Dig Deep My Grave

by Cheryl Honigford

  “I’ll be back to check on you in a few minutes,” Adaline said. “Be sure to drink that whole thing.”

  Vivian nodded as her eyes drifted shut. She heard the door of the bedroom click and Adaline’s muffled footfalls on the hall rug as she hurried away.

  • • •

  Dear.

  Vivian’s eyes snapped open. She stared up at the elaborate curlicue molding in the center of the ceiling where the gas lamp used to be, before electricity was installed in the cottage. The leaves on the tree outside her window whispered softly, shadows from the branches drifting over her bedroom walls. What had woken her? A dream. No, not a dream exactly. Something else. Something had happened, but what?

  Dear. The word spun around in her mind like a top. Dear, spoken in her Aunt Adaline’s softly nasal voice. Her aunt never called her dear. Adaline never called anyone dear—not even her own children. Vivian sat up in bed, heart hammering in her chest.

  Hap. She sucked in her breath.

  Hap was dead again. He’d died right in front of her. His blood was on her hands. She lifted them in front of her face and stared at them. But they were clean—no traces of blood at all. Adaline had found them in the boathouse and brought her straight to bed. Vivian pressed her hand to her chest.

  How long had she dozed? She looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was ten fifteen now. She’d gone to meet Hap just after nine, so she’d been out for less than an hour. She leaned over the side of the bed and saw the mug Adaline had handed her, lying on the rug. The contents had spilled, leaving an ominous stain.

  Warm milk and brandy, and perhaps something else? She plucked the mug from the carpet and drew it under her nose. She didn’t know what she hoped to smell. Something bitter, perhaps? The brandy was sharp and overpowering, and she could detect nothing else. Still, she’d only had the two sips, and that was a lucky thing. No doubt she’d have slept through the entire next day if she’d ingested the full contents of the mug.

  Adaline wanted her out of the way. Perhaps they’d all try to convince her that everything she remembered from the evening before had been a bad dream. She looked down into the empty mug. Suddenly, she was certain of it. Her mind cleared.

  That note had been for her. Hap had wanted to explain things to her. Explain why he’d left her like that eight years ago. Explain why he’d faked his own death and let Charlie take the blame. And someone else hadn’t wanted him to explain.

  Vivian jumped from the bed, pausing as soon as her feet hit the floor. Adaline had said she’d be back to check on her, hadn’t she? Vivian shoved the bed pillows under the sheets, arranging them to look like a sleeping form, and drew the quilt up high. She thanked her lucky stars for all of those nights in her irreparable youth when such subterfuge had been necessary. Still, Vivian would be sunk if Adaline took more than two steps into the room.

  She paused for a moment to slow her breathing and reached for the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn. She jiggled it as quietly as she could. She was locked in. The ire rose in her. Now there was no doubt. She was meant to be kept in this room until morning, and everything she’d seen tonight would be swept under the rug. She crossed the room to the window, sliding up the sash as silently as she could. She leaned out the window and spotted exactly what she was looking for, just a foot away—a trellis.

  There was one other skill from her disreputable youth that would come in handy in this situation, she thought as she hooked one leg over the sill. She reached over and gave the vine-covered trellis a hearty yank. It wasn’t a drainpipe, but it would do.

  • • •

  Vivian picked her way across the lawn, hugging the shadows. She glanced back at the main house and noted that every light facing her on the ground floor was still ablaze. She paused to watch two shadows pass before the shaded window in the front parlor, but she couldn’t say who they might be. Perhaps Adaline and Bernard, cooking up a story to cover what had really happened here tonight. Vivian clenched her fists at her side and then continued on. She glanced off to the right at the dark copse of trees, where she’d seen the flow of a cigarette before, but it was completely dark now. Still, she felt the small hairs on her forearms bristle. Someone could still be there, watching.

