Coup de Glace

by P. D. Workman

“She didn’t do that the day we were up there,” Vic said.

  “No, not that I saw,” Erin agreed. “She must have gone back and done it after that.”

  “Today?” Terry asked.

  “She wouldn’t have had time today. Not if she had to take the goats out to pasture and then come in to the bakery. There wouldn’t have been time to go all the way up to the cemetery.”

  “She was already there. It wouldn’t have taken more than a minute.”

  Erin frowned. “Why was she there?”

  “To take the goats to pasture.”

  “To… the upper pasture?”

  “Yes. That’s where she took the goats this morning.”

  “I thought she took them to the lower pasture. That’s where they were the day when we were here.”

  “The grass was long in the upper pasture,” Vic said. “They hadn’t been up there for quite a while. They must have been finished in the lower pasture, so Bella took them up instead.”

  Erin nodded. “Right. No reason why they wouldn’t. I was just picturing that she’d gone to the lower pasture.”

  Vic looked at Erin, and Erin looked at her. Terry sensed the tension and waited for Erin and Vic to work it out and tell him what was going on. Erin couldn’t shake the vague sense of unease she felt, knowing that Bella had gone to the upper pasture instead of the lower.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. When we were up there, we saw one of their neighbors, Mr. Ware. The fence between their two properties is up there.”

  Terry nodded. “We’ll talk to neighbors. Today we just checked whether anyone had seen Bella. We’ll have to interview them more deeply later.”

  “He seemed nice,” Vic said.

  “Yes. And Cindy said she hasn’t had any trouble with them since Ezekiel died,” Erin contributed.

  Terry scratched his chin. “But Ezekiel and he had issues?”

  “Just some competitiveness. Territoriality…”

  “Had there been any dispute over property rights lately?”

  “Cindy said not. She said everything has been quiet, there haven’t been any issues.”

  Terry nodded. “I’ll talk to Cindy about the necklace, maybe she knows whether Bella was wearing it today or whether she left it in the cemetery sometime last week. We can’t assume it means anything at all if she wasn’t wearing it today.”

  Erin had crawled into bed much later than her usual bedtime. Vic planned to take a sleeping pill so that she’d be able to get in a few hours before morning. Terry wasn’t headed to bed, but he didn’t need to be up as early as they did, either. The townspeople would not be ready to start a search until a decent hour. They all separated, going their different directions. Erin lay in bed, patting Orange Blossom and making notes in her notepad as she waited for her brain to start winding down so that she’d be able to sleep.

  She didn’t like to take sleeping pills, which always left her feeling groggy and hung over in the morning. She had an herbal tea Adele had left with her earlier, along with some valerian, hoping she’d be able to settle in for sleep, which seemed a long way off.

  Orange Blossom purred and snored. Erin tried to match her breaths to his, resting her eyes.

  She started to doze with the bedside lamp still on, unwilling to turn it off until she knew for sure she’d be able to fall asleep. She didn’t want to toss and turn in the darkness, getting increasingly frustrated.

  Her restless, waking dreams took her back to the meeting in the barn. She saw all of them as if from up above. Reg, Bella, and herself. Reg twirled and hummed and called for Grandma Prost to come, holding the locket up over her head like a beacon or a lightning rod. She heard the rustling of wings and the low murmur of the birds as they called to each other and watched the bizarre show going on down below.

  “Grandma Prost,” Reg chanted, “come and commune with us. Bella wants to talk to you.”

  “Leave me alone,” Erin said from her viewpoint up above them. “Why don’t you leave me in peace?”

  “You can’t stay in the barn,” Bella told her. “Mom said. It’s not allowed. It’s too dangerous in here.”

  Erin tried to explain that she didn’t know where she was, and Reg shook her head, sending her skinny braids dancing around her head. “Ghosts belong in the graveyard. Not the house. Not the barn. The graveyard.”

  Erin felt herself being pulled away from the barn. She tried to hold on, but there was nothing for her to grasp. The tug that started behind her belly button increased until she felt sick, and she had to let herself be pulled by it. She stared up at the stars and tried to count them. She looked for the familiar constellations but couldn’t find them.

  “You’re on the other side,” Reg told her, “so they’re backwards.”

  Erin tried looking for their mirror images, but still couldn’t find them.

  “Count goats,” Bella told her, “they’re much healthier than sheep.”

  Erin tried to gather the stars to her but couldn’t gather them together. Looking more closely, she saw that they were goats, and they followed behind Bella, bleating and complaining about the way they had been treated.

  “You didn’t put the goats away,” she told Bella.

  “I couldn’t. He took me away before I could.”

  “Who did?”

  “Pan. The goatherd.”

  Erin blinked. Her eyes were sticky, and she couldn’t quite wake up.

  “Where did Pan take the goats?”

  “Over here.” Bella led her to the cemetery, which was much larger than it had seemed when Erin had been there in real life. It went on forever, with rows and rows of crosses and tombstones, and many statues of sheep and goats and angels. A lot of the angels seemed to have pig snouts.

