“Have you told Gillian?” he asked.
Dismayed, I said, “No, I thought I’d leave that to her father.”
He fidgeted.
“She told me Parrish used to live on your street,” I said.
“Did she?” he said absently. “I don’t know. I never have kept track of the neighbors. The police did ask about it. I suppose that’s how they were able to bring pressure on him.”
“Did Parrish know Julia?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, frowning.
“She never complained to you about someone staring at her?”
“Perhaps she did,” he said vaguely. “Listen, Gilly doesn’t have much to do with us these days. I think she’d rather hear this news from you.”
Reluctantly, I agreed to be the one to tell her.
But Gillian, in her usual manner, had revealed nothing of her feelings to me. She simply said, “Have you told my dad yet?”
I told her I had.
“He doesn’t like to deal with anything unpleasant. Was he the one who asked you to tell me?”
“Yes.”
She smiled, not at all cheerfully, but in the tight-lipped way a person smiles if she’s right about something she doesn’t want to be right about.
“You’ll go with them, won’t you?” she asked. “To find out if this woman in the grave is my mother?”
In one minute flat, she had broken down the resistance that neither the D.A. nor my bosses had been able to breach.
I rang the doorbell of the Sayres’ house. To my surprise, it now played “Dixie.” I heard someone scampering down the stairs, shouting, “I’ll get it!”
Jason pulled the door open, seemed taken aback, then looked sullen. His hair was now cut fairly short and dyed a mix of black and blond. He was wearing a long, loose T-shirt and very baggy pants. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Jason, honey?” a voice called from upstairs. A voice too young to be his grandmother’s.
Jason rolled his eyes. He was thirteen now, and much taller.
He seemed to make a sudden decision, quickly shut the door behind himself and said to me, “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I asked, startled.
“Just go!” he insisted in his half-man, half-boy voice. He started moving off the front porch. “That your Jeep?”
“The one I’m using, but—”
He came to a halt when he saw Jack sitting in the driver’s seat. “Who’s that?”
“A friend of mine.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Looks kind of old, but cool,” he said, starting to move toward the jeep again.
“It’s all relative,” I said. “The age part, I mean. Look, Jason—”
“Jason!” a voice screeched from an upstairs window.
“Oh, shit!” he said, glancing back at the house, then running toward the Jeep.
“Who is that?” I asked, running to keep up.
“Jason!” the voice screeched again.
He yanked the back passenger door open and jumped into the Jeep. “Dude!” he said to Jack. “Get me out of here!”
“Don’t even turn the key, Jack,” I said. “We are not going anywhere until he tells me who the banshee is.”
“What’s a banshee?” Jason asked.
“I’ll explain that as soon as you tell me who this is that’s coming out the front door of the house,” I said, indicating a stylishly dressed, thin blond woman in her mid-fifties, whose noticeable efforts to turn back the hands of time hadn’t even bent its pinky.
“That,” Jason said grimly, “is Mrs. Sayre.”
45
THURSDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 14
Las Piernas
“Jason, are you trying to kill your father?” the new Mrs. Sayre called out.
Jason’s back went rigid.
Not noticing, she went on. “Do you know what he’d say if he knew you were getting into a Jeep with total strangers?” She stood back a little from us, eyeing Jack’s scarred face, leather outfit, earring, and tattoos with disapproval.
