OVER HER DEAD BODY: The Bliss Legacy - Book 2 (33 page)

Gus put his arm around her, and they walked down the hall to her door. When he turned to go to his own room, she grasped his hand and drew him inside. “Don’t go.”

“I thought with everyone in the house, you’d be uncomfortable.” He gestured with his head to the room beyond her door. “Me, being there.”

“If I were uncomfortable, it would mean I’m ashamed,” she said, her voice cool, warming when she added, “I’m not.”

He brushed her damp hair behind her ears and cupped her face. “And that’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever had. Plus there’s an added bonus.”

She looked at him.

“I can hold you in my arms instead of doing guard duty outside your door.”

Her eyes looked weary when she said, “You can’t protect everyone, Gus. Not from themselves, anyway.” She stood on her toes and kissed him. “Now, let’s go to bed.” She smiled, but he sensed it was forced. “As you said, tomorrow’s going to be a rough day.”

Mace drove around the abandoned property he’d checked out earlier in the day. Only a mile or two from Farrell’s place. It’d work.

Empty for years. Had to be. The barn was practically a rubble heap; the windows in the house, most of them broken, were dark. Some rusted-out farm equipment, or what was left of it, was hard set into deep grass beside the rutted road leading to the house.

He pulled in behind the barn. He’d come at Mayday from the back, where the Farrell woman’s bedroom was. At least he’d got that much out of the Erica bitch before things went sideways. He touched his bandaged ear, got fuckin’ mad all over again, then told himself to calm down.

Main floor, rear of the house, that’s what she said. This whole thing should be a snap. Get in, get her dead as quietly as possible, and get out.

Simple plans were always the best.

The grin faded. The unknown factor was the asshole with the knife who, according to Erica, was in the next room to the nun. With luck he’d get the job done before one of the bastard’s eyelids so much as twitched, but if not …

But first the woman. He had to get the woman.

Peering through the rain slashing at his windshield, he let out a frustrated breath. Not a chance it was going to let up tonight. Mace pulled on the rubber boots he’d bought at the local Wal-Mart. Looking out the car window, he wished he’d bought hip-waders. This job would give him pneumonia for sure.

He briefly switched on the overhead light to check his watch. Two-fifty A.M. Figuring somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes to cross the field, he’d be there before four, no sweat.

He got out of the car, out of habit locked it, and pulled his jacket collar up around his ears. Butting his head against a rain turned into bullets by the punishing wind, he started across the field.

Keeley, lying on her back, stared into the darkness above her head. She knew it was nearly three, had to be, because she’d heard the two o’clock chime from the old wall clock in the dining room, and she’d been awake for what seemed forever.

When she wasn’t thinking about the lean hard body in bed with her—and wondering how deeply Gus slept—she was thinking about another body. Jimmy Stark’s.

Doing what she had to do wasn’t something she could do in the daylight with the cast of thousands currently in Mayday House peering over her shoulder—and the police in the wings. No. To confirm where they’d buried him, and decide what to do if she was right, was best done alone and in the dark.

She had two or three hours at most.

Carefully, oh-so-carefully, she shifted to the edge of the bed.

“Where are you going?” Gus said, his voice heavy with sleep.

Damn!
“Bathroom. Go back to sleep.” Only a half lie, because it was her first stop. She put her feet on the floor, but before she could stand, his hand shackled her wrist.

“And after that?” No more sleep in his voice, only a terse coolness. Suspicion.

She took a deep breath, couldn’t find another lie, and didn’t want to. “Out.”

“Jesus.” He let go of her wrist, sat up, and turned on the bedside lamp. Its light cast him in pale yellow, turning his bare chest to gold and leaving his face in darkness. “Talk to me, Keeley. Tell me what the hell is going on with you.”

She knew those dangerous probing eyes of his were settled on her. And she knew there was no escaping them, which meant the chances of her getting away from him now were zero to nil.

She stood and took a couple of steps away from the bed, wishing she could be honest, but she was too cowardly, too ashamed for him to know her thoughts. If she was right about where Stark’s body was, no one but she would ever find it. If she held her silence, she’d keep the faith with her mother and grandmother. Mayday House would go on as before.

As a house of lies, a house of deceit, a house of shame.
Leaden silence filled the room.

