grave. He’s a man named Dale Morgan, and I should have talked to him long ago. I would have, if I wasn’t too scared to do what I knew I had to do.”
Delmar’s eyes were red, like he’d been crying. Because he didn’t want me to see, he hung his head. “You ain’t scared of nothin’,” he said. “You ran out of that room, just like the rest of us did.”
“But maybe I wouldn’t have been here in the first place. Not if I talked to Dale Morgan first. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe if I found out what he knows, maybe Sammi wouldn’t be-”
A noise from behind us stopped me, and I turned just in time to see a couple paramedics lift Sammi’s body onto a stretcher and put it in an ambulance.
I don’t know what it was about watching the scene that knocked the shock out of me. I do know that when it was gone, the only thing left behind was exhaustion.
My knees were weak and my shoulders sagged. I barely heard Absalom when he asked, “What you going to do?”
“I dunno.” It was the truth. My eyes filled with fresh tears. “I know I can’t just stand here, not when Sammi’s dead and…” I sobbed. “It’s not the kind of place where women should get killed. It’s a stupid little motel with flamingoes on the bathroom walls.”
I listened to my own words wash back at me, and a chill like the touch of a dead hand tingled up my legs and into my body. My veins filled with ice water.
I stood there thinking for so long, Absalom figured something was wrong. He waved a hand in front of my face. “Pepper? You OK?”
If only he knew. I was as far from OK as it was possible to get.
I threw off the blanket, and I was in my car and out of the parking lot before any of them could ask where I was going.
At Garden View, there’s a gate that employees use when they come into work early or leave late. It’s in an out-of-the-way place, and not many people know it’s there. Those of us who do have access to the code that unlocks it.
There is no such entrance at Monroe Street. The cemetery isn’t as big, for one thing, and since the only people on the payroll are city maintenance workers who come and go in daylight hours, there’s really no need for anything but the main gate.
Which means that gate gets locked every evening.
Which is a shame since by the time I drove across town and parked in front of the cemetery, it was long past sunset.
Which explains why I had to climb over the iron fence.
I am not by nature an athletic person. Besides a sweat (never a pretty thing), I broke a couple fingernails. And ripped my jeans. I got to the top of the head-high fence and held my breath, panicking at the height and the possibilities that spread out in front of me in a litany of disasters: broken bones, concussions, mussed hair.
None of that was anything I wanted to think about, and rather than dwell and panic some more, I closed my eyes, let go, and dropped. It would be nice to say I landed gracefully, but truth be told, I ended up on my butt.
No way I was going to let any of it stop me.
I was hobbling a bit, but my steps were fueled by the anger that had been building since the Lake View. Limp or no limp, I headed straight for Jefferson Lamar’s grave.
“You get over here, and you get here right now!” I didn’t care who heard me, so I didn’t even try to keep my voice down. Besides, who knows how loud you have to scream to be heard on the Other Side. “Lamar!” I tried again. “I need to talk to you, and I need to talk to you now!”
There was a shimmer in the air about ten feet away, and the next thing I knew, Jefferson Lamar was adjusting his big honkin’ glasses on the bridge of his nose. “It’s late,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be-”
In three steps, I closed the distance between us, and I guess I’d learned something from Sammi after all (besides how not to dress). If I wasn’t sure my hands would swish right through him, I would have shoved him hard enough to knock him down, just like I’d seen her do to Virgil. With no more substantial way to demonstrate my anger, I pointed a finger at his nose. “You lied to me. And now somebody’s trying to kill me. And somebody did kill Sammi. Are you listening?” I don’t know how he couldn’t be, since by this time, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. “Did you hear me? I said Sammi’s dead. Just like Vera. And her death is all your fault. Just like Vera’s.”
“No.” He slashed a hand through the air and this close, I felt the ripple of an icy breeze. “I didn’t kill Vera. I told you-”
“You told me you weren’t screwing her.” When I stared into those dead eyes of his, my jaw was so rigid, it felt like it was going to snap. “You told me that. You swore it was true. But you knew. You told me yourself. You said the Lake View was the kind of tacky place with flamingoes on the bathroom wallpaper.”
“Oh.” Right before my eyes, Lamar folded like an origami stork. It was all the proof I needed, and I guess that should have made me feel better.
All it did was make me madder than ever.
“There were no crime scene photographs that showed the bathroom at the Lake View,” I told him. Even though I shouldn’t have had to point this out, I wanted to watch him squirm. “There’s no way you could have known about the flamingoes. Not if you weren’t there.”
He backed away and refused to meet my eyes. “It doesn’t mean I killed her,” he said.
“It means you’re lying.”
His shoulders rose and fell. “You’re right.”
“Well, hot damn!” I laughed, but believe me, there was no humor in the sound. If they bottled sarcasm, they would come to me as the source. “So all this time, you’ve been proclaiming your innocence, and all this time, I’ve been stupid enough to believe you. And now you’re telling me you’re not innocent. That you’re a murderer!”
“No, not a murderer. But not innocent, either.”
The only way I could try to think to steady my rattling heart rate was to take a deep breath. “You admit it? You and Vera-”
When he turned and walked away, I followed right after him. Good thing. If I wasn’t close by, I wouldn’t have heard him when he mumbled, “She was young and pretty and lively. I was a married middle-aged man, and I loved Helen. Believe me.”
“Yeah, like I’ve believed you all this time?”
We were near the beat-up mausoleum, and Lamar stopped. “There was something exciting about being with Vera,” he said. “Something dangerous. She was so prim and efficient in the office, but when we were alone together, she was wild and different, and she made me feel so young! So-”
“So much like the cheat you really were?”
His shoulders sagged. “The guilt was overwhelming. Even so, I couldn’t stop myself. There were nights I told Helen I had to work late. Vera and I, we would head away from Central State to someplace where no one would recognize us.”
“To the Lake View?”
“No, that’s the truth. The night Vera was killed…” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “That was the one and only time we’d ever been to the Lake View. How that clerk said he recognized us… why he would lie like that…”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Seems to be a lot of that going around.”
“I’m sorry.” The way he said it, I almost believed him. “I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. If Helen finds out…”
“Is that a little bit of conscience I hear talking?” Since I thought it was, my anger ratcheted back. A little, anyway. “How could you be so heartless? Not to mention stupid?”
“I’d never done anything like it before. I never would have again. But there was something about Vera…”
“And when you took the stand in court and denied you were having an affair with her?”
He scraped a hand through his buzz-cut hair. “All these years, I’ve second-guessed my decision to keep quiet about the affair.” He dared to look into my eyes. “I’ve second-guessed it,” he said, “but I’ve never regretted it.
