Sacred Page 29
We let ourselves out and followed the path along the back lawn as the sea grew still and quiet.
I took the keys I’d taken back from Desiree as we wound past the garden and the reconverted barn and stopped at my Porsche.
It was dark out, but there was a glow shining over the night from the stars above, and we stood by my car and looked up at it. Trevor Stone’s massive home shimmered in the glow, and I looked out at the flat swell of dark water to the place where it met the horizon and the sky.
“Look,” Angie said and pointed as a white asterisk of light shot across the dark sky, trailing embers, lunging toward a point beyond our view, but not making it. It shorted out two thirds of the way there and imploded into nothing as several stars around it seemed to watch without interest.
The wind that had been screaming off the ocean when I arrived had died. The night was impossibly still.
The first shot sounded like a firecracker.
The second sounded like communion.
We waited, but nothing replaced the gunshots but silence and the distant lapping of tired waves.
I opened Angie’s door and she climbed in, reached across, and pushed mine open as I came around.
We backed out and turned around, drove past the lighted fountain and the oak sentries, around the short minilawn with the frozen birdbath.
As the white gravel sucked under my grille, Angie produced a boxy remote control she’d taken from the house and pressed a button, and the great cast-iron gates with the family crest and the letters TS in the center parted like arms bidding us welcome or farewell, both gestures often seeming the same, depending on your perspective.
EPILOGUE
We didn’t hear what had happened until we got back from Maine.
The night we left Trevor’s we drove straight up the coast to Cape Elizabeth and checked into a small bungalow overlooking the ocean at a hotel that was surprised to see just about anyone up there before the spring thaw.
We didn’t read newspapers or watch TV or do much of anything except put up the Do Not Disturb sign and order room service and lie in bed in the morning and watch the late winter whitecaps churn in the Atlantic.
Desiree had shot her father in the stomach, and he’d fired a round through her chest. They lay there facing each other on the parquet floor as the blood leaked from their bodies and the surf lapped at the foundation of the home they’d shared for twenty-three years.
Police were said to be baffled by both the dead valet in the garden and evidence that both father and daughter had been bound to chairs before they killed each other. The limo driver who dropped Trevor back at the house that night was questioned and released, and police could find no evidence that anyone but the victims had been in the house that night.
Also during the week we were gone, Richie Colgan’s series on Grief Release and the Church of Truth and Revelation began to appear. The Church immediately filed suit against the Tribune and Richie, but no judge would impose an injunction on the story, and by the end of the week, Grief Release had temporarily closed its doors in several locations across New England and the Midwest.
No matter how hard he tried, though, Richie never discovered who the faces and power behind P. F. Nicholson Kett were, and Kett himself could not be found.
But we didn’t know any of that in Cape Elizabeth.
We knew only each other and the sounds of our voices and the taste of champagne and the warmth of our flesh.
We talked about nothing of any import, and it was the best conversation I’d had in a long time. We looked at each other for long periods of charged, erotic silence, and often broke out laughing at the same time.
In the trunk of my car one day, I found a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The book had been a gift from an FBI agent with whom I’d worked last year on the Gerry Glynn case. Special Agent Bolton had given it to me while I was locked in the throes of depression. He told me it would provide comfort. I didn’t believe him back then, and I tossed it in my trunk. In Maine, though, while Angie showered or slept, I read most of the poems, and though I’d never been a big fan of poetry, I took a liking to Shakespeare’s words, the sensuous flow of his language. He certainly seemed to know an awful lot more than I did—about love, loss, human nature, everything really.
Sometimes at night, we’d bundle up in the clothes we’d bought in Portland the day after we arrived, and let ourselves out through the back door of our bungalow onto the lawn. We’d huddle together against the cold and work our way down to the beach, sit on a rock overlooking the dark sea, and take as full a measure as possible of the beauty laid out before us under a pitch-black sky.
The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect.
And he was right.
But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.
Those nights by the sea, I’d take Angie’s hand in mine and raise it to my lips. I’d kiss it. And sometimes as the sea raged and the darkness in the sky deepened, I’d feel awe. I’d feel humbled.
I’d feel perfect.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest gratitude to Claire Wachtel and Ann Rittenberg for finding the book within the manuscript, and not letting up on me until I found it, too.
What little I know about field-stripping a semiautomatic handgun, I learned from Jack and Gary Schmock of Jack’s Guns and Ammo in Quincy, Massachusetts.
What I couldn’t remember about the St. Pete/Tampa area, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, and specific points of Florida law was filled in by Mal and Dawn Ellenburg. Any remaining mistakes are mine.
And thanks, as always, to those who read the early versions and gave me honest feedback: Chris, Gerry, Sheila, Reva Mae, and Sterling.
About the Author
DENNIS LEHANE is the author of A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel; Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; and the New York Times bestsellers Mystic River and Shutter Island. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, he lives in the Boston area.
www.denislehane.com
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Praise
Acclaim for New York Times Bestselling Author
“Lehane’s voice is an original he turns the hard-boiled detective novel into an elegiac treatise on the corruption of the soul.”
Michael Connelly
“A stunning good novelist, one of our very best.”
James Patterson
“One of the best writers of his generation, period.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[Dennis Lehane is one of] the very best young mystery writers.”
Esquire
“Lehane’s voice, original, haunting, and straight from the heart, places him among the top ranks of stylists who enrich the modern mystery novel.”
Publishers Weekly
Books by
Dennis Lehane
SHUTTER ISLAND
MYSTIC RIVER
PRAYERS FOR RAIN
GONE, BABY, GONE
SACRED
DARKNESS, TAKE MY HAND
A DRINK BEFORE THE AR
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SACRED. Copyright © 2006 by Dennis Lehane. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written p
ermission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2006 ISBN: 9780061807664
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