Gus threw the covers off and got out of bed. He pulled on his jeans, took his shirt from the chair, and said, “Wherever you’re going, we go together.”

“No. What I have to do, I have to do alone.” She wouldn’t involve Gus in this, ask him to be dishonest. She couldn’t.

He took the few steps separating them, studied her for what seemed forever, then narrowed his eyes and nodded his head slowly. “I get it.”

He cupped her chin and pulled her face to his. “You know where the body is.” He didn’t ask; he stated it, looking absolutely sure of himself.

Keeley pulled away from his grip, wrapped her arms around herself against the room’s chill, and said nothing.

“You’re a lousy liar, Keeley, so why even think about trying?”

“I’m not lying—about anything. I’m just not absolutely sure yet, and I don’t want to tell the others—”

“And you consider me one of those ‘others?’”

“No, it’s just that—” How could she tell him she was considering telling the biggest lie of all, a sin of omission, by denying Erica, Paul, and Christiana access to their father’s body, proof of what had happened to him. God, even she hadn’t processed that yet

“Get dressed.” He walked back toward the bed to retrieve his shoes. “We’ll go together.” He looked up at her from where he sat on the edge of the bed. “And if you don’t want to tell the others you know where he is, that’s fine by me.” He paused, his hands still on the laces of his shoes. “Although I doubt that course of action will make you happy.”

Keeley gasped.
How could he know her ragged thoughts?

“What is
not
fine by me,” he went on, “is you putting yourself in the sights of Mace’s gun.”

He finished tying his shoes, stood. Keeley hadn’t yet moved an inch, her mind too busy trying to figure out how her planned one-woman reconnaissance had turned into a team effort. She studied the irritated man in front of her, and her mouth went dry. Love, she thought.

“Flashlights,” she said. “We’ll need flashlights.”

“What about shovels?” he asked, his face set with grim purpose.

Keeley shuddered. “No. No shovels … yet.”

When Mace’s cell phone rang, its tone was barely audible over the wind and rain. He fumbled in his pocket for it and raised it to his ear.

“Where are you?”

Dolan. Mace took a deep breath of cool. “Working the night shift.”

There was a slight pause. “Tonight’s the night, then?”

“Uh-huh.” Mace stopped near a copse of trees to get his breath and get out of the weather. He rubbed the dampness off his cheeks. “Almost there. So how’s about you leave me to it. I’ll call you when the job’s done. We can plan a little celebration.” Might as well start making nice-nice to idiot boy, considering payday was at hand.

“Where exactly is
‘there’
?” Dolan asked.

“Mayday house.”

“What’s your plan?”

Mace let out a breath and with it some of his cool. “I’m handling it, Dolan. So why don’t you shut the fuck up and let me do my job?”

“Seems to me that’s what I’ve been doing and the bitch is still alive. So I repeat, what’s your plan?”

This time Mace held back on the cursing. Dolan was doing his thing, making like he was the boss. Easy to be tough from the other end of a phone line. He’d humor the jerk, if only to get him off the damn phone. “Going in from the back of the house. That’s where Farrell’s room is. I take her out and I’m gone.”

“Mace.”

“Yeah.”

“Do not fuck this up.”

Mace didn’t answer; he clicked off and spoke into the rain. “Yes, boss-man. Anything you say, boss-man.” Stuffing the phone in his pocket, he headed across the empty windswept field.

In the kitchen, cast in the dim gray of the kitchen’s nightlight, Gus watched Keeley disappear into the shadow of the mud room. When she came out she was wearing overalls over her jeans, a woolen cap on her head pulled low over her ears, and a hooded rain jacket. She retrieved two flashlights from a shelf in the kitchen and handed one to Gus. “Ready?” she whispered, intent on not waking the second-floor sleepers.

In the lousy light, Gus eyed her from top to toe; she vaguely reminded him of an Inuit on a seal hunt. “I take it from the gear you’ve put on, Stark isn’t buried in the cellar.”

“You take it right.”

“Where, then?”

She put her fingers to her lips. “Shush.” She closed the Velcro fastener at her neck, her face disappearing behind a hood that encompassed her head and left no peripheral vision. “Let’s go.”

