“Everyone dies.” But his hand came to his breather again, and his eyes watched Eve warily over it. “I heard her—Edwina—talking to a soldier I knew. Young first lieutenant, sent down from upstate. Can’t remember his name. They’d slip off when she’d come to sing. Or you could see the way they looked at each other. The way Therese and I looked at each other.”
“They were lovers?”
“Probably. Or wanted to be. She was young, a lot younger than Taker.”
“Who? Taker?”
“That’s what they called Lowell—James Lowell.”
“Because he took the bodies the dead wagon brought in,” Eve said, remembering Dobbins’s comment.
“That’s right. She was half his age, vital, beautiful. He was too damn old for her, and…and there was something in his eyes. In the old man’s, too, his father. Something in their eyes that brought the hair up on the back of the neck.”
“They found out about her and the soldier.”
“Yes. I think they were going to run away. He wouldn’t have been the first to desert, or the last. It was summer. We had the sector secured, temporarily in any case. I went out, just to walk, to remind myself what we were fighting for. I heard them talking, behind one of the supply tents. Her voice, you couldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s. They were talking about going north, up into the mountains. A lot of people had fled the city for the mountains, the country, and he still had family up that way.”
“She was going to leave her husband, run off with this soldier.” And Robert Lowell, Eve calculated, would have been around twenty.
“I didn’t let them know I was there. I wouldn’t have turned him in. I knew what it was to love someone, and be afraid for her.
“I backtracked a little, then crossed the street so they wouldn’t know I’d been close. Give them privacy, you know. Fucking little privacy back then. And I saw him, on the other side of the tent, listening to them.”
“Lowell,” Eve realized. “The younger one.”
“He looked like he was in a trance. I’d heard he had a mental condition. There were whispers, but I thought it was just the excuse they used to keep him out of the fight. But when I looked across the street, when I looked at him, there was something not right. No, not right at all. I need water.”
Once again, Eve lifted the cup and straw to his mouth.
“He turned them in.”
“He must have. There was nothing I could do, not with him there. I was going to warn them later, warn the lieutenant about the kid. But I never got the chance. I went up the block, debating with myself on what I should or shouldn’t do—wanted to talk to Therese about it first. They were gone when I came back. The soldier off on assignment, and Edwina back home. I never saw either of them alive again.”
“What happened to them?”
“It was more than a week later.” His voice was tiring, genuinely, she judged. She wouldn’t get much more. “The soldier was listed as AWOL, and she hadn’t been back. I thought they’d gotten away. Then one night, I went out for sentry duty. She was on the sidewalk. No one would ever say how whoever had tossed her there had gotten through the posts. She was dead.”
A tear slid out of his eye, tracked around the side of the breather. “I’d seen bodies like that before, I knew how they came to be like that.”
“Torture?”
“They’d done despicable things to her, then tossed her, naked and mangled, on the street like garbage. They’d shorn off her hair, and had ripped up her face, but I knew who she was. They’d left her wearing the Tree of Life necklace she always wore. As if to make certain there would be no mistake.”
“You thought the Lowells did it? Her husband, father-in-law, stepson.”
“They said she’d been taken and tortured by the enemy, but it was a lie. I’d seen that kind of work before, and it had been on the enemy. The old man was a torturer. Everyone knew it, and everyone was careful not to speak of it too loudly. If they believed a prisoner had information, they took him to Robert Lowell—the old one.
“When they came to get her, he wept like a baby, the one you’re looking for now.” Pella’s eyes opened, and they were fierce despite his flagging voice. “When he saw her under the sheet we covered her with, he wept like a woman. Two days later, I lost Therese. Nothing mattered after that.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police this nine years ago when these murders started?”
“I didn’t think of a dead woman from a lifetime ago. I never thought of it, nor of her. Why would I? Then, I saw that sketch. A long time ago, but I thought there was something familiar. When you came yesterday, I knew who he was.”
“If you’d given me this yesterday, given me his name, you might have spared Ariel twenty-four hours of pain.”
Pella just turned his head away and closed his eyes. “We all have pain.”
Riding on disgust, Eve stormed out of Pella’s town house. “Miserable bastard. I need any and all properties owned by the Lowells, or Edwina Spring, during the Urbans. Get out that damn golden shovel and dig.”