“Sorry. Just checking.”
Giving a huff of exasperation, she whacked his arm, which startled him. Sara had never been playful with him, and he liked it. So he laughed, his pleasure that she was standing next to him, that she loved him, full and rich and overflowing.
Sara watched Gabriel laugh as a grin spread huge and wide across his face, the deep timbre of his voice loud in the quiet room, and she was overwhelmed. She didn’t think she had ever actually heard him laugh before, and God, it was a sexy thing. Not pretty, and maybe even mildly obnoxious, but sexy as hell because there was joy on his face. A happiness that she had never seen there before, and she realized she hadn’t been aware of its absence until she saw and heard it. She burst out with her own laugh.
“It’s not funny,” she told him, and it wasn’t. Yet somehow it was. And it felt amazing to laugh with him. “Now clean this apartment up. I’m not moving into this filth.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, reaching for the nearest empty soft drink can, but then ruining the effect by sticking his tongue out at her.
Which was so casual, so free, so out of character yet somehow so Gabriel that she laughed even harder. It was right, it was good, it was so hopeful, the sound of their laughter intermingling, that the questions didn’t matter. The ambiguity, the mysteries, the unknown, didn’t really matter as much as it did to just be together, to share this moment, this day, this life with each other.
Sara spotted Angel lying in the sun spot on the floor, and went to greet her kitten. The cat purred as she scooped her up, and with Angel in her arms, she stepped back out into the hall and pulled in the suitcase she’d left outside the door. Rolling it inside the apartment, she let go of the cat and the handle and picked up another empty pizza box. It boggled the mind to consider how many pizzas he could have possibly consumed in five weeks, and she grabbed a napkin stuck to the box and wiped at the grease spot it had left on the table. It was then she saw the sketchbook shoved to the back of the table, opened to a drawing in pencil of her chewing her lip, studying a paper in her hand. Sara flipped the page and found another of her lying in bed on her side, back visible, wearing a T-shirt, the sheet up to her waist. Then another of her dancing in her miniskirt, legs bent, arms out, a sassy smile on her face. And one of her naked, sitting with her knees to her chest, her eyes shiny and filled with love, lust.
Sara glanced over at Gabriel, unable to speak.
He was watching her. With a small smile and a shrug, he said, “I told you I’ve been busy.”
She could definitely live like this.
“I thought the same thing,” Gabriel said to Sara later, over Cajun food he had snagged from a restaurant up the street. He suspected he was talking a lot, frequently with food in his mouth, which wasn’t classy or attractive, but he was so damn glad she was back that the words were tripping over each other to get out of his mouth. He had the sense that he needed to say everything as quickly as possible in case she disappeared and he never had another chance.
They had spent the afternoon companionably shoveling out his mess, and now while they ate they were dissecting the questions that still remained in the murder cases.
Sara shook her head and picked up her water, sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed. “I just can’t see why Marguerite would murder four generations of women without a more concrete reason. I mean, I sincerely doubt my grandmother was having an affair with Rafe.”
“Here are my concerns,” Gabriel said. He had given a lot of thought to the conclusion of Marguerite as murderer as he’d written the book during the last few weeks and there were still some seriously loose threads dangling. “Why would Raphael buy the house on Dauphine? That seems incredibly random for a man who never admitted he was aware of Jessie’s relationship to Anne. Nor did I ever consider Raphael at all emotionally involved with Anne. Secondly, you said there was a Bible verse on that absinthe bottle. Given what Raphael was quoted during the trial as saying, that seems like too large of a coincidence. Why would both Marguerite and Raphael be using Bible quotes?”
“I don’t know. That’s been the problem the whole time. Too many questions. And I want to know what happened to Rafe’s stuff in his condo. If he wasn’t involved with Marguerite, how did she know he moved out? And was he planning to take his stuff to the house on Dauphine Street? Why would he do that? And who sent the crime scene pics?”
“I don’t know either.” Gabriel abandoned his plate of food and went to his office. Bringing his laptop back into the living room and sitting on the couch next to Sara, he opened his pictures file and clicked on the folder that contained all the shots he’d taken for the book. He wanted a look at the house on Dauphine Street for some reason. Wanted to see if he could see Raphael in the top window. He cropped and enlarged the photo of the front of the house, but he didn’t see anything.
“You think it was Raphael in the window?” Sara asked.
“I don’t see who else it would have been. Did it look like him?”
“I don’t know. It was so quick, so out of context . . . I wouldn’t have expected to see him.”
Since Gabriel was already in the folder, he started randomly clicking through all the pictures he’d taken that day— of the street sign, the house, Sara on the street, Anne’s tomb— looking for something, anything he hadn’t noticed before.
“What’s that?” Sara touched the screen, right on the upper left of Anne’s tomb.
“It’s graffiti.” Which he didn’t remember being there when they had visited the tomb. He had thought the tomb was freshly painted. But there was clearly writing on it.
“What does it say?” Sara was squinting at the screen.
Gabriel clicked Edit and enlarged the photo. It was a little grainy, but they could read the words.
" ’In Him we have redemption,’ ” Sara read.
“Where have I heard that before?” Gabriel stared hard at it. “And do you remember that being on the tomb? I could have sworn there was no writing on the tomb when we were there. We would have noticed this . . . it’s not normal graffiti.”
Sara grabbed his wrist. “Gabriel. Where are the crime scene photos of my mother?”
“In my office. Why?”
“I have a terrible feeling . . . Will you go get them?”
“Sure.” He stood up, handing her his laptop. He had no idea what they would see in those pictures, but he agreed with her. He had a bad feeling too. None of this was right and none of it was a coincidence. There was an answer, he just had to find it. The envelope was in his desk drawer, and he undid the clasp, pulling out the graphic pictures. Flipping through them as he walked, he scanned them carefully, hoping to avoid showing Sara the horrific images if at all possible.