Sacred Read Free

“with all due respect, please don’t talk to us about this.”
    “Why not?”
    She raised her head. “Because you don’t know anything about it, so it makes you sound like a moron.”
    His fingers caressed the head of his cane lightly before he leaned forward and touched her knee with his other hand. “You’re right. Forgive me.”
    Eventually she smiled at him in a way I’d never seen her smile at anyone since Phil’s death. As if she and Trevor Stone were old friends, as if they’d both lived in places where light and kindness can’t reach.
     
    “I’m alone,” Angie had told me a month ago.
    “No, you’re not.”
    She lay on a mattress and box spring we’d thrown down in my living room. Her own bed, and most of her belongings, were still back in her house on Howes Street because she wasn’t capable of entering the place where Gerry Glynn had shot her and Evandro Arujo had bled to death on the kitchen floor.
    “You’re not alone,” I said, my arms wrapped around her from behind.
    “Yes, I am. And all your holding and all your love can’t change that right now.”
     
    Angie said, “Mr. Stone—”
    “Trevor.”
    “Mr. Stone,” she said, “I sympathize with your grief. I do. But you kidnapped us. You—”
    “It’s not my grief,” he said. “No, no. Not my grief I was referring to.”
    “Then whose?” I said.
    “My daughter’s. Desiree.”
    Desiree.
    He said her name like it was the refrain of a prayer.
     
    His study, when well lighted again, was a shrine to her.
    Where before I’d seen only shadows, I now faced photos and paintings of a woman in nearly every stage of life—from baby snapshots to grade school, high school yearbook photos, college graduation. Aged and clearly mishandled Polaroids took up space in new teak-wood frames. A casual photo of her and a woman who was quite obviously her mother looked to have been taken at a backyard barbecue as both women stood over a gas grill, paper plates in hand, neither looking at the camera. It was an inconsequential moment in time, fuzzy around the edges, taken without consideration of the sun being off to the women’s left and thereby casting a dark shadow against the photographer’s lens. The kind of photo you’d be forgiven if you chose not to incorporate it into an album. But in Trevor Stone’s study, framed in sterling silver and perched on a slim ivory pedestal, it seemed deified.
    Desiree Stone was a beautiful woman. Her mother, Isaw from several photos, had probably been Latin, and her daughter had inherited her thick, honey-colored hair, the graceful lines of her jaw and neck, a sharp bone structure and thin nose, skin that seemed perpetually under the glow of sunset. From her father, Desiree had been bequeathed eyes the color of jade and full, fiercely determined lips. You noticed the symmetry of genetic influence most in a single photograph on Trevor Stone’s desk. Desiree stood between mother and father, wearing the purple cap and gown of her graduation, the main campus of Wellesley College framed behind her, her arms around her parents’ necks, pulling their faces close to hers. All three were smiling, robust with riches and health it seemed, and the delicate beauty of the mother and prodigious aura of power in the father seemed to meet and meld in the face of the daughter.
    “Two months before the accident,” Trevor Stone said and picked up the photo for a moment. He looked at it, and the lower half of his ruined face spasmed into what I assumed was a smile. He placed it back on the desk, looked at us as we took the seats in front of him. “Do either of you know a private detective by the name of Jay Becker?”
    “We know Jay,” I said.
    “Works for Hamlyn and Kohl Investigations,” Angie said.
    “Correct. Your opinion of him?”
    “Professionally?”
    Trevor Stone shrugged.
    “He’s very good at his job,” Angie said. “Hamlyn and Kohl only hire the best.”
    He nodded. “I understand they offered to buy