فصل 02 - بخش 08

2

An old man sitting on a bench in Trotwood Community Park was happy to give her directions to the place where the bodies of ‘those poor gals’ had been found. It wasn’t far, he said, and she would know it when she got there.

She did.

Holly pulled over, got out, and gazed at a ravine which mourners – and thrill-seekers masquerading as mourners – had attempted to turn into a shrine. There were glittery cards upon which words like SORROW and HEAVEN predominated. There were balloons, some deflating, some fresh and new, even though Amber and Jolene Howard had been discovered here three months earlier. There was a statue of Mary, which some wag had decorated with a mustache. There was a teddy bear that made Holly shudder. Its plump brown body was covered with mold.

She raised her iPad, took a picture.

There was no whiff of that smell she had gotten (or imagined she’d gotten) at the cemetery, but she had no doubt the outsider would have visited this place at some point after the bodies of Amber and Jolene had been discovered, sampling the grief of the pilgrims to this makeshift shrine like a fine old Burgundy. Also the excitement of those – not many, but a few, there were always a few – who came to meditate on what it might be like to do such things as had been done to the Howard girls, and listen to their screams.

Yes, you came, but not too soon. Not until you could do so without attracting unwanted attention, the way you did on the day Frank Peterson’s brother shot Terry Maitland.

‘Only that time you couldn’t resist, could you?’ Holly murmured. ‘It would have been like a starving man trying to resist a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.’

A minivan pulled in ahead of Holly’s Prius. On one side of the bumper was a sticker reading MOM’S TAXI. The one on the other side read I BELIEVE IN THE 2ND AMENDMENT, AND I VOTE. The woman who got out was well-dressed, plump, pretty, in her thirties. She was holding a bouquet of flowers. She knelt, put them beside a wooden cross with LITTLE GIRLS on one arm and WITH JESUS on the other. Then she stood up.

‘So sad, isn’t it?’ she said to Holly.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m a Christian, but I’m glad the man who did it is dead. Glad. And I’m glad he’s in hell. Is that awful of me?’

‘He’s not in hell,’ Holly said.

The woman recoiled as if she had been slapped.

‘He brings hell.’

Holly drove to Dayton Airport. She was running a bit behind, but resisted the urge to exceed the speed limit. Laws were laws for a reason.