Gabriel shook his head, wondering if that would have been better or worse than the spectacle he could still see and hear and feel as clearly as if it were the day before. “Quite the contrary. People have an intense fascination for murder. Anne Donovan’s funeral was a crowded, throbbing mob of morbid curiosity seekers. It rained that day, a torrent of steaming, warm water, and the street, the sidewalks, the cemetery, were a sliding, muddy mess. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees with the storm, and there was a fog, so that all you could see was the black hat in front of you, and the tombs rising suddenly out of the mist. A fitting ending to a gruesome death.” And Gabriel had also seen a woman who had approached him, a child’s hand clasped tightly in her own, her face pinched with anxiety, cheeks streaked with tears. She had slapped him soundly, straight across the cheek, penetrating the fog of the air, his brain, the ever-present guilt. It had been Anne’s cousin, or so she had said, and she urged him passage to hell, before retreating, never to be seen or heard from again.

But the irony was that Gabriel had already been condemned to a personal hell long before receiving her vehement request. He was still in it.

Sara leaned against the wrought iron gate surrounding the tomb and stared at the blank spot left by the crumbled nameplate. “No one deserves to die like that. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Yet so true.”

Her arm brushed his, the top of her head only coming up to his chin. Gabriel was surprised again at how petite she was, at how fragile she could look, yet how determined her voice was. “This must be hard for you, because of your mother.”

A sigh slid out of her mouth. “It is.” Fingers gripped the fleur-de-lis spikes of the fence. “Her funeral was similar to Anne’s in that there was tons of media coverage. Spectators. It was noisy and obnoxious, and disrespectful. And everything was happening so fast in those first few days, the police questions changing, always shifting, always looking for something, the media searching for the angle, trying to figure out which way to take the story. I really wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was just numb, trying to help the investigation, trying to deal with the details, and the shock. The police were at the funeral, a good ten strong, in full patrolmen uniform. It was to ensure crowd control, they said, but it was so invasive. And the paper made a big deal out of me showing up with Rafe . . . but the thing is, he cared more about my mom than anyone else. He and I were friends. Of course I would go with him.”