The Lost (Echoes from the Past #9) - Irina Shapiro Page 0,2
expecting. Katya hasn’t been feeling well, physically or emotionally. She’s convinced this one is a boy, and I think she’s right. This pregnancy is so different from the first one.”
“Is that why Vanessa is having nightmares? Jealous of a new sibling already? Surely she’s too young to understand.”
“It’s not the baby,” Rhys said. “We haven’t told her yet. Katya wants to wait until the second trimester to tell Vannie. It’s a Russian thing, apparently. Telling people too soon might cause a miscarriage.”
“But you just told me,” Quinn pointed out.
“And you will never reveal my indiscretion to Katya,” Rhys replied as he accepted a mug of coffee. “I think it’s a silly superstition, but she truly believes it.”
“My lips are sealed.”
They took their coffees into the lounge, where they settled comfortably, Rhys on the sofa and Quinn in the armchair. “What’s up?” she asked him, sensing his hesitation. Rhys wasn’t one to mince words, but there was something in his eyes that put Quinn on guard.
“I need to ask a huge favor, Quinn,” Rhys began. He exhaled loudly. “You know what they say about the road to hell, right?”
“Yes, it’s paved with good intentions,” Quinn replied, wondering where this was going.
“Katya loves to swim,” he said, as if that was meant to explain everything.
“So?”
“So, I decided to put in a swimming pool at the new house. I wanted to make her happy. The workers broke ground last week.” Rhys took a sip of his coffee and glanced toward the window, his shoulders sagging against the back of the sofa. “They had to cut down two old trees and extract the roots in order to clear the space.”
“Oh, God. Don’t tell me,” Quinn said. Now she saw exactly where this was going.
Rhys nodded miserably. “I am telling you. They found skeletal remains trapped amid the roots. Of course, the police were called in, but they ruled it a historic burial, filed a lengthy report, and happily left me to deal with the situation.”
“And have you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Why not?” Quinn asked, arching her brow. Generally, any human remains that were not the subject of an ongoing investigation or a cold case were left where they had been found or reburied at a local cemetery. There were countless dead sleeping peacefully beneath every corner of Britain, many of them having lain undisturbed for centuries.
“Vanessa was there, playing in the garden, when they found the skeleton. She saw the whole thing.”
“Did she understand what she was looking at?”
“She understood enough to be frightened. I would have been able to talk her round if Katya hadn’t become hysterical.”
“Why?” Quinn asked. Ekaterina Velesova Morgan was one of the calmest, most rational people Quinn had ever come across. She was intelligent, resourceful, and confident enough to put up with a man like Rhys, who didn’t suffer fools gladly. Quinn couldn’t reconcile the Katya she knew with a woman who’d give in to superstition or become hysterical at the sight of a skeleton.
“Katya’s grandfather’s younger brother had gone missing during the Second World War. They lived near Kiev then, in an area occupied by the Germans. Oleg was fifteen when he disappeared. His parents searched everywhere for him, asked all their neighbors and even approached the German command, but no one seemed to know anything. They eventually came to believe that Oleg had run away to join the Partisans.”
“Did they ever find out what happened to him?” Quinn asked.
Rhys nodded. “It was more than ten years after the war ended that ground was broken for a new block of flats. The site was half a mile from Babi Yar. Have you ever heard of it?”
Quinn nodded. “Sounds familiar, but I can’t recall the details.”
“It’s a mass grave where more than thirty-three thousand Ukrainian Jews had been executed and buried. There’s a monument there now, but at the time, the Soviets wanted to obliterate any sign of what had taken place there and were building on the bones of the people who’d been murdered.”
“And Oleg was one of them?” Quinn asked.
“Oleg wasn’t Jewish, but he must have been caught in the vicinity of the killing ground. Perhaps he’d witnessed some of the atrocities, or maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They found his remains trapped in the roots of a tree they’d cut down to clear the ground for the building site,” Rhys said.
“How were they able to identify him after all that time?” Quinn asked, ever the archeologist.