Lost in thought, I nearly fell over a stone or maybe an exposed root in the path. I cursed under my breath as I stumbled and my rib shrieked.
"Are you all right?" whispered Stephen, just ahead and out of sight.
"Just a few scratches," I mimicked.
He laughed softly again and urged me on. Just as I thought I would have to call a rest, Stephen let me catch up to him on the trail. "We have to go off the path a little ways here."
"Why?"
"You'll see," he said, turning into the brush.
"Stephen, wait a minute," I said. I leaned back against a tree to ease the pressure on my breathing apparatus. "I'm hurting pretty badly. Detours are not a happy prospect right now."
His voice dropped very low, so low I could barely hear him, even in the summer stillness. "I want you to believe me. I want you to see this before we see the judge. Please, it's important. P1ease?"
"See what, Stephen?"
"Please?"
I sighed. "How far?"
"Not far," he said quickly. "Maybe twenty yards. He couldn't… Maybe not even twenty."
I told my rib that the kid had been through a lot. "All right," I said. "But let's take it real slow and easy, 0kay?"
"Sure. Slow and easy."
"Real slow and easy," I corrected.
"Right," he said, and we slipped under a branch and began edging in.
We had moved about his twenty yards when he stopped and sank slowly down to his knees.
"This is it," he said, looking down but not otherwise moving.
I eased down on one knee. There was a decaying log with a large clump of wildflowers growing around it.
"What is it?" I asked quietly.
"Her grave," he said. "My mother. This is where he buried her."
I had nothing to say. I looked at Diane Kinnington's place and I thought of Beth's place. Both were on hillsides, and both had flowers. And each, it seemed, had one faithful mourner.
"I was there when he shot her," Stephen said in the low, flat voice. "It was…" He stopped. Then, "Afterwards, he locked me in my room. The judge had hit me, knocked me out, I guess, but I woke up. I heard him, through the window, at the tool shed. I got up and looked out, but it was too rainy and dark to see well. The judge was carrying some tools, I could hear them clanging together, and he was hurrying down the path with them. I must have passed out then, because the next thing I remember is being in an ambulance on my way to Willow Wood and nobody would listen to me."
"They'll listen now," I said, forgiving his failure to remember that he had been catatonic. I restrained myself from patting his shoulder. He was only fourteen, but he didn't seem to need any comforting.
Stephen continued. "When I was at Willow Wood, I had time to think." He changed his voice and said, "'All the time in the world'," as though he were mocking a doctor's phrase there. "I figured out what must have happened, but I couldn't tell anyone about the judge covering it up. Who'd believe me against him? When my grandmother got me out of Willow Wood, I came home and acted like nothing… like the judge hadn't done anything. I was afraid to tell my grandmother, afraid that he'd kill her too. When I could, I searched. I had to be really careful. I searched for the gun, and finally found it. But first I had to search… for her."
The ache was getting me, so I shifted knees. Stephen tensed when I moved, then relaxed and settled from his knees onto his haunches. He had yet to look away from the grave. "I had to be sure the judge didn't realize I was searching, so I didn't do it every day, sometimes not even for a week. It was tough not to, but it was a quest, and I couldn't let her down by being discovered. I knew from what I saw at the window that he had buried her somewhere down the path. But it had been almost a year, and I didn't know if he would have dug… moved her, moved her while I was away at Willow Wood.
"Then one day I found this spot. I remembered the fallen tree from a storm we'd had that year. But the tree didn't look right, and I realized it was because of all the flowers. There were flowers other places, but there hadn't been any here and now there were lots and lots of flowers, but mostly in this one little spot. At first I thought that God had put them here special, special for her and special for me so I could find her."
He rubbed his right forearm across his eyes. I found myself doing the same.
"Then I read in a botany book that flowers grow over bodies that aren't… in coffins. That's when I was sure she was here. I came to visit every day, but I'd walk in from a different direction each time, so as not to make a path that would let the judge know I'd found her. Some days, I wouldn't even come right up to her, because I didn't want the plants around her to look trampled." He finally swung his face toward mine. "Did you ever have anybody close to you be buried?"
I hadn't stopped thinking about Beth since he'd begun. "Yes," I said in a choked voice.
He tried to examine me in the moonlight. "You're crying," he said. He looked back down at the grave. "I'm ready to see the judge now," he said.
So was I. So…was…I.
TWENTY-SEVENTH
– ¦ "He'll probably be in the library," Stephen whispered as he beckoned me toward the back of the house.
"Does the house have an alarm system?" I asked, still winded from my hike up the path.
"Yes," he said as we approached the back door, "but he never turns it on until he goes to bed."
Stephen produced a key, and we entered the house.
I followed him to a turn in the corridor. He took the turn, and we approached two large polished double doors.
Stephen looked up at me. "Ready?" he whispered.
"Does he keep a gun at his desk?" I asked.
Stephen shook his head. "Only upstairs, in the bedroom."
"Then I'm ready."
We opened the doors.
The judge was standing in front of a mirror. He was dressed in an Izod Lacoste sport shirt and khaki pants. He had notes in his hand and appeared to have been rehearsing his speech.
"Practicing a eulogy?" I asked.
He looked at us as if we'd entered the Debutante's Ball naked.
"Sit down, Judge. We want to have a little lobby conference."
The judge looked over at the telephone. Stephen briskly walked over to the wall and pulled the plug from the wall jack. The judge moved unsteadily toward his desk chair. I took an easy chair and tried to maintain my smile as I lowered my rib cage into it.
Stephen sat to my right and a little behind me, keeping me between him and his father.
It was a beautiful room, with carefully polished wainscoting and natural-wood bookshelves. I would say "restored" wood, but I doubt that that particular wood had ever been allowed to deteriorate. The books I could see were mainly law titles, with some leather-bound, gold-lettered fiction classics by Defoe, Dickens, and assorted others sprinkled around.
The judge slumped into his chair and then tried a fine, arrogant recovery.
"Mr. Cuddy, I must say I underestimated you. I want to thank you for returning Stephen to me."
"Aren't you even curious about Blakey?" I asked.
The judge lost a bit ot? his regained color. "What about him?"
"He didn't fare too well after he called you yesterday."
The judge started, then must have inwardly cursed for thus confirming my suspicion about the call.