Gus claimed his still-wet leather jacket from the hook by the door, and they went out the back door where the weather waited to attack them.

Keeley paused on the top step and grimaced. “I hope this storm will save us from waking Father Barton. That man would hear a pin drop on a cloud.”

“He’s not there, but his housekeeper is.”

“Mrs. Rankin.” She nodded and thought a minute. “She shouldn’t be a problem.” She grabbed his hand. “Let’s go.”

“Whoa.” When she started to step off the porch, he tugged her back. “You’re telling me Stark’s buried in the graveyard?”

“Yes. That’s where I think he is.”

“Keeley, there must be three hundred graves over there.” The wind lashed at his hair; the craziness of what they were doing did the same in his head. This was nuts.

“Three hundred and twenty-two, to be exact. My mother”—she paused a moment and glanced away, then back—“was among the last to be buried there. But we won’t have to check them all.” Her voice came out of the hood. “The older graves are nearest the church, the newer ones fan out from there. I think the one we’re looking for, an eighties grave, will be close to the Mayday House hedge.” She paused. “I know the graveyard layout. I spent a lot of time in there when I was a kid. I used to sit there for hours.” She paused. “Praying for the dead.”

“Strange kid.” He tried to visualize his energetic redhead slowing down enough to kneel in an old graveyard.

“Maybe, but you know what
they
say, the dead don’t bother you; it’s the living you have to watch out for.” Gus couldn’t argue with that. “And you think Mary and your mother buried Stark in a church graveyard.”

“Yes, I do. I know it sounds crazy, but I can see them doing it … for a lot of reasons.”

“You think it might have been their way of making things right,” he said. “Burying Stark in the churchyard.”

Her shrug was uncertain. “It’s possible.”

He thought about it. Possible. Yes, and aside from the hallowed ground, religious aspect of things, damn smart. Especially if there happened to be a grave already dug and waiting for its occupant. Dig a little deeper, put the body in, cover it with dirt. Yeah. It’d work, although he kept his more pragmatic view to himself. “Even if they did, how will you find it? All the graves look pretty much the same.”

“They’re not.” She pulled his hand. “Can we go? It’ll lighten up soon, and I’d rather do what I have to do while everyone’s still asleep.”

They walked across Mayday’s huge backyard and pushed through the dripping hedge. The night lamp attached under the peak of St. Ivan’s steep roof cast a foggy wash of gray light on the graves nearest the church, and bleak shadows over those beyond it. Gus turned on his flashlight.

Once on the other side, Keeley waved her light along the hedge and the graves closest to it, walked about thirty feet, and dropped to her knees. She set her flashlight beside her to illuminate a grave and ran her hands slowly over its surface.

Gus, standing over her, said, “If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can help.” He pulled his wet collar up against the rain-laden wind.

Still on her knees, she moved to the next grave. “Stones. I’m looking for a series of stones embedded on the surface of the grave.” She looked down the uneven row of tilted headstones and mossy plaques bearing the names of the dead and records of their time on earth. All of them black with rain, the plots themselves were buried inches deep in leaves driven to earth by the harsh weather.

Gus didn’t bother asking why he was looking for stones. He followed her lead, sank to his knees, and started probing the surface of the nearest grave.

The heavy rain soaked the rest of the way through his jacket; then, with the suddenness common to a Pacific Northwest storm, it stopped. Gus knew the reprieve was temporary.

Keeley shoved the hood from her head, mumbling, “Thank God.” But she carried on with her grim task.

He felt a hard lump under his palm, shifted his hand back, and pressed harder. A stone, then another. “There’s something here.”

Keeley crawled to his side. “Where?”

He took her hand and pressed it against the stones. She moved her own hands in a circle, her face tight with purpose; then she shook her head. “No. That’s not it. There should be a pattern.” She went back to the grave she’d abandoned, but after running her hands over it, she rested on her heels. When her flashlight dimmed, she picked it up, and pointed it down the row of graves. “Maybe you should start there,” she said, circling her light on a headstone about fifty feet away. “I’ll go there.” She swung it in the opposite direction. “We’ll work toward each other instead of away.” She paused. “The pattern might be hard to find. It’s been a lot of years.”

“We’ll take it slow.” He gave her his much brighter flashlight and took hers.