He said, “ Nan looks good.”

“She’s had a hard time.”

“I couldn’t believe y’all were living together.”

“She’s a good person. I didn’t really see that before.” Hell, she didn’t see a lot of things before. Lena had made an art out of fucking up anything remotely positive in her life. Greg was living proof of that.

For lack of something to do, she looked up at the tree. The leaves were ready to fall. Greg made to leave again and she asked, “What CD?”

“Huh?”

“Your accident.” She pointed to his leg. “What CD were you looking for?”

“Heart,” he said, a goofy grin breaking out on his face.

“Bebe Le Strange?” she asked, feeling herself grin back. Saturday had always been chore day when they lived together, and they had listened to that particular Heart album so many times that to this day Lena couldn’t scrub a toilet without hearing “Even It Up” in her head.

“It was the new one,” he told her.

“New one?”

“They came out with a new one about a year ago.”

“That Lovemonger stuff?”

“No,” he said, his excitement palpable. The only thing Greg loved more than listening to music was talking about it. “Kick-ass stuff. Back-to-the-seventies Heart stuff. I can’t believe you don’t know about it. I was knocking on the door the first day it was out.”

She realized then how long it had been since she had listened to music she really enjoyed. Ethan preferred punk rock, the kind of disaffected crap spoiled white boys screeched to. Lena didn’t even know where her old CDs were.

“Lee?”

She had missed something he’d said. “Sorry, what?”

“I need to go,” he told her. “Mama’s waiting.”

Suddenly, she felt like crying again. She forced her feet to stay on the ground and not do something foolish, like run toward him. God, she was turning into a sniveling idiot. She was like one of those stupid women in romance novels.

He said, “Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” she said, trying to think of something to keep him from going. “You, too.”

She realized she was still holding the daisies, and she leaned down to put them on Sibyl’s grave. When she looked back up, Greg was limping toward the parking lot. She kept staring, willing him to turn around. He didn’t.

CHAPTER NINE

Jeffrey leaned against the tile, letting the hot water from the shower blast his skin. He had bathed last night, but nothing could get rid of the feeling that he was covered in dirt. Not just dirt, but dirt from a grave. Opening that second box, smelling the musty scent of decay, had been almost as bad as finding Abby. The second box changed everything. One more girl was out there, one more family, one more death. At least he hoped it was just one girl. The lab wouldn’t be able to come back with DNA until the end of the week. Between that and analyzing the letter Sara had been sent, the tests were costing him half his budget for the rest of the year, but Jeffrey didn’t care. He would get another job down at the Texaco pumping gas if he had to. Meanwhile, some Georgia state representative was in Washington right now enjoying a two-hundred-dollar breakfast.

He forced himself to get out of the shower, still feeling like he needed another hour under the hot water. Sara had obviously come in at some point and put a cup of coffee on the shelf over the sink, but he hadn’t heard her. Last night, he had called her from the scene, giving her the bare details of the find. After that, Jeffrey had driven what little evidence they found in the box to Macon himself, then gone back to the station and reviewed every note he had on the case. He made lists ten pages long of who he should talk to, what leads they should follow. By then, it was midnight, and he had found himself trying to decide whether or not to go to Sara’s or his own home. He even drove by his house, too late remembering that the girls had already moved in. Around one in the morning, the lights were still on and he could hear music from the street as a party raged inside. He had been too tired to go in and tell them to turn it off.

Jeffrey slipped on a pair of jeans and walked into the kitchen, carrying his cup of coffee. Sara was at the couch, folding the blanket he had used last night.

He said, “I didn’t want to wake you,” and she nodded. He knew she didn’t believe him, just like he knew that he was telling the truth. Like it or not, his nights had been spent alone for most of the last few years, and he hadn’t known how to bring what he had found out there in the woods home to Sara. Even after what had happened in the kitchen two nights ago, getting in bed with her, climbing in between the fresh sheets, would have felt like a violation.

He saw her empty mug on the counter and asked, “You want some more coffee?”

She shook her head, smoothing down the blanket as she put it on the foot of the couch.

He poured the coffee anyway. When he turned around, Sara was sitting at the kitchen island, sorting through some mail.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“I feel like…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t know what he felt like.

She flipped through a magazine, not touching the coffee he’d poured. When he didn’t finish his thought, she looked up. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” she said, and he felt as if a great weight had been lifted.

Still, he tried: “It was a hard night.”

She smiled at him, concern keeping the expression from reaching her eyes. “You know I understand.”

Jeffrey still felt tension in the air, but he didn’t know if it was from Sara or his own imagination. He reached out to touch her and she said, “You should wrap your hand.”

He had taken off the bandage after digging in the forest. Jeffrey looked at the cut, which was bright red. As he thought about it, he felt the wound throb. “I think it’s infected.”

“Have you been taking the pills I gave you?”

“Yes.”

She looked up from the magazine, calling him on the lie.

“Some,” he said, wondering where he had put the damn things. “I took some. Two.”

“That’s even better,” she said, returning to the magazine. “You can build up your resistance to antibiotics.” She flipped through a few more pages.

He tried for humor. “The hepatitis will kill me anyway.”

She looked up, and he saw tears well into her eyes at the suggestion. “That’s not funny.”

“No,” he admitted. “I just… I needed to be alone. Last night.”

She wiped her eyes. “I know.”

Still, he had to ask, “You’re not mad at me?”

“Of course not,” she insisted, reaching out to take his uninjured hand. She squeezed it, then let go, returning to her magazine. He saw it was the Lancet, an overseas medical journal.

“I wouldn’t have been much company anyway,” he told her, remembering his sleepless night. “I kept thinking about it,” he said. “It’s worse finding it empty, not knowing what happened.”

She finally closed the magazine and gave him her full attention. “Before, you’d said maybe someone came back for the bodies after they died.”

“I know,” he told her, and that was one of the things that had kept him from sleep. He had seen some pretty horrible things in his line of work, but someone who was sick enough to kill a girl, then remove her body for whatever reason, was a perpetrator he was unprepared to deal with. “What kind of person would do that?” he asked.

“A mentally ill person,” she answered. Sara was a scientist at heart, and she thought there were concrete reasons that explained why people did things. She had never believed in evil, but then she had never knowingly sat across from someone who had murdered in cold blood or raped a child. Like most people, she had the luxury of philosophizing about it from behind her textbooks. Out in the field, he saw things very differently, and Jeffrey had to think that anyone capable of this crime had to have something fundamentally wrong with his soul.