Free Evidence of Blood by Thomas H. Cook Page B

files that had her initials in them.”
    “Which were?”
    “Well, her full name is Sarah Dora Overton,” Lois said matter-of-factly. “So those were the files I took.”
    “S, D and O,” Kinley repeated.
    “That’s right,” Lois said. She smiled grimly. “But, as it turned out, there was nothing about her in any of them.In the S file there was nothing but just old pictures of the town. Sequoyah, I mean. Ray fancied himself a sort of town historian, you know.”
    Kinley nodded.
    “And the O, that was just a bunch of newspaper clippings.”
    “What about D?” Kinley asked.
    Lois shrugged. “That one was empty.”
    Kinley nodded. “So there was nothing about this woman in any of the files?”
    “No.”
    “So where is it?” Kinley asked. “The stuff about her?”
    For a moment, Lois appeared off-balance, her own doubts rising, despite all her efforts to suppress them. Then her old resolve once again asserted itself, and her face grew very solemn. “I don’t know, Jack,” she began. “And I don’t want to know.” She glared at him determinedly. “It’s enough that they’re not here for Serena to find out about it all. And if you keep this up, this looking into Ray’s death, you’ll probably find out where his precious little love notes are, and when you do, Serena will find out about everything, too.” She leaned toward him, her face softening almost to a look of pleading. “Please, don’t do that, Jack,” she said. “Serena thinks her father was a perfect man. Let her think it.”
    “Where does she live, Overton?”
    Lois hesitated.
    “It’s easy to find out, Lois,” Kinley told her.
    Lois stared at him silently.
    “Look, maybe she can put it all to rest,” Kinley told her. “Maybe she can tell me where everything is. It’s even possible that he’d gone down to the canyon to meet her. If she can clear a few things up, then I can do the same for Serena.”
    Lois still appeared doubtful. “Would you be that careful?” she asked.
    “I’m not here to destroy a father’s reputation,” Kinley said firmly. “Particularly Ray’s.”
    “All right,” Lois said. “She doesn’t live in Sequoyah. She lives up on the mountain. At the end of that same road where the cemetery is, the one where Ray’s buried.”
    Kinley recalled the previous night when he’d been at Ray’s grave, and his mind immediately did its miraculous trick of providing him with a fully detailed photograph. He saw the sweep of the cemetery with its crop of short, gray stones, then the wall of dark forest which lay beyond it, and somewhere deep within it, far in the distance, the small yellow light of a farmhouse near the mountain’s rim. “Near the edge,” he said. “She lives near the edge.”
    Lois nodded. “In more ways than one,” she said.

NINE
     

     
    The road narrowed after it passed the cemetery, curving sharply toward the mountain’s edge, the undergrowth closing in around the car so that the yellow beams of its headlights seemed to be moving down a long green funnel. The dusty light that filtered through the surrounding trees and brush narrowed as the woods thickened, then suddenly diffused as he neared the black rim of the mountain.
    Even from a distance, he could see where the great granite precipice stretched out before him, the night air spilling over it like an ebony waterfall. At the very edge, the road swung abruptly to the left, and he found himself headed down a narrow path which skirted the rim for nearly half a mile. At its end, he saw the small farmhouse he’d glimpsed the night before, wood-framed and unpainted, with a small swing on its slumped front porch.
    He brought the car to a halt, shut off the lights and sat motionlessly behind the wheel. If this was the place Ray had come for love, he had chosen it well. It was small and remote, a place where he need fear only the gossip of the birds.
    He got out of the car and headed toward the house. He was only halfway to its front steps