  The boathouse loomed ahead in the darkness, quiet and still. The late-summer evening atmosphere was heavy and pregnant with humidity. Vivian glanced up at the sky. The stars were still visible, a thick dusting of white. The clouds had not rolled in yet. Later, she thought. The storm would come later.

  She removed her shoes and climbed the boathouse steps on tiptoe. If the murderer had come back, she certainly didn’t want to give them advance notice of her arrival. That went for anyone else too, she thought. For some reason, she imagined Adaline here sitting vigil over Hap’s body in the dark, and shivered. But when she inched open the door at the top of the stairs with a creak and a moan of the old hinges, there was no one there.

  Vivian stood still for a moment until her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the interior. Hap’s body was gone. She moved silently, still on tiptoe, to the center of the room and crouched down to examine the spot where he had fallen dead at her feet. She hissed as sharp pain exploded from her right knee. She’d fallen at some point, hadn’t she? Everything was a blur.

  The blood had been cleaned up. All that remained was a slightly discolored patch on the wooden floor where Hap had lain. Vivian stayed rooted to her spot, blinking in the dim light. She held her hand out, hesitated, then brushed her fingertips over the floorboards. Her fingers came away dry. Perhaps it wasn’t blood after all.

  She should have brought a flashlight. The sliver of moon reflected scant light, and she could barely see her hand in front of her face, much less make out whether a dark spot on wooden floorboards had once been human blood.

  Vivian’s gaze swept the dark corners of the boathouse. How could things have been cleared away so fast? Had she imagined all of it? Hap stumbling, falling at her feet, dying before her eyes? Dying twice in front of her in the span of a few days? She stood, and her knee shrieked again with that sharp, stinging pain. She gasped and pressed her fingertips to it. The freshly formed scab had torn open, and a trickle of blood slid down her shin. She had fallen on the lawn earlier when Adaline had dragged her from the boathouse. The scrape was real; the pain was real.

  She thought of the cigarette glowing in the trees not far away, the person who held it lurking and watching. But Vivian had heard the shot as she’d approached the boathouse—after she’d seen the cigarette glow. She’d been perhaps thirty feet away when she’d heard the shot that she’d assumed was a champagne bottle being uncorked. It was dark, but surely she would have seen someone running down the wooden steps of the boathouse. She would have heard them, at the very least, and she’d heard nothing.

  She crossed to the other side of the boathouse. Here, the second floor was open on three sides to the waters of the lake. Perhaps the shooter jumped over the railing? She judged the distance to be about fifteen feet straight down into a weedy thicket near the water’s edge. A tricky prospect even in broad daylight. Could someone have accomplished it in the darkness? Possibly, she thought, but not without hurting themselves. She considered the suspects available—all of them her family and half of those women. That’s not something she could see any of the female members of the family doing. Bernard and Adaline weren’t exactly sporty. The only one who might have been able to do it without breaking his ankle was David. But why would David have killed Hap?

  She started out toward the copse of trees where she’d seen the light of the burning cigarette. Then heard something. She paused, held her breath. There it was again, the click-clack of heeled shoes. Someone in a hurry. Someone rushing out to the end of the dock.

  Without time to think it over, Vivian ran the opposite way, around the corner of the boathouse and down the length of the dock, glowing white against the night-black water of the lake. A woma
n stood in the rowboat at the far end of the dock, struggling with the bowline. As the boat drifted away from the dock, Vivian leaped the foot or so from the dock to the drifting boat. She banged her knee hard against the plank bench seat, and something small and heavy slid from the bench and fell to the bottom of the boat with a thump.

  The woman jerked and looked up. Gwen’s face was a pale oval in the moonlight. Stern and stony as she stared at Vivian. Her big eyes were wide.

  “Viv, what are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? What are you doing, Gwen? And don’t tell me you felt like a late-night constitutional.”

  Gwen sat silently for a moment, one hand splayed over her heart as she caught her breath.

  “Hap is dead,” she whispered. “Shot.” She lowered her chin and locked eyes with Vivian.

  Vivian nodded.

  “Did you do it?”

