shivered. It seemed only right to do something to honor the pair who’d met their ends here, whoever they were. But the light was fading and there was a hint of pink in the sky, signaling sunset. There was no time to linger. Very quietly humming the hymn “Amazing Grace,” Liz stood quite still as she regarded the reddening sky. She asked herself which way felt right for retracing her steps and pointed her arm in that direction. Dropping her eyes to look, she saw that, without her paper markers, she would have walked into the woods in a direction that was about thirty degrees off from the correct one.
Thanking herself for marking the path, Liz made her way up the slope again. It was an easier task to remove than to attach the papers to the trees, so Liz was able to concentrate better on examining the branches above her. When she came to the end of “Amazing Grace,” she hummed it again, a little more loudly. This time, she was humming it as much for reassurance as to honor the dead. She longed to share the intensely lonely scene with something living, even a chickadee. But there was no sign of the little birds, not even the sound of their distinctive call,
But it soon became evident that Liz was not alone in the darkening hollow. Suddenly, the silent woods did produce a noise sounding, for all the world, like an old biddy shrieking, “Drink your tea!” There it was again, “Drink your tea!”
As a branch moved off to her left, Liz realized the noise had been a birdcall. She could not call to mind the name of the bird, which she now saw possessed an iridescent black body and a brown head. The bird dropped to the ground, poking its beak at the underbrush. Liz looked away from the bird, scanning the landscape.
And then she saw it. The same metallic red color she’d seen in the blurry foreground of DeZona’s photo. A synthetic strand of knitting material, worked into a bird’s nest on the ground. But it was the tree branches, not the ground, that must have formed the foreground to DeZona’s photos. Had the nest fallen from a tree? No, it looked as though it had been built where it lay, nestled into the twigs and leaves there. Liz shone her flashlight on the nest. It also contained some finer strands of strawberry-blonde human hair.
Grasping the sap-covered trunk of a young pitch pine for support, Liz heard a sound she recognized. The same kind of keening she’d heard from Veronica when the child flew across the Newton City Hall Common and threw herself into Liz’s arms. This time, however, the sound came from Liz’s own throat.
She turned her eyes to a sky that had turned the color of flame. And as she did, she saw the glint of another piece of synthetic yarn snagged on a tree branch, the kind of yarn that might well be knitted into the nose of a reindeer in a Christmas-patterned sweater.
Chapter 28
Although it was in easy reach, Liz did not remove the bird’s nest from its place. Instead, with delicate movements born of respect for the dead, she pinched a few strands of hair between her fingernails and pulled them gently from the nest. She also used the scissors on the small Swiss Army knife she carried on her key chain to snip off a tiny segment of the synthetic yarn. Carefully folding the evidence into another sheet of paper taken from her reporter’s notebook, she put the little packet into the pocket of her leather jacket.
Next, Liz looked around at the increasingly dim scene. The only outstanding landscape feature was a boulder, looking like a ghostly white mound in the falling light. She would have loved to measure the nest’s distance from the boulder but had nothing except her feet or her notebook to use as a ruler. She was reluctant to pace the distance without having another landmark to find it by in the future. In her mind’s eye, she drew a line from the boulder through the bird’s nest to the first tree beyond the nest. It was the same pitch pine she grasped for support earlier. But, amongst so many other pines, how would she recognize this one later? She could tag the tree with paper but paper is not weatherproof and she did not want to call anyone else’s attention to the spot. Looking fruitlessly for something to mark it with—even a pile of pebbles to place by its trunk—she realized she could bend and break some branches on the tree to mark it. Only after breaking three of them did she pace out the distance to the boulder. Then she used her flashlight to help her find and remove one piece of paper after another until she left the hollow behind her.
As she approached her car, which stood alone in the parking lot, she reproached herself for failing to comb the scene for any dark hairs the police might have left behind. Kinnaird would wish to compare them with the paler strands, she was certain.
In her car, she placed a call to her answering machine in the newsroom, hoping she would find a message on it from Cormac. There was no word from him. Instead, a message from Jan Van Wormer prompted her to phone him immediately.
“Al told me he returned to the topiary garden in Wellesley today,” the piano builder said. “He said it was the first time, since that long-ago incident, that he could bring himself to visit a place he had once loved. When he was there, he saw an older woman tossing things to her dog. She didn’t look particularly familiar, he said, but when he heard the sound of her voice he took another look. It was Ellen’s mother, Olga Swenson.”
“Yes, I know she was there today. I saw her there myself. But I didn’t see Ali. What time of day was this?”
“Around one-thirty.”
“That’s when I was there.”
“You wouldn’t have seen my apprentice anyway. You see, after he looked into the little hidey-hole, he hid.”
“What hidey-hole?”
“The place where he and Ellen—they were friends, you know—used to hide little toys and treasures. It’s in the summerhouse, under a loose board in the floor.”
“What did he find in the hidey-hole?”
“A toy horn I think. He said he blew it, but then, after spitting this much out, he went all tongue-tied on me.”
“Perhaps I can get him to tell me more.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. The poor fellow has run off again.”
Overtired from her day and confused in the darkness, Liz made a wrong turn as she attempted to drive back home. The mistake cost her almost an hour, as she found herself winding through sand-edged roads and past several small ponds in Myles Standish State Forest. But the long drive also gave her time to think. Teased by the fact that she and Ali had both been on the edges of the topiary garden at the same time but had not seen one another, she recalled Rene DeZona’s remark, “My lens often sees things the eyes don’t.”
She recalled how, earlier that day, two students had posed on the hillside leading up to the summerhouse. Liz remembered framing them in the larger scene. Did her photo include the summerhouse, too? Perhaps. It was a long shot, but what if the photo revealed Ali holding the object that had upset him?
Pulling off the road, she dialed the operator and asked for the telephone number for Wellesley College information and then dialed it. She was in luck. The person on information line duty at Wellesley College was a student. Although at first the student told Liz she was not supposed to give out telephone numbers unless the caller knew both first and last names, she relaxed when Liz said, “You know that hot prof Florrie’s nuts about? Well, I’m his TA. He asked me to get in touch with her for him.”
“Oh, well, if you’re his teaching assistant. . .” She supplied the number.
Fortunately, Florrie was thrilled to be contacted by a news reporter. Although the camera was not hers, she knew it was a digital model. She said she’d get in touch with her friend Ellen and ask her to e-mail the image to Liz as soon as possible.
It took almost an hour for Liz to reach the newsroom, where she accessed her e-mail. Sure enough, the Wellesley student had come through. There was the image of the two attractive young women in the topiary garden. Unfortunately, though, the camera angle did not take in the summerhouse. Liz should have remembered this, because when she stood in the shade at the edge of the Pinetum to take a backlit shot, she would have had to point the camera westward, not northward, up the slope. The wider scene Liz had framed included Lake Waban and the balustrade that defined the shore. Exhausted, Liz printed out the image on ordinary paper, folded it into her pocket, and drove home.
Too tired to fuss with the window shades, Liz left them open and went straight to bed. That meant she had a
