Judgment of the Grave (25 page)

Sweeney couldn’t sleep. She had slept for almost three hours on the couch with Megan, but then Quinn had come by and now she couldn’t sleep at all. So, she got out of bed, took the padded mailer off the table by the window, and popped the CD into her laptop.

Kenneth Churchill’s hard drive had contained the kind of stuff any college professor’s computer would: student e-mails and papers, class curricula. He also had lots of photos of himself in his Minuteman uniform and a folder titled “Josiah Whiting research.”

Bingo. Sweeney opened it and found twelve documents that seemed to correspond to chapters for the eventual book. It seemed that Churchill had chosen the most logical structure for a biography, a chapter on Whiting’s early life, his apprenticeship with his father, and his early involvement with the militia.

Sweeney scanned through the notes. While he had all kinds of wonderful details he’d gleaned from searches of probate records and historical documents, the bare facts stuck to the lines of the story as she knew it.

She read through the rest of the chapters. He followed Whiting through the buildup to April 19 and then devoted three chapters to the actual day. Much of the early material was the stuff she knew already, and Churchill had obviously relied heavily on Baker’s account of the day. At the bottom of the document, though, she found a transcription of the letter Ian had found in Hamish Jones’s collection. She knew from Will Baker that Churchill was aware of the contents of the letter, but here was proof that he’d seen the same document Ian had.

She turned to the handwritten notes. From the photocopies, she was able to tell that they had been copied from a ruled notebook. The notes looked a lot like her own research notes, with scrawled titles like “Concord Trip 9/1” and “notes from George Whiting interview 6/21.” Sweeney read through them and found some notes that Churchill had taken during an interview with Cecily Whiting in January, before they had started seeing each other, she realized. “No proof of what happened,” he had written in his messy hand. “But she thinks killed and dragged himself into pond. Only explanation. She says, ‘People here in Concord knew him. His family would have been looking for him. I think he would have been found if he died in the woods.’”

It was a good point. The woods had certainly been thicker in the eighteenth century, but they had been well traveled and it just didn’t make sense that someone wouldn’t have found his body. Had Baker buried him, or had he just been lucky?

She read all the way through the notebook but didn’t find anything more of interest. She thought for a moment. One of the questions she’d had all along was why Kenneth Churchill had been so interested in Whiting’s gravestones. She felt she’d missed something, so she flipped back through the notebook and looked for references to Whiting’s gravestones.

Kenneth Churchill had obviously been interested in the death masks because he’d drawn a few little sketches of some of the later very strange ones and written, “Unusual?” next to them in the margin. He had also, Sweeney realized, gotten interested in the shapes of Whiting’s headstones. There were lots of little sketches of the tops of the stone. She scanned across his messy writing and read the notes he’d made next to them. “Tops uniform until 1774,” he’d written, and Sweeney congratulated him for noticing how the shapes had changed in 1774. The tops had indeed gotten thinner. “Mask?” he had scrawled next to one of sketches. He was wondering why the death masks had changed too.

“Well, Kenneth Churchill,” she said as she put the disks and the photocopied pages back in their envelope. “I’m going to sleep.”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22

Marcus Churchill had been crying. It was obvious from his red eyes and the way he wouldn’t look at Quinn and Andy when he came into the room. But when Quinn said, “I’m so sorry, Marcus,” and tried to touch him on the shoulder, Marcus stepped back as though Quinn had tried to stab him with a red-hot poker.

“We need to know how you got hold of your dad’s credit card,” Andy said gently. “I know you want to help us clear this up.”

Marcus didn’t say anything. They had called Beverly Churchill that morning and asked her to bring him in that afternoon. They had arrived dutifully, Marcus dressed in jeans and a ratty sweatshirt, a tiny sad patch of stubble on his chin.

“Marcus,” Quinn said. “We need to know if you had anything to do with your dad’s death.”

He looked up at them, his eyes wide. “I didn’t…I didn’t
do
anything,” he said.

“What do you mean?’

“I didn’t do anything to him…. Wait, you think I…?” Quinn watched him carefully; he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t an act. There was a kind of dullness to the kid’s protestations.

“What are we supposed to think? You use your dad’s credit card and you won’t tell us how you got it, and then your dad is found dead.”

Marcus stood up and lunged toward them and Quinn watched Andy reach instinctively for his holster. He jumped up and took Marcus by the shoulders. “Marcus, you need to sit down,” he said. “We want to keep this calm and low-key, right?”

“But…” Marcus’s eyes filled with tears, and Quinn waited. “Okay, I stole it from him, okay? I stole it from him.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

“Because I didn’t want my mom to know, okay?”

