Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(15)
Author: Erin McCarthy

They had a lot in common. Both living in a precarious little isolation tent, struggling to survive, to be normal. Kidding themselves. Lying and ignoring the blatant truth—that they were clinging to the edge, one stumble short of going over the side.

“Come on,” he said again, and this time he reached out, took Sara’s hand in his, and pulled her forward into the cemetery.

She sucked in a quick breath and looked up at him with luminous blue eyes. Her head went back and forth, a protest, but at the same time, she walked forward, settling in beside him, her hand light and warm in his. It had been a long time since he had touched anyone, and the sensation of warmth, of her hand lightly shifting in his, their skin caressing, felt so acutely good, so intense and real, that painful longing rose up in him. The desperate need for someone to share pleasure, conversation, time with. Futile, ridiculous wants that he had no business entertaining.

So he let go of her hand and moved forward at a pace he knew she couldn’t match.

He was standing in front of the tomb he had paid for, that held the remains of Anne Donovan, when Sara stopped next to him and said, “It’s very peaceful in here.”

“Yes.” It was. The cemetery was quiet, the sun silently beating down on the many white tombs, casting a shadow over the front of Anne’s tomb. “This is where Anne Donovan is buried.”

“How do you know? There’s no nameplate.”

“It fell off. Marble tends to crack from the moist climate, and then it just drops off without warning.” And he hadn’t replaced it. Wasn’t exactly sure why not, but he hadn’t. “But church records indicate this is the correct tomb. She’s interred in it alone.” Another point about which he felt some guilt. It made no logical sense, given that he knew her soul didn’t reside in the brick structure, but in New Orleans tombs were crowded, families buried together, the bones of three, eight, twenty people, all together in one tomb. It seemed a comfort, an appropriate display of connectedness to other mortal beings. Anne lay alone. In death as she had in life.

“I read that John Thiroux paid for the burial.”

“Yes. She was cremated first.”

“I wonder why.”

Because he hadn’t been able to handle the image of her body, once so young and beautiful, decaying beneath its brutal wounds.

“I don’t know.” It was an attractive tomb, with a wrought iron gate around it, tidy and recently painted, a weeping angel statue resting pensively on top. Gabriel hadn’t wanted that damn angel statue, had been appalled when he’d first seen it a hundred and fifty years ago, but he had given his lawyer at the time the funds for the tomb and had him handle all the details. He’d been too grief- and guilt-stricken, too chronically drunk to make the arrangements on his own, and it was of course the ultimate irony that the lawyer had chosen the symbol of an angel weeping to decorate the top of the tomb.

Lifting his camera, he took shots of the tomb, of the angel.

“It must have been a sad, lonely funeral.”

Gabriel shook his head, wondering if that would have been better or worse than the spectacle he could still see and hear and feel as clearly as if it were the day before. “Quite the contrary. People have an intense fascination for murder. Anne Donovan’s funeral was a crowded, throbbing mob of morbid curiosity seekers. It rained that day, a torrent of steaming, warm water, and the street, the sidewalks, the cemetery, were a sliding, muddy mess. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees with the storm, and there was a fog, so that all you could see was the black hat in front of you, and the tombs rising suddenly out of the mist. A fitting ending to a gruesome death.” And Gabriel had also seen a woman who had approached him, a child’s hand clasped tightly in her own, her face pinched with anxiety, cheeks streaked with tears. She had slapped him soundly, straight across the cheek, penetrating the fog of the air, his brain, the ever-present guilt. It had been Anne’s cousin, or so she had said, and she urged him passage to hell, before retreating, never to be seen or heard from again.

But the irony was that Gabriel had already been condemned to a personal hell long before receiving her vehement request. He was still in it.

Sara leaned against the wrought iron gate surrounding the tomb and stared at the blank spot left by the crumbled nameplate. “No one deserves to die like that. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Yet so true.”

Her arm brushed his, the top of her head only coming up to his chin. Gabriel was surprised again at how petite she was, at how fragile she could look, yet how determined her voice was. “This must be hard for you, because of your mother.”

A sigh slid out of her mouth. “It is.” Fingers gripped the fleur-de-lis spikes of the fence. “Her funeral was similar to Anne’s in that there was tons of media coverage. Spectators. It was noisy and obnoxious, and disrespectful. And everything was happening so fast in those first few days, the police questions changing, always shifting, always looking for something, the media searching for the angle, trying to figure out which way to take the story. I really wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was just numb, trying to help the investigation, trying to deal with the details, and the shock. The police were at the funeral, a good ten strong, in full patrolmen uniform. It was to ensure crowd control, they said, but it was so invasive. And the paper made a big deal out of me showing up with Rafe . . . but the thing is, he cared more about my mom than anyone else. He and I were friends. Of course I would go with him.”

“You went with Rafe?” Gabriel knew that actually from reading the articles online about Sara’s mother’s death, but he wanted to hear what Sara would say about him.

“It was completely normal to go with my mom’s boyfriend given that I don’t have any other family.” A finger slipped under her sunglasses and wiped at her eye, but he didn’t think she was crying. “At the time I didn’t realize he was the primary suspect. It only took the police five days to decide he was guilty and arrest him for murder, but it took nearly a year to acquit him in court.”

“Like John Thiroux.” Him. “Is that why you’re interested in this case? Or is it strictly your mother’s case that you want to solve?”

“No. I want to solve both. Though I don’t think my mother’s murder is solvable at this point. I came more to see if forensics could shed light on Anne’s case, and yes, because there are strange similarities. The weapon used, the method of the murderer—killing them in bed. Boyfriends accused. Boyfriends who discovered them.” And something else that Sara suspected no one else knew, not even Gabriel. That Anne Donovan was the great-grandmother of Jessie Michaels. That before her mother had died, she had received a copy of the original newspaper article announcing Anne Donovan’s murder.