THREE

There would be grief later on at the memorial services for Wanda Lindstrom held in Cambridge, but nothing then would match the outpouring of sorrow of the Yarkie men returning from High Ridge that night after the laboratory debacle. With the help of new rain, the second flare-­up of fire in the woods had been controlled without too much difficulty. Now the men shared the bitterness of fellow soldiers beside a fallen comrade.

This woman, so different from all of them, had come to aid Yarkie, and she had helped generously, without the reserve that might have been expected. She had not needed to trek to the kettle hole searching for the roaches with them. She had not needed to work so arduously in the lab. She had not needed to respond so immediately to Hubbard’s summons in the first place. Far from being cold or distant, she had stood with them shoulder to shoulder. And from what they learned now, she had just sacrificed her life to save Peter Hubbard’s. The Yarkie men gave Wanda Lindstrom their highest accolade—she was “topnotch crew.”

At times like this the least said among them, the best. The sheriff quietly asked Craig to make a coffin. Meantime, Elizabeth and Bonnie had, with aching tenderness, wrapped the woman’s broken body in old curtains. The shroud was not clean, but it covered the terrible sight. The men, as if in a funeral procession, reverently carried the body to the empty second-­floor room and laid it on the sandy floor until the officials could decide how to handle the matter the next morning.

When Elizabeth called the Task Force to dinner, they ate without appetite. In the general quiet, they became conscious of the noisy way Russell Homer stowed away his food. He didn’t slurp, but he bent over his plate and sucked food into his mouth, swallowing with an audible gulp. It was a little irritating, but at the same time somehow comforting, a reminder of normal Yarkie days when there was nothing more troublesome to be worrying about than one’s manners and what herbs to put in a fish chowder.