Franklin reached the Delaford Road himself. He was wearing thick-soled hob boots, and he stamped them on the asphalt as soon as he was able.
“You want to walk,” he said. “You’re absolutely sure.”
“I’m absolutely sure.”
“Fine.”
Franklin started walking up the road in the direction of the Episcopal Church spire and the big white house, and Gregor followed behind. It was cold and windy and miserable, with only sporadic bursts of sunlight to alleviate the gloom, but although it was farther than Gregor might otherwise have chosen to walk in this weather, it was not actually far. In no time at all they were in front of the church itself, rising stone-built and majestic from a bed of untrammeled snow. Less than a minute later, they had reached a place from which they could see the front door of the rectory in the distance. Gregor nodded to himself, checking his watch and counting in his head. They were two older men—older was as far as he would go; he wasn’t ready for Franklin Morrison’s “old.” A younger man or woman would have been much quicker, and it wouldn’t have taken him very long at all. Franklin flapped his arms in the air to get warm.
“We could go up there and pay a call on Ms. Kelley Grey,” he said, gesturing toward the rectory. “I’d like to talk to her again anyway. I’d like to talk to her for a good long time.”
“I’d like to talk to her, too,” Gregor said, “but not right now. Does she live up there all the time?”
“Far as I know. She’s in some kind of graduate program or something downstate, I think.”
“Were she and Gemma Bury close?”
Franklin Morrison shrugged. “Hard to tell with flatlanders. They go on at each other so much. They spent a lot of time together.”
“What about Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek?”
Franklin Morrison snorted. “Aside from the fact that Gemma was getting it on with Tisha’s husband, I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about. I got to tell you, Mr. Demarkian, I do not spend a lot of time worrying how the people out here are behaving themselves, except for Stu and his wife, of course, because they’re friends. As for these other people,” his sweeping arm took in the Vereks and the Episcopal rectory both, “who can tell?”
“Try to guess,” Gregor suggested. “Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury.”
“They talked,” Franklin said. “They knew each other better than they knew any of us, and that includes better than Gemma knew her parishioners, who would really appreciate it if she’d go off and worship the goddess in Boston. Except now she can’t. If you see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean. This is a stone wall.”
This was most certainly a stone wall. It was nearly covered over by towering evergreen trees, but it was more than broad enough to walk on, assuming the trees did not impede your progress. Gregor hesitated and looked up the road.
“What’s just beyond here?” he asked. “The Verek place?”
“That’s right. You can’t see much with all the trees, but you’re only a few hundred steps from the Verek driveway.”
“How long to walk?”
“For us?” Franklin grinned. “Forever. For a good healthy young person, less than two minutes. If that.”
“All right,” Gregor said. He turned back to the stone wall and began to climb slowly onto it, being careful not to slip. Frozen rock is slick. It would be all too easy to fall and break his head. The day Tisha Verek and Dinah Ketchum had been killed, there had been little or no snow on the ground, and the temperature had been warm for the season. Gregor remembered that from the report Franklin had shown him. That was good. If the temperature hadn’t been warm, anybody who’d tried to do this would have killed himself long before he managed to kill anybody else.
Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Once away from the road and into the trees, the branches were not so encroaching and the surface of the stones did not feel so treacherous. Gregor was able to stand up tall and walk normally, with Franklin panting and swearing behind him. Gregor kept his memory of the map Franklin had drawn him as clear as possible in his mind and plunged ahead, looking to the right and to the left, into the trees on each side.
“All this land used to belong to Stuart’s people,” Franklin said. “The first they sold off was to the Episcopal Church back in the 1800s, and then just a few years ago they sold the lot to the Vereks. Stashing cash. All the farmers are stashing cash these days. There’s not enough money to be made from farming.”
“What’s that I see through the trees?” Gregor asked. “Looks like glass.”