“Okay,” Quinn said. “When did you steal it?”

He looked away. “A month or so ago. At the end of the summer.”

“Why? Did you need money for something?”

Marcus mumbled something unintelligible.

“What, Marcus?”

“No. I was pissed at him, so I thought it would be cool if I charged a bunch of stuff on his card and if he got mad I could just…He wouldn’t be able to punish me.”

“Why were you pissed at him?”

Silence.

“Why were you pissed at him?”

Marcus stared out the window.

“Because he had a girlfriend. Out here.”

Quinn looked at Andy. “How did you find out, Marcus?”

He was silent for a long time, then said, “Because I followed him out here and I saw him with her, okay?” He looked up and his eyes were full of tears again. “I saw them in the woods.”

Quinn looked up. “What do you mean, you followed him here?”

“I got this guy from school to drive me out one of the weekends there was a reenactment and I watched. It was really weird. He’d been going to them for a year, but I didn’t really know what he did, you know? But I watched him pretending to fight and then after it was over, I hung around and I saw him walk up the road and kind of duck into the woods. So I followed him.”

“He went to the clubhouse?”

“It was some kind of little house in the woods, and when he got there, this lady came outside and they started kissing. Then they went in and I waited for a while but they didn’t come out.”

“When was this, Marcus?”

“In May.”

“And you didn’t come out here again?”

“No. I knew where he was after that, though.” Marcus Churchill’s eyes welled up with tears again and he tried to wipe them away with the back of his hands. “He was a bastard,” he said suddenly, and started to sob. “He was such a bastard.”

“I don’t know. Either he’s a really good liar or he’s telling the truth,” Andy said once Marcus had gone.

“I think he’s telling the truth. We’ll have to check with the friend who he says drove him out here, and we want to check his alibi for the third. But my instinct tells me it’s not him.”

“Yeah? I’m not so sure. What else have we got at this point?”

Quinn thought for a second. “I don’t know. We haven’t been able to find any connection between him and Beloit. So, I think we have to consider the possibility that maybe Beloit wasn’t connected to it at all. Maybe he was kind of a casualty, an accident. So, then we’re left with the question of why someone would want to kill Kenneth Churchill, and I keep thinking that this book he was writing must have had something to do with it. I mean, in a way this whole thing with Cecily Whiting just kind of obscured that.”

“You think he got killed because of this guy who died what? Like two hundred years ago? I don’t see it, Quinny.”

“Well, it was why he was out here, right? That’s why he was going around and talking to all these people. What if he found out something that people didn’t like?”

“I don’t know.” Andy looked at his watch. “I’m wrecked. You want to go grab a beer?” He grinned. “For old time’s sake?”

Quinn checked his watch. It was almost nine. Sweeney had had Megan all day. But another hour probably wouldn’t matter. She’d seemed pretty cool about it that morning. “Sure,” he said. “For old time’s sake.”

They went to the tavern at the Minuteman, and Andy pointed Quinn to a booth and went up to the bar to order two pints. He brought them back and sat down across the table. “So how about this, huh? The Somerville boys on the case. Remember how we always played detectives when we were kids?”

“Jeez. I’d forgotten all about that.” Quinn took a long sip of his beer. “We were nosy little bastards, weren’t we? Remember when we decided that old Mrs. Mahoney had killed her husband and we tried digging up her backyard?”

“She was so pissed at us. I thought she was going to kill us. What happened to the husband, anyway? Did we ever find out?”

“I don’t remember. I think maybe he just had a heart attack. But there must have been something that made us suspicious.”

“I don’t know. Kids are always suspicious.” They laughed and worked on their beers for a few minutes. Quinn looked around the tavern. It was nice to be out like this, like a regular person. It had been a long time since he’d gone to a bar.

“So, what about you, Andy? You got a girlfriend? You never said.”

Andy looked uncomfortable for a minute, then said, “Nah. Nobody special at the moment, though I can have my share if I want it. It’s the damn job. I had a girl I lived with back last year, but she got tired of me never being around, and that was that. I don’t know how you did it with a wife and kid.”

“Well, I don’t think I did it very well. It’s funny, I always thought you’d end up with what’s-her-name, Heather. Didn’t you date her all through high school?” Quinn found himself embarrassed all of a sudden. He had reminded them both that they had lost touch in high school, that Quinn didn’t really know whom Andy had dated.

“Yeah, mostly.” Andy looked embarrassed too. “But she went off to California after school. She had an aunt out there who was going to set her up with a job. I never heard what happened to her. Probably married with a whole bunch of kids by now.” He seemed sad, and Quinn found that he wanted to cheer him up.

