Page 45 of Dirty Valentine (A J.J. Graves Mystery #17)

Three Days Later

I found Jack on the back porch at dawn, coffee steaming in his hands, staring out at the mist rising from the Potomac. The storm had finally broken, leaving the world washed clean and gleaming in the early light.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked, settling beside him on the swing.

“FBI called me at four. They found more journals in Judith’s apartment.

She’d been planning this since she was sixteen.

” He took a sip of coffee. “Started when she learned she was descended from both sides—the Hughes who stole the land and Bridget Ashworth who was murdered for it. The conflict tore her apart.”

We rocked in comfortable silence. The investigation would go on for months—testimony, evidence review, the slow grind of justice.

But the killing was done. Potts, Evangeline, and Judith were in federal custody.

The truth about the seventeen victims Thomas had identified was public.

And Sheldon, somehow, had emerged from the whole ordeal intact, already asking Emmy Lu if she knew any nice, normal girls who didn’t conduct séances.

“Mom called,” Jack said. “She and Dad are coming for Sunday dinner. She says she wants to write a book about this.”

“Of course she is.”

“Patricia Whitman’s leaving town. Donating Thomas’s research to KGU.”

“Can’t say I blame her.”

A cardinal landed on the porch railing, its red breast bright as fresh blood. It studied us with one black eye, then flew off toward town.

The sun climbed higher, burning off the mist. Somewhere across King George County, people were waking up to ordinary lives, making coffee, reading the news about our extraordinary week. But here on our porch, in the quiet between night and day, I thought about Bridget Ashworth.

Not the legend or the ghost story, but the woman.

A healer who grew herbs by the river, who helped her neighbors until they turned on her for her land.

She’d died refusing to confess to crimes she hadn’t committed, the weight of stones crushing the life from her while men who called themselves righteous divided up her property.

Three hundred years later, her descendants had tried to balance those scales with blood. They’d failed, becoming the very thing they’d sought to punish—killers who destroyed innocent lives for their own purposes.

But maybe that was the real lesson. That vengeance was just another kind of weight, crushing the life from anyone who carried it. That justice delayed too long became poison. That the truth, when it finally surfaced, was usually uglier than the lie.

“Ready to go in?” Jack asked.

“In a minute.”

I watched the mist disappear completely, leaving King George County exposed in the morning light—all its beauty and all its blood, its history and its hauntings, its old wounds that never quite healed.

Somewhere in the cemetery across town, fresh flowers lay on Bridget Ashworth’s grave. Anonymous tributes from people who finally knew her story. The real story.

After three hundred years, she could rest in peace.