by Linda Howard
“Don’t tell me somebody done dug up that time capsule a week ago, and you boys have just noticed.”
“According to your tape, it was still there at sunset yesterday.”
She wheeled, stared at the image. “If it was there yesterday, then whoever took it’s on that tape.”
“I didn’t see anyone,” he repeated patiently, and fast-forwarded through to dawn to show her. When he stopped the tape, they could see the hole at the base of the flagpole and the granite marker flipped off to the side. A ferocious frown pulled her brows together.
“Run it again,” she snapped, coming to stand behind him.
He did, rewinding the tape yet again, and this time doing periodic stops of the tape to see when the vandalism first appeared. At 2:30 AM, the hole was there. When he stopped it again, at 1:53 AM, the site was undisturbed.
“Now run it in real time,” she said, dragging a chair over. She gave her monitors a quick look, then settled her attention on the tape playing in front of her.
Knox punched Play and the time-counter began clicking forward a second at a time. Seven minutes later he said, “Shit, what was that?” A brief, white flash had glared on the screen. Then it was gone, and so was the time capsule.
He stopped the tape, hit Rewind, then almost immediately hit Play again. The tape had backed up three minutes. The same thing happened. The ground was undisturbed, then came that white flash, and when it faded, the capsule was gone.
“Somebody’s messing with my camera,” Tarana said in a voice of doom.
“I don’t think so.” Frowning, Knox rewound the tape over those same few crucial minutes. “Watch the timer.”
Together they watched the seconds ticking away. At 2:00 AM, the white flash filled the screen. At 2:01 AM, the flash faded and the time capsule was gone.
“That’s not possible,” Tarana snapped, surging to her feet and kicking her chair. She turned and glared at all the monitors. “If somebody’s messing with that camera, he can mess with all these, and that ain’t gonna happen.”
Silently Knox watched the sequence again. He hadn’t noticed the flash when he’d been fast-forwarding or rewinding. But it was definitely there, and the granite slab had been in place before the flash but was pushed aside afterward, and the dark hole gaped at the foot of the flagpole.
He rewound the tape all the way. The time display was exactly twenty-four hours before he’d come in here and Tarana had stopped the tape. He didn’t know if anyone could tamper with the tape without messing up the time, or if it was even possible without someone coming into this office, in which case no way had a bunch of high school kids been responsible.
He scratched his jaw. He supposed he could sit with his watch in one hand and time the tape, but that would take twenty-four hours and be boring as hell besides. There was an easier way to get to the bottom of this.
Tarana was stalking back and forth behind him, breathing fire and muttering curses. Knox felt sorry for the next person who came through that door, because, deprived of a definite target, she might just take her ire out on anyone handy.
“I’m going over to the hardware store,” he said, sliding his chair back and grabbing his coffee cup.
“Hardware store? What you going to the hardware store for? You can’t just waltz in here and show me somebody’s been messing with my cameras, then just waltz out again to go buy some nails. You sit back down!”
“Dad has security cameras, too,” Knox said. “One of them is pointed toward the door.”
“So?” she snapped, then realization dawned. “Oh, I gotcha. Glass door, big glass storefront, right across the street from the flagpole.”
He winked at her as he went out the door.
The square was busy now as he crossed the street; people were coming to the courthouse, taking care of business like car tags, driver’s licenses, boat registrations. Some of the stores were open, including the hardware store; the rest of them opened at nine. MacFarland had strung a nice crime-scene perimeter, blocking off a good twenty yards in either direction from the flagpole, thereby blocking the sidewalk and making people walk around.
The bell above the door dinged when Knox walked in, and Kelvin looked up as he was checking out a customer. “Be with you in a minute, son,” he said.
“Take your time.” Looking up, Knox located the security camera and turned to follow the alignment. Just as he’d thought, the flagpole was almost dead center opposite the front door. Whoever had done the vandalism might have somehow blocked the courthouse security camera, though he didn’t see how, but this camera was inside the store and hadn’t been tampered with.
