Yeah, except this was a huge-ass place.
“What times do you walk it?” she inquired.
“Before I go to sleep at nine, and then again at five in the morning.”
Well, that wasn’t exactly a good thing. The collector, who was likely a watcher too, probably kept an eye on the cemetery and knew his habits.
Unless the man was the watching collector.
Time would tell.
She gently pushed.
“Do you stay here?” she asked, pointing at the small building next to the greenhouse, assuming that’s what he meant when he said he went to sleep after walking the cemetery.
He nodded.
“But only until Friday night. Then, I go home to see my mother. She gets lonely, but I have to work. I have to keep an eye on her. I worry that she’ll miss me.”
Ethan was listening.
Okay, so they knew that the man had a pattern, and he left for the weekends. They’d learned that in two minutes. A highly intelligent person, like a collector, would find that out too.
“How long does it take to walk this place?” he asked. “It’s huge, and I bet scary at night.”
He laughed.
“You don’t have to worry about the dead. It’s the living who are dangerous,” he said, and then switched topics. “It takes about an hour and a half in the dark.”
That was plenty of time for someone to get in here, and spend time digging up a grave when he was asleep. The caretaker’s shack was furthest from most of the cemetery.
“This is it,” he said, pointing out the greenhouse where the growing happened.
Inside, they looked around, and Elizabeth let Ethan wander, looking to see if he saw blood, or anything that would say someone was killed there.
Meanwhile, she focused on the man.
He was his own little mystery to her.
“Wow. These are so pretty,” she said. “What are they called?” she asked, building rapport with the man.
While she liked flowers, Uriel did the gardening. She didn’t know the difference, unless it was a rose. She once smelled a peony, and it smelled like a rose, and it took her a couple days to figure out that Peonies were a thing.
Why rose-shaped and scented if not a rose?
That was her big question.
With big hands, Jeffrey handed her a delicate little pot of flowers.
“They are pansies. They look like they have little faces. Those are Johnny Jump-ups. They are in the violet family. Those are Marigolds. They keep deer from eating the rest of the flowers. I like the color,” he said.
She did too.
“These are gorgeous. How long have you been working here?” she asked.
Jeffrey considered it.
“Almost three years.”
