One Grave Less

than she told Chief Garnett. This mysterious coworker of Simone’s told Mrs. Brooks that you had been sending bolts of material soaked in drugs out of Porto Barquis to a place in Florida where the drugs were recovered. He did not tell her what kind of drugs, nor did the woman ask. It was enough for her to hear the word drugs ,” said Gregory. “I think it is all one thing to her.”
    “What part did she think Simone played in this?” asked Diane. “Surely she didn’t think her daughter was part of a drug smuggling ring.”
    “No. The chap told her that you hired Simone to track down a lost shipment of valuable South American Indian fabric for the museum, and that Simone had no idea what she was getting into or what she was carrying.”
    “Damn,” said Diane. “She believes it still, doesn’t she?”
    “Yes. She won’t be talked out of it. It is proof, after all, that she was right, and her daughter should have followed her advice,” said Gregory.
    The waitress came to refill the coffee and bring David several packets of hot chocolate to put in his. They stopped talking until she left. Diane took a long sip of the hot coffee, wishing Simone had at least written her a letter, an e-mail, or something. What was this about?
    “Did Simone’s brother, Pieter, have anything to say?” asked Diane. “You said you were to meet him in the coffee shop.”
    “He said Simone was obsessed,” said Gregory. “She discovered something in Oliver’s things and it made her crazy. Simone had been secretive and preoccupied ever since she looked into the boxes that Oliver mailed from the mission. She told Pieter she was finishing an investigation that Oliver had started. Pieter thinks she had collected some kind of evidence of her own, and that she was bitter and determined, but would not confide in him. She told him he was safer not knowing.”
    “She knew to trust Diane,” said David. “Whatever she had, or whatever she discovered, it must have revealed who was involved. Otherwise, how would she know who to trust? How would she know to trust Diane? She must have discovered which one of ‘us’ ordered the raid on the mission—if that was what her words to you meant, Diane.”
    Steven went still. “What? What do you mean—one of us ordered the raid on the mission? It was Santos.”
    “We believe that Simone thought it was one of our team who asked him to do it,” said Diane.
    Steven shook his head. “No, I don’t believe that. We were too close.”
    “Perhaps she meant someone on the periphery of your group,” Frank suggested. “Someone loosely connected with the project or the mission.”
    No one said anything for several moments.
    “No,” said Diane, as if she just truly realized what Simone’s warning meant. “Simone meant someone close. She said ‘us.’ That’s who we were then—a family, an ‘us.’ Someone close. She meant one of our small family.”
    Steven shook his head. “You’ll have a hard time convincing me of that.”
    “Perhaps, whoever it is,” said David, “meant to kill Simone and stop her from revealing their identity. They caught up with her here, at the museum. These rumors were meant to distract us, to give us something to do other than investigate what they hoped was Simone’s death. Destroy our credibility, cost us our jobs. It was their bad luck that she spoke to you before she lapsed into a coma.”
    “That doesn’t explain my problem,” said Steven. “I knew none of this. Why would I need to be distracted?”
    “Perhaps you know something,” Gregory said to Steven. “There’s a reason. We just need to flush it out. It gives me some satisfaction that, if David is correct and these rumors were meant to give us a time-consuming hobby away from Simone, they had the opposite effect.”
    No one had anything to say. Steven looked like he had been broadsided. He kept shaking his head.
    “Do you have any theories?” David asked him.
    Steven was quiet for several moments. He drummed his fingers on the table.
    “Okay,” he said, tapping the tabletop with his middle finger. “Why now? Why did all this happen now? And why these god-awful rumors? What happened to trigger all this? You’re saying Simone was investigating stuff she dug out of Oliver’s belongings—belongings that she just recently felt emotionally strong enough to face going through. What if that wasn’t the trigger? What if there are no boxes? Or what if that stuff was only souvenirs, after