All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 254

254

It was a fine spring morning as Sammy stepped from the gallery and out onto Main Street.

He took coffee with Mary Meyer, the two comfortable enough in each other’s company to sit with their newspapers, him scowling at a smiling Carter and Castro as she read of the sweeping investigation that now covered seventeen states. Led by the FBI, and police chief Saint Brown, they had used the interview transcripts with Joseph Macauley to map a detailed trail of the life of Eli Aaron. They had recovered the final body from Pearl River County, by the Hemmsford Swampland. Comfort was small, but to the families starved of so much, it was a chance to lay their pain to rest and begin the process of grieving. There had been no mention of

Grace in any newspaper or report.

“Justice is served,” she said.

“And it only took three decades,” Sammy said.

“Karma, Samuel. Do you believe?”

“More so each day.”

“Getting romantic on me,” she said.

“I can still picture your father’s face.”

“If you had your time over…” she asked him that often, and he would smile, as if he were not going to satisfy her with a response.

“I would tell your father, and Franklin’s father, to go fuck themselves.

I’d leave the Rothko where it was, because I already had something far more beautiful to make a life with.”

She rolled her eyes but could not fight the smile, and then she turned the page and noted the listing. That night he would take her to the newly

reopened Palace 7, where they would see a return of Cleopatra.

He would take her hand.

She would let him.

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