Necessary Evil Read Online Free PDF

the
dig together.
    “Maddie,” he whispered in my hair. “I’m so
sorry, Maddie.”
    I’d dreamed about Joe coming back into my
life. I’d scripted dozens of witty conversations, imagined me throwing my head
back, laughing, looking like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina ,
only with reddish curly hair. But that day, tears overflowing my swollen eyes,
my scripted lines left me. My wits as well.
    “They killed him, Joe,” was the first
thing I said. “They killed him.”
    We sat hidden together on the choir loft
stairs for a long time. He listened while I cried. I told him about the
treasure hunters, and the holes, and the accident, reliving the scene as I
spoke. I must have sounded like a mad woman – all I could see were trespassers,
flooding our land, leaving holes and destruction, gold-blind to the death they
caused, and I began to shiver uncontrollably, despite the heat.
    “They killed him and they’re still there,
Joe,” I whispered, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. “They just. Keep. Digging .
I found another hole this morning. Another bloody hole !”
    If I hadn’t just cried myself tearless, I
would have crumbled again. But I had nothing left to give, just a hollow
emptiness and a dreadful fear: that we’d never be free of this cursed treasure
story, nor of the ever-present intruders.
    “Oh, Maddie,” Joe said again.
    The others had returned by then. We heard
them entering the church basement, the faint sounds of laughter and chatter
signifying warmth, security, and kinship. I felt alone, as though I were a
million miles away, kept away by a force far more insurmountable than distance.
And even though Joe was there, his profile in sharp relief against the light of
the doorway, his shoulder brushing mine, his handkerchief crumbled in my hands
– even he was there only temporarily. I, and I alone, would have to face the
future.
    To keep myself from sliding into despair,
I turned to anger.
    “ They won’t believe that there is nothing
to find ,” I snapped in a whisper. “They will keep looking for it – why
would they stop now when even Mark Dulles’ failure wouldn’t stop them?”
    “They’ll stop,” Joe said softly, “once
definitive proof is found.”
    I laughed, bitterly. “Definitive proof!
How can you prove something isn’t there?”
    He looked at me, with just the slightest
hint of a smile.
    “That,” he said, “is the right question.”
     
                                                             
***
     
    I don’t know how long I’d been staring at
the photo, but I was in a deep enough reverie to be startled when Aunt Susanna
said, “He’s writing another book!”
    Shaking my head clear, I put the files on
top of the cabinet and went back to the desk to take a look. “He is? What
about?”
    She pointed at the screen. She had
followed a link to the Braeburn College Journal, where the headline announced, Popular lecturer on loan to Mass .
    Still reading, Susanna said, “According to
this, he’s writing a book on the Carignan Diaries while he’s guest lecturing.
That had some connection to the Civil War, too, which I remember was a favorite
subject of his. He was forever talking to Michael about it.” She frowned,
seeming confused. “Now, I wonder why he’s doing that, and not something about
the Beaumont letter. He was so interested when you sent it to him, and now that
he’s in the area, he’d be able to see it whenever he wants...”
    Before she could think too much about it,
I pointed out the second to last paragraph of the article. “It says right
there. Apparently, this was the project that Professor Maddox was working on
when he died and the family asked him to finish it.”
    “For joint credit, I’ll bet,” she said,
and before I could question her remark, she read aloud, “Professor Tremonti is
looking forward to his return to New England, where he received his Masters and
first worked as a