The Graves of the Guilty (Hope Street Church Mysteries Book 3) (24 page)

“Go ahead and leave, Ashley,” Cooper said with a dismissive wave. “Ivan might be coming after me, too, so I need to stay.”

Ashley was about to protest, but seeing the steely determination in her sister’s face, she nodded and turned away with an apologetic smile for Maria.

Cooper took a step forward. Maria’s reluctance to talk, her sudden decision to move, and the panic written in her eyes confirmed Cooper’s belief that the older woman had withheld information from the police. “Other boys will be killed. You know this is true. Don’t walk away from them.” Cooper kept her voice as gentle as she could, despite the urgency she felt. “Please. Just tell me what you know so I can do something to stop him.”

Maria looked at the ground, her face contorted as different emotions—fear, anguish, and anger—manipulated her features.

“Do you want more mothers to know your grief?” Cooper asked, allowing her own anxiety to show. “To be in agony?”

Covering her face with her hands, Maria began to cry. Nina instantly advanced on Cooper and pointed at her. “Have you no shame? Go away from here!”

“No!” Maria called out, her voice cracking. She spoke quickly to her sister in Spanish and then vanished into the house. As no one had invited Cooper inside, she waited out in the cold, hugging herself against the air and the sharpness of her own words. After a few minutes she sat down on the edge of the curb, her back turned toward the Gutierrez house.

After several minutes, Maria joined her, coatless and shivering. Her eyes were raw from crying and her nose red from being rubbed over and over again with a tissue. She handed Cooper a photograph. “This is my son. I came to this country for Hector, so that he would have chances I never had. I was a single mother and an illegal, but I got papers and a job. Nina had immigrated before me and had become a true citizen by then. But there was never enough money.”

“What was your first job?” Cooper asked to keep the other woman talking. Maria’s answer took her by surprise.

“I was in charge of human resources at Double A Auto in Norfolk,” she said.

Where Miguel once worked!
Cooper was stunned by the revelation.
But what does the connection mean?

Maria touched the picture of her son, tracing the curve of his face with her fingertip. “I had nothing when I got that job, but both Nina and I spoke good English and we were quick to learn computers.”

“Did Nina work at Double A, too?”

“No. She got a government job, but like her, the people who hired me taught me everything I needed to know.” She fell silent and Cooper was afraid that she’d heard all Maria was willing to say. But finally, she began to speak again. “As long as I stayed quiet, my son and I would have a good life. I knew what I was agreeing to, and for his sake I did everything they said. After a while, I convinced myself I was doing nothing wrong—just taking a shortcut to the American Dream.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks and Cooper handed her a tissue. Maria stared at the object and then, as though unwilling to antagonize the chapped skin on her nose any further, dabbed gently at her face and then balled the tissue inside a clenched fist.

“But Hector . . . he wanted more and more as he grew into a man. He wanted a car and expensive clothes and video games. I couldn’t give him all of these things, so he started working for
them,
too. He was foolish, to steal from these people. Him and Miguel. Those silly boys wanted to live like movie stars, to forget that they were still foreigners here and might be for the rest of their lives.”

She carefully reclaimed the photograph. “Envy. One of the deadly sins. It’s what truly killed them.” A tear plopped on the image, then another, the water distorting Hector’s grinning face. “The Bible says, ‘A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.’”

Cooper had never heard that line of Scripture before. She touched the other woman’s hand. “I am sorry for what you’ve lost.”

Maria placed a small cardboard box in front of her. “My heart has not been at peace since I came to this country, no matter how much I tried to deceive it. This”—she pointed at the box—“will serve as our confession.”

Assuming Maria intended for her to look inside the box, she reached for it. Suddenly, her hands were seized.

“Swear to me you will not open this until tomorrow night!” Maria’s brown eyes were wide with dread. “By then, we’ll be gone. I can’t let any harm come to my sister. Nina is all I have left and I’m the one who talked her into . . . Just make me this promise. And if I don’t believe you I won’t give you the box.”

“I swear,” Cooper assured the woman, meeting her frantic gaze and squeezing her hands to show her earnestness. She had no choice. “I swear to honor your request.”

