"Yeah, a beautiful location." Clauson shut the door to the kitchen, directing Grady toward the final and smallest structure. "This was the only building that was locked. Brian had the key on a ring along with his car keys. I found the key in his pants pocket."
When Clauson opened the door, Grady frowned.
The floors in the other buildings had been made from wooden planks, except for fire bricks beneath the stoves. But this floor was smooth, gray slate. In place of the cinderblock walls in the other buildings, the walls in here had oak paneling. Instead of a stove, a handsome stone fireplace had a shielded slab of wood for a mantle, an American flag on each side, and framed, glistening photographs of eight smiling youngsters – male and female – positioned in a straight line above the flags. The age of the youngsters ranged, Grady estimated, from six to nineteen, and one image of a boy – blond, with braces on his teeth, with spectacles that made him look uncomfortable despite his determined smile – reminded Grady distressingly of his own, so longed-for son.
He took in more details: a church pew in front of the photographs above the fireplace, ceramic candle holders on the mantel, and… He stepped closer, troubled when he realized that two of the smiling faces in the photographs – lovely, freckled, red-headed girls, early teens – were almost identical. Twins. Another pattern he noticed, his brow furrowing, was that the oldest males in the photographs, two of them, late teens, had extremely short haircuts and wore military uniforms.
"So what do you make of it?" Clauson asked.
"It's almost like…" Grady felt pressure in his chest. "Like a chapel. No religious objects, but it feels like a chapel all the same. Some kind of shrine. Those twin girls. I've seen them before. The photographs, I mean. Brian and Betsy had copies in their wallets and showed them to me a couple of times when they invited me over for dinner. They also had larger, framed copies on a wall in their living room. These are Brian and Betsy's daughters." Grady's stomach hardened. "They died ten years ago when a roller coaster jumped its tracks at a midway near Pittsburgh. Brian and Betsy never forgave themselves for letting their daughters go on the ride. Guilt. That's something else grieving parents suffer. A lot of guilt."
Grady stepped even closer to the photographs, concentrating on the blond, vibrant, ten-year-old boy with glasses and braces that reminded him so painfully of his son. The likeness wasn't exactly the same, but it was poignantly evocative.
Guilt, he thought. Yes, guilt. What if I hadn't been working late that night? What if I'd been home and Helen and John hadn't decided to go out for pizza and a movie? That drunk driver wouldn't have hit their car. They'd still be alive, and it's all my fault because I decided to catch up on a stack of reports that could just as easily have waited until the morning. But no, I had to be conscientious, and because of that, I indirectly killed my wife and son. Not showing it, Grady cringed. From a deep, black, torture chamber of his mind, he wailed silently in unbearable torment.
Behind him, Clauson said something, but Grady didn't register what it was.
Clauson spoke louder. "Ben?"
Without removing his intense gaze from the photograph of the young, blond boy, Grady murmured, "What?"
"Do you recognize any of the other faces?"
"No."
"This is just a hunch, but maybe there's a pattern."
"Pattern?"
"Well, since those two girls are dead, do you suppose… Could it be that all the kids in these photographs are dead?"
Grady's heart lurched. Abruptly he whirled toward the sound of a splash.
"What's the matter?" Clauson asked.
"That splash." Grady moved toward the door. "Someone fell into the pool."
"Splash? I didn't hear anything."
Grady's eyes felt stabbed by sunlight as he left the shadows of the tiny building. He stared toward the state policemen at the concrete rim of the swimming pool. The medical examiner was getting into his station wagon. The ambulance was pulling away.
But the pool looked undisturbed, and if anyone had fallen in, the troopers didn't seem to care. They merely kept talking among themselves and didn't pay attention.
"What do you mean?" Clauson asked. "There wasn't any splash. You can see for yourself. No one fell into the pool."
Grady shook his head in bewilderment. "But I would have sworn."
Disoriented, he did his best to answer more questions and finally left the compound an hour later, shortly after five, just as Clauson and his men were preparing to lock the buildings and the gate to the area, then secure a yellow NO ADMITTANCE – POLICE CRIME SCENE tape across the fence and the gate.
Troubled, numb with shock, aching with sorrow, he trembled. He used his two-way radio to contact his office while he drove along the winding road through the looming mountains back to Bosworth. He had a duty to perform, but he couldn't let that duty interfere with his other duties. The office had to know where he'd be.
With Brian Roth's sister. The deaths of his wife and son – the rules he'd learned from attending the grief meetings of The Compassionate Friends – had taught him that you had to do your best to offer consolation. Compassion was the greatest virtue.
But when he finally stopped at Ida Roth's home, a modest trailer in a row of other trailers on the outskirts of Bosworth, he didn't get an answer after he knocked on her flimsy metal door. Of course, Grady thought. The undertaker. The cemetery. The double funeral. Ida has terrible arrangements to make. She'll be in a daze. I wish I'd been able to get here in time to help her.
To Grady's surprise, the woman next door came over and told him where Ida had gone. But his surprise wasn't caused by the gossipy woman's knowledge of Ida's schedule. What surprised him was Ida's destination. He thanked the neighbor, avoided her questions, and drove to where he'd been directed.
Five minutes away to the restaurant-tavern that Brian and Betsy had owned and where Grady found Ida Roth sternly directing waitresses while she guarded the cash register behind the bar.
The customers, mostly factory workers who regularly stopped by for a couple of beers after their shift was over, eyed Grady's uniform as he sat at the counter. Whenever he came in to say hello, he was usually off-duty and in civilian clothes. For him to be wearing his uniform made this visit official, the narrowed eyes that studied him seemed to say, and the somberness of those narrowed eyes suggested as well that word had gotten around about what had happened to Brian and Betsy.
Grady took off his policeman's cap, wished that the jukebox playing Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely" weren't so loud -
– and who the hell had been morbid enough to choose that tune? -
– then studied Ida's gaunt, determined features.
Brian's only and older sibling, she was in her early fifties, but she looked sixty, partly because her hair was completely gray and she combed it back severely into a bun, thus emphasizing the wrinkles in her forehead and around her eyes, and partly as well because her persistent nervousness made her so thin that her cheeks looked hollow, but mostly because her pursed lips made her expression constantly dour.
"Ida," Grady said, "when some people tell you this, you've got every right to feel bitter. The automatic reaction is to think 'bullshit, get out of here, leave me alone.' But you know that I've been where you are now, a year ago when my wife and son were killed. You know that I'm an expert in what I'm talking about, that these aren't empty words. I understand what you're feeling. With all my heart, I'm sorry about Brian and Betsy."
Ida glowered, jerked her face toward a waitress, blurted "Table five's still waiting for that pitcher of beer," and scowled at Grady while pressing her hand on the cash register. "Sorry? Let me tell you something. Brian shut me out after his children died. We visited. We spent time together. But things between us were never the same. For the past ten years, it's been like we weren't blood kin. Like" – Ida's facial expression became skeletal – "like there was some kind of barrier between us. I resented that, being made to feel like a stranger. I tried all I could to be friendly to him. As far as I'm concerned, a part of Brian died a long time ago. What he did to Betsy and himself was wrong. But it might be the best thing that could have happened."