Drewe shrieks and cuts to the right. With adrenaline spurting like hydraulic fluid into my limbs, I empty my lungs in a savage scream and charge. The man shouts my name and brings up one hand, but I see only his throat. I pounce like a wildcat, both hands throttling him as he tumbles backward. The impact knocks out his wind, and I pummel his face with three quick rights before he can recover. Fury and fear flash in his eyes as blood from his broken nose fills the orbits. Feeling him going limp beneath me, I push off his chest with both hands, scramble to my feet, and sprint the last few yards to the back of the superintendent’s office.
Drewe is already inside the Explorer. A sharp thump startles me-then I realize she just unlocked the doors. I leap into the driver’s seat as she clambers across the console to the passenger side. In one continuous motion I crank the engine, throw it into gear, and hit the gas. The tires spin wildly on the gravel before they catch, and we hurtle forward onto the narrow asphalt lane as though shot from a catapult.
“Was it him?” yells Drewe, gulping air.
“Get down!” The Explorer is doing fifty through the headstones and still accelerating.
“I don’t know!”
“You don’t know?”
“It looked like him!”
“Did you kill him?”
I shake my head, trying to keep us on course and watch the rearview mirror at the same time. “I hurt him enough to get past him.”
Drewe slumps down in the seat and begins probing her elbow joint. “Maybe it wasn’t him,” she says, her breathing ragged. “I mean, anybody could have dropped those glasses.”
“Into her grave? No. He’s here.”
“You don’t know that. I think you didn’t kill him because you weren’t sure.”
As the Explorer rockets through the cemetery gate and onto the highway, one image fills my mind: two tall, stunningly dressed and coiffed young women at the edge of the burial crowd, and beside them, a gray-hatted man wearing sunglasses.
“He’s here, Drewe. He wants to kill us.”
“So why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 45
From the cemetery I drove straight to Sheriff Buckner’s office in Yazoo City. I answered Drewe’s questions about Berkmann as best I could without revealing the existence of the videotape. I told her who he was, that the FBI had identified him with Miles’s help, and that Miles had sent me a picture of him via computer. The fact that Drewe’s early theories about the case had proved to be so accurate gave her little solace. She seemed bent on convincing herself-and me-that Berkmann had died in the plane crash.
Sheriff Buckner had attended Erin’s burial, but when Drewe and I were ushered into his office we found him eating a shrimp po’boy with his feet propped on his desk. He started shaking his head the moment he saw me. Before I said anything, he wiped tartar sauce off his mouth, put down his sandwich, stood, and paid Drewe his respects. Then he looked at me and said, “I don’t know whether to arrest you or give you a medal.”
Buckner had just heard from the Yazoo City police chief how Bob Anderson’s son-in-law had gone crazy out at the cemetery and assaulted an FBI agent named Wes Killen. The agent had called 911 on a cellular phone and was now on his way to the emergency room at Kings Daughters Hospital.
While Drewe and I gaped, Buckner explained that the FBI had insisted on sending an observer to Erin’s funeral on the chance that her killer might show up. He got a big charge out of the fact that I’d brained the FBI man before he could get to his gun, and pointed out that Erin’s murderer, had he been there, would probably have killed Special Agent Killen long before he was “observed.”
I wasn’t amused by the story, but at last I understood why-if Edward Berkmann
Sheriff Buckner listened to my sunglasses story with the sincerity of a doctor humoring a schizophrenic. He promised to look into the three “out-of-towners” I’d noticed at the funeral, but we were clearly wasting our time. As we left, Buckner told me not to worry about the FBI agent pressing assault charges. The Bureau would never stand for the embarrassment of a public trial.
We are almost to Drewe’s parents’ house now, and I’m doubting myself more with each passing mile. Who’s to say someone
When Bob’s mansion comes into sight, surrounded by a visiting fleet of automobiles, Drewe says, “I really do have to be there.”
“I know.”
Looking into her lap, she shakes her head. “All those damned casseroles.”
“I know. Erin would have hated it.”
She looks sharply at me. Then, slowly, she softens her gaze. “You’re right.”
I decide to take a desperate gamble for normalcy. “Think of the poor chickens who died to make all that tetrazzini.”
Drewe backhands my chest with a stinging pop, but the hint of a smile tugs at her mouth. She knows exactly what I’m feeling. A thousand sacred words and condolences are nothing compared to one throwaway line that captures something of Erin’s real life. We both know Erin would have hit me the same way for that joke, and Drewe acting as her surrogate brings her back to life for us, if only for an instant.
In the momentary escape from grief, I’m tempted to bring up the question that has tortured me ever since I told Drewe the truth about Holly. What about Patrick? Does she think he should be given the answer to the question that has haunted him so long? Has she already spoken to him? This is the final legacy of the secret, the last unexploded mine. But right now I don’t have the nerve to probe it.
“What does the house look like?” Drewe asks, her voice heavy.
“I scrubbed out the office. The deputies tore things up pretty bad, and it smells like tear gas, but I managed to sleep there last night.”
“Pull in,” she says, pointing out a path through the cars blocking Bob’s majestic drive.
I have to park thirty yards from the front entrance. Drewe opens the Explorer’s door but does not get out. Feeling a strange tingle in my chest, I reach for the ignition key and shut off the engine. She closes the door again and settles into her seat.
We sit in the muggy silence, the dead motor ticking like a half-sprung clock. I’m about to suggest that we get out and talk when she says, “As bad as this is, I still believe one thing. We were meant for each other. I’ve always known that, and so has anyone who ever knew us.”
She is looking at the windshield, not me. A hundred words pop into my head; all sound calculated and hollow.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, watching an elderly couple shuffle out of the entrance arch. “We’ve been here too long. Rain, I mean. It’s too safe. I know that sounds ridiculous, considering what happened to us here. But maybe that’s
In these words I hear the door to my future opening. “You’re my love, Drewe. You always have been. Just tell me where you want to go.”
She smiles and lays a hand over mine. “Give me an hour and a half. Then come back for me.”
Excitement quickens my blood. “You’re coming home tonight?”
