Judgment of the Grave (19 page)

When Quinn got back to the inn, Beverly Churchill was standing out front. There were two suitcases next to her and she was staring into the road, as though she thought someone was going to emerge from it. She was wearing jeans and a red sweater with a thick cowl neck, and the sweater seemed to swallow her up. Her skin seemed even paler next to the blood-red wool, and her light eyes stared out at nothing.

“Mrs. Churchill?” He was confused. When they’d talked on the phone, he had told her where he was staying and she had mentioned coming out to Concord if they found anything, but what was she doing here now?

“Oh, hello. I was just…Marcus and I just got here. I was going stir-crazy at home and I thought maybe we should come out and stay here for a few days, just until we figure out what’s going on with Kenneth.”

He wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t love the idea of having Churchill’s wife staying at the inn, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

“This will be better,” she said firmly, then looked down the street again. “Marcus said he was going to go downtown and I was just…wondering why he would do that.”

“It’s been a hard time for all of you,” Quinn said. “Can I help you with the bags?”

“No, no, I can do it. It’s just the two.” She suddenly noticed that he had a stroller with a baby in it. “Is this your daughter?” She leaned over and studied Megan carefully. “She’s beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

“Have you found Kenneth yet?”

“No, but the state police went out to the gas station and they’re interviewing all of the employees. We hope to have something soon.”

“Is he here?”

“I don’t know. You have to remember that it’s possible the card was stolen.”

“But if it was, wouldn’t he have reported it?”

“Mrs. Churchill, at this point, we just don’t know. You’ll have to wait and see.”

“I know,” she said, allowing him to open the door for her. “I know that, but it’s so difficult. I mean, the not knowing. I almost wish they would just find him, because then it would be all over.” She looked up at him. “But there’s a part of me that doesn’t want him to be found. I just can’t imagine what he…”

Quinn stood with her while she checked in and then walked her up to her room. At the door he said, “I should tell you that we’ve identified the man in the woods. His name is Tucker Beloit. Does that name ring a bell at all?”

“No. I don’t think so.” She seemed scared all of a sudden. “Why? Should it?”

“Not necessarily. But he did serve in the Gulf War around the same time as your husband.”

“So, you’re still thinking that Kenneth killed him?”

“We don’t know anything. That’s very, very premature. I’m going to look into Beloit’s military service tomorrow, see if we can find a connection, but at this point we’re just still looking into things.”

Megan gave a loud squeal and Quinn shifted her to his hip. “I’d better get her to bed. Let me know if you need anything.”

Beverly Churchill smiled and said, “You know, I really do appreciate how nice you’re being to me, even if I don’t seem very grateful. You’re doing more than you need to and I’m very…well, thank you.” The blue eyes were very clear and her dark hair fell against her white cheek.

He smiled at her. “It’s okay. Just doing my job.”

Megan went right to sleep. It was ten and he wasn’t tired at all, so he sat up, plugged in the baby monitor, and took the receiver with him down the hallway.

Sweeney answered the door after his first knock. She was dressed in old gray sweatpants and a T-shirt that had the word
BASEBALL
emblazoned across the front, her hair up in a messy ponytail. She looked up at him and said, “Wanna come in?”

“Sure. I just put Megan down and…” He held up the baby monitor. “I can hear her if she cries. You sure I’m not bothering you?”

“No, I’m actually glad of the company. I just went down and got a bottle of wine from the tavern and I don’t want to drink all of it myself. Really. Besides, you didn’t get to tell me about the guy in the woods.” It struck him that she meant it, that for some reason she was glad he had come by. She held up one of the glass tumblers from the bedside table and he nodded, watching as she poured a velvet stream of red into the glass. It was rich and fruity when he tasted it, and as he sipped, he let the liquid roll on his tongue. Just the taste relaxed him.

“So, who is he?” she asked, propping herself up on the bed.

