Tonight I Said Goodbye (St. Martin's Minotaur Mystery) (40 page)

"Yes," she said, "you do. And that's all you can ask of yourself, Lincoln. Now I'm going to let you get some sleep. You're going to need it for a day under the interrogation lamps."

"It'll be a blast," I said. "The cops are probably selling tickets if you want to be there for the show."

I walked her down to her car. She gave me a long, hard hug, then climbed into the Acura and drove away.

I went upstairs and dug Betsy Weston's diary out of the drawer where I had stashed it. I read through a few of the entries again, smiling at her spelling mistakes, able now to put a voice and an attitude with the thoughts. Then I snapped it shut and threw it in the garbage can. The heart-shaped prism I had taken from her bedroom that same afternoon was in the drawer with the diary. I started to toss it in the trash, too, but I didn't. I took it down to the gym and used the fishing line to hang it in the little window next to the desk. The sun would emerge from behind the clouds again one of these days, and when it did, the prism would sparkle, and maybe it would make Grace smile. You do what you can.

I locked the office and walked out to the parking lot. A jet roared overhead, flying quite low as it came in for a landing at the airport just a few miles away. The sound was tremendous, a blast that seemed to shake me until it was all I was aware of. I looked up at the sky and watched the trail of smoke and the lights as the plane roared in. I wondered where it had been and where it would go next. I wondered if it had carried Julie and Betsy Weston someplace. Eventually, the plane descended so low the buildings obscured it from sight. The cloud of vapor it had left behind faded slowly into the night sky, and then there was nothing left but the memory of the sound.

I went upstairs and went to bed.