  “I told you not to bring the pigs,” Erin told them. There was no answer. She started to wander up and down the aisles, looking for the others. “Where did you guys go? Are you going to leave me here forever?”

  “It is forever,” Reg told her gently. “A ghost can’t come back. You can talk to us, but you have to stay there forever.”

  Erin shivered as a cold wind blew through her. “But it’s cold here. I don’t want to stay here. Can’t I go in the house, where it’s warmer?” She remembered the barn that she had come from. “I’ll go back to the barn. I’ll stay there, and I promise I won’t bother anyone.”

  “The grave is always cold,” Bella said. “Wherever it is. You take the cold with you.”

  Erin didn’t think that was true. She tried to push her way out of the cold, to look outside of the graveyard and see back through the stars to the barn again.

  “It’s getting smaller,” Bella said. “We’re getting bigger, so it’s getting smaller.”

  And it was. She could see the white boundary fences around the cemetery. She could count the rows and columns that before had seemed endless. Erin tried to touch one of the grave markers. She could see Bella’s name on it. On the one beside that, she could see Clementine’s name, and then her parents. Erin hadn’t realized that her family was buried in that cemetery. She’d never seen the gravestones before.

  The tombstones were just beyond her reach. Every time she tried to touch them, the distance changed, and then she was standing at the edge of the cemetery where there were no new markers. While she watched, a hole opened up in the ground. First it was round, like an animal burrow, but it got bigger and bigger until she was afraid she could fall into it. As it expanded, it took on a rectangular shape, until she knew she was looking at a grave.

  “You’ll be fine here,” Bella said tenderly. “Goodbye, Erin.”

  “I don’t want this one,” Erin objected, looking around. “I want to be buried with my family.”

  “They’re here. Don’t you worry. This is the right place.”

  “No. I don’t want this. I still have to make the mud pies.”

  “The mud pies will always be there. They’ll make themselves. This is your place.”

  As Erin watch
ed, the rectangular hole started to fill in, and she knew it was her grave and she was already in it. They were going to bury her, whether she was ready or not.

  “Wait,” she insisted. “This isn’t right. Wait until I’m ready.”

  “Death waits for no man,” a man’s voice insisted. “This is where you will be, until the angel blows the trump.”

  Erin looked at the gravestones around her, at all of the cherubs with pig noses waiting to blow the trump.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You belong here.”

  The grave had filled with dirt. Grass grew over top of it, but Erin could still see the outline in the grass, the slight depression where the dirt had settled over time.

  Chapter Twenty

  T

  he morning alarm went off, making Erin’s whole body convulse with surprise and panic. What had happened? What had she done? Where was she, and why couldn’t she just run away again?

  The bedroom at Clementine’s house resolved around her. She was home. It had just been one of those restless dreams like she had when she was camping or wasn’t able to get to sleep at the right time. How much had she managed to get in? A couple of hours? Not nearly enough, but she needed to get up and get moving anyway. She would catch up on her sleep the coming nights. The searchers would need to be fed. Something sturdy and portable, like the energy bars she made for hikers. People who were upset about Bella’s disappearance would want comfort food. And she needed to replace at least some of the many popsicles and frozen treats that had been consumed the day before.

  Erin forced herself to swing her feet off the edge of the bed to start her on her way to the bathroom where she would shower to wake herself up. Orange Blossom stretched all of his legs out and opened his mouth in an incredibly wide yawn that ended with a tiny squeak. She smiled and shook her head at him.

  “You’re just trying to be cute, aren’t you?”

  He curled himself into a ball and looked at her upside-down. He would go back to sleep while Erin was in the shower, but once she was dressed, he would trip her all the way to the kitchen, yowling and complaining like he hadn’t been fed in days.

  By the time the animals were fed, and the tea kettle was whistling, Vic had made it into the kitchen. She yawned almost as widely as Orange Blossom and covered her mouth after it was done.

  “Some mornings come way too soon,” she commented. “Whose idea was it to become a baker, anyway?”

  “I feel like I was up all night,” Erin said. “The dreams that I was having… you couldn’t have made up anything more bizarre.”

  “I slept like the dead.”

  Erin had to laugh at the turn of phrase, after the subject of her dreams. “I guess I did too, but not the kind of dead who just go to sleep and stay there!”

  Vic gave her a quizzical smile. “But you don’t believe in any other kind of dead, do you? You think that once a person dies, that’s it and they’re gone from this earth for good, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Other than the legacies they leave behind. I don’t believe in an eternal spirit… but I did dream that I was one last night.”

  “You dreamed something you don’t believe in? Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “I’ve dreamed about being able to fly or breathe underwater, but I didn’t wake up being able to do those things!”

  Vic considered. “Well, yeah, I suppose.”

  Erin took a sip of her tea that had not yet had enough time to steep. She made a face and put it to the side. “I think I was Bella’s grandmother, at least for part of the dreams. I could see myself from outside, because I was a ghost.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Erin did her best to remember and describe the progression of the dream to Vic. It was already slipping away from her, in the way that dreams did, and in a few days, she probably wouldn’t be able to remember any of it. She described the filling and settling of the earth inside the grave.