The customer left and Knox went over to the checkout counter. “I need to see your security tape,” he said to Kelvin. He nodded out the window. “Somebody dug up the time capsule last night and somehow blocked the courthouse camera. I figure your camera caught the action.”
Kelvin looked up at the camera, following the path the same way Knox had. “Reckon so. I wondered what all that yellow tape was for. That’s the time capsule we watched them bury, right?”
“The same one. Unless they dug it up and buried a fresh one that I don’t know about.”
“Nineteen eighty-five. Southern Cal won the Rose Bowl, and I had to listen to that asshole Aaron for a whole year.”
Kelvin always referred to his brother-in-law Aaron as “asshole Aaron” because he liked the alliteration; he didn’t, however, like his brother-in-law. Reaching beneath the counter, he ejected a tape and handed it over the counter to Knox. “There you go.”
“I don’t know when I’ll get it back.”
“Don’t worry about it. I got extras.”
Tape in hand, Knox went back to his office. He had a small TV/VCR combo and he turned it on, then slipped in the tape. With the remote in his hand, he rewound until he was close to the right time, then in fits and starts until 1:59 AM showed on the clock display. The detail wasn’t as good and the glass distorted the view some, but he could make out the square granite marker right where it was supposed to be. He pressed Play and watched. There was always some variance in clocks, so he had no idea how long he’d actually have to watch.
At 2:03:17, there was a white flash. Knox sat up straight, staring at the screen. At 2:03:18, the flash faded. Now the pale square of the granite marker was lying off to the side, and the ground had been disturbed.
“Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “What in hell is going on?”
2
A more careful examination of the scene revealed exactly nothing. The granite marker was polished on the side that bore the engraved dates, but a careful dusting picked up no fingerprints at all. There definitely weren’t any footprints. The whole thing was weird.
By now, Knox wasn’t the only one who was curious. Tarana was furious, still certain someone was messing with her security cameras even though Knox had tried to tell her his dad’s store camera had shown the same brief flash, then nothing else. He figured when she calmed down some, he’d try again.
MacFarland was telling everyone how he’d noticed the hole when he drove by on his way in to work; others had noticed the hole, but hadn’t thought anything about it. Now, if there’d been a body lying there, that would have been different, but a hole in the ground hadn’t seemed all that suspicious.
Peke County was small, and not a hotbed of crime. Pekesville had a comfortable population of twenty-three thousand, just big enough to afford some conveniences that wouldn’t be found in a smaller town but not big enough to attract gang activity or satanists, anything exotic like that. The sheriff’s department more normally handled the garden variety of trouble: domestic violence, theft, drunk driving, some drugs. Lately meth labs had become real popular, and since the labs were normally set up in remote locations, that meant most of them were in the country rather than within Pekesville’s city limits, which meant the deputies had fast become experts in how to handle the literally explosive situation.
But a hole in the ground? W
hat were they supposed to do with that?
When the sheriff, Calvin Cutler, moseyed into his office and heard about the mystery, he had to go look at the hole himself. Surrounded by a group of deputies and two investigators, he trooped down to the front of the courthouse. “Don’t that beat all,” he said, staring at the scattered dirt within the area outlined by the crime-scene tape. “Who in tarnation would want a time capsule?”
Calvin Cutler didn’t swear, which was so unusual in a peace officer that his men sometimes referred to him, behind his back but with affection, as “Andy.” He stood six foot five, weighed close to three hundred pounds, and had hands that could swallow a basketball. He had started out as a deputy, worked his way up the force to chief deputy, and then when the sheriff retired, he’d run for the office and was currently in the middle of his fourth term. Sheriff Cutler knew the job from the ground up, and Knox couldn’t think of a better man to work for.
“It’s gotta be kids,” he continued. “Nobody else would do such a fool thing.”
“But how was it done?” Knox asked.
