“May I have this and the envelope?” the detective asked, and when she answered, “Of course,” he slipped them both into a plastic sleeve, as if the card were of some great importance.

There was a knock on the open door, and the receptionist with the frizzy blue hair poked her head in. “I’m sorry, Sister, but there’s someone here to see you . . . Oh!” Her eyes rounded at the sight of Montoya as he and the reverend mother entered through a small back doorway.

“Thank you, Eileen. Detective Montoya and I are almost finished.”

“Detective?” Her graying brows drew together behind the glasses that made her eyes appear owlish. “But the man who’s here says he’s—”

Montoya’s partner, the heavier-set fellow, appeared behind Eileen.

“It’s all right,” Charity said, waving him inside. “I think I need to talk to both detectives.”

Eileen had shifted slightly and Bentz entered.

“Please, close the door,” Charity said to Eileen, and as it closed, she motioned to the two chairs facing her desk. “I’m glad you’re both here,” she said, finally ready to unburden herself. “You see, I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 36

“It’s as if I didn’t even know her,” Valerie said as they walked into the mausoleum. Slade’s boots rang against the polished marble floors, and, as always when she visited here, Val felt cold, her skin chilling as if the ghosts of the dead haunted the wide hallways of the mausoleum where the ceilings rose twenty feet and the walls were polished stone. Tall windows on either end of the edifice let in natural light, today a filtered sun. She had the feeling she was walking through a long tunnel, the walls of which were inhabited by the dead.

Her parents’ ashes were sealed here, on the east wall, along with dozens of others who had died. Gene Richard Renard and his wife, Nadine Lynne Bates Renard, held permanent residence in a vault on the fifth row from the bottom in a wall of veined marble.

Val ran her fingers over the etched letters while Slade leaned against a tall ladder that was used to reach the higher spaces. She’d come here often after they’d died, first her father of throat cancer and less than two years later, her mother of a brain aneurysm, just after Christmas, the very year that Camille decided to live with Val and Slade in Texas for a while, then left to join the convent. Though Gene had been nearly seventy when he died, Nadine had been much younger, only fifty-eight when she’d died. Val had sometimes wondered if the aneurysm had been caused by the stress her daughters had put Nadine through, though every doctor she’d talked to had dissuaded her of the idea.

God, that was a bad time for all of them.