Free The Assassini by Thomas Gifford Page B

a little girl, hearing the happy lilt of her laughter, and when I touched her hair I felt the crusty blood, felt the singed hair breaking at the touch, saw the smeared wound where the bullet had entered. She’d knelt in prayer and someone had held the gun within an inch of her head and put her out, like quenching a candle. I was sure she hadn’t felt a thing. Maybe, for some inexplicable reason, she’d trusted her killer.
    My hand was sticky with her blood and hair. Val was dead and I was having trouble catching my breath. I rolled her head back the way it had been. My sister, my dearest friend, the person I loved most in the world, was dead at my feet.
    I sat back in the pew, held her hand trying to make itwarm and failing horribly. My face was frozen in grief and I didn’t want to cope. I didn’t want to stand up and do something.
    A wisp of cold, a draft, fluttered something caught in a sliver at the corner of the wooden bench. I plucked it from its niche. A triangular piece of fabric, black, waterproofed like a raincoat. I was barely registering it at all, just holding it, something for my hand to do.
    I heard the chapel door creaking, then footsteps on the stone floor.
    The footsteps came down the aisle while I tried to stop trembling. I hoped Val’s killer had returned to have a go at me. I’d kill him with my bare hands. I wanted to die killing him. I looked up.
    Peaches was peering down at me. He’d taken one look and everything was registering on his face. All the color had drained away, no more peaches and cream. His mouth had slackened open but he wasn’t saying anything.
    Beside him Father Dunn was staring down at her. She looked so lonely. “Oh shit,” he whispered in a tone of infinite sadness.
    I thought he was commenting on my sister, but I was wrong. He reached down and took the bit of black fabric from my hand.
    It didn’t take long for the machinery of death to start clanking away. Sam Turner, the police chief, arrived with a couple of his cops and shortly thereafter an ambulance and a doctor with his black gladstone bag. Sam Turner had been a friend of the family’s all my life. He’d obviously been awakened and brought back out into the hellish night: his gray hair was doing a Dagwood Bum-stead, and his face wore a gray fuzz outlining his drooping dewlaps. He wore a plaid shirt and windbreaker and corduroys and green Wellies. He shook my hand and I knew he was hurting, too. He’d known Val from when she was a little girl and now he was heading through the rain and snow to the chapel to see how it had ended.
    Peaches, tight-lipped and pale, made coffee and brought it into the Long Room on a tray with mugs and fixings. He and Dunn had come on impulse to see if Valhad shown up all right: Peaches had been worried about the chance of a car accident. Seeing the light in the chapel, they’d come in to find me holding my dead sister’s hand. While Peaches and I drank coffee, Dunn went back to the chapel with Sam Turner. He was probably researching a scene for a novel.
    Turner was wet and cold when they came back. He took a mug of steaming black coffee and slurped it noisily. Through the window I saw them putting Val’s body, wrapped in an oilcloth bag on a stretcher, into the ambulance. The rain and snow drifted slowly through the lights in the forecourt.
    “Jesus, there’s not much to say, Ben. I’m sealing off the chapel and we’ll get some scene-of-the-crime boys up from Trenton. You don’t have any idea what happened, do you?”
    “Only the obvious,” I said. I thought about Val’s state of mind when she called me, but I couldn’t imagine how to start in on that with Turner. “She just got in today. Called me in New York, asked me to come out and meet her tonight.” I shook my head. “I just assumed she was late, doing some errands. Went into town for a burger, came back, looked around again, found her. That’s it.”
    He sneezed into a red bandanna and rubbed his nose.