The Gravedigger's Ball (17 page)

“I’ve called you five or six times since all this happened, and you ignored my calls, just like you always do.”

Her husband tried to interrupt her, but Lenore wouldn’t let him.

“No, I’m talking now, John, and you’re listening!” she shouted as tears streamed down her face. “I’ve tried to be a good wife to you. I’ve never used you, never crowded you, never taken more than I’ve been given. I’ve loved you, John, probably a lot more than you deserved. And for you to be callous enough to call me after what I’ve been through and talk to me about your
investors
—”

Mann could hear him trying to backpedal, but Lenore was having none of it.

“You know, John, I wasn’t sure that I should come to Philadelphia. I thought it was selfish of me to come here looking to do something for myself. But you’ve shown me what real selfishness is. Thanks for the lesson.”

She disconnected the call, and in a few moments, the phone began buzzing again. Lenore hit the power button to turn the phone off and threw it in her pocketbook. Then she sat back and looked out the window with her arms folded.

Charlie glanced at her once again. He almost felt sorry for her. “Are you all—”

“It’s not for you to understand. Isn’t that what you told me?”

“Okay,” Charlie said nonchalantly, thankful that he didn’t have to talk.

As they turned off Broad at Pike Street and headed north on Germantown Avenue, they both tried to get their minds off their relationships. Mann focused on the road ahead. Lenore stared out the window and wondered what it would be like to live in a place such as this.

There were barber shops and churches, restaurants and discount stores, and women wearing everything from Muslim garb to low-cut blouses. The men were dressed in boots and work clothes. The streets were dressed in discarded trash, and, mixed in amongst the teenage boys with their underwear exposed, there were children.

They laughed as they ran along the sidewalk near the high school football field that bordered Hunting Park Avenue. They jumped rope along the residential strip near the train station called Wayne Junction. They rode bikes and skateboards on cracked, uneven sidewalks. They seemed to live happy lives, even as they frolicked in places where death was always close.

Mann drove through a block of ramshackle houses where a waving American flag looked oddly out of place, and Lenore read the names of drug-war casualties on telephone poles with dingy teddy bear memorials.

They rode farther, and the storefront churches that dotted nearly every block of Germantown Avenue gave way to storefront mosques. A tiny strip mall was surrounded by a low stone wall, and as Lenore stared out the window at the people, the people stared back, curious as to why she was so interested.

“Where’s this safe house?” Lenore asked Mann as they passed yet another barber shop.

“You’re the psychic,” Mann said. “You tell me.”

She turned on him with all the attitude she could muster. “What is your problem?”

Charlie Mann glanced at her before returning his attention to the road. “I don’t like people who get in my business.”

“Well, from the way you treat your girlfriend, it looks like your business is a lot like mine. For that reason alone, I would’ve thought you’d be a little nicer to me after you overheard my conversation with John.”

“And I would’ve thought we’d all get together, hold hands, and sing ‘Kum ba Yah.’ But since people keep killing each other, I keep coming to work.”

Lenore didn’t respond. Instead she looked at him closely for the first time. She saw his rounded nose and chiseled jaw, his ample lips and chocolate skin. She saw something else beneath his handsome face, too. She saw that he was hurt.

“You don’t like coming to work anymore, do you?”

He laughed. “Is that one of those broad statements you psychics make so people think you’re for real?”

“I don’t call myself a psychic,” Lenore said. “But I know when I see someone who’s hurting.”

“What makes you think I’m hurting?”

Lenore didn’t answer. Instead, she stared out the window, watching as the neighborhood changed from residential to commercial and back again. They passed Germantown High School and the First United Methodist Church. They passed the Johnson House, a former stop for runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. And with each historical landmark she saw, Lenore felt the triumph and heartbreak and pain and hope of those who’d traveled this road. None of her feelings were stronger than the ones that took hold of her as they approached Cliveden, a centuries-old estate near the site of a Revolutionary War battle.

