"I'd have thought you'd be back in New York," Kyrie said. "With your family."
He shrugged. "There is no family. There was Tom. And I couldn't leave . . . yet. They're going to give me back the body tomorrow. I'll be flying it back with me for burial. Our family has a plot in Connecticut." He hesitated. "There will be a funeral. Probably closed-casket funeral. I wouldn't want . . ." He shook his head. "I thought you might want to come. I . . . you don't have to but if you want to I'll pay your fare. I've asked Keith, too. Other than that it will just be me and my business associates. I think . . . some of Tom's friends should be there."
Kyrie contemplated this. She wasn't sure. On the one hand it might offer . . . closure. On the other hand, she just wasn't sure. After all—she knew he was dead. Did she need to see him buried too?
And yet, it did seem right that he should have friends there with him, didn't it? He shouldn't go into the ground watched only by people who thought he'd gone bad. Poor Edward's son who'd gone to the wrong.
"I'll try," she said. "Yes. I think I would like to go."
"Good," he said. "And that brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about. You know the Athens is closed. From what I understand it is about to be foreclosed on. Not only had . . . the owner no living relatives that anyone can find, but he hadn't paid the mortgage in about three months. Apparently whatever frenzy . . . well . . . He wasn't taking care of business."
She nodded, not sure what he meant.
"I wanted to offer you . . . I wanted to . . . I know you're unemployed now."
Kyrie shook her head. "Waiting jobs aren't hard to come by," she said. "Particularly late-night ones. People offer them to you for being alive and breathing."
"I know," Edward said. "But I would like . . ." He took a deep breath, as if steeling himself to brave a dragon in full rampage. "Tom liked you an awful lot."
She nodded, then shrugged. It didn't seem to matter.
"I'd like to offer you college money," Edward said. "And however much money you need to live while you're in college. You can study whatever you want to." He swallowed, as if something in her expression intimidated him further. "I can't help you much in most professions, but if you take law, I can see to it that our firm hires you, and if you're half as smart as you seem to be, I can probably nudge you up to partner before you're thirty."
She heard herself laugh and then, in horror, she heard abuse pouring from her lips. She called him every dirty word she could think of. And some she wasn't sure existed.
His eyes widened. "Why . . . why?"
"You're trying to make reparations," she said, and the sane person at the back of the mind of the raving lunatic she seemed to have become noted that she sounded quite wild. "As if Tom were responsible for my being without a job. Tom isn't, you know. It was not his fault that the beetles ran wild. It was not his fault—"
And then the tears came, for the first time since all this had started. Tears chased each other down her cheeks, and there was a great sense of release. As though whatever she'd kept bottled up all this time had finally been allowed to flow.
She became aware of Edward's hand, gently, patting her hair. "You have it all wrong," he said. "I'm not trying to make up for anything Tom did. It's just that without Tom, I really have no family. And besides, I owe him a debt. Whoever started it—and it can be argued I did—right there in the end, he gave his life to end it, so that I could go free. That's a debt. I'm trying to look after the people he cared for. Don't deny me that. I've offered the same thing to Keith. Anything I can do to help, in his studies or his career . . . I'm a fairly useless person. Most of what I can offer is money. But that's yours, if you need it."
As suddenly as they'd started, the tears stopped. Kyrie wiped at her face, and swallowed and nodded. "I don't know, yet," she said. "I just don't know. I'll. I'll come to the funeral. And then we'll see."
* * *
"There are jobs with the police force, if you should want them," Rafiel said.
He stood by her kitchen door, looking, for the first time since she'd known him, stiff and ill at ease.
Kyrie sat at her kitchen table. She'd been going through all the newspapers, one by one. The one from after Tom's death talked about the two horrible tragedies in town—the group of people who seemed to have died in the garden at the castle. And Tom's death. The headline screamed "A Tragic Night In Goldport."
She looked up at Rafiel. "Surely the CSIs could tell that the bodies had been dead a while and buried," she said.