Sacred

We’d left the study and Lurch and the Weeble behind and had made our way unsteadily into Trevor Stone’s rec room or gentleman’s parlor or whatever one called a room the size of a jet hangar with both a billiard and snooker table, cherrywood backing to the dart board, a poker table, and a small putting green in one corner. A mahogany bar ran up the east side of the room with enough glasses hanging overhead to get the Kennedys through a month of partying.

Trevor Stone poured two fingers of single-malt into his glass, tilted the bottle toward my glass, then Angie’s, and both of us refused.

“The men—boys, actually—who committed the crime were tried rather quickly and convicted and recently began serving life without possibility of parole at Norfolk, and that’s as close to justice as there is, I guess. My daughter and I buried Inez, and that should have been it except for the grief.”

“But,” Angie said.

“While the doctors were removing the bullet from my jaw, they found the first sign of cancer. And as they probed deeper they found it in my lymph nodes. They expect to find it in my small and large intestines next. Soon after that, I’m sure, they’ll run out of things to cut.”

“How long?” I said.

“Six months. That’s their opinion. My body tells me five. Either way, I’ve seen my last autumn.”

He swiveled his chair and looked out the window at the sea again. I followed his gaze, noted the curve of a rocky inlet across the bay. The inlet forked and thrust out into something that resembled lobster claws, and I looked back to its middle until I found a lighthouse I recognized. Trevor Stone’s house sat on a bluff in the midst of Marblehead Neck, a jagged finger of landscape off Boston’s North Shore where the asking price for a house was slightly less than that for most towns.

“Grief,” he said, “is carnivorous. It feeds whether you’re awake or not, whether you fight it or you don’t. Much like cancer. And one morning you wake up and all those other emotions—joy, envy, greed, even love—are swallowed by it. And you’re alone with grief, naked to it. And it owns you.”

The ice cubes in his glass rattled, and he looked down at them.

“It doesn’t have to,” Angie said.

He turned and smiled at her with his amoeba mouth. His white lips shook with tremors against the decayed flesh and pulverized bone of his jaw, and the smile disappeared.

“You’re acquainted with grief,” he said softly. “I know. You lost your husband. Five months ago, was it?”

“Ex-husband,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “Yes.”

I reached for her hand, but she shook her head, placed her hand on her lap.

“I read all the newspaper accounts,” he said. “I even read that terrible ‘true crime’ paperback. You two battled evil. And won.”

“It was a draw,” I said and cleared my throat. “Trust me on that.”

“Maybe,” he said, his hard green eyes finding my own. “Maybe for the two of you, it was a draw. But think of how many future victims you saved from those monsters.”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “with all due respect, please don’t talk to us about this.”

“Why not?”

She raised her head. “Because you don’t know anything about it, so it makes you sound like a moron.”

His fingers caressed the head of his cane lightly before he leaned forward and touched her knee with his other hand. “You’re right. Forgive me.”

Eventually she smiled at him in a way I’d never seen her smile at anyone since Phil’s death. As if she and Trevor Stone were old friends, as if they’d both lived in places where light and kindness can’t reach.

“I’m alone,” Angie had told me a month ago.

“No, you’re not.”

She lay on a mattress and box spring we’d thrown down in my living room. Her own bed, and most of her belongings, were still back in her house on Howes Street because she wasn’t capable of entering the place where Gerry Glynn had shot her and Evandro Arujo had bled to death on the kitchen floor.

“You’re not alone,” I said, my arms wrapped around her from behind.

“Yes, I am. And all your holding and all your love can’t change that right now.”

Angie said, “Mr. Stone—”

“Trevor.”

“Mr. Stone,” she said, “I sympathize with your grief. I do. But you kidnapped us. You—”

“It’s not my grief,” he said. “No, no. Not my grief I was referring to.”

“Then whose?” I said.

“My daughter’s. Desiree.”

Desiree.

He said her name like it was the refrain of a prayer.

His study, when well lighted again, was a shrine to her.

Where before I’d seen only shadows, I now faced photos and paintings of a woman in nearly every stage of life—from baby snapshots to grade school, high school yearbook photos, college graduation. Aged and clearly mishandled Polaroids took up space in new teak-wood frames. A casual photo of her and a woman who was quite obviously her mother looked to have been taken at a backyard barbecue as both women stood over a gas grill, paper plates in hand, neither looking at the camera. It was an inconsequential moment in time, fuzzy around the edges, taken without consideration of the sun being off to the women’s left and thereby casting a dark shadow against the photographer’s lens. The kind of photo you’d be forgiven if you chose not to incorporate it into an album. But in Trevor Stone’s study, framed in sterling silver and perched on a slim ivory pedestal, it seemed deified.

Desiree Stone was a beautiful woman. Her mother, I saw from several photos, had probably been Latin, and her daughter had inherited her thick, honey-colored hair, the graceful lines of her jaw and neck, a sharp bone structure and thin nose, skin that seemed perpetually under the glow of sunset. From her father, Desiree had been bequeathed eyes the color of jade and full, fiercely determined lips. You noticed the symmetry of genetic influence most in a single photograph on Trevor Stone’s desk. Desiree stood between mother and father, wearing the purple cap and gown of her graduation, the main campus of Wellesley College framed behind her, her arms around her parents’ necks, pulling their faces close to hers. All three were smiling, robust with riches and health it seemed, and the delicate beauty of the mother and prodigious aura of power in the father seemed to meet and meld in the face of the daughter.