“It seemed like you could see the whole Milky Way that night. We sat there for a little while—five minutes, I guess—not talking, just looking. Then he said, ‘Scientists are starting to believe that there’s no end to the universe. I read that in the New York Times last week. And when you can see all the stars there are to see, and know there’s even more beyond them, that’s easy to believe.’ We never talked much about Brady Hartsfield and what he did to Babineau after Bill got really sick, but I think he was talking about it then.”
“More things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy,” Jeannie said.
Holly smiled. “I guess Shakespeare said it best. He said pretty much everything best, I think.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Hartsfield and Babineau he was talking about,” Ralph said. “Maybe he was trying to come to terms with his own . . . situation.”
“Of course he was,” Holly said. “That, and all the mysteries. Which is what we need to—”
Her cell phone tweeted. She took it from her back pocket, glanced at the screen, and read the text.
“That was from Alec Pelley,” she said. “The plane Mr. Gold chartered will be ready to take off at nine thirty. Are you still planning on making the trip, Mr. Anderson?”
“Absolutely. And since we’re in this together—whatever it is—you better start calling me Ralph.” He finished his coffee in two swallows and stood up. “I want to arrange for a couple of unis to keep an eye on the house while I’m gone, Jeannie. Any problem with that?”
She batted her eyelashes. “Just make sure they’re good-looking.”
“I’ll try for Troy Ramage and Tom Yates. Neither of them looks like a movie star, but they’re the two who actually arrested Terry Maitland at the ballfield. It feels right for them to have at least some role in this.”
Holly said, “There’s something I need to check, and I’d like to do it now, before it’s full daylight. Can we go back to the house?”
4
At Holly’s request, Ralph pulled the shades in the kitchen and Jeannie closed the drapes in the living room. Holly herself sat at the kitchen table with the markers and the roll of Scotch Magic Tape she’d bought in the office supplies department at Walmart. She tore off two short lengths of tape and placed them over her iPhone’s embedded flash. These she colored blue. She tore off a third length, put it over the blue strips, and colored it purple.
She stood up and pointed to the chair nearest the archway. “That’s the one he was sitting in?”
“Yes.”
Holly took two flash pictures of the seat, moved to the archway, and pointed again. “And this is where he sat.”
“Yes. Right there. But there were no marks on the carpet in the morning. Ralph looked.”
Holly dropped to one knee, took four more pictures of the carpet, then stood up. “Okay. That should be good.”
“Ralph?” Jeannie asked. “Do you know what she’s doing?”
“She’s turned her phone into a makeshift black light.” Something I could have done myself, if I had actually believed my wife—I’ve known about this particular trick for at least five years. “You’re looking for stains, aren’t you? Residue, like the stuff in the barn.”
“Yes, but if there is any, there’s much less of it, or you would have seen it with your naked eye. You can buy a kit online to do this kind of testing—it’s called CheckMate—but this should work. Bill taught me. Let’s see what we’ve got. If anything.”
They gathered around her, one on either side, and for once Holly didn’t mind the physical closeness. She was too absorbed, and too hopeful. I have Holly hope, she told herself.
The stains were there. A faint yellowish spatter on the seat of the chair, where Jeannie’s intruder had sat, and several more—like small drips of paint—on the carpet at the edge of the archway.
“Holy shit,” Ralph murmured.
“Look at this one,” Holly said. She spread her fingers to enlarge a splotch on the carpet. “See how it makes a right angle? That’s from one of the chair legs.”
She went back to the chair and took another flash photo of it, only this time down low. Once more they gathered around the iPhone. Holly spread her fingers again, and one of the chair legs leaped forward. “That’s where it dribbled down. You can raise the shades and open the drapes, if you want.”
When the kitchen was once more filled with morning light, Ralph took Holly’s phone and went through the pictures again, swiping from one to the next, then going back. He felt the wall of his disbelief beginning to crumble, and in the end all it had taken was a bunch of photos on a small iPhone screen.