She told herself to stop thinking. Thinking was doing Kali no good. Faye’s job was to crawl from car to car, looking for a grief-stricken little girl. So she did, but she didn’t find Kali in the parking lot, and neither did anybody else.
All the while, Frida lay in her casket in the stained-glass light of an empty chapel, covered in flowers and waiting to be put to rest for eternity.
Chapter Thirty-six
They had looked for Kali until the sun began to fade, and he had helped them. At any number of times during those long hours, he had thought all was lost. They were going to find her before he did, and she would tell them everything.
Finally, he knew what he had to do. Kali had seen what he did to her mother, so she had to be silenced, along with the woman who had kept him from finishing the task. Her outburst in the chapel had made that clear.
He had seen her footprints. She had been running like someone who would keep moving without a single turn until she dropped from exhaustion, so he had to be running in the right direction. He had obliterated her trail as best as he could while running at full tilt. And as he ran, he asked his mind to chew on a problem for him. He was not, at the moment, armed.
It had not seemed safe to load his trunk with a shovel. Instead, he had found a likely spot far away from here, where he had already dug a grave for the archaeologist. A shovel waited there for her. Now he needed it to silence the child, too, but it was there and she was here.
Working without the shovel went against everything inside him. Kali was small. So, for that matter, was Faye Longchamp-Mantooth. It would be no big trick to strangle them or beat them with his bare hands. Emotionally, though, he needed the distance of the shovel and its handle. He also needed the protective clothing and gloves that waited with the shovel. They put him in another world. They isolated him from what the shovel was doing.
Murder must leave no trace on his person. He knew no other way to do it.
Flowers, too, were a necessity. They added grace to the moment. They reflected the woman and her beauty. They fed the earth with the fragrance of their rotting petals. He could do nothing without flowers, but they, at least, were not a problem. He was surrounded by delicate woodland wildflowers.
Ripping a fistful of black-eyed Susans from their stems, he thrust them into his pants pocket, alongside the tiny baby’s breath blossom he had taken from the graveyard. The flowers’ nearness helped him focus. He could do this. He just needed to find her.
With the flowers in his pocket, the insight came.
The creek. He was looking in the wrong place. A child who waded up a creek every day would not be running through these woods when she had familiar flowing water handy. He would find her there. The creek was a gift, because it would give him a way to do murder at one remove, the way he liked to do it. It would also give him a way to bury her without a shovel.
Drowning was the secret. If he drowned her, the water would wash him clean and the water itself would be a kind of grave. Scattering flower petals on its surface would fulfill his final compulsive need.
He stared at his hands as he ran for the creek. Could he really hold a living being underwater with those hands? Could he bear to feel the passing of a soul as it left a body?
He could do it.
Oh, yes. He knew he could do it. He had no other choice.
Chapter Thirty-seven
It was well past the time when Joe would have expected Faye to be at the motel, and maybe she was there, but she wasn’t answering her phone. She might even be in the room next door to the one where Amande waited, but he had no way to know. He only knew that he couldn’t stand lying on an uncomfortable and too-short bed, dialing her number repeatedly. So instead he was wandering around the motel, hoping to see her or to hear her voice.
They’d driven all day, and now his wife was nowhere to be found. There were any number of places where she might legitimately be, safe and happy, but Joe couldn’t deny it any longer. He was terrified and he had been since Faye had first told him about the woman who had been buried alive.
Not knowing what else to do, and unable to sit idle, he’d detoured from wandering around the lobby, wandering instead out to the parking lot to look for her car. No luck. So maybe she was working late.
On his way in, he had another idea to distract him from his fear. Well, he had the same idea again. He’d only asked for her at the desk three times. Why not make it four? Maybe this time the clerk would tell him what he needed to know, if he just found the right words to ask him.
When the bored clerk emerged from the office, Joe said, “I know you can’t tell me what room Faye Longchamp is in, and I don’t want you to, because I’m her husband and I don’t want any old stranger to be able to find out where she’s sleeping—”
The clerk gave a slow nod. “So you understand why we have rules. That’s cool. And unusual.”
“But is there anything you can to do help me find her? Do you have a number for anybody else with her group?”
The clerk checked his computer. “I’m sorry. She made the reservations herself through an online vendor. I don’t have any information here that you don’t already have. I mean, I have her home address, which would be