  “No,” Vivian said.

  “But someone did shoot him about an hour ago. And he’s dead.” Gwen sounded as if she was trying to convince herself of that fact.

  “Yes,” Vivian said. “How do you know all of this? You didn’t…”

  Gwen’s eyes met Vivian’s again, the whites glowing in the near-total darkness of the lake. “No,” Gwen said. Vivian wondered if she was the only one in the house who didn’t know that Hap had faked his death at the garden party. Was she the only one who wasn’t in on it?

  Gwen seemed to consider Vivian for a moment. Her brows drew together and then smoothed. She nodded and leaned forward, pulling something from the floor. She placed it gingerly on the bench seat before her and stared at it as if it might jump up and bite her. It was a gun. Vivian’s stomach twisted. If Gwen didn’t shoot Hap, then why did she have a gun?

  “I found it,” Gwen said.

  “Found it?”

  She nodded. Vivian looked past Gwen toward the shore. They were drifting away from Oakhaven.

  “In some bushes beside the summer kitchen. I was still in the parlor with Marshall when Mother came back with you. I heard enough to understand that something had happened to Hap in the boathouse. Mother told me to send Marshall home, so I did. Then I stopped to have a smoke. I smoke there, by the far corner of the summer kitchen, because you can’t be seen from the house.” Vivian nodded. That was precisely where Vivian had smoked her smuggled cigarettes when she was Gwen’s age. “I dropped my cigarette on the ground, and when I bent to retrieve it, I saw something sticking out from underneath the bushes. It was this.”

  They both stared down at the gun. Vivian had only seen the starter guns used as sound props at the radio station. She had no idea how to use a real gun—or even how to differentiate between them. This one was small and old, with a curiously thin barrel and hatch-marked butt. It was flat, without the round chamber for bullets like the prop guns used at the station. So it was not a revolver. A pistol? Whatever it was, it radiated menace.

  “Do you recognize it? Is it your father’s?” she asked.

  Gwen stared down at it. “It could be. I never paid much attention to his guns.”

  “You said you just found it in the bushes?”

  “Yes.”

  Vivian looked over her own shoulder at the water, lying still as glass. “And your first thought was to throw it in the lake?”

  Gwen shrugged. “It wasn’t my first thought, no. My first thought was that I couldn’t believe that whoever had shot Hap hadn’t thrown it in the lake themselves.” She nodded toward the boathouse receding into the distance behind them and mimed a lazy overhand throw. The killer could have easily thrown the gun over the side into the lake.

  “And because of that, my second thought was that whoever had shot Hap had panicked. They panicked and ran, and by the time they realized they were still carrying the gun, they were near the summer kitchen, and they wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. So they tossed it in the bushes and kept running.”

  Vivian nodded. Yes, that made sense. If this story of Gwen’s was true, that is.

  “And your third thought?”

  Gwen didn’t answer right away. Vivian heard her sigh, hitching in a breath as if she were gathering courage.

  “My third thought was that I could see David doing exactly that. Shooting in anger and panicking afterward. You know David. He has such a quick temper.”

  “But why would David…?”

  Gwen looked up at her. Her face was pale, her mouth set into a grim line. “Jealousy,” she said. “Hap and Lillian were having an affair.”

  Vivian exhaled. “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t know, I suppose. They were acting strangely around each other during the garden party—like that wasn’t the first time they’d met but they were both pretending like it was. Then Constance told me she saw them together.”

  “When?”

  “The Saturday evening before the party, at the guesthouse.”

  “I don’t understand.” Vivian massaged her temples.

  Gwen sighed and slumped forward, her elbows on her knees. She sat with her head in her hands for a moment. “This is all my fault, Vivian. All of it. I brought Hap here because I wanted to get you two back together. I was so convinced that it all would work out in the end that I tried even after Constance told me her suspicions about Hap and Lillian.” She looked up at Vivian, tears rimming her big, brown eyes. “I figured love conquers all…right?”

