inspected the parachutes and the helmets and tugged at the straps before anyone could jump. It was a serious responsibility. Nobody wanted to do it but Sean.

“Sort of a badge-hunter,” Merlin said, “but he always wanted to be the number one guy in the stack.”

I nodded. In close-quarters battle, you didn’t want to be the first guy in.

The first guy in the stack was the one who got shot, if it was going to happen. When you’re walking through the mountains of Afghanistan, the first guy in line is the one who’s going to trigger a land mine. But Sean always volunteered to do it.

“Not to mention he saved my life,” I said.

“Yeah, there’s that.”

I sensed someone approaching, and I turned to see the hippie woman come up to me. “I liked what you said earlier,” she said.

“Are you a relative?” I asked. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Nick Heller.”

“Not a relative. And yeah, I know who you are.”

Up close her attire seemed less hippie, more boho — artsy, funky. Her shawl looked expensive. Designer, maybe. I noticed her unlined features, the irises that seemed to flicker between gray and brown. “Oh, yeah?” I said.

She gave me a long, measuring look as if she was making a decision. Finally, she said, “Can we talk?”

Montanaro’s was a large, roomy restaurant on Route 6 that was known to the locals for its excellent Italian food, its homemade pasta and fresh-baked bread, and the best pizza outside of New Haven, Connecticut. It was dismissed by summer visitors, who preferred the seafood shacks, which they considered more authentic, like outsider art. That was just fine with the locals.

We met in the parking lot. The day was chilly and raw, and it felt good to walk into the humid warmth of the restaurant. The place was deserted. It was in between lunch and dinner, but they were willing to let us just order soft drinks. After we were seated, I glanced at the menu, changed my mind, and ordered some fried calamari and rigatoni with vodka sauce. When she ordered a garden salad, I figured she’d stop at that, but she went on to add the lasagna al forno. So we were having lunch, this mystery woman and I. She had dark brown hair cut in a sort of shag, just touching her shoulders. She had a sharp nose and lively brown eyes, but she just missed being pretty. A slight rearrangement of her refined features and she would have been.

She took off her shawl. Underneath she was wearing a black crepe gathered midi dress. The heavy crepe material looked very high-end, like it was cut to fit her. She wore dark opaque stockings and black suede booties with chunky wooden heels. Diamond stud earrings and a single diamond pendant around her neck. The whole outfit looked Parisian, very free-spirited. I pay close attention to what women wear, not because I care about fashion but because I think women tell you a lot with what they choose to wear, much more than men do. This woman was artistically inclined, and wealthy, and unconventional.

“Okay,” she said, folding her hands on the table. Her nails were painted the color of a bruise. “My name is Susan Kimball. You’ve probably heard of my father, Conrad Kimball.”

“As in the Kimball Gallery at Harvard?”

“And the Kimball Wing of the National Gallery, and the Kimball School of Medicine, and on and on.”

“And Kimball Pharma.”

She arched her brows. “Exactly.”

The Kimball name was on countless buildings around the world and wings of museums. Conrad Kimball was a great philanthropist. He was also known to be a rapacious entrepreneur. I knew only the basics about the guy. The company he’d founded, Kimball Pharmaceutical, made the opioid drug Oxydone, the drug that Sean Lenehan had overdosed on.

The waitress brought a steaming loaf of crusty bread impaled by a steak knife. I cut a few pieces and offered the basket to Susan. She took a piece, and then I did.

“You didn’t know Sean, and you’re not related to him,” I said. “Nobody here knows you. So why are you here?”

“Because I knew you’d be here.”

I paused a moment, considered asking her how. Decided not to. “You could have emailed me.”

“You don’t have a website.”

“That’s true.”

“You’re also not listed anywhere. Neither is Heller Associates.”

“Also true.” My clients all get to me through word of mouth. I prefer that to advertising on the World Wide Web and putting a big target out there for bad guys to try to hack.

“You’re not on Facebook or Twitter, at least not under your name. But I heard about you. So I hired someone to find you.”

Another private investigator, no doubt. Well, I wasn’t in hiding either, so finding me wasn’t that impressive an achievement. “Well done,” I said. “What can I do for you, Susan?”

“You’re a, what? Private intelligence agent?”

“Something like that.”

“So, not a private investigator?”

“Not just.” I reached for another piece of bread. “So you showed up at the burial of someone you don’t know — is that, maybe, a little strange, considering where your family’s fortune comes from?”

“Or maybe it’s totally appropriate,” she said defiantly, her nostrils flaring.