“Well, you’ve made a nice little career for yourself, anyway. Can I expect to hear about your promotion one of these days?”

“We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Andy drained his glass and motioned toward the bar. “You want another one?”

Quinn checked his watch. “Nah. I better get upstairs. Thanks, though. I’ll get you next time.”

Their eyes met and neither of them had anything to say for a second. Andy looked away and Quinn said, “You know, Andy, there’s something I always meant to say to you. About that time, with your dad. I always felt bad I didn’t do anything about it. I should have called the police or something.”

As he said the words, Quinn felt as though it had happened yesterday rather than fifteen years ago. He had gone to pick up Andy on a Saturday night. They were going out somewhere, to a party or something, and he’d knocked on the door, but nobody had answered, so he’d gone around to the back door, which was standing open in the summer air.

Andy’s dad had been a big guy, an ex-boxer who had worked, for as long as Quinn knew him, on the docks, and he had the beefy forearms to prove it. When Quinn opened the back door, Andy’s dad had been taking a swing at Andy’s head. Andy, a skinny teenager, had his hands up in front of his face and Quinn heard him pleading, “Dad, don’t. Come on, don’t,” but he’d heard Mr. Lynch’s fist connect with Andy’s face and he’d seen the blood spurt out of Andy’s nose. At that moment, Mr. Lynch had looked up and seen Quinn standing there.

Quinn hadn’t know what to do, so he’d just stood there and said slowly, “I came to get Andy.” Andy had stared at him, but Quinn wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, and Mr. Lynch had turned around and given Quinn the scariest look he had ever seen on an adult’s face.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” he’d screamed. “Andy’s not going out tonight.”

And Quinn had slunk away like a cat.

Now Andy looked up and something came down over his eyes, like a shade had been pulled. He looked away. On the other side of the bar, someone laughed loudly. “I forgot all about that,” he said. “Seriously. You still thinking about all that old stuff?”

“Nah, I just…I always felt bad about it.”

“Well, don’t.” His voice was cold. “I’m gonna hang out and have one more. I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah. Night.” On the stairs, Quinn turned around and watched Andy’s solitary figure sit there for a minute before getting up to go to the bar for one more.

Beverly Churchill drove straight past Monument Square and the inn, straight out Lexington Road, past houses and barns and expanses of field. It was dark and the lights inside the houses along the road flashed past like the trails of Fourth of July sparklers. She wasn’t sure where she was going, so she just kept driving. Beside her, Marcus was silent, staring out the window, and she had the feeling that he wanted her to keep driving too. She turned onto a residential road, then onto another and another, the big houses set back from the road hulking in the night. She kept driving until she was sure they were lost and then she pulled the car over and turned it off. She hadn’t smoked for going on fifteen years now, but she wanted a cigarette so bad that she could feel the smoke in her mouth.

“What are you doing?” Marcus asked her.

She turned to find him slumped in his seat, staring out the window.

“I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t know where else to go.”

“Nice houses out here,” he said, still looking out the window. She looked past him at the roof of a big white house rising above a tall hedge.

“Yeah. They are nice. Remember when we moved into our house? I didn’t think I’d ever seen a nicer one. But then there’s always a house that’s nicer or bigger than yours. Always someone who makes you feel bad about what you’ve got. Remember that. You have to feel good about who you are, no matter where you are or who you’re with.”

He looked over at her, confused, and she bumbled on. “Marcus, your father is dead.”

He stared at her for a minute and then said, “You think I don’t know that? Why was I just interrogated for two hours?”

She undid her seat belt and turned around all the way, so she could look him in the eye. “No, listen to me. Your father is dead and we have to learn to do better for each other now. You’re all I have, Marcus. You’re my only child, and I’m the only mother you have, and we have to figure out how we’re going to be now. We haven’t been doing very well for each other lately.”

As she said the words, she felt a sudden sense of lightness. Her headlights illuminated the trees alongside the road, gave each of them a little halo of light so that they looked almost like they were covered with snow. She loved it when the trees were covered with snow. It would be winter soon; soon it would snow. And they would be okay. She knew it with sudden certainty.

“I know you had nothing to do with your father’s death. I don’t even need you to tell me that, and you know what? Even if you had, I would still love you and I would find you a lawyer and we would go forward together. Even if you had killed him. Because you’re my son and I will never love anyone as much as I love you.” She was able to say the words very calmly and when she was done, she looked over at him.

He was staring out the window at the haloed trees, and though he said nothing, she felt a sense of peace coming from him. As they sat there in the now dying autumn, they listened to the sounds of the car cooling down, the little knocks and whines it made. Beverly reached over and put a hand on his arm.

Marcus didn’t push it away.