Even the late October sky wore black to her funeral. The gathering storm clouds hung like a flannel shroud above the graveyard, ominous and foreboding, not unlike the face of the stranger who stood ramrod straight just behind a mound of red clay that would forever remove the young woman from her place on earth.
His eyes, as hard as cracked marble, never left Ambrose Lincoln.
Lincoln dismissed him with a glance.
But he burned the man’s image deep into his brain. He didn’t know why. But he wanted to remember the man even if he never saw the stranger again. Not quite six feet tall. Square chiseled face. Pencil mustache. Sloped shoulders. A scar that could easily be mistaken for a half moon carved just below his left ear. A nervous right eye, or was it just lazy? A suit as black as the sky. Perfectly tailored. A raincoat to match. If the man had a gun, it was well hidden. Lincoln had no idea why he even thought that the stranger might be carrying a gun.
He heard the minister quote the twenty-third Psalm.
Something about the valley of the shadow of death.
It sounded familiar.
Ambrose Lincoln promptly forgot it.
He looked again at the wooden rosewood coffin placed gingerly on the rails of a metal bier. It had been opened. A brusque wind ruffled the dark hair of his wife.
She no longer cared.
It no longer mattered.
He heard a woman softly cry.
She had hugged his neck. She said she was his mother.
A tall man wearing a gray suit that would have been new in 1929 and probably worn less than a half dozen times since, lay a hand on Lincoln’s shoulder. The man had the crude, powerful grip of steel worker.
He said he was Lincoln’s father.
Ambrose Lincoln forced himself to look again into the face of his wife.
So young.
So pale.
So soft.
So dead.
He hoped she had died quickly. He hoped she had not experienced pain. He hoped that her final breath had been as easy to take as the first breath of a sleeping child.
He had no idea how she died.
No one had told him.
He hadn’t asked.
Secrets of the Dead on Amazon US
We allow you to read the first page of a book, look at its cover and then buy it, but only if you like it. Nothing beats sampling a novel. Experience the simple pleasure of finding novels that you like, fast, with BooksGoSocial.com.
