Chapter 4 - The Iron in the Earth
The crypt at Lake View Cemetery smelled of wet granite, dead ferns, and three generations of embalming fluid that had seeped through the sandstone foundations during the great slide of nineteen-eighty-six.
It was five-thirty in the morning.
A portable diesel generator chugged behind an ancient cedar hedge seventy yards away, its exhaust mixing with the sea fog that rolled off Lake Washington in thick, greasy banks. A single halogen work light on a yellow tripod illuminated the marble facade of the Sterling family mausoleum—a miniature Grecian temple of cold Barre granite, topped with a weeping angel whose stone fingers had been worn smooth by eighty years of northern salt air.
Clara sat in the front passenger seat of the armored Yukon, three tiers down the cemetery road.
She was wearing a heavy black cashmere coat that Mrs. Gable had brought down from the third-floor cedar wardrobes. It fit her shoulders with an unnatural, sickening precision. The silk lining smelled faintly of dried bergamot and the cedar chips used to preserve winter wool; when she slipped her hands into the deep pockets, her fingers found an old silver dollar, worn flat on both faces, and a single, hard lozenge of cherry throat candy wrapped in yellowed cellophane.
Beside her sat Mikhail.
He had not turned on the car’s heater. The engine was dead, the windows cracked two inches to prevent the glass from fogging. A short-barreled Remington twelve-gauge shotgun rested across his knees, its steel receiver cold and gray in the dawn twilight.
"You should look away when they lift the slab," Mikhail said. He had not looked at her once in forty minutes. "Concrete dust gets in the throat. Stays there for three days."
"I’m not looking away," Clara said.
Up on the portico of the tomb, three men in rubber boots and orange safety vests were working an iron pinch bar into the mortar line beneath the bottom stone.
Adrienne stood five paces back, his hands deep in the pockets of his dark overcoat, his hat pulled low against the mist. Beside him stood a thin, nervous man with an aluminum clipboard and a portable leather surgical roll—Dr. Chen, the deputy chief medical examiner for King County, who had been pulled from his bed at three in the morning by two men who did not give their names but carried a warrant signed by a presiding judge of the state superior court.
The sound of the mortar cracking was loud—a sharp, dry snap that sounded like an elk’s leg breaking under a falling log.
The workmen grunted, their iron bars levering the five-hundred-pound faceplate out from the granite wall.
A cloud of fine, yellow dust billowed out into the glare of the halogen light, smelling of dry lime, sulfur, and ancient damp.
Behind the stone lay the bronze casket.
It had not rusted; the air inside the tomb was dry enough to preserve the heavy lacquer, but the silver handles had oxidized into an ugly, oily violet.
Adrienne did not wait for the workmen.
He stepped forward, his boots crunching on the broken mortar, caught the left-hand carrying bar with his bare hand, and pulled.
The rollers inside the crypt screamed with sixty years of rust. The casket slid out onto the hydraulic lift table with a heavy, hollow thud that shook the yellow tripod.
Dr. Chen stepped forward with a set of specialized bronze keys designed to open the security locks on nineteen-fifties burial vaults. His hands were trembling so violently he dropped the first key onto the granite flags.
"Pick it up," Adrienne said.
His voice was not loud. It had that flat, rhythmic neutrality that was far more terrifying than a shout.
"Mr. Sterling," Dr. Chen stammered, his spectacles slipping down his sweat-sheened nose. "The seal... if the liner has failed, the biological decay could be... the gases—"
"The liner did not fail," Adrienne said. "Open it."
The lock turned with a dry, metallic click that echoed through the misty cedar trees.
The two workmen caught the edge of the bronze lid. They looked at Adrienne. He nodded once, a three-inch tilt of his chin.
They lifted.
Clara leaned forward in the passenger seat, her forehead touching the cold glass of the window.
The halogen light poured directly into the satin interior of the vault.
The casket was not empty.
It contained sixty pounds of lead construction ingots, three sacks of dry builder's sand that had split along their paper seams, and an old iron railway coupling that had been wiped down with carbolic acid to kill the smell of the machine shop.
Tucked into the velvet pillow where the head should have rested was a single silver photograph frame.
The glass had not broken.
It held an eight-by-ten print from an autumn afternoon in the Arboretum: Evelyn Sterling sitting on the low stone wall of the Japanese garden, eight months pregnant with the triplets, her hair long and dark, laughing into the sun while a great black dog with an iron collar rested its heavy head across her knees.
Adrienne did not scream. He did not curse.
He reached down into the bronze box, picked up the silver frame with his bare hand, and looked at it for three seconds in the glare of the halogen light.
Then, with a smooth, unhurried motion, he turned the frame over.
Taped to the black velvet backing was an index card, yellowed at the edges, written in the cramped, spidery cursive of an old man who had learned his penmanship with an ink-dip steel nib in a parochial school:
“Some things are too expensive to leave in Seattle, Adrienne. The interest is forty percent per annum. We will collect when the docks are paved.”
Adrienne folded the card once, slid it into the breast pocket of his coat, and walked down the granite steps toward the Yukon.
His face had not changed.
The lines were the same; the eyes were the same. But as he reached the car, Clara saw that the skin around his temples had pulled so tight the bone seemed ready to tear through the flesh.
He opened the door, stepped into the driver’s seat—dismissing Mikhail with a single flick of his wrist—and turned the ignition key.
The eight cylinders roared to life with a deep, predatory rumble that sent a flock of crows bursting out of the dead cedars above the vault.
"Who was it?" Clara asked. Her voice did not shake. The cold in her ribs had become absolute—a solid, diamond-hard center of gravity that held her upright against the leather.
Adrienne shifted the heavy transmission into gear, the tires spinning on the wet gravel as he turned the long hood toward the city below.
"My uncle," Adrienne said. "Arthur Sterling. The man who gave me my first gun when I was twelve."
He looked at her across the console.
The dawn light was beginning to break through the gray clouds over the Cascade Mountains, painting the fog a bruised, bloody rose.
"He didn't want to kill you, Evelyn," Adrienne said, his voice dropping into a register that made her jaw ache. "Killing you only made me angry. He wanted to keep you alive where he could reach you if I ever tried to take the shipping lines away from his trust."
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"I don't remember him," she whispered.
"You will," Adrienne replied, his hand coming across the console, his fingers closing over hers with a grip that left no room for doubt, for running, or for the small, safe life she had built behind the bar on Fourth Avenue. "Before the week is out, Evelyn, you will remember every room in his house."