  Vivian’s mouth fell open, but she didn’t know where to begin. Love didn’t conquer all, and had there really been that much love between her and Hap in the first place? It must have seemed so to her starry-eyed cousin.

  “Gwen, I…”

  Gwen looked over Vivian’s shoulder, and her eyes widened with alarm. She put her fingers to her lips. Vivian turned to look back at the shore but saw no movement among the shadows.

  “What is it?” Vivian said.

  “I thought I saw someone on the shore. But it’s nothing.” Gwen picked up the oars and started rowing with one oar to turn the boat toward the middle of the lake.

  Vivian opened her mouth again to try to explain, to try to soothe Gwen’s guilt, but nothing came out. She did blame Gwen, especially now that she’d heard all this. Gwen had interfered in her life, and she might have gotten Hap killed because of it. She’d stuck her nose into things that she didn’t understand. But it was also just the sort of thing Vivian would have done at Gwen’s age, she thought. She would probably still do it, if faced with the same situation. Vivian leaned back against the stern of the boat and the large metal box wedged there and sighed. This was a Grade-A mess.

  It was plausible that Hap and Lillian had been having an affair, knowing Hap. If Constance had seen them together in the guesthouse, that could really be the only explanation, couldn’t it?

  “Did Constance tell David about what she saw?” Vivian said.

  Gwen stopped rowing. The boat continued to drift. “I don’t think she needed to tell him. I think David already knew.”

  “But David was with your father in the study just before it happened. I saw him when I passed the study door.”

  “That’s the thing, Viv. I saw David walking past the parlor room window while Mother was trying to talk you into a game of bridge. He was headed toward the front of the house—toward the lake, toward the boathouse. And I… Well, I didn’t see him come back.” She frowned, and then she continued with her original train of thought. “So I thought if I got rid of this gun that no one could ever prove David had done anything. The lake’s more than a hundred feet deep in the middle. No one will ever find it.”

  Vivian’s pulse quickened, and she sat up. Without a murder weapon or a body, it would be very hard for anyone to prove that Charlie hadn’t murdered Hap on Sunday. Especially if Bernard couldn’t or wouldn’t help persuade the police.

  “But you can’t do that,” she said quickly.

  “Why
can’t I? As far as the police know, Hap has been dead for days. Now he’s dead for real.”

  “And Charlie’s been wrongfully accused.”

  Gwen bit her lip. “Yes, there’s that. We’ll just have to get Constance to recant her statement,” she said. “Tell them she didn’t hear Charlie say he wanted to kill Hap. Without that, they don’t have much of a case. Frankly, I don’t know why they’d ever believe a word she says. She’s been hitting that nerve tonic pretty hard lately, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  Yes, what had Constance said this morning? That she’d been seeing ghosts? Vivian had assumed she meant in the metaphorical sense—the ghost of what had been, what might have been. But maybe she was being literal. Maybe she’d seen Hap after his supposed death on Sunday and assumed that she was seeing things. Maybe that’s why she’d been hitting the nerve tonic. She thought she was losing her mind.

  Vivian felt each rocking of the boat in her gut now. None of this made any sense.

  “But Hap is dead, Gwen. And someone here killed him. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

  Gwen continued rowing again with a grunt. Her expression didn’t change. “Of course I care. But he’s dead. I can’t change that. What I can change is someone I love going to prison over a horrible mistake.”

  What about the someone I love? Vivian thought.

  Gwen stopped rowing again. She leaned forward, forearms resting on the pulled-in oars, and considered Vivian for a moment. Then she tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. Vivian followed her gaze, her eyes sweeping over the dots in the sky—the Milky Way clearly visible as a white arc across the darkness. Before Vivian could register what she was doing, Gwen had picked up the pistol and held her arm straight out to the side so that her hand dangled over the water.

  “No, Gwen—”

  Vivian lunged forward, but she knew even as she reached for Gwen that she was too late. A small splash echoed across the still water.

  The gun was gone.

  Chapter Nineteen