Epilogue

I wasn't back at the ranch in Texas for more than a few hours before my cell phone rang. The FBI agent in charge of the Ft. Worth branch wanted me to know that a forensics team from Quantico would arrive at the ranch early tomorrow morning to assist in my search for my mother's remains. While this was fine with me, I began to be concerned about just how many folks now had my private cell phone number. It was just a little late to start worrying about security again.

The search team arrived on schedule and brought a large group of young forensics and physical anthropology students with them. Apparently, they were going to use this as a training exercise for some of their junior agents and graduate student summer interns. They brought in cadaver dogs, ground scanning radar, imaging and biosensor systems that could detect organic decay even years later, and a lot of warm bodies willing to roll up their sleeves in the West Texas summer heat and shovel dirt. We shoveled a lot of it.

Three days later, right when I was beginning to fear the team would pack up and leave me all alone, they found the body, still clad in the remains of her old housecoat all wrapped in the Navaho blanket, still holding on to her purse with her skeletal fingers still gripping it tight. An hour later they found the bodies of his previous two victims, his previous wife and her young son. For the first time in twenty years I began to feel that there might be some hope left in his world.

I touched the bones of course, but they had nothing whatsoever to say to me. I didn't know whether to be happy at this or sad.

She wasn't much of a mother to me. In fact, she was quite an awful parent who had knowingly and willingly entrusted me to the abuse of a stranger in return for her own material needs. But she was my mother who had given me my first name in life, if not much else.

The Angel and her father both offered to come to the funeral, but I requested that they stay home in Boston. After twenty years of searching for her, I could at last put her to rest, and I hoped that this final belated comfort for her remains would bring both of our spirits to rest. I sat by the grave a very long time and watched the cemetery crew fill the holes with dirt.

I buried both of the women next to their husband, my stepfather. One on either side of him. The plots were empty and I couldn't resist the irony. He had murdered them both and I had later had my revenge on him. I'm sure they'll have plenty to talk about for the rest of eternity. I buried the young lad next to his mother. If I had not acted as I had in avenging my mother it was likely that some long distant day someone might have found my bones joining these.

They could now all be at peace, and now I wanted peace in my own life more than anything ... and for the first time in my life I thought it had a chance of actually happening.

Before leaving the funeral home, I had made it quite clear that he should sell off the empty lot on the other side on my mother. I would most definitely not be wanting or needing it. I passed on providing long-term care for the gravesites as well, my mother was never much on flowers anyway and I didn't think I'd ever be returning here again. There was nothing left here that I desired to remember or feel sentimental about.

Before leaving the ranch for the last and final time, I had to resist the urge to burn the place down to the ground. The bad ghosts were all inside me, not the house, I told myself. Let someone else build some happy memories living here instead. I found a realtor and signed all of the paperwork to place the ranch up for sale at a 'can't miss' bargain price. The economy was poor in the area but someone would be sure to snap it up fast. When I offered my agent an extra ten thousand dollar bonus if he could close on a sale within thirty days, I knew that he already had a buyer in mind. Three weeks later the ranch was sold to a nice young couple with a pair of young children just getting starting in life and I couldn't have been happier. I did have my realtor warn them to replace that old coal burning furnace immediately, if not sooner.

I did remove that other tainted ring from its hiding spot under a floorboard at the ranch house. I didn't have a use for it but thought someday someone else would, and I gave it a new hiding spot back at the farm in Pennsylvania. I had plans for its evil twin that I had taken from the Countess. I began to wonder exactly how many of these nasty little fuckers might be floating around in the corridors of wealth and power. They were old... very old. Classical or Hellenic era Greek or Persian I think, originally worn by a pair of Magi with very real magical abilities and passed on down to a hundred generations since. Often passing through the hands of knaves and poltroons, but sometimes in the hands of someone just and honest. Just thinking about this gave me insomnia for nearly a month.

I didn't get to see my Angel the first week that I spent in Boston. She was supposedly up in Connecticut looking over a private treatment center for troubled teens that she was intending to give a fat foundation endowment to, and our paths kept missing each other. I didn't force the issue and let her keep her privacy for now.

Late that Friday, sitting in my new corner office behind an old wooden desk from the 1930's that just oozed character, I wrote the most difficult letter I had ever written in my life. Worse even than my earlier thirty page confessional.