The sheriff turned and stared at the camera on the top corner of the courthouse. “Nothing but a flash on the film, huh?”
“And on the security camera in the hardware store.”
Sheriff Cutler stuck his hands in his pockets and grinned at Knox. “Driving you crazy, I guess.”
“It’s got me curious.”
“Guess this means you’re going to spend department money getting to the bottom of this mystery hole, if you’ll excuse the pun.”
Knox shrugged. On his list of priorities, this was way down at the bottom. There was no victim, and nothing of any real value had been taken. This was vandalism, but the big question was, did anyone really care? And the bottom line was that the sheriff decided what he investigated, not him. “Only in my spare time, if you don’t mind. It’s puzzling, but not important.”
“That’s if you have any spare time,” the sheriff said affably as they all headed back.
“Yeah,” Knox agreed. Small county or not, the department stayed pretty busy because they were perpetually understaffed. Knox was the chief investigator, but since the department had only three investigators, total, he didn’t figure that was any big thing. With just the three of them that meant eight-hour shifts were something they’d heard about but weren’t quite sure they believed in; they were all pretty much on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Knox usually worked between seventy and eighty hours every week, but that was partly because the other two investigators had families and he tried to give them some home time. To his way of thinking that didn’t mean he was a particularly good leader; it meant he was lonely, and he worked so he wouldn’t have to go home except to sleep.
They’d wasted enough time pondering the theft of a time capsule, and he had a stack of paperwork on his desk that had to be plowed through, plus the cases in which he needed to do some actual investigating. After fortifying himself with another cup of coffee, he settled down to his job.
Knox liked working in law enforcement. Not only did he enjoy the camaraderie, but the job was a perfect fit for him. In what other field would he be paid for asking questions, poking around, solving puzzles? Okay, so maybe there were other jobs that would have let him do the same thing, but in law enforcement he got to carry a weapon. That trumped being, say, a reporter, every day of the week.
After about an hour of desk time, with maybe a quarter of his paperwork finished, he got to his feet and shrugged into a lightweight jacket. He wore a shoulder holster over a white polo shirt that was neatly tucked into a pair of jeans, and slightly battered athletic shoes. Considering the heat of the early summer day, he’d have gladly done without the jacket, except for the sheriff’s dress code. Calvin didn’t care if his investigators wore pajamas, so long as they also had on a jacket. Since the sheriff didn’t also insist on a tie, Knox counted his blessings.
“Where you off to?” Helen, Sheriff Cutler’s assistant, asked as she leaned in to toss another four inches of reports on his desk.
“Jesse Bingham’s. Someone broke into his barn last night, slashed the tires on his tractor, killed a bunch of chickens.”
“I’ve never met a man more deserving of having his tires slashed, but I hate it about the chickens,” Helen said, and strolled back to her office. Jesse Bingham was well-known for his nasty disposition, and he filed complaints just about every time anyone crossed him.
Knox hated it about the chickens, too. They were stupid birds, but surely they’d suffered enough, being owned by Jesse Bingham.
Leaving the parking lot, he took a left on Fourth Avenue, which led directly to the highway. When he stopped at the traffic light, his right-turn signal on, he saw a lone figure standing in the Brookhaven Cemetery just across the highway. He turned off his turn signal, and when the light changed, he drove straight across the intersection to the cemetery’s entrance.
He parked under the spreading shade of a hundred-year-old oak, then got out and walked across the thick grass to the woman who was standing with her hand lightly resting on a white marble tombstone. Without looking, he knew what the inscription on the tombstone read: Rebecca Lacey, Beloved Daughter of Edward and Ruth Lacey, followed by the dates of her birth and death. If she had died three months later, the tombstone would have read: Rebecca Davis, Beloved Wife of Knox Davis. He put his arm around the woman, and without a word she tilted her head to lay it against his shoulder. They looked at the grave of the young woman they had both loved: her daughter, his fiancée.
