Mausoleum (24 page)
Here's what happened next.
In the dull light of early dawn, Grace Botsford closed the front door of her saltbox and climbed into her thirty-year old Trans Am and drove up Main Street toward Mount Pleasant. After she passed Trooper Moody's cottage, she unbuckled her seatbelt.
At the top of Mount Pleasant, just past Brian Grose's place, she turned the car around and faced it down the hill and stepped hard on the gas. The old street racer rumbled to life and down it rolled heading for the bend in the road that had done in her father with a lethal assist from Angel.
Suddenly she screamed.
I couldn't blame her. Who wouldn't scream if someone unfolded himself from the narrow slot behind the front seats, and said, “Grace, you have an innocent passenger on board.”
She slammed on the brakes, went into a skid, got the car under control and pulled onto the shoulder, screaming, “Get out! Get out!”
“No.”
“Ben, I know what I'm doing.”
“I know what you're doing, too, and that's why I'm not getting out.”
Her eyes were huge. She was breathing hard. Otherwise she was, as always, still as sculpture. The damned-est thing was she did not look crazy. Annoyed was more like it. She glared at me the way you would glare at some dolt blocking a grocery aisle while you were trying to get shopped, get home, and cook dinner.
I said, “The Frenchtown Diner will be open by now. Why don't we drive down and have a cup of coffee and a little breakfast?”
I did not expect her to reach inside her cardigan sweater and pull a pistol from a shoulder holster. But she did. And she pointed it at my face. Her hand was steady, her grip sure. She flicked off the safety without looking down at it. “Get out.”
“Grace, what's the gun for?”
“In case I don't die in the wreck I'll blow my brains out before they bring the ambulance. Get out.”
“You think of everything, don't you?” Including the snug holster so that even badly injured she could reach the gun to finish the job.
“Leave me to this Ben. I am doing what's right.”
“It's not right. If you want to âatone' for the sin of shooting Brian, atone with good work.”
“I have done plenty of âgood work.' Dad and I both. And I know that I am leaving our âwork' in good hands, and for that I thank you, Ben Abbott. It gives me peace. But if you try to stop me from doing what I must, I will shoot you. I will
attempt
to just wound you.”
“Okay,” I said. I pitched the passenger seat forward, opened the door, and climbed over the seat. Halfway out I tried once more. “Grace.”
“Out!”
“If you kill yourself, I will resign from the Association.”
“What?”
“I won't be president of the Village Cemetery Association. I won't look after our burying ground for the next fifty years. I'll leave it to âundesirable inhabitants.'”
“You would never do that.”
“I will if you kill yourself.”
“Would you give up everything you love in our town in exchange for one miserable life?”
“I will move away. Start over somewhere else. I will leave Newbury to its own devices.”
“You can't desert everything you care about.”
“Aren't you?” I asked.
She blinked. “Would you rather see me go to prison?”
“I don't see that happening. You were very careful. You'd make a wonderful criminal. No one knows but me, and I don't have any proof.”
“Lieutenant Boyce suspects.”
“She doesn't have any proof eitherâI presume this gun in my face is not one that would interest her.”
“Of course not. I registered it years ago, while I took shooting lessons. Lieutenant Boyce knew about them, by the way.”
“Lots of people learn to shoot. No proof, no case. And one of these days, I'm hoping, Lieutenant Boyce will remember how much she loved her own father. He was her hero. A cop. Shot in Bridgeport.”
Grace Botsford blinked, again. She looked like she was going to cry. Instead she engaged the safety, shoved the pistol back in the holster, made sure it was clipped, and buttoned her sweater over it. I climbed back in the car. We buckled up and drove down to Main Street, hung a left at the flagpole and grabbed the last two stools at the Frenchtown Diner.
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