Sam might have liked to try striking up a conversation with the waitress, someone who most likely knew plenty of the people in this town. She didn’t come back toward him after putting in his order, even though the menu holder was at his end of the counter. Instead, she moved away to the other end, keeping the menu in her hands, as she went back to talking to the man she’d been speaking with when he entered. She leaned close. Sam didn’t miss the glances she sent in his direction.
His nominal business completed, he leaned against the counter and scanned the room with what he hoped looked like idle curiosity. Sure enough, damn near every eye in the place was fixed on him, some doing a better job of hiding it than others. He tried not to make eye contact, even as he scoped out every face for any that seemed familiar. None did at first glance. Then again, it had been a long time. There was no telling if he had a chance of truly recognizing anyone. Even if his memory could be trusted, everyone would look thirty years older.
One of the men seated alone at a booth suddenly tossed his napkin down on the table and rose. Pulling his wallet from his back pocket, he moved to the counter a couple of feet away from Sam, placing his check on the surface. “I’m ready to settle up, Gracie.”
“Sure thing, Clay.” The waitress took his check and the twenty-dollar bill he’d laid on top of it, then moved to the register a few feet away.
Sam waited. The man had gotten up and come over to stand near him for a reason.
A few seconds later, the man turned and looked at him, his eyes scanning Sam’s face with what would have been uncomfortable thoroughness if Sam was the type who was easily unnerved.
Sam stared back, keeping a neutral expression on his face. The man looked to be in his sixties, with thinning gray hair, a paunch and a pinched expression. Something in his face made Sam think he might have been a handsome man once, although his glory days were clearly far behind him.
The man nodded at Sam, the gesture not particularly friendly. “Afternoon.”
“Afternoon,” Sam returned.
“You new in town?”
“Just got in this morning.”
After a beat, the man extended his hand. “Clay Howell.”
“John Samuels,” he returned, the name coming easier this time than it had the first.
Sam could see the man turning the name over in his mind, trying to place it, and he saw when he’d failed to. “You been to Fremont before?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Passing through?”
“Actually I just got hired on a restoration project. An old house over on Maple.”
The man didn’t seem surprised, not that Sam expected him to be. He didn’t seem anything, simply nodding, his eyes never leaving Sam’s.
“You know two people were killed in that house.”
“So I hear.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
Sam tried to make it look like he was thinking about it. He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s sad, sure, but I hear it happened a long time ago.”
“Not long enough for some people.”
“Did you know them? The people who were killed?”
Clay Howell’s eyes narrowed, the first hint of outright anger appearing in the redness that darkened his cheeks. “I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”
He’d certainly hit a nerve there. “No offense intended.”
“Best not ask questions like that if you don’t want to cause offense,” the man spat. “You won’t make too many friends around here as it is working on that house.”
“I’m not here to make friends. Just here to do a job.”
The waitress reappeared, setting the man’s change on the counter next to him. He took a single bill, leaving the rest there and motioning for her to take it. “See you later, Gracie.”
“Later, Clay,” the waitress echoed faintly.
Shooting Sam one last glare, the man moved past him toward the door.
“Your order will be right up,” the waitress told Sam be fore heading back to the other end of the counter. From the look on her face, that couldn’t happen soon enough for her.
Sam stayed where he was, leaning casually against the counter, and turned the encounter over in his mind. Interesting. Maggie was right. People around here certainly were weird when it came to that house.
If he wasn’t mistaken, asking a simple question had just earned him an enemy, his second that day if he counted the man Maggie had pissed off by hiring him.
If that was what asking one question was going to get him, then he was more than prepared for them to be just the first of many.
Chapter Four
The graves lay in a nearly forgotten section of the cemetery. Whoever had chosen their location had likely hoped for exactly that to happen, for the two people buried in the plots and what had happened to them to be forgotten. Most of the surrounding graves were much older, the stones indicating their inhabitants had died more than a century ago. But thirty years earlier, space had been made to fit two more plots into this location where they’d be easily overlooked.
Sam supposed he should be angry, but he hardly had any room to judge. This was the first time he’d been to the cemetery. He’d done as good a job of ignoring these graves as anybody, and he didn’t even have plot placement to blame for it.
Dawn had begun to break a short time ago, the thin light of morning illuminating the layer of fog that hung over the graveyard. Somehow, being able to see the fog made it more eerie than when it had been darker. He hadn’t expected to stay this long, coming just before dawn in hopes of getting in and out unspotted, not wanting to have to explain to anyone why he was here. But it had taken him a while to find the graves, searching the more recent section of the cemetery first. And once he finally located them, walking away didn’t seem so easy to do.
He wondered who’d paid for the plain stones. The flat slabs contained only the occupants’ names and the years they’d been born and died. Nothing about their lives. Nothing about their relationship to each other. Nothing about the people who’d loved them or the sadness left in the wake of their loss.
Grief, stark and heavy, welled up from the pit of his stomach, and the back of his eyes began to burn. Words he wanted to say more than anything pushed at the back of his throat, gagging him, begging to be released.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…
But whatever remained in these graves, he couldn’t fool himself that the people who’d been buried here would hear those words. Or that forgiveness would be so easily granted.
Lost in his thoughts, he heard the crunch of tires on the road behind him too late. Not that he could have done much about it. It wasn’t like he could run. Whoever it was had already seen him, seen his truck. There was no use trying to hide.
He turned and saw that a police cruiser had pulled up behind his truck. He bit back a curse. It would be hard enough trying to come up with a plausible explanation for why he was here at this time of day for a regular person. A cop would be twice as suspicious.
A single figure stepped from behind the driver’s seat and started through the fog toward him, slowly materializing in the haze. He was a big man, maybe in his early forties. As he’d done with nearly every face he’d encountered so far, Sam tried erasing thirty years from the man before him to see how he must have looked back then. Only people like Maggie