The furnace got as hot as two thousand four hundred degrees and radiated heat in all directions. Buddy often used potash and soda ash as an added fuel, which vaporized almost immediately but was easy to get off the final product with a spritz of industrial cleaner. He used a cleaner the consistency of jelly. It looked like a tub of K-Y Jelly but was a hell of a lot cheaper.
He used a mold for the jar so all the jars would be very consistent in size and shape. They had to be to fit into the glass wall he had made.
Next to the furnace was the steel marver, a flat table used to work the glass and form a cool skin on the exterior of the glass.
Buddy liked the idea of practicing an art developed before the birth of Christ. Sure, it had been refined, the equipment updated, but the craft was roughly the same.
After he’d made a jar and cleaned up his workstation, Buddy carefully carried the jar containing Lexie’s last breath to his apartment, where he kept his work of art safely stored behind a padded moving blanket. Once inside he carefully removed the blanket and started the simple ceremony he’d created over the years. It was very personal and, for the first few years, short. All it involved was placing his hand over each jar that contained the final breath of one of his subjects. He took a second to recall them in as much detail possible. How they had looked when he first met them, how long he had talked to them, how easily they had made the transfer to eternity.
In his first three years of this project he’d only had two jars. Then he settled in to about a jar a year until the last three years when he knew things were moving far too slowly. Back then he wouldn’t have believed the pace he kept now.
He rushed the ceremony as he slipped his hand past the jars in the top, then moved onto the next row, pausing only on the jar in the middle. He remembered Alice. She had been so sweet and young. Maybe too young. It was only through the news that he had learned she was fourteen years old. She had those big blue eyes and blond hair and that thin, graceful neck that his left hand was able to envelop completely. He remembered that stunned look on her face. He’d only known her a few minutes. It was entirely a wild opportunity that he took without any hesitation.
During the lunch hour on a job in northern Flagler County she’d sat down next to him on a bench near the Intracoastal Waterway. They chatted for a few minutes. He excused himself and walked back to his van, picked out a jar he’d made only the day before, walked back, and sat next to her like he was about to finish his lunch. Instead, he casually reached across and clamped down on her windpipe like a vise. She let out a little squeak. Her legs thrashed, but he’d used so much pressure he almost didn’t get her final breath. He had never heard for sure, but he thought he might have broken her neck because he’d moved so quickly and she was so fragile. For some reason during the ceremony he always paused over Alice.
He also let his hand linger over Rhonda. She’d been a few years older than most of his subjects. Classy and beautiful in her own way. He remembered seeing her eighteen-year-old daughter on the news afterwards and wondered if there was a place in his art for her too. How old would she be now? Twenty-six?
Overall he was well satisfied with his efforts and knew, given the expanse of time to look back, each of the women would appreciate how much care he had taken to save them for eternity.
Stallings arrived at his former residence, darted up the driveway, and knocked once before bursting in. Maria had sounded serious enough for him to not waste time and knock. Maria sat alone on the living-room couch, and when she looked up he could see she’d been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and a pile of tissues sat on the coffee table they’d bought together the week after they moved into the house. She had a notebook in her lap as she slowly turned her head to Stallings with that sad face.
Stallings did a quick scan of both downstairs rooms to see if either of the kids were around. He stepped forward and said, “What’s wrong? What do you have to show me?” He eased down on the couch next to her and she immediately grasped his hand. He asked one more question, “Where’re the kids?”
Maria sniffled, then said, “Charlie’s already asleep and Lauren’s in her room studying.” She held up a small leather notebook and turned it so he could see Jeanie’s name on the small brass plate in the front. “This is the diary I gave Jeanie on her tenth birthday. The detectives with JSO took it for a couple of weeks after she disappeared, but because her last entry was more than two years before she disappeared they returned it to us.”
Stallings couldn’t recall the exact details of what they had taken from his daughter’s room. It sounded about right. That was sort of thing Patty Levine would look into. Stallings was more of an interviewer and hunter.
Stallings gave Maria plenty of time. No pressure, just a gentle arm around her shoulder while she started to cry again. Finally she sniffled and wiped her eyes with a Kleenex before blowing her nose. “I never looked at the diary. It felt like an invasion of Jeanie’s privacy. It was like I didn’t want her to be angry when she came home. But tonight I searched through her closet and pulled this out of storage.” She tapped the leather cover of the diary. “And I found an entry that might lend credence to your father’s comment that he saw Jamie after she disappeared.” Maria carefully opened the diary and read a passage. “I learned more about my grandfather. My dad saw him today and thinks he lives in a rooming house on Davis Street. My mom encouraged Dad to visit him. But my dad said there was no way he would go see him.” Maria closed the diary and looked up at her husband. “That’s the only entry that mentions it. I searched the whole diary a couple of times.”
Stallings had looked through the diary himself when it was returned. He’d jumped to the same conclusion as the JSO detectives. He had been so frantic to find a fresh clue that he hadn’t read back into the diary two years before she disappeared.
Stallings was stunned into silence, unable to do anything but stare straight ahead as a thousand possibilities raced through his brain. He clearly remembered the evening he’d come home and told Maria he’d seen his father shambling along the sidewalk on Davis. Stallings had been working the homicide of a homeless man not far away and had canvassed the entire neighborhood for witnesses. He’d slowed his car and stared at the old man but couldn’t work up the nerve to stop and actually speak with him. It was one of only a few times he’d seen the man during their long period of estrangement. Stallings had seen him in lockup after he’d been arrested for drunk and disorderly. And he’d seen him on the street now and then but never anything regular. Maybe only three times in the last ten years. He remembered this time and how he’d come home and told Maria all about it after he’d thought the kids had gone to bed. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate what had happened. Jeanie was a very bright girl and she would’ve found a way to narrow down where his father was living. The only question was if she’d purposely planned to visit him after she ran away.
So it came down to the fact that she did know how to find his father and the old man had not had a hallucination and his recollection of the visit wasn’t a component of his memory problems. Stallings had a lot to talk to the old man about.
He laid his head on the back of the couch and put his feet on the coffee table. Maria nudged closer to him, then looked him in the face.
Hope flashed in Maria’s dark eyes.
THIRTY-SIX
John Stallings woke to sunlight streaming in from all the windows. He’d slept through the night for the first time in months. It took him a few seconds to realize where he was and why he slept so soundly. He was on the couch in this old house and Maria was snug against his chest, snoring softly.