“It’s been seven years,” she said softly. “Sometimes I go days without thinking about her, and then when I realize it, that’s almost worse than the days when losing her feels as fresh as if it happened yesterday.”
“I know,” he said, because he did. The first time he’d realized that he hadn’t thought about Rebecca at all the day before, the sense of having betrayed her had been almost more than he could bear. But time moved on, and the living either kept on living or they died, too; either way, life and events had a way of shifting around so the empty place was filled in. He could look at her grave now without feeling as if he’d been stabbed in the heart. He could remember her with distant affection, the sense of love having faded. He would probably always love the way they had been together, the promise of happiness, but she was seven years’ gone and he was no longer in love with her.
He kissed the forehead of the woman who had almost been his mother-in-law. It was different for her; Rebecca would always be her child, and the quality of that love would never change. It was a love that wasn’t dependent on hormones or chemistry to remain fresh, that didn’t require close proximity. On the other hand, she too had days when the memories didn’t surface, and maybe that was nature’s way of keeping the pain from being unbearable.
Ruth Lacey was a slim, young-looking woman of fifty-three. There was very little gray in her hair and she kept it in a pixie cut that suited her delicate face. She’d been twenty when Rebecca was born, an age that now seemed to him to be ridiculously young. Ed, her husband, had been cheating on her practically from the day they were married, but she’d stayed with him, for reasons unknown to anyone but her. Maybe he’d soured her on marriage so much she didn’t see any point in being free to try it with anyone else, so she’d stayed with him for purely practical reasons. Maybe she loved the son of a bitch. Knox knew there was no way of telling what went on in other people’s private lives, or of understanding the bond that held certain people together.
She was a woman who seemed very open and giving, but who was actually very private. When Rebecca died, she had held her pain and grief inside—except with Knox. They had clung together then, and she’d let him see the depth of her loss. They’d helped each other through the dark days, and as the years passed, though they had less and less contact with each other, the bond and affection remained, as if they were soldiers who had fought side by side and never forgot that kinship.
There were alwa
ys fresh flowers on Rebecca’s grave. Knox had placed his share there, but over the last few years the effort had been mainly Ruth’s. Last year, he didn’t think he’d come to the cemetery at all. For three years before that, he’d come only on the anniversary of her death.
The funny thing was, the day after Rebecca’s funeral, when he and Ruth had stood practically in the same spot where they were now, Ruth had told him how it would be. “For a while,” she’d said, “you’ll be here a lot; then gradually you’ll be able to let go. You’ll come on the anniversary, maybe, or her birthday. Maybe Christmas. Maybe you’ll forget and not come at all. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Don’t feel guilty about it. You still have your life to live, and you can’t do it if you try to hold on to something that’ll never be.”
He stooped and plucked a weed that had escaped the caretaker’s eagle eye, remembering her funeral, and the grave covered with flowers. She had died in March, just before spring became full-blown. He’d spent the night at her house—despite being engaged, they hadn’t moved in together—and when they got up that morning, she’d said, “I have a bitch of a headache. I’m going to take some aspirin.” She’d headed toward the kitchen, and he’d jumped into the shower. When he had shaved and dressed, he went into the kitchen and found her on the floor, already dead. He’d called 911 then done CPR anyway, even knowing it was useless, but unable to not make the effort. By the time the medics arrived, he’d been exhausted and dripping with sweat but unwilling to stop because his heart was unwilling to accept what his brain already knew.
The autopsy revealed that a massive aneurysm in her brain had burst. Even if she’d already been standing in a hospital emergency department when it happened, there was no way anyone could have reacted fast enough to save her. So she was gone, at the age of twenty-six, two weeks before her bridal shower, nine weeks before their wedding.
That was when he’d started working so many hours, and seven years later he was still doing it. Maybe it was time he scaled back to, say, sixty hours or something like that. He hadn’t dated much—you couldn’t date when you were working all the time—so of course he hadn’t become involved with anyone since Rebecca. He was thirty-five, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get any younger.
