No, it hadn’t taken its rest in this vault, but she believed it had been in this cemetery, perhaps even before the deaths of Mavis Holmes and her son. Holly thought （she knew it might only be a fancy） she could smell its presence. Brady Hartsfield had had that same smell about him, the stink of the unnatural. Bill had known it; the nurses who had cared for Hartsfield had known it, too, even though he was supposedly in a state of semi-catatonia.
She walked slowly to the little parking lot outside the cemetery gates with her bag banging against her hip. Her Prius waited alone in the sizzling summer heat. She walked past it, then turned a slow three-sixty, studying every aspect of the surrounding area. She was close to farm country—she could smell the fertilizer—but this was a transitional belt of industrial abandonment, ugly and barren. There would be no pictures of it in the Chamber of Commerce promotional brochures （assuming Regis had a Chamber of Commerce）。 There were no points of interest. There was nothing to attract the eye; it was repelled instead, as if the very earth was saying go away, there is nothing for you here, goodbye, don’t come again. Well, there was the cemetery, but few people would visit Peaceful Rest once winter came, and the north wind would freeze those few away after the briefest of visits to make their manners to the dead.
Yonder to the north were train tracks, but the rails were rusty and there were weeds growing up between the crossties. There was a long-deserted train station, its windows boarded up like those of the Holmes house. Beyond it, on a spur, stood two lonely boxcars, their wheels buried in vines. They looked as if they had been there since the Vietnam era. Near the deserted station were long-abandoned storage facilities and what she assumed were obsolete repair sheds. Beyond those, a broken factory stood hip-deep in sunflowers and bushes. A swastika had been spray-painted on crumbling pink bricks that had been red a long, long time ago. On one side of the highway that would take her back to town, a leaning billboard proclaimed ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART! CHOOSE LIFE! On the other side was a long low building with a sign on its roof reading SPE DY ROBO CAR WASH. In its empty parking lot was another sign, one she’d seen once already today: FOR SALE CONTACT FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF DAYTON.
I think you were here. Not in the vault, but close by. Where you could smell tears when the wind was right. Where you could hear the laughter of the men or boys who pushed over Heath Holmes’s stone and then likely urinated on his grave.
In spite of the day’s heat, Holly felt cold. Given more time, she might have investigated those empty places. There was no danger; the outsider was long gone from Ohio. Very likely gone from Flint City, too.
She snapped four pictures: the train station, the boxcars, the factory, the deserted car wash. She reviewed them and decided they would do. They’d have to. She had a plane to catch.
Yes, and people to convince.
If she could, that was. She felt very small and lonely just now. It was easy to imagine laughter and ridicule; thinking of such things came naturally to her. But she would try. She had to. For the murdered children, yes—Frank Peterson and the Howard girls and all the ones who had come before them—but also for Terry Maitland and Heath Holmes. A person did what a person could.
She had one more stop to make. Luckily, it was on her way.
2
An old man sitting on a bench in Trotwood Community Park was happy to give her directions to the place where the bodies of “those poor gals” had been found. It wasn’t far, he said, and she would know it when she got there.
She did.
Holly pulled over, got out, and gazed at a ravine which mourners—and thrill-seekers masquerading as mourners—had attempted to turn into a shrine. There were glittery cards upon which words like SORROW and HEAVEN predominated. There were balloons, some deflating, some fresh and new, even though Amber and Jolene Howard had been discovered here three months earlier. There was a statue of Mary, which some wag had decorated with a mustache. There was a teddy bear that made Holly shudder. Its plump brown body was covered with mold.
She raised her iPad, took a picture.
There was no whiff of that smell she had gotten （or imagined she’d gotten） at the cemetery, but she had no doubt the outsider would have visited this place at some point after the bodies of Amber and Jolene had been discovered, sampling the grief of the pilgrims to this makeshift shrine like a fine old Burgundy. Also the excitement of those—not many, but a few, there were always a few—who came to meditate on what it might be like to do such things as had been done to the Howard girls, and listen to their screams.