“After tomorrow, you can show it to the police. But I beg you—do not let Mr. Love take away the scholarship in Hector’s name. It is the only good to come from all of this wickedness.”

“No matter what, there will be a scholarship. Lincoln doesn’t go back on his word.” Cooper hoped she was speaking the truth. After all, if he discovered Maria was also a criminal, he might feel too betrayed to support such a fund. Shaking her head, Cooper knew she couldn’t think about such things now. “Are you going back to Mexico?”

Without answering, Maria rose and looked at the box at Cooper’s feet with disdain. “Do not let envy spoil your life. Be grateful for what has been given to you.” Her lips trembled as she clasped Hector’s picture against her chest.

“I will,” Cooper promised and felt a wave of sorrow as Maria trudged across the dormant grass toward her house. Her posture was stooped, as if a heavy weight pressed down upon her back. She shuffled into the outstretched arms of her sister, who glanced at Cooper accusingly as if to say, “Look what you’ve done.”

Though Cooper’s throat was tight with grief, she recognized that Maria’s exhaustion partially stemmed from speaking the truth. It had taken Maria’s last bit of strength and courage to entrust a stranger with her secrets. Cooper stared at the box. She knew the police would pry open the flaps within minutes and whisk Maria straight to the station for questioning, but Cooper had made a vow. She had accepted the transfer of the bereaved mother’s burden and it was now hers to carry.

Glancing backward, Cooper saw the two older women locked in an embrace. Their shoulders shook as they cried in one another’s arms.

Whatever you’re guilty of, Maria Gutierrez,
Cooper thought,
you deserve to be comforted.

Collecting the box, she climbed quietly into her truck and drove off into the descending night.

16

At home, Cooper put Maria’s box under her kitchen table told herself to forget all about it until the next morning.

She’d tried calling Ashley to tell her about her conversation with Maria but got the answering machine several times. Nathan offered to come over and take her mind off both Maria and the mysterious package, but Cooper had politely declined. What she most wanted was to sink into a tub filled with hot, lavender-scented water, and then bundle up in her flannel coffee-cup pajamas and read a book on the sofa with Moses and Miriam curled into twin balls of vibrating fur at her feet.

However, her attempts to lose herself in the pages of a romantic suspense novel failed, so she turned on the television and watched
American Idol
.

After the episode was over, Cooper flipped channels in search of a heartwarming sitcom or a humorous movie, but every show seemed to be a crime drama. Forensic techs in pristine lab coats exchanged information with detectives in tailored suits on one channel. Uniformed policemen led a prisoner to his cell in another. There were historical crime shows, legal-themed crime shows, and paranormal crime shows. If Cooper wanted to watch anything else, she’d have to settle for an infomercial about a buttoning machine or a Western. Neither choice was appealing.

Cooper switched off the TV and lay in silence for a moment. Moses yawned, stretched, and walked up the length of her body. He rubbed his small face along her jawline, his way of saying that while he loved her, he would love her twice as much if she’d get up and give him a snack.

Kissing the top of the kitten’s soft head, she smiled. “I suppose you’d like a nice can of tuna?”

At the word, Miriam’s head whipped up from where it had been partially burrowed beneath Cooper’s slippered feet. Laughing, Cooper scooped the kittens into her arms and carried them into the kitchen. Knowing she was fostering a bad habit, she placed both cats on the counter and dumped a small can of tuna onto a saucer. As they nuzzled each other and mewled in anticipation, Cooper drizzled tap water over the tuna and set the treat in front of the little cats.

She listened to their contented lapping for a moment and then turned toward the kitchen table, as though lured by a powerful magnet.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to open the box,” Cooper told her preoccupied felines. “But I can give it a little shake, right? That won’t hurt anybody.” Grasping the cardboard box in her hands, she shuffled it back and forth very gently. It sounded like the edges of a thin book banging against the sides.

It could be a book, or a bunch of standard-size papers, or an envelope of photographs.
Her mind conjured numerous possibilities.

