Authors: Mortal Fear
“I know that. I’ve always known it.”
She looks up and scans the wide expanse of the cemetery. I watch her from the side, her profile regal, her thick auburn hair rippling from beneath the black hat, catching a wisp of breeze. She has never looked stronger or more unattainable than at this moment. As she turns to me, I look down, not wanting to be caught staring. My eyes register a dark glint against the sheen of the coffin.
“You dropped your sunglasses,” I tell her.
“What? Where?”
“Down there.” I point into the grave. “I don’t want to sound superstitious, but maybe we should just leave them.”
“Those aren’t mine.”
“What?”
She points to her throat. Her Ray-Bans lie flat against her black dress, suspended from the high neckline by one earpiece.
The wraparound glasses in the grave lie at the very foot of the coffin. That’s why I didn’t see them while I was playing the guitar. They almost look positioned there, rather than dropped from some distraught mourner’s hand. They stare up out of the hole like a pair of sightless eyes.
“Drewe?”
“I wonder if they’re Mother’s,” she says, stepping to the edge of the grave and bending over.
I catch her arm. “Stop.”
“Ow! That hurts.”
“Stand up, Drewe. Stand up straight.”
“What?”
“He’s here.”
“What?”
“He’s here.”
“Who?”
Then she is looking up into my face with horror.
“Don’t look around,” I tell her, even as I do myself. Every headstone in the field now seems capable of concealing a killer. My eye inventories mausoleums at the speed of light, prioritizing the most dangerous areas.
“He didn’t do the killings,” I hear myself whisper.
“What?”
“He didn’t kill the EROS women. The Indian woman did. He only fired the tranquilizer gun. We’ve got a chance.”
“Harper, he’s dead. How can he be here?”
I’m trying to appear calm, but if Berkmann is watching me, he must see me scanning the headstones with the controlled panic of a soldier walking point in the jungle. “We’re going to have to run.”
“Where?” Drewe asks, her voice thin.
“The Explorer’s parked behind the superintendent’s office.”
“That’s a hundred yards away.”
“I’m going to leave my guitar here.”
She squeezes my hand, hard. “Shouldn’t we take it with us? Try to act casual and get as far as we can? You can drop it if we have to run.”
“We have to run
now
. He could be fifteen yards away, between us and the truck. Take three or four deep breaths, then break for it when I do. Watch the ground, not the building. Don’t trip.”
“Should I hold your hand?”
“No. If he chases us, I’ll stay behind you. Don’t look back. If he jumps up in front of us, I’ll have to try to kill him. You keep running.”
“Harper—”
“
Keep running
. My thirty-eight is under the driver’s seat. That’s the only way you can help me if I have to fight. Here are the keys.”
“Oh.”
“Take them. God, I wish your father was still here. We’d kill that son of a bitch right now. Okay, get ready. One, two—”
We’re off without ever saying “go,” flying across the grass like locust shells blasted before a prairie wind. With every step I see Berkmann’s powerful body rising from behind a gravestone, scalpel in hand, moving with the speed and inevitability of nightmares. I pump my legs furiously, willing Drewe faster as in my mind Berkmann angles toward her, me running to get between them but not making it as he plunges the scalpel into her stomach—
The superintendent’s office is closer, maybe fifty yards. I hold back, giving Drewe the lead, pivoting my head as I try to scan 360 degrees of threat, knowing he can see me, that he can pick his moment—
“Harper!”
Drewe is down. Something tripped her and laid her out hard on a flat stone the length of a coffin. I yank her up, still looking frantically around us. She cradles one elbow as if it’s broken.
“Can you run?”
“Go!” she gasps.
I start to run, but she jerks me to a stop. “The keys!”
She darts back to the gravestone and begins scouring its surface like someone searching for a contact lens.
“Drewe?”
“I’ve got them! Go!”
Even as the ranks of stones tighten around us, we pick a sure path through them, dodging the little bronze-roofed markers that read “Perpetual Care.” They might as well be land mines. We’re five yards from the office when a dark-haired man in a tan jacket steps out from behind it.
