Dig Two Graves by James Harper (important books to read .txt) 📗

to him, made up some specious story. It wasn’t the time or the place to get into it with Bella in her improved but still vulnerable state. He made a joke of it.

‘Yeah. And you were the one who said I don’t mess around just because of what I did to the guy posing as a detective.’

They both laughed at that, even if it did hurt her busted ribs.

Then he went to find Blair.

14

His phone was in his hand, ready to call her, when she came out of the elevator. She saw the look on his face, her step faltering momentarily. He got right to it.

‘We need to talk.’

He wasn’t even in the mood to reflect on the way that the roles were reversed. The way the world normally worked, it was the women who said, we need to talk, the men who swallowed nervously, loosened their collars.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you all about it when we get there. Come on.’

There wasn’t any point asking her, where to? She wouldn’t tell him. And he’d find out soon enough.

They went downstairs and caught a taxi to the nearest car rental office. She told him what she wanted him to do, then waited on the sidewalk while he went inside and rented a silver Chevy Suburban with tinted rear windows. Then he drove them to the house where she collected an armful of plaid blankets, threw them in the back. He eyed them suspiciously, the lyrics to Billie Jo Spears’ Blanket On The Ground running through his head. She caught him looking, smiled at him.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to attack you. I’m old enough to be your mother.’

She’d used the word attack in a man-eating cougar sort of way, but it had a prescient ring behind it.

She directed him across town to pick up I-495. He followed her directions, didn’t ask anything until they were on the Interstate heading south.

‘You want to tell me what this is really about now?’

‘Not yet. I want to show you.’

He gave up, got settled in for the eighty-odd miles drive to Woods Hole. It took them two and a half hours, most of it in silence apart from the music on the radio. About halfway there she received a phone call. He guessed she’d been expecting it from the way she’d been holding the phone in her hand the whole time. He glanced at the screen before she answered it. Merritt.

Again.

Something was going on.

Merritt did most of the talking. She contributed a couple of uh-huh’s, then ended the call. The nervous tension he’d felt building in her since they set off ratcheted up a notch. She cracked the window open a couple inches, angled her face towards the cool breeze.

‘Everything okay?’ he said.

‘Fine.’

‘How’s Merritt?’

That got a reaction. Her head snapped sideways at him, lips parted.

‘I saw his name on your screen,’ he said.

She nodded, didn’t volunteer anything.

‘You tell him what you told me about Bella beating up his grandfather?’

‘Yes.’

‘You tell him the real reason?’

He didn’t say that, of course. But he sure as hell thought it. He pushed harder on the gas, a subconscious act. The quicker they got there, the sooner she’d show him the truth—whatever that meant.

A couple miles before they reached the ferry terminal that would take them to Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, she told him to pull into a gas station. She got out, climbed in the back, burrowed her way under the blankets. He set off again as a muffled okay came from behind him.

She stayed hidden under the blankets for the whole of the forty-five-minute ferry crossing, didn’t join him in the front again until they were on Seaview Avenue heading south towards Edgartown.

‘So this is what it’s like having kids, is it?’ he said. ‘You want to play I spy now? I spy with my little eye, something beginning with . . . S’

Looking out of the window, you’d have thought it was an easy one with the Atlantic Ocean stretching away to the horizon on their left. Except it wasn’t sea in his mind so much as suspicious or subterfuge.

They repeated the whole procedure fifteen minutes later when they got to Edgartown and waited for the Chappy Ferry to take them to Chappaquiddick. He couldn’t say why, but he’d had a premonition for a while now that the infamous island was their destination. On the other side, they followed Chappaquiddick Road and then a rough dirt road across the island to Dike Bridge where Senator Ted Kennedy’s car went off the bridge and into Poucha Pond in 1969.

He parked fifty yards from the bridge and they walked the rest of the way, stopping in the middle of the bridge to admire the view. Except he knew by now that it was something very different she saw in her mind beyond the sand and sea and perfect blue of the sky. She slapped the guard rail with her hand.

‘This wasn’t here when Kennedy’s car went off the road.’

They carried on, went past a bicycle rack and then a wooden hut with a flag blowing in the wind, off the end of the bridge and into the sand dunes of East Beach. She turned left and they walked another hundred yards through the sand, no words passing between them. He knew they’d arrived when she stopped and sat on a dune. She drew her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped around them. A protective gesture. But not to shelter her from the wind coming off the flat expanse of the Atlantic in front of them. To ward off memories of the past.

He could’ve told her she was doing it wrong with her arms wrapped around her. They were inside her already. And they were coming out no matter how hard she squeezed her knees. He let the wind blow through him as he waited for her to start. Tasted the salt on his tongue, the smell of the sea filling his nose, the evocative