Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

Stan Ballard thought, This is insane. I’m insane. What was I thinking?

He stood just outside the museum, wreathed in fog. For one more moment he thought about leaving, then opened the door.

One by one the snakes slithered in, and Jon Nunn found himself looking at each of them as if he were trying to pick a face from a line of mug shots. There was Justine Olegard, dressed in black, with a single strand of white pearls and spiked heels, but otherwise quite somber in her appearance. She was talking to two people he didn’t know. Perhaps she knew them. Perhaps she didn’t. It wouldn’t matter to Justine. She was used to glad-handing strangers, talking up the museum, angling for a donation. It wouldn’t surprise him if she managed to pass the cup a little even tonight. Something in Justine never quite turned off. She was like a candle that never sputtered out, though he’d never been able to figure out exactly what her light revealed.

Suddenly, as if summoned, Justine broke away from the two people. She’d probably gotten the message that they were of limited means, or indifferent to art, or had sunk their money into some hospital wing that bore their names and would thus not be making a contribution to the McFall. Whatever it was, it had caused Justine abruptly to lose interest.

Nunn glanced in the other direction, to where he could see Peter Heusen uncomfortably flanked by his niece and nephew, Rosemary’s two children. Rosemary had been convicted when they were still young, and Nunn wondered how they’d fared beneath the burden of having their mother executed for the murder of their father. He couldn’t imagine their uncle providing solace. Something about Peter Heusen added little knifepoints to the air. It was as if he made a tiny slit in everyone he met, which no doubt explained why Ben and Leila looked so uneasy at the moment, both of them glancing about in a way that showed just how quickly they wanted to get away from their uncle. There was something icy in the way they stood a little too far away from him for actual conversation, both quite stiff, though only Ben had his arms folded, the sure sign that he felt himself under attack. Leila’s attitude was just as wary, it seemed to Nunn, so that she appeared less enclosed within a family circle than trapped in a steadily closing vise.

“Hello, Nunn.”

Nunn turned, surprised to find Stan Ballard standing beside him.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” Nunn said.

“Well, a man has to be careful, don’t you think?”

“Careful about what?”

“Leaving his wife on the arm of her ex-husband,” Stan answered. “Old fires sometimes give off new sparks, right?”

Nunn shrugged.

Stan glanced around the room. “You must really be in your element, Nunn.”

“In what way?”

“Oh, you know, everyone gathered together in one place. All the suspects in the parlor.”

“Suspects?”

“Of murder most foul.” Stan smiled. “Don’t expect me to believe you’re not thinking of Rosemary’s case.”

Of course Nunn had been thinking of nothing but the murder since his arrival at the museum. He’d never been able to get it out of his mind-it had spread over his life like a stain, and even now he could feel that stain still spreading. He thought of the way those old Cold War films used to show the red tide of Communism sweeping over Europe and Asia. Rosemary’s crime and punishment was like that, he thought, a force that had engulfed his life.

“You must be reviewing the whole thing,” Stan said lightly, so that Nunn thought he was being vaguely mocked, or if not that, then reduced to a prissy little parlor-mystery stereotype, or worse, a rumpled gumshoe going over yellowing case files while his life trickled away in futile reenactments and baseless surmises. He was thinking that neither of these unflattering visions of himself was wholly inaccurate, as he watched Belle and Don McGuire arrive. Belle as beautiful as ever, the perfect California girl, Don every inch the thuggish ex-con.

“So what are you thinking, Detective?” Stan asked with a laugh.

“Actually I was thinking that that guy there once beat the hell out of Christopher Thomas.” It had come out at the trial, and briefly at the time Nunn had wondered if Don had been in some way connected to Christopher Thomas’s murder.

Stan’s gaze shifted over to the man Nunn indicated. “Who’s the girl on his arm?”

“That’s his wife, Belle,” Nunn answered. “Rosemary tried very hard to help her rise in the art world here.”

“And you think the husband might have felt that their relationship was a little too close?” Stan asked.

Nunn shook his head. “Who knows?” he answered impatiently, now tired of the little game Stan was still playing with him.

“The Shadow knows,” Stan answered with a laugh. “But the question remains.”

“What question?”

Stan’s smile slithered into place. “Who is the Shadow?”

With that, Stan stepped away, then walked over to Sarah, took her arm, and placed it in his, a gesture of possession Nunn knew he was clearly meant to see, and one that Sarah just as clearly resented. As well she should, he thought, since it was as crude as a prospector staking a claim.

Still, he found Sarah’s ultimate acceptance of the gesture somewhat painful, so that he turned from the scene and fixed his attention on Haile Patchett, who caught his eye and smiled. He’d wondered how much of anything she’d told him the other day was true.

Now in the museum she was drifting from place to place, sometimes stopping for conversation but clearly uninterested in engaging anyone for long. Something about her movements was odd, Nunn thought, purposeful, like a cat in an unfamiliar room, sniffing here, there, everywhere. Haile had always been something of a prowler, of course. Rosemary had certainly detested her, and for a moment Nunn could almost feel Rosemary at his side, watching with the same odd suspicion as Haile sauntered about. The tingling sense of Rosemary’s presence beside him was strange, but then that was the way it worked with a haunting case: it was like a body that never cooled.

And Rosemary’s never had.

The Shadow knows .

This time it was Rosemary’s voice, rather than Stan’s, and Jon felt an odd quiver because he had heard it so distinctly, a whisper, or perhaps a hiss, Rosemary’s angry ghost.

For a moment, he surveyed the “shadows” that surrounded him and it occurred to him that Stan, arrogant bastard that he was, had been right. Jon had come to this service not to remember Rosemary in death but to return her to his life, not to memorialize but to resurrect her. Perhaps all the debts he’d incurred in pursuit of her were now demanding to be paid no less adamantly than Rosemary’s ghost had suddenly demanded to be heard.

Without realizing it, he suddenly whispered her name: Rosemary .

In his imagination, all movement abruptly stopped, and slowly, as if controlled by invisible strings, each head turned to face him: Stan, Haile, Justine, Tony, Sarah, Belle, Don, even Rosemary’s own children, all of them now peering at him coldly, with their lips tightly sealed.

The door of Justine’s office opened with a loud click, but nobody was around to hear it. An attendant was guarding the roped-off ramp to the lower exhibit galleries, but Haile had gotten rid of him by telling him a locked car had its lights on in the parking lot-having made sure on her way in that there was a locked car with its lights on. By the time the attendant checked out the car for a license number, came in, went upstairs, and found the owner, she hoped to be done here and gone.