Drewe shrieks and cuts to the right. With adrenaline spurting like hydraulic fluid into my limbs, I empty my lungs in a savage scream and charge. The man shouts my name and brings up one hand, but I see only his throat. I pounce like a wildcat, both hands throttling him as he tumbles backward. The impact knocks out his wind, and I pummel his face with three quick rights before he can recover. Fury and fear flash in his eyes as blood from his broken nose fills the orbits. Feeling him going limp beneath me, I push off his chest with both hands, scramble to my feet, and sprint the last few yards to the back of the superintendent’s office.
Drewe is already inside the Explorer. A sharp thump startles me—then I realize she just unlocked the doors. I leap into the driver’s seat as she clambers across the console to the passenger side. In one continuous motion I crank the engine, throw it into gear, and hit the gas. The tires spin wildly on the gravel before they catch, and we hurtle forward onto the narrow asphalt lane as though shot from a catapult.
“Was it him?” yells Drewe, gulping air.
“Get down!” The Explorer is doing fifty through the headstones and still accelerating.
“Was it him?”
“I don’t know!”
“You don’t know?”
“It looked like him!”
“Did you kill him?”
I shake my head, trying to keep us on course and watch the rearview mirror at the same time. “I hurt him enough to get past him.”
Drewe slumps down in the seat and begins probing her elbow joint. “Maybe it wasn’t him,” she says, her breathing ragged. “I mean, anybody could have dropped those glasses.”
“Into her grave? No. He’s here.”
“You don’t know that. I think you didn’t kill him because you weren’t sure.”
As the Explorer rockets through the cemetery gate and onto the highway, one image fills my mind: two tall, stunningly dressed and coiffed young women at the edge of the burial crowd, and beside them, a gray-hatted man wearing sunglasses.
“He’s here, Drewe. He wants to kill us.”
“So why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 45
From the cemetery I drove straight to Sheriff Buckner’s office in Yazoo City. I answered Drewe’s questions about Berkmann as best I could without revealing the existence of the videotape. I told her who he was, that the FBI had identified him with Miles’s help, and that Miles had sent me a picture of him via computer. The fact that Drewe’s early theories about the case had proved to be so accurate gave her little solace. She seemed bent on convincing herself—and me—that Berkmann had died in the plane crash.
Sheriff Buckner had attended Erin’s burial, but when Drewe and I were ushered into his office we found him eating a shrimp po’boy with his feet propped on his desk. He started shaking his head the moment he saw me. Before I said anything, he wiped tartar sauce off his mouth, put down his sandwich, stood, and paid Drewe his respects. Then he looked at me and said, “I don’t know whether to arrest you or give you a medal.”
Buckner had just heard from the Yazoo City police chief how Bob Anderson’s son-in-law had gone crazy out at the cemetery and assaulted an FBI agent named Wes Killen. The agent had called 911 on a cellular phone and was now on his way to the emergency room at Kings Daughters Hospital.
While Drewe and I gaped, Buckner explained that the FBI had insisted on sending an observer to Erin’s funeral on the chance that her killer might show up. He got a big charge out of the fact that I’d brained the FBI man before he could get to his gun, and pointed out that Erin’s murderer, had he been there, would probably have killed Special Agent Killen long before he was “observed.”
I wasn’t amused by the story, but at last I understood why—if Edward Berkmann
had
been at the cemetery—he did not kill Drewe and me. Special Agent Wes Killen didn’t pull a gun on me because he knew me—probably from pictures—but he would have shot Berkmann in a heartbeat.
Sheriff Buckner listened to my sunglasses story with the sincerity of a doctor humoring a schizophrenic. He promised to look into the three “out-of-towners” I’d noticed at the funeral, but we were clearly wasting our time. As we left, Buckner told me not to worry about the FBI agent pressing assault charges. The Bureau would never stand for the embarrassment of a public trial.
We are almost to Drewe’s parents’ house now, and I’m doubting myself more with each passing mile. Who’s to say someone
didn’t
accidentally drop their sunglasses into the grave, then decide that retrieving them would be too embarrassing? Maybe it’s Berkmann’s video that’s got me paranoid. The shocking intensity of his personality makes it hard to accept the idea that he’s dead.
