Todos los capítulos de EMPTY GRAVE.. the brother we buried : Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

"That's Elias's," Mrs. Hallett said. "He did it when he was twelve. I keep it in the hall." It hung beside the coat rack in a dime-store frame, a pencil drawing of a fat orange cat asleep on a porch rail. Every whisker had been drawn separately. In the corner, in careful child's capitals, someone had signed it E. VOSS. Jose stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets because he didn't trust them. "Biscuit," she said. "Dead nine years. The boy gave me a better likeness of that cat than the vet got on an X-ray." She was seventy-eight and had lived across Tamarack Street from the Voss house for forty-one years. She'd made coffee they hadn't asked for and put out a plate of shortbread nobody touched. Rainer sat on the porch glider with a mug balanced on his knee. He hadn't said anything since hello. The three-hour drive had taken them through four towns on back roads in a Corolla Rainer had borrowed from a man who didn't

Camille took his shirt without a word. She'd opened the door before he reached it. She stood there in a gray cardigan with her hair pulled back, and she looked at him once, from his unshaven jaw to the cigarette smell in his collar, and then she stepped aside and let him in. She didn't ask where he'd been. She didn't ask whose car had dropped him at the curb. She ran the bath hot, laid out a towel and a clean T-shirt, and carried his clothes down the hall to the machine as if they were any other laundry. He heard the lid close. The dial click. Water start. Nothing in her face had changed. That was the part he turned over later, lying in the bath with his knees up, the water going gray around him. She'd smelled Rainer on him like a stranger smells rain and had chosen, with perfect courtesy, to behave as if there'd been no weather. His phone was on the edge of the tub. He had texted Rainer from the curb. *Do yo

Camille parked on the fourth level of the garage and waited eleven minutes, because the man she was meeting was late and she had learned that how a person handled being late told you most of what you needed to know.He took the stairs, not the elevator. Mid-fifties, gray crew cut, a windbreaker the color of wet cement. He got into her passenger seat and shut the door softly. "Mrs. Alvarez.""Vale. I kept my name.""Ms. Vale." Gideon Reese had spent twenty-two years with the state police and eleven since in a business with no sign on the door. "You said on the phone you had a harassment situation.""A former associate of my husband's. He's been sending photographs, messages. He disrupted our wedding." She handed over a manila envelope. "That's what I have. His name is Rainer Voss. He drives a borrowed car, usually, or he walks. He's very good at not being found.""Everybody is, until somebody's paid.""There's a young man who sat

"You can leave, you know."Rainer stood in the doorway of his own kitchen in yesterday's shirt, hair flat on one side. It was nine in the morning. The hot plate was on. Jose stood over it with a spatula, cracking eggs into a pan he'd found under the sink, and had been doing it for ten minutes with great concentration."I'm making eggs.""I see that.""You don't have a toaster.""I have a hot plate.""That's not a toaster." He flipped one. It broke. "Do you want yours broken or broken?""Jose.""Broken, then."Rainer didn't move. "You didn't leave.""Apparently not.""Why?""Because the bus wasn't running." Jose slid the eggs onto a plate, set it on the table, and handed Rainer a fork. "Eat."Rainer sat. He looked at the plate the way he'd looked at the whiskey. Then he picked up the fork and ate half the egg in three bites, and some of the stiffness went out of his sh

The Alder Room had two doors, a service corridor behind the bar, and a man in the corner pretending to read a newspaper he hadn't turned in twenty minutes.Rainer counted all of it from the threshold. Then he counted the woman at the window table, because she was the only reason he'd come.She didn't wave. She watched him cross the room with her hands folded beside a white teapot, and when he reached the chair across from her, she said, "You're early. Good. You like to see the room first.""Where's your friend?""Which one?""Corner. Gray crew cut. He's on page four of the sports section and hasn't moved his eyes.""That's Mr. Reese. He's very good." She poured a second cup of tea, set it in front of the empty chair, and slid it two inches toward him. "He's here so I'll feel safe. You may sit, or you may go. I'd rather you sat."Rainer sat. He moved the cup to the side without touching the handle.Up close she wasn't what he'd rehearsed. He'd spent three years building her out of a ph