Page 9 of The Vanished

She nodded. “I really would.”

“I’ll make dinner,” Gabe offered. “I can be trusted to boil spaghetti. And there’s a container of bolognese sauce in the fridge.”

“Thank you,” Quinn said and wrapped her arms around him when they both stood.

She pressed her cheek to his chest and was reassured by the steady beating of his heart. Sometimes she still couldn’t believe she’d got so lucky, and hoped Gabe knew how much she loved and appreciated him.

“Go on,” he whispered into her hair. “I got this.”

Quinn grabbed a zip-top bag from the cupboard, then took the folded glove out of her satchel and hurried upstairs. In the bathroom, she took a pair of tweezers out of the medicine cabinet and found a new toothbrush. She used the tweezers to hold the silver band under a stream of warm water and used the brush to carefully scrub away the slime and the dirt that coated the surface. As the slime dissolved, a pattern began to emerge. The metal wasn’t solid but exquisitely filigreed, and it wasn’t just any band. It was a claddagh ring, hands holding a crowned heart forming the focal point of the design. As the last of the grime melted away, the band shone in the light from the overhead fixture. It didn’t appear to have any scratches or nicks, but a stamp was clearly visible on the inside of the band. This didn’t date the ring, since silversmiths had been stamping their creations since the 1300s, but it was still a clue. Quinn was now certain that the body did not date to the Roman occupation or any time before the fourteenth century.

She turned off the water and dropped the ring into the plastic bag before disposing of the filthy toothbrush and returning the tweezers to the cabinet. Once in the bedroom, she kicked off her shoes, reclined against the pillows, and held up the bag. The silver glowed in the mellow light of the autumn afternoon, the tiny heart at the center making her own heart ache with sadness. The claddagh ring was an age-old symbol of love, given as an engagement or wedding band since the medieval period. What had happened to the man who’d given his heart to the deceased? Had he searched for her, or had he known she was dead? Or might he have been the one to kill her? It was a brutal and heartbreaking fact of life that, when a woman went missing or was murdered, statistically it was most often her domestic partner who was responsible. The investigation into her disappearance and the consequences for those responsible would largely depend on when the woman had lived and the laws of the land at the time. Perhaps there was a record of the case, but in order to find it Quinn would need a name and the year she’d vanished.

As she prepared to touch the ring, she reflected that there was one commonality to all her previous cases. Each foray into the past had taken her to the most significant time in the victim’s life and focused on the period leading up to their death. So as soon as Quinn made contact with the metal, she would learn several basic facts that would enable her to conduct her own research. She took out the ring and shut her eyes, emotionally prepared at last to see the deceased as she had been in life, but nothing happened. Quinn kept her eyes closed for several more seconds, but all remained silent and dark. At first she wondered if she was experiencing this vacuity due to the deceased’s dulled faculties, but she soon realized that wasn’t the case. There was no connection at all.

She opened her eyes and turned the ring over in her fingers. The only times she’d felt this type of void had been either when the owner had still been alive or when the item had been brand-new and had yet to be imprinted with the memories of its owner. The ring had come from the well, and she had taken it off the dead woman’s hand herself. The only possibility that remained was that the band had been new at the time of death. Which would mean that she must have died minutes after she’d become engaged or been married. Quinn set the ring aside, now even more determined to get to the truth.

With this new discovery, the mystery had just deepened.

SIX

Colin promised to get in touch in a few days, so there was nothing to do but wait. Quinn did her best to keep busy and try to avoid Rhys, who couldn’t accept that the ring was useless and kept insisting she try again. If she couldn’t discover what had happened to the nameless woman, he would have to rely solely on the science, which would be a huge disappointment to those who would be tuning in to see Quinn at work, or find another subject for the show’s comeback. Quinn ordered him to stop pestering her and promised that she’d get back to him when she had something to tell. Little good it did her, but she did try.

While she waited for Colin to complete the postmortem, Quinn finished writing the article she’d been working on for Archeology Today that detailed the dig she and Gabe had attended in the summer. They had been encamped on the shore of Lake Iznik in Bursa, Turkey, where the remains of a 1,600-year-old basilica that may have been the setting of the First Council of Nicaea had been discovered in 2014. The purpose of the dig had been to collect artifacts from the same period that would help them to map out the area that had become submerged as a result of the earthquake that had destroyed the basilica. But as Quinn worked on the article and went about her days, her thoughts kept straying to the dead woman. Endless questions swirled in her mind, and, although she hadn’t admitted as much to Rhys, she had tried holding the ring several more times in the hope that something might come through. But the result had been the same every time. The ring held no imprinted memories and wasn’t going to tell her anything about the deceased.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, Quinn decided she needed a fun night in and invited her brother Logan and his son Max to join them for dinner and a film that Friday, something she made sure to do at least once a month. Logan’s partner, Rafe, had walked out on Logan days after the first lockdown had been lifted, having realized that he wasn’t emotionally equipped for either monogamy or parenthood. Logan hadn’t dated anyone seriously since then, and, although he adored Max, he was at times quite lonely, especially since their brother Jude was still stationed in Germany. Jude was married now and had two little girls. The family lived on base and had come to visit only once since the children were born, at Christmas last year.

As soon as dinner was done, Gabe excused himself and headed upstairs to finish some paperwork, and the children migrated to the lounge to watch the movie. Not interested in the film, Logan invited Quinn to join him in the garden, where he questioned her about the case. He had been a little put out to learn about his sister’s secret ability on X, but once he’d got past his annoyance, he’d been surprisingly interested and wanted to hear about Quinn’s Trinidadian ancestor to whom Quinn could trace her gift. Perhaps it was because Logan was a member of the medical community that he needed to understand the logistics, and make sense of the visions Quinn experienced. If she hadn’t been having them since childhood, he might have suggested she see a neurologist, in case the mind trips were the result of a tumor.

“Too bad you can’t see into the future,” Logan said. “I’d love to know what the world will be like in fifty, one hundred, even a thousand years.”

“I’m not sure I want to know,” Quinn replied as she looked up at the darkening sky.

People had always looked to the stars for answers, and she was happy to do the same. And dream rather than fear what was to come.

“Why not?”

“Because I would be tempted to see my own future. And I’d rather not know the date of my death, or learn of the losses I am destined to bear.”

“But maybe if you knew, you could change your future,” Logan suggested practically.

“Maybe. But different decisions could lead to different outcomes, some of them even more terrible.”

Logan sighed. “I wish I could have seen my future.”

“Was there something you would have changed?” Quinn asked.

Her brother nodded. “Perhaps I would allow things to happen in their own time.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“It’s just that I always rush things. I want what I want right now,” Logan complained.

“Nothing wrong with that. Instant gratification.”

“Sometimes instant gratification leads to heartache down the road.”

“Are you referring to something specific?”