When Bob’s mansion comes into sight, surrounded by a visiting fleet of automobiles, Drewe says, “I really do have to be there.”
“I know.”
Looking into her lap, she shakes her head. “All those damned casseroles.”
“I know. Erin would have hated it.”
She looks sharply at me. Then, slowly, she softens her gaze. “You’re right.”
I decide to take a desperate gamble for normalcy. “Think of the poor chickens who died to make all that tetrazzini.”
Drewe backhands my chest with a stinging pop, but the hint of a smile tugs at her mouth. She knows exactly what I’m feeling. A thousand sacred words and condolences are nothing compared to one throwaway line that captures something of Erin’s real life. We both know Erin would have hit me the same way for that joke, and Drewe acting as her surrogate brings her back to life for us, if only for an instant.
In the momentary escape from grief, I’m tempted to bring up the question that has tortured me ever since I told Drewe the truth about Holly. What about Patrick? Does she think he should be given the answer to the question that has haunted him so long? Has she already spoken to him? This is the final legacy of the secret, the last unexploded mine. But right now I don’t have the nerve to probe it.
“What does the house look like?” Drewe asks, her voice heavy.
“I scrubbed out the office. The deputies tore things up pretty bad, and it smells like tear gas, but I managed to sleep there last night.”
“Pull in,” she says, pointing out a path through the cars blocking Bob’s majestic drive.
I have to park thirty yards from the front entrance. Drewe opens the Explorer’s door but does not get out. Feeling a strange tingle in my chest, I reach for the ignition key and shut off the engine. She closes the door again and settles into her seat.
We sit in the muggy silence, the dead motor ticking like a half-sprung clock. I’m about to suggest that we get out and talk when she says, “As bad as this is, I still believe one thing. We were meant for each other. I’ve always known that, and so has anyone who ever knew us.”
She is looking at the windshield, not me. A hundred words pop into my head; all sound calculated and hollow.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, watching an elderly couple shuffle out of the entrance arch. “We’ve been here too long. Rain, I mean. It’s too safe. I know that sounds ridiculous, considering what happened to us here. But maybe that’s
why
it happened. You know? We wanted too much to go backward. To this ground where we grew up, to our families, or their memories.” At last she turns to me, her eyes filled with conviction. “We won’t grow in this soil, Harper. We’ve got to find our own place.”
In these words I hear the door to my future opening. “You’re my love, Drewe. You always have been. Just tell me where you want to go.”
She smiles and lays a hand over mine. “Give me an hour and a half. Then come back for me.”
Excitement quickens my blood. “You’re coming home tonight?”
“Yes. To pack.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re moving, Harper. Tomorrow, if not today.”
“Where?”
“We’ll rent a house in Jackson to start. After that, we’ll work it out. Wherever we want. It’s time to go.”
I search her face for signs of doubt, but there are none. I start to get out and to walk her to the door, but she stops me by leaning over the console and kissing me on the cheek.
“Make it an hour,” she says.
Still flying from Drewe’s kiss, I pull into the parking lot of a convenience store and head for the pay phone. The Kings Daughters Hospital operator connects me with an ER nurse who eventually gets special agent Wes Killen to the phone.
I apologize before I tell Killen who I am, and again after. He listens to my explanation with professional detachment, then begins asking questions as I tell him the story of the sunglasses. He promises to have the Bureau check with the airlines for anyone resembling the “New York people” I saw at the funeral.
Unbelievably, Killen has to return to the cemetery and continue his vigil at Erin’s grave. He even criticizes himself for leaving his post long enough to get his nose patched up. After he gives me a cellular phone number I can use to reach him if I need to, I apologize once more and sign off.
Driving back to our farmhouse, I feel I’m traveling a road I’ve never seen before. Because it is no longer the road home. It’s the road away. The road that will lead Drewe and me out of the past and into our future. The events that brought us to this point are too painful even to focus on, yet they have delivered us from ourselves. For the first time, I allow myself to believe that the demented killer who pissed into my guitar for posterity might actually be bumping along the bottom of the Mississippi River, getting nested in by catfish or ripped to pieces by gar.