As Lenore looked through the wrought-iron gate at the grounds surrounding the mansion, the brilliant light of artillery flashed in her mind. She reached for her temples and squeezed to dull the pain, but the sound of charging horses grew louder as images from the battle filled her consciousness. Muskets flashed. Blood poured. Bodies fell. Then, suddenly, she saw a war of a different type.

The uniforms were black instead of red and blue, and while the soldiers were spurred on by drugs and false belief, the deaths were all too real. A red-haired man lay dead on a train platform. Blood-spattered pews played host to twisted bodies. An angel’s wings stretched toward a hundred-foot ceiling. The final image she saw was her sister, falling as a bullet struck her head. A dark face was on the other side of the gunshot. That face belonged to Charlie Mann, and the grief belonged to him, too.

As Lenore fell farther into the cavern that was her vision, the car stopped with a jolt. Charlie Mann’s voice came softly at first, like an echo, but as the cloud lifted from her mind and she came back to the moment, she could feel his hands gripping her shoulders.

“Mrs. Wilkinson!” he shouted as he shook her. “Lenore!”

She heard him, though barely, so Charlie Mann shook her once again. Her shallow breathing became stronger, and the blackness in her mind gave way to a sea of colors, and she awakened feeling as if she’d seen the joy and pain of many lives, including Charlie’s.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He had pulled the car over to the curb. “You looked like you blacked out for a minute there.”

“No, I just saw something,” she said as she looked into his face. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” he asked with genuine concern.

She nodded and ran her hands through her hair.

He looked at her again, just to be certain she was all right. Then he pulled back into traffic, with the other car following close behind.

“I never answered your question,” she said weakly as they bumped along the cobblestone street.

“What question?”

She closed her eyes and leaned back against her seat. “You asked what made me think you were hurting. Do you still want the answer?”

They both knew he didn’t, but after a few seconds of silence, Lenore continued.

“I think you’re hurting because you never imagined that being a cop meant you’d actually have to kill people.”

Her words catapulted him back to the Angel of Death investigation. He didn’t know or care how much Lenore knew. He just wanted her to let it go.

“The department exonerated me for what I did,” he said, his tone defensive. “So let’s just drop it.”

“Dropping it won’t erase the fact that you’re still looking for forgiveness,” she said. “Especially if you can’t forgive yourself.”

Mann was angry, then defiant, and finally, sad. He wasn’t sure how to handle those feelings, or if he wanted to handle them at all. “Your theory’s interesting,” he said as they sped along the avenue, “but how I do my job is none of your business.”

She turned to him with a puzzled expression. “Of
course
it’s my business. You killed my sister.”

Mann pursed his lips as grief crept up from the place where he’d hidden it from everyone, including himself.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked with a compassion Mann hadn’t expected.

“I’ve already talked to a counselor about it,” he said quietly. “They make you do that after police shootings.”

“And I’m guessing you told that counselor what he wanted to hear,” she said. “Then you told Sandy and everyone else that you’re fine. But you’re not fine, are you? A man like you doesn’t just forget about taking a life. He sits in it, hurts from it, and unless he talks about it, he dies a little bit every day.”

“What do you mean, ‘a man like me’?”

“I mean the kind of man who knows what it’s like to lose someone.”

Mann’s eyes grew vacant as he thought of losing his father to a murderer’s bullet. He wondered, each time he thought of what he’d done, if he was a murderer, too. Lenore could sense that, so she tried to give him a measure of peace.

“I need you to know something,” she said as he made himself look at the road ahead. “I need you to know that I forgive you for what happened to Mary. I don’t know if that’ll make any difference in how you feel about it, but I think that’s one of the reasons I’m here—to tell you that you’re forgiven.”

Mann hesitated, unsure how to respond. He thought of the long nights he’d spent with Sandy after the shootings, and how she’d never been able to reach him. He thought of talking to the counselor and never feeling relief. He thought of consulting his mother and not feeling better. And yet, here was this woman he barely knew, speaking the words that caused the weight to slowly lift from his shoulders.

There were only two words left for him to say, and he spoke them in a strong, clear voice. “Thank you.”