“His name is Tucker Beloit. It looks as though he was mentally ill and he was coming out to see his parents. But here’s the thing. He had a connection to Kenneth Churchill.” He told her about both men’s military service. “It may not come to anything, but if they knew each other, it’s beginning to look more and more like Kenneth Churchill must have killed him and taken off.” He told her about the credit card and Beverly Churchill’s coming out and checking into the inn.

“I interrupt some real work there?” he asked, pointing at the books spread out on her desk.

“Not exactly.” She told him about her conversation with Will Baker. “So, I’m trying to figure out where Kenneth Churchill could have gotten this idea from. It may just be something he was throwing out there, but on the other hand, it’s a pretty serious allegation. I tend to think he must have had some reason to ask. If Josiah Whiting was a spy, maybe that’s why his gravestones got so weird. You know, a man fighting against his own conscience. Maybe that’s the meaning of the death’s-heads.”

She was excited, pacing back and forth across the room while she talked. “You mean, a spy, like James Bond or something?” Quinn sipped his wine and stretched out his legs. Suddenly he felt very content, pleasantly exhausted.

“Kind of. He was killed, or disappeared, in 1775, so in those early days, he must have been passing on information about the underground organizations, about the preparations of the militia, that kind of thing. If he was a spy at all. That’s the thing. I have no idea if he was or not. And it could have been John Baker too.” She told him about Will Baker’s response when she’d asked him about it.

He watched her. She seemed hyped-up to him tonight, as though she’d had too much caffeine, and her eyes seemed worried. “You’re positive that there weren’t any more notes, nothing indicating what he was working on?” she asked him. “That trip to London seems strange to me. I talked to a friend of mine who said that she knows someone in London who is cataloging a series of letters from British officers during the Revolution. I just feel like there must be something indicating what direction he was going in.”

Quinn shook his head, then said, “I’ll ask his wife about it again, though.” He picked up the baby monitor and checked to make sure the little light was on, then replaced it on the bedside table and sat down in her armchair. He was suddenly very, very tired. He wanted to go to sleep, he wanted to go back to his room and get into bed and go to sleep. But Megan would be getting up soon. She’d napped for hours. He’d have to change her, get her dressed, fix her a bottle, find something to eat.

He must have sighed because Sweeney said, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m just tired. So how long are you staying out here, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking just for the week, but now that I’m into Josiah Whiting, I’m thinking I’ll stick around until I figure out what happened to him.”

Quinn raised his eyebrows. “And until we figure out what happened to Kenneth Churchill?”

“Why not? What’s wrong with that?”

He laughed at the hurt expression on her face. “Nothing, it’s just that you like playing detective. I can tell.”

“Well, this stuff may just help you solve his murder,” she said, looking proud of herself. “Then you won’t be laughing at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you.”

“Okay.” Through the baby monitor, they could hear Megan make little gurgling sounds, then snore loudly a couple of times before settling back into her even breathing. They listened to her for a few minutes.

“So, are they going to call you when they know anything about whether they find him?”

“Yeah. It’s funny, actually. The state guy in charge of the investigation is an old buddy of mine. We grew up on the same street. Andy Lynch. I guess he interviewed you.”

“Oh, yeah, he was kind of a jerk. He definitely thought there was something wrong with me. Did you go to school together?”

“I went to college and he joined the Marines. He was in Desert Storm and everything. If he’d stayed in, he’d probably be over there now. But he went to the police academy and he got promoted a bunch of times. They love the military in my line of work.”

“Was it good to see him again?”

“Yeah. He lived down the street and his old man was a real asshole, so he used to come over and spend a lot of time at our house. My mother used to call him her honorary son. They got a real kick out of each other.”

She was studying him intently and he suddenly wondered if his face had betrayed his sudden sadness. “Are your parents still alive?”

“No. My father died when I was in college. Heart attack. And my mother got cancer a few years ago, before Maura and I got married. She died quick. It was the bad kind, pancreatic.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well…” He put his hands in the air, shrugged.

“Do you have siblings?”