“I’m not going to stand here and blindly guess!” she declared before putting it on the table. After brushing her teeth and putting on some moisturizer, she reentered the kitchen, picked up the box, and put it back under the table, out of sight. She then whiled away the rest of the evening working on a two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle showing the wares sold in an old-fashioned general store. After completing the edge pieces and a large chunk of the penny candy display, Cooper finally went to bed.

Nestled under a down comforter and a soft cotton blanket, Cooper expected to drift off immediately, but her mind wouldn’t stop replaying a variety of scenes. She remembered walking through Miguel’s apartment, touching the silk shirts hanging in neat rows in his closet, and discovering the drawer filled with cash. Images of Club Satin followed, then the newspaper article’s title about Hector’s execution-style murder, and finally, Maria’s hunched shoulders and weary gait as she shuffled into her sister’s waiting arms.

Exasperated and exhausted, Cooper had thrown back the covers and stumbled in a groggy haze between sleep and wakefulness to the bathroom for a glass of water. While she filled the tumbler, Maria’s box seemed to call to her from the kitchen. She ignored the temptation and climbed back into bed. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep, only to be plagued by unrelated but frightening images, such as Miguel’s body in the trunk, a shark exposing its rows of dagger-like teeth, a pair of headlights in the rearview mirror.

The final sequence had been downright scary, for it involved a lurking shadow in an empty, ice-covered parking lot. In her dream, Cooper had tried to open the door of her truck, knowing that she had to get inside and quickly. But no matter how hard she pulled and yanked at the handle, which was covered by a thick crust of unrelenting ice, the door wouldn’t budge. She knew, without turning, that someone was coming for her, hunting her like some silent panther. Crying, she pleaded for the door to give way, struggling with all her might to get it open. When she felt the stalker’s breath on her neck, she woke up.

Never had the weak light of a February morning been so welcome.

• • •

Cooper was thankful to be so busy at work that same day. Make It Work!’s main competitor, Reliable Office Solutions, had officially closed and, as a result, the phone rang incessantly all morning. Angela had been talking so steadily that she hadn’t even had time to reapply a fresh layer of lipstick.

“I thought you were going to hire an assistant,” Cooper whispered while Angela wrote down a prospective client’s information in her bubbly script.

Covering the mouthpiece, Angela snarled, “Her
Highness
doesn’t think I need any help. She’s talked Mr. Farmer into waitin’ another two weeks to see if we’re really going to stay this busy.”

Cooper frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. We’re obviously expanding. My department already has more than enough work and so does Ben’s. I believe you’re getting a raw deal.”

Angela thanked the client sweetly and hung up. Ignoring the steady blinking of the other three phone lines, she took a long drink of Diet Coke and sighed wearily. Despite the flashing lights, the phone remained silent.

“How’d you get the lines to stop ringing?” Cooper asked, recalling how maddening it had been to listen to the blaring of the multiple lines during Angela’s brief absence a few weeks ago.

“When I heard the news about Office Solutions, I ran right out to Costco and bought a new phone. This one’s got a mute button.” She answered line two and pleasantly asked the caller to hold. “See? I’m not as dumb as Mrs. Farmer thinks.”

Cooper watched Angela return to her momentous task. She noted the pile of paperwork threatening to fall out of her friend’s overflowing inbox as well as the stack of manila folders occupying the corner of her desk.

This is no good,
Cooper thought and vowed to speak to Mr. Farmer during her lunch hour. However, her boss was nowhere to be found when she returned to the office at quarter after twelve, though Angela was exactly where Cooper had left her. Replacing the receiver, the office manager put her head in her arms in exhaustion. The phone continued to twinkle like a Christmas tree.

“I haven’t even gone to the ladies’ room all
mornin’!” Angela wailed. “I used to love my job, but frankly, I’d rather have a root canal than spend another minute in this place. At least I wouldn’t have to talk at the dentist’s!” Angela gestured at the blinking telephone base. “See? It never ends!”

“I thought you put on a voice mail recording during lunch,” Cooper said.

On the verge of tears, Angela cried, “
She
thinks we’ll lose potential new clients if they don’t get to talk to a friendly, professional Make It Work! employee right away. I don’t dare leave my desk in case she calls, pretending to be a client! Cooper, I’m a prisoner!” she cried.