Chapter 5
FIVE
Quinn got back just as the kids came home from school, so closeting herself with the ring was out of the question.
The children wanted to know where she’d been and talked over each other as they told her about their own days and argued about what they wanted for dinner.
Rufus barked excitedly, as he always did when the children got home, and Gabe wasn’t able to put in a word edgewise, so he took the dog for a walk instead.
“Tell me,” Gabe invited her once he had come back, the children had gone upstairs to do their homework, and he and Quinn were left alone in the kitchen. He’d made tea, and they settled companionably at the kitchen table with their mugs.
“It was strange,” Quinn admitted. “I’ve unearthed countless remains over the years, but they had all been skeletonized, and I felt no connection to them until I saw them in my visions and learned something about their lives.
This was different.” She paused as she recalled what she had experienced at the mortuary and tried to put it into words.
“I got to see this woman’s face. Up close.
And it stayed with me all the way home. She was so young, and lovely.
And my heart broke for her,” she said, her voice quavering.
There had been a time when any archaeological discovery had felt like a triumph—a small victory against the relentless march of time and an opportunity to learn, to teach, and to add a paragraph to the ongoing story of mankind.
But she had been young then, and na?ve. Now she was a mother, and every missing child on the news, every story of neglect or cruelty, struck her to the core.
When she had looked at the young woman in the mortuary, she hadn’t only mourned the life that had been lost and all the experiences that would never come to pass.
She had thought of the parents who might have spent years searching for their daughter, and of the man who had slipped a ring onto her finger.
This woman was not merely a fascinating find; she had been loved, had lived a life, albeit a short one, and must have left behind a terrible void.
And Quinn was the only one who might be able to give her identity back to her.
“Was Dr. Harrison willing to speculate on the cause of death?” Gabe asked.
“Not without performing a postmortem. But he did not discover any wounds that might have been fatal.”
“There are other ways a person could be murdered. Or maybe she killed herself,” Gabe offered.
“Maybe, but I have never heard of anyone throwing themselves down a well. The house overlooks the Irish Sea. Surely if she’d wanted to drown herself, she could have walked into the sea.
” Which would have given her the option to change her mind, Quinn thought.
The woman would not have been able to climb out of the well.
But perhaps that had been the point, whether it had been suicide or murder.
“No sense speculating until we know how she died.”
Quinn nodded. “We’ll have to wait until Colin examines the remains.”
“You will be able to see how she died,” Gabe reminded her gently.
“Yes, but I still need the scientific data to back up my findings. Viewers will be expecting that, now more than ever.”
“Because you will need to win their trust back,” Gabe finished for her.
“Yes. If I tell them the woman’s story, there will be those who will say that I made it all up. I must offer them irrefutable proof.”
“And you will. Colin will provide you with the forensic evidence needed to convince even the most implacable naysayers.”
“That’s what I’m hoping for. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with any more vicious attacks on my character. But I know it will never be smooth sailing, no matter how much evidence I provide.”
“You know better than most what people are like. There will always be those who refuse to accept proof and will choose to believe they’re getting duped. It comes with the territory.”
“I know,” Quinn said. “I must have been mad to agree to this.”
Gabe smiled at her, and his gaze was warm with affection but also alight with wonder. “Would you like to spend some time with the ring?”
She nodded. “I really would.”
“I’ll make dinner,” Gabe offered. “I can be trusted to boil spaghetti. And there’s a container of bolognese sauce in the fridge.”
“Thank you,” Quinn said and wrapped her arms around him when they both stood.
She pressed her cheek to his chest and was reassured by the steady beating of his heart. Sometimes she still couldn’t believe she’d got so lucky, and hoped Gabe knew how much she loved and appreciated him.
“Go on,” he whispered into her hair. “I got this.”
Quinn grabbed a zip-top bag from the cupboard, then took the folded glove out of her satchel and hurried upstairs.
In the bathroom, she took a pair of tweezers out of the medicine cabinet and found a new toothbrush.
She used the tweezers to hold the silver band under a stream of warm water and used the brush to carefully scrub away the slime and the dirt that coated the surface.
As the slime dissolved, a pattern began to emerge.
The metal wasn’t solid but exquisitely filigreed, and it wasn’t just any band.
It was a claddagh ring, hands holding a crowned heart forming the focal point of the design.
As the last of the grime melted away, the band shone in the light from the overhead fixture.
It didn’t appear to have any scratches or nicks, but a stamp was clearly visible on the inside of the band.
This didn’t date the ring, since silversmiths had been stamping their creations since the 1300s, but it was still a clue.
Quinn was now certain that the body did not date to the Roman occupation or any time before the fourteenth century.
She turned off the water and dropped the ring into the plastic bag before disposing of the filthy toothbrush and returning the tweezers to the cabinet.
Once in the bedroom, she kicked off her shoes, reclined against the pillows, and held up the bag.
The silver glowed in the mellow light of the autumn afternoon, the tiny heart at the center making her own heart ache with sadness.
The claddagh ring was an age-old symbol of love, given as an engagement or wedding band since the medieval period.
What had happened to the man who’d given his heart to the deceased?
Had he searched for her, or had he known she was dead?
Or might he have been the one to kill her?
It was a brutal and heartbreaking fact of life that, when a woman went missing or was murdered, statistically it was most often her domestic partner who was responsible.
The investigation into her disappearance and the consequences for those responsible would largely depend on when the woman had lived and the laws of the land at the time.
Perhaps there was a record of the case, but in order to find it Quinn would need a name and the year she’d vanished.
As she prepared to touch the ring, she reflected that there was one commonality to all her previous cases.
Each foray into the past had taken her to the most significant time in the victim’s life and focused on the period leading up to their death.
So as soon as Quinn made contact with the metal, she would learn several basic facts that would enable her to conduct her own research.
She took out the ring and shut her eyes, emotionally prepared at last to see the deceased as she had been in life, but nothing happened.
Quinn kept her eyes closed for several more seconds, but all remained silent and dark.
At first she wondered if she was experiencing this vacuity due to the deceased’s dulled faculties, but she soon realized that wasn’t the case. There was no connection at all.
She opened her eyes and turned the ring over in her fingers.
The only times she’d felt this type of void had been either when the owner had still been alive or when the item had been brand-new and had yet to be imprinted with the memories of its owner.
The ring had come from the well, and she had taken it off the dead woman’s hand herself.
The only possibility that remained was that the band had been new at the time of death.
Which would mean that she must have died minutes after she’d become engaged or been married.
Quinn set the ring aside, now even more determined to get to the truth.
With this new discovery, the mystery had just deepened.