He hesitated a moment and she felt she’d asked the wrong thing. “A brother, but he’s…well, for one thing, he’s a lot older. They—my parents, I mean—left Ireland in the early seventies, just before I was born. My father had gotten mixed up in some stuff over there and we had to get out, but my brother was pretty deep into it. He stayed. Ended up spending most of his twenties and thirties in prison. It just about broke my mother’s heart. I never met him, if you can believe it. But he’s out of prison now, he lives in Cork, has a family and all. I was thinking about taking Maura and Megan over to meet him sometime. Before.”

“What kind of stuff was he mixed up in?”

He studied her for a minute, then looked away and said, “Oh, you know. Stuff. So, I never had a brother. But Andy Lynch was kind of like a brother to me. At least, until we were in high school. After that it was strange. I knew too much about him. He knew too much about me. Once he was in the military, we didn’t have a lot to talk about. He became a soldier. He believed in what he was doing. I guess I had a hard time relating.”

“It’s funny, you know. We tend to think of the guys who fought in the Revolution as being somehow different from all these other guys who ever fought in wars. But it’s all the same thing, isn’t it? People dying for an idea.”

“Except it’s hard to know what the idea is anymore.”

“They probably felt that way back then too,” Sweeney said. “It was probably vague and strange to them too. Freedom. Liberty. What does it really mean?”

He was about to say something when Megan’s voice, just a whimper at first and then a full-blown howl, came through the baby monitor. Sweeney started.

Quinn suddenly felt so tired that he could barely lift himself up out of the chair. He hesitated for a moment. Maybe she’d just go back to sleep. If he just waited…Her cries came even louder. He stood up and unplugged the monitor. “I’d better go,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

Marcus Churchill pulled his windbreaker more tightly around himself and walked into the wind. It had gotten really cold in the last hour since he’d been walking around, looking for something to do. He’d already gotten himself a cup of coffee and now he was just walking, trying to get his mother’s face and voice out of his head, the way she’d looked when he left her at that stupid hotel and told her he was going downtown. It pissed him off, the way she looked all hurt, as though he was wounding her by wanting to get away from her, but now that he thought about it, he felt kind of sorry for her. She was pretty bummed out about his dad. Maybe “bummed out” wasn’t quite right, maybe it was pissed. But it was a weird kind of pissed, like she was pissed at herself as well as at his dad and just for good measure she’d decided to be pissed at Marcus too.

And it was all his dad’s fault. That was what he kept coming back to. If his dad hadn’t done what he did, none of this would have happened. He was a bastard. That’s what he was. A total bastard. It was a word Marcus had only ever heard adults say. Kids his age called people assholes or retards or something. But he liked the way the word felt in his mouth as he said it.
Bastard. Bastard
.

He was cutting through a parking lot behind a bunch of the cutesy little stores on Main Street when he saw the kids. They were about his age, maybe a little younger. He checked out their clothes. They looked kind of preppy, but it was worth a shot. He took a cigarette out of the pack in his back pocket and stood for a minute while he lit it, watching them to make sure he wasn’t making a mistake. There were three girls and two boys. One of the girls was kind of cute, he decided. The boys were pushing each other, pretending to fight, showing off for the girls.

“Hey,” he said, walking over to them. “Any of you guys interested in buying some weed off me?”

They looked around at one another as though someone had just told them they’d won the lottery. “Yeah,” one of the boys said. “You got some?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if you were interested if I didn’t have some.” A station wagon pulled into the parking lot, its headlights illuminating the kids’ faces for a minute, then drove on. In the light, he could see that the boy he’d been talking to had really bad acne, stretching over his face like red lace. One of the girls bent down, hiding her face. “There anywhere we can go and smoke?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said.

Suddenly, the only thing Marcus wanted was the warm camaraderie of sitting around and getting high, the way people seemed to really like him then, the way he felt happy and easy and peaceful. “Come on. I won’t even charge you for it.”

The kid watched him. “You can come with us,” he said finally. “I have a car and we have this place we go to out in the woods.”

“All right,” Marcus said, grinning. “You got a deal.”