The Sleepwalker(59)

“You’d be fine. But I wasn’t even thinking about what you’d say.”

“Then what?”

“I was thinking about what you’d see.”

I paused and said nothing. I didn’t understand what she was driving at. When I just looked at her, she went on, “You could see people’s faces in the pews. Their reactions. You might be able to see who did it.”

She was absolutely serious. “Who do you think you are, Cam Jansen? Nancy Drew?”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that whoever killed Mom will be in the church?”

“Not for one single second.”

“Criminals always return to the scene of the crime.”

“They don’t.”

“And they’re never as smart as they think they are. In the end, they always do something stupid.”

I knew what she was referring to: Gavin’s boss, the head of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Waterbury, had said essentially that to the media after the medical examiner’s findings were released. He’d said if Annalee Ahlberg had been murdered—and even the head trauma did not definitively support that hypothesis—it was likely that whoever had killed her had made a mistake at some point. I was less confident. Gavin was, too. I had only seen him once in the last few days, and I missed him. But it was difficult for me to get away with my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins in town. Moreover, the state police had been energized by my mother’s corpse. They were looking once more at my mother’s clients and friends and—it was clear to me—my father. They insisted that none of us needed to be afraid, though how they could be so confident that whoever had killed my mother had no interest in the three of us sometimes left me perplexed. In any event, Gavin himself was busy, though he had told me that he would be at the service.

“Usually they only do something stupid in the movies,” I said to Paige.

“Or around here. Some of the dumbest criminals in the world live around here.”

“I’ll give you that,” I agreed. A few weeks earlier, a guy my age had tried shoplifting a couple of hunting knives from a sporting goods store near Burlington. He had hidden them, unsheathed, under his shirt. When he was running from the store, he had tripped and stabbed himself in the stomach. He’d nearly bled to death in the parking lot.

“So you’ll do it? You’ll say something about Mom?”

“No. I told you, I’m not capable. I’m just…not. But I will see who’s there, okay?” I tried not to sound patronizing.

“I will, too,” she said, nodding. Then she reached for one of the dresses beside her on the bed. “Wear this one,” she suggested, holding up a black pullover with embroidered flowers along the bodice that fell to just below my knees. I always felt like a flamenco dancer when I was wearing it.

“It’s not too, I don’t know, frivolous?” It was a testimony to how out of sorts I was that season that I was even considering the fashion advice of my kid sister.

“No. Besides Mom liked it.”

“Mom did.”

Our father had had our mother—or, to be precise, what was left of our mother—cremated. The small urn with her ashes was going to be buried after the service in the Bartlett Cemetery. My father and Paige and I had picked out a spot on a hill that got a lot of sun. It was in the newer section—the original cemetery had plots dating back to 1785—but there was a hydrangea nearby and we all liked the irony.

I heard my grandfather’s heavy walk on the corridor and then on the stairs. He wasn’t a big man and he wasn’t an especially old man. He was only seventy-six then. But he had outlived his daughter, a tragedy no parent should have to endure, and he had aged worse than any of us that autumn. Twice I had found him crying softly in our house. My grandmother was usually oblivious, which may have been a blessing for her, but it was devastating for me to witness. She was seventy-four and, it seemed to me, extraordinarily beautiful. Like her daughter, she was tall, though her hair by then was a lush alabaster mane that fell to her shoulders and that my grandfather brushed in the morning and evening. She was slender, and her eyes remained electric—undimmed, despite the way her mind was failing. She was, I had deduced as a very young girl, the source of my mother’s charisma.

“I will keep my eyes out at the service,” I reassured Paige. I had no expectations that I would learn anything, but I felt a deep pang when I looked at her, and I wanted her to know I was listening.



Before we left the house, I found Paige and brought her to our parents’ bedroom. I waved my arm theatrically over our mother’s dresser and the jewelry there, as if I were a genie who had just made a small mountain of precious stones appear in the desert.

“Take something,” I said. “For the funeral—and, I guess, forever.”

“We can’t just take Mom’s jewelry,” she said, uncharacteristically aghast.

“Why not? Eventually Dad will just divvy it up between us. Besides, the seriously valuable stuff is in the safe deposit box at the bank.” To show her that I meant business, I took the cable bracelet with the blue topaz and cuffed it over my wrist. “I view this as a tribute.”

“I view it as theft.”

“Oh, please.”

She looked around the room as if she wanted to be sure that no one was watching us, and then reached for the charm bracelet. “Everyone will know it was hers,” she said.