  Vic nodded. “That’s pretty macabre. I guess your brain was disturbed from everything that we talked about yesterday. Worry about Bella.”

  Erin frowned. She took another sip of her tea, trying to get her fuzzy brain to complete her mental processes.

  “Whose grave was next to Ezekiel’s?”

  “I don’t know… I guess his parents on one side. And then a plot beside him for Martha. But like Bella said, they didn’t have any remains to bury there, so it was still empty.”

  “Then why would they dig it up?”

  Vic shook her head. “They didn’t. They didn’t even put up a memorial headstone. If it was me, I would have at least put up a headstone, even if no one ever found my wife. It’s just the right thing to do.”

  “The empty plot was to the right.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The ground had settled. There was a rectangle of ground that was lower by an inch.”

  Vic opened her mouth to answer, and then she understood. “Like it had been dug out and refilled, and then the ground had settled. But there would be no need to do that if there was no body to bury.”

  Erin nodded.

  “You don’t think someone…?”

  Erin nodded again.

  “We’d better call Terry!”

  “Let him sleep. He won’t be able to get anything done this early in the morning. He’ll have to wait until everyone else is up anyway.”

  Terry came by the bakery later in the morning to let Erin know what was going on and what their plans were for the day. As Erin had anticipated, portable snacks and meals would be wanted, and she already had rows of granola and energy bars molded and ready to be wrapped. She tentatively explained to Terry about the empty plot next to Ezekiel’s, which she suspected wasn’t quite as empty as they had thought. He frowned, thinking back to his investigation of the day before.

  “I was so focused on the necklace on Ezekiel’s headstone, I never even looked at the empty plot,” he said. “It never even registered.”

  “I didn’t really think about it either, but I guess I noticed it subconsciously. Who would have done it, though?” Erin asked. “Cindy? I don’t think Bella knew. I don’t think it could have been Ezekiel, because if it was him, wouldn’t he have put his wife in the next plot in line, not leaving a space for himself and then burying her in the next one?”

  “First of all, you’re jumping to conclusions by assuming it is Martha in that grave, if it even is a grave. And if it is, it could be an old one, from generations ago.”

  “Why would somebody have skipped over the plots for Ezekiel and his parents and whoever else generations ago? They wouldn’t just put people in random places in the graveyard. They would have followed some kind of order or pattern.”

  “There may be a logical layout we don’t know about. More questions than can be answered right now. I’ll talk to Cindy and see what she knows. She may be able to explain it. We don’t want to waste time on something that might be totally unrelated to the disappearances of Bella and her grandmother.”

  “Yeah. You’re right, I guess. What did you find out from Cindy about the locket?”

  “She wasn’t even aware that Bella had it. She doesn’t know when Bella might have put it on the gravestone.”

  “So maybe yesterday, maybe not.”

  Terry nodded. “And does it make any difference? What if she did put it on the grave yesterday? We already know that she was up there, she’s the one who took the goats to graze. The necklace doesn’t prove anything.”

  “What if Bella was seen putting it on the grave? What if someone took her because of that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because… they thought it meant she knew about Martha being buried there. Or maybe she said something to someone about the grave next to it.”

  “Maybe,” Terry said, giving a hesitant shrug.

  “When we were up there with her, she said it didn’t look right.”

  “What didn’t look right?”

  “She didn’t know. She said maybe it was becau
se she hadn’t been there for a while. But maybe she figured it out yesterday, like I did in my dream.”

  “Who was there when she said it didn’t look right?”

  “Just me and Vic. Mr. Ware was there for a little while too. I don’t remember what parts of the conversation he was there for.”

  The first order of business was to take Cindy to the cemetery to see if she noticed anything out of place. She kept asking what was wrong and what she was supposed to see, but Terry shook his head and asked her to just look around. He looked at the depression in the ground in the plot next to Ezekiel’s and looked at Erin. She hadn’t imagined it. That part hadn’t just been a dream. It had been a memory that her brain had been working away at, trying to tell her that something was wrong.

  But Cindy barely even glanced in the direction of the plot. She looked at her father’s headstone. She looked around at a few others, which apparently all looked just the same as they always had. She looked around, staring off into the distance, where Erin could see the white fence between the Prost farm and the Ware property.

  “It seems so much smaller,” she said, gazing around the cemetery again.

  “That’s what Bella said,” Erin agreed. “She said it must be because she hadn’t been there for a long time. Like when you go back somewhere you knew when you were a little kid, and it’s so much smaller than it was, because you’re bigger.” Erin had felt much the same way when she had seen Clementine’s shop again. It was only that big? Hadn’t it once been much bigger and grander?

  “Yes,” Cindy agreed. “That must be it.”

  They all stood there quietly.

  “That fence is new,” Cindy said finally.

  “Mr. Ware must have replaced it in just the last few years.”

  “Maybe. I don’t think I’ve been up here since Ezekiel was buried.”

  “Seventeen years ago?”

  “More or less.”

  “Cindy…” Erin ventured.

  “What?”

  “You said that Ezekiel used to fight over the property lines. When he thought fences had been moved, even just a few inches.”