A few minutes later, they drove past a black gate and into a driveway on a quiet street at the city’s outer edge. The tree-lined community was known as Chestnut Hill. It was a haven of sorts, where the people were fiercely liberal and the property values were extremely high.

This community, with its quaint shops, suburban feel, and fairytale dwellings, was the last place anyone would look for a murder witness.

As the cops who’d followed them emerged from the other car and Charlie Mann led Lenore into the house, Mann took extra care to make sure she was properly protected. She gratefully accepted his help.

Their truce was real but tenuous. Mann was thankful that she’d given him some peace, but he was wary of her gift. Lenore felt odd in the presence of the man who’d killed her sister, yet she was strangely drawn to him.

As Mann set her up in the safe house, they each knew they’d have to learn to accept their dependence on each other. Lenore needed Mann for protection, and Mann needed Lenore for truth.

Nearly everything else in their lives was in doubt. They’d both seen enough to know that. But amidst the uncertainty, they were sure of one thing. The killer was out there, and eventually he’d have to surface.

CHAPTER 9

A pale man wearing a Phillies cap over his jet-black hair walked out into the cool afternoon and stood on the curb near a Fairmount Avenue apartment building. The art museum area, which bordered the park, had undergone a tremendous rebirth in the past twenty years. The juvenile jail had given way to plans for a museum. Poverty had been replaced by affluence.

Here, in a neighborhood filled with condos and custom townhouses, colorful shops and cafés, no one questioned the killer’s presence on the street. After replacing his nineteenth-century greatcoat with a cap, gray sweats, and worn running shoes, he looked as if he belonged. The neighbors couldn’t have known that he’d just left a room carved out from the soil of a graveyard. They couldn’t have known that his stony stare was the heartless gaze of a killer. They weren’t close enough to know that he smelled of blood and damp earth. They only knew that he appeared to be normal, and that was enough for them.

Standing less than a mile from the spot in the park where he’d murdered Officer Frank Smith after eliminating Clarissa Bailey, he could still see dozens of police cars blocking the entrance to Kelly Drive. But in spite of their presence, the killer stood his ground, because here, he was just one of the anonymous faces that traversed the pristine streets near the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

He thought back to the text he’d received earlier, and he patted his pocket to make sure he’d remembered to bring the phone. As much as he wanted to rebel against the order, he’d spent too much time formulating his plan to deviate from it. He would proceed to phase 2 as planned, and he’d work within the established time frame.

It was odd the way things had come about. The murder of his wife the year before had created in him an unbearable grief. He thought if he could learn about death, if perhaps he could understand it better, the grief would subside. Thus began his morbid fascination with death. He read about it in books, researched it online, and went to a mentor who sat on the Fairgrounds board to ask if he could volunteer at the cemetery. He was given three weeks to do so, and over the course of that time, the grief did anything but go away. In fact, it transformed into outright rage. He didn’t know if there was anyone who could understand how he felt. That is, until he found the raven.

It was in a remote area of the cemetery, near a three-story-high piece of rock that stood at least fifty yards from the nearest grave. The bird was standing over its fallen mate, its demeanor defensive and its manner uncertain. Like all ravens, this one had mated for life, and when its mate died, the raven didn’t know what to do. The man understood that, and so he took his anger and grief and focused it on a new goal. He would train the raven to live again, and in doing so, the man would learn to live again, too.

He’d heard that ravens had guarded the Tower of London for centuries and that a series of keepers had trained the birds to do so. Knowing that ravens are dangerous carnivores who can pluck out a human’s eye if provoked, he researched the trainers’ methods and adopted them as his own.

The day after he spotted the raven, the man returned with all manner of food for the bird—from eggs and cow livers to mice. He left the food near the area where the dead mate lay and watched from a distance. The raven refused to eat. The man repeated his trek for a second day. Still, the raven refused to eat. On the third day, the man brought a different type of food. It was the heart of a lamb. The raven ate. From that point on, the raven regained his strength, and it was almost as if he’d been resurrected.