Ten Years Gone полностью

Suddenly, a brisk wind gusted and swept the flowers away. Had I arrived five minutes later than I did, I never would have known they had been there to begin with.

"So it's you, then."

I spun around. The scratchy voice belonged to a religious man with a bushy black beard laced with gray. He had on black pants and a vest over a white shirt beneath the hem of which peeped the tassels of his tzitzit. A large black yarmulke covered his bald head. He was leaning on a straw broom as he eyed me with clear blue eyes that looked too young for his fifty-something face.

"It's me, what?" I asked.

"The one who's always leaving flowers on that grave there. The little one's."

"Are you saying that there are regularly flowers here?"

He inclined his head. "So you're not him?"

"No."

He was disappointed to hear that. "It's regular, but not something to set your watch by. Sometimes a month goes by with no flowers, and then I'll find new ones one week after the next."

"And always on this grave—" I pointed at Willie Ackerland's grave "—but never on this one?" I moved my finger to indicate Esther's headstone.

"Yes. Just on the little one's."

"Any particular kind of flowers? Any special color?"

"No," he said. "They can be red one month and yellow the next."

"How long has this been going on?"

He scratched his bearded cheek. "The first time I saw the flowers was during my first month here, six years ago. But a colleague of mine told me it's been happening for longer than that."

"And you've never seen the person who leaves them?"

He shook his head. "I start my day early in the morning—seven thirty, eight at the latest—and the flowers are already there. Whoever he is, he comes at night when the cemetery's deserted. Strange, isn't it?"

Very strange, I thought.

"I wouldn't want to be here at night," the man continued. "In the dark, with all the spirits of the dead around me."

"Is the cemetery locked at night?" I asked.

The man raised his eyebrows. "Why would it be? There's nothing worth stealing here."

So whoever it was could come and go as he pleased. He wouldn't need to scale a fence or jimmy a lock. He'd just walk right in and up the same path I had, to Willie Ackerland's grave. It could be anyone.

"I'd sure like to know who it is," the man said.

Me too, I thought. But what did it matter who had left these flowers? I had my killer. He was dead. I knew the man who had put money in his hand to kill Esther, and to kill me. Mira would soon see to him. This case was over and done with. So why was my stomach knotted tight? Why was the blood thudding in my ears? Why did I feel that this was important?

Because it was odd. Because it didn't fit. Because the flowers were left exclusively on the stone marked Erich Kantor—Willie Ackerland's grave—and not on Esther's. I could think of no one who would have reason to grieve for Willie but not for Esther. Not someone who'd been in Israel for at least the past six years.

And because someone who sneaks into a cemetery in the dead of night is trying to hide something, and whenever someone is hiding something, there is a reason for it.

"Well, anyway, I got some sweeping to do," the man said and wished me a good day. I mumbled a goodbye without turning to him, and I could hear his footfalls receding as he walked off. I had my eyes firmly set on the two graves, willing them to divulge their secrets, to tell me who this mysterious mourner was.

I might have stood there for one minute or five, my mind churning in gradually deepening desperation, knowing that it would come up with no answers. Then the wind picked up again, stronger than before, buffeting my clothes, swirling up dust and dirt against my neck and face so that I had to avert my face and shut my eyes. When I opened them, I happened to be facing diagonally to the left, looking at the row of graves behind Esther's and Willie's.

And there I saw it, at the edge of my field of vision, the upper half of an unassuming headstone engraved with the name Talia Shamir. Beneath the name was a date of death. I blinked once or twice, sure my eyes were playing tricks on me, but of course the date remained the same. Not March 1939, when the prison raid to free the passengers of the Salonika had taken place, but August 31, 1939, a mere five days after Esther and Willie were slain.

Could this be another Talia Shamir and not Michael's wife? Talia was an uncommon name, and the date of birth on the stone indicated that this Talia had been but twenty-one when she died, about the same age Michael had been ten years ago. The right age to be the woman in Mira's picture.