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“Ever?”
“No bride. No wife. Not ever.” He let several seconds lapse, then said, “Anything else?”
Yes. A hundred things, but she shook her head.
“Then excuse me, please.” He walked past her and went into the bathroom.
The conversation had left her feeling more disturbed than ever. She had bared her soul about the tragic death of her parents and its effect on her, a topic she was usually reticent about because it was so painful.
He had continued to dodge questions that could have been easily answered with one or two words. Instead, he was keeping her in the dark, and it was a shadowy unknown that made her uneasy.
Feeling chilled again, she wandered over to the fireplace. The logs recently added had burned quickly. She moved aside the fire screen, took one of the smaller logs from the box, and carefully placed it on top of those aflame, then reached for another. As she pulled it out, others shifted, revealing something at the bottom of the box.
It was a brown paper bag, larger than a lunch sack, but not as large as a grocery bag. Curious, she worked it out from beneath the logs, which took an effort because it was heavy.
To keep the sack closed, several folds had been made in the top of it. She unrolled them and opened it.
Inside was a rock, eight inches in diameter at its widest point, with jagged points that formed a miniature mountain range across the top of it. Those peaks were stained dark red with blood. It had run into the network of minuscule crevasses like a macabre lava flow. Stuck in the dried blood were several strands of hair, exactly the length and color of hers.
She gave a sharp cry of realization just as hands, which she had noticed specifically for their size and strength, caught her upper arms from behind, spun her around, and yanked the sack away from her.
“You weren’t supposed to see that.”
Chapter 8
FBI Special Agent Jack Connell climbed the steps of the brownstone, checked the box at the door, and pressed the button beside the name Gaskin. She was expecting him and answered almost immediately. “Mr. Connell?”
“Here.”
She buzzed him in. He opened the main door and stepped into a small vestibule, then went through another door with etched-glass panels set in heavy, carved wood. She had warned him that the building hadn’t been modernized to include an elevator, but fortunately her apartment was on the second floor.
He rounded the elaborately carved newel post at the landing. Eleanor Gaskin was standing in an open door, through which she extended him her right hand. “You haven’t changed.”
“Can’t say the same for you.”
She laughed with good nature and patted her distended tummy. “Well, there is that.”
Now in her early thirties, she was striking, with widely set brown eyes and straight black hair worn almost in 1920s flapper style. She had on black leggings, ballet flats, and an oversized shirt to accommodate her pregnancy. There was no artifice in her smile. After shaking hands, she moved aside and motioned him in.
“Thank you for calling me,” he said. “We leave our cards with people but rarely expect to hear back from anybody. Especially not after so much time.”
“Four years, if I’m not mistaken.”
It had been four years since the mass shooting in Westboro, Virginia. He’d interviewed this young woman two months after that dreadful day but hadn’t spoken to her again until her unexpected call last night.
“Have a seat,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”
“No thanks.”
He sat down on the sofa indicated. The room was awash with sunlight coming in through the bay window that overlooked the street. It was a tree-lined, strictly residential block, situated between two of the busy boulevards of New York’s Upper West Side.
“Nice building,” he said. Apartments like this, which seemed to encompass the entire second floor of the brownstone, came with a hefty price tag.
As though reading his mind, she said, “My husband inherited it from his grandmother. She’d lived here for over forty years. We had to update it, of course. New baths, new kitchen. Best of all, it had a spare room for the nursery.”
“First child?”
“Yes. It’s a girl.”
