Grave Endings Read Free Page B

tacked on another five years.”
    In my dreams, which have resumed in frequency and intensity since Connors’s visit, I see Aggie as she looked on that warm July night almost six years ago. I see her wistful smile, the urgency in her deep brown eyes,
Come
with me, Molly,
a few rebellious dark curls that escaped her crocheted navy scrunchy, the silver locket gleaming against the navy of her three-quarter-sleeved cotton sweater. I hear her purposeful tread as she hurries from her car in the darkening night toward a synagogue hall she will never reach where hundreds of women have joined to recite psalms for a young mother stricken with cancer.
    In my dreams a man follows her. He is a hulking figure, his face masked in shadows, and there is menace in the stealth of his gait, in the set of his granitelike shoulders. I scream Aggie’s name, to warn her, but the sound dies in my throat, and I watch, helpless, bound by shackles of sleep, as he accosts her and drags her into an alley. I see the glint of steel as the blade slices the air, again and again, but even in my dream my subconscious takes pity on me and I see nothing else.
    Porter glanced at his watch. “Is that it? Are we done playing twenty questions?”
    â€œI guess.”
    I would never be done. I now had a name for that shadowy figure, but still no face. I had questions whose answers had died with Creeley:
    Did Aggie hurry when she heard his footsteps, or was she suddenly aware of him looming above her? Did she sense peril, or did he put her off guard by asking for the time or spare change before he attacked? Did he clamp his hand on her mouth to stifle the screams I hear in my head?
    â€œYou okay?” Porter asked. “You look a little green.” He sounded uncomfortable, probably trying to figure out what to do if I fainted—or worse, started crying.
    â€œI’m fine,” I said, though my upper lip was beaded with sweat. My legs felt shaky when I stood.
    â€œI know this is rough, Blume, but at least you can put it behind you.”
    I could hear in his voice that he was impatient for me to be gone—away from his desk, from the station, out of his life. I also heard, again, what sounded like genuine solicitude, which brought me this close to crying, something I refused to do in front of Porter.
    I bit the inside of my lip until the quivering stopped. “By the way, how old was Randy when he died?”
    â€œThirty.”
    Zack’s age, and in two months, mine. And Aggie’s, if Creeley hadn’t killed her. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help thinking about Randy Creeley and the road not taken.

three
    I WAS TEMPTED TO GO HOME AND HAVE A GOOD CRY, but I normally collect data for my
Crime Sheet
column on Mondays and Tuesdays, and keeping busy would be therapeutic. After copying material from the Wilshire board, I did my rounds at several other police stations, then picked up Zack from his shul office at a little after two and drove to my brother Judah’s Judaica store in a nearby Beverly Boulevard strip mall to select Zack’s
kittel.
It’s a ceremonial white cotton robe that, like the white of the bride’s gown, symbolizes purity. A married male wears a
kittel
on Yom Kippur and at the Pesach (Passover) seder and is buried in it (after a long, happy life, one hopes). Zack would wear his for the first time on our wedding day, a private Yom Kippur that would erase all our sins.
    â€œAnother plus for matrimony,” I’d commented last Monday night to my three sisters at our weekly mah-jongg game, earning smiles from Edie and Mindy and a frown from Liora, who was subbing for my sister-in-law, Gitty. Liora is twenty, the youngest of us Blume women. Since her return last June from a year’s study at a girls’ seminary in Israel much like the one I attended, she’s also become the most earnest and pious.
    â€œDon’t joke,” she’d warned.
    The truth is, I was