Dig Deep My Grave

by Cheryl Honigford

  Everyone at the house except Vivian had known that Hap had not died on Sunday. That much was becoming clear. There had been a plan in place, and things had been going according to that plan until Vivian had shown back up at Oakhaven and thrown a wrench into the works. Why the subterfuge? Why would Hap fake his death—and need the collusion of the entire Lang family to do it? She’d asked Gwen all of these questions but had gotten no answers. The girl had simply shut down after tossing the gun.

  She’d rowed them back to shore in complete silence and had spoken again only after she’d stepped out of the boat. She’d begged Vivian to forget what she’d told her, and what she’d seen with her own eyes. Since the adrenaline fueled by her sense of purpose in getting rid of the gun had worn off, Gwen had seemed terrified. Her hands were shaking, and Vivian had to help her cinch the knot in the rope to moor the boat. Vivian told Gwen to go to bed and stay out of it from now on. The girl had already made enough of a hash of things.

  And it certainly was a hash, Vivian thought. She went over the jumble of the night’s events as she made her way slowly across the lawn toward the forest path in the back of the house. Hap was dead. She’d seen him die, but if she hadn’t, she may not have believed it herself. His body had disappeared, and the apparent murder weapon was now lying at the bottom of Geneva Lake, thanks to Gwen jumping to conclusions.

  And what about those conclusions? Gwen suspected David because she thought Hap and Lillian were having an affair. But had those two even known each other prior to the garden party? Gwen had said Constance told her she’d seen them together at the guesthouse the evening before, but Constance had been seeing a lot of things lately, hadn’t she? She’d admitted that to Vivian herself.

  Once again, Vivian cursed the fact she hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight. It was dark in the forest, and she could barely see the path before her. Crickets chirped from the underbrush as she picked her way awkwardly in the darkness. Mosquitoes buzzed maddeningly close to her ears, and she slapped ineffectually at them. Something small scurried across the path in front of her, and she stumbled over her own feet in surprise. She stopped and pressed an open palm to her thumping heart. What was she doing? She should just leave. Go now while the getting was good.

  But there was Charlie to think of. She had to clear all of this up to save him—wherever he might be. He may already be dead. Shot by police in a standoff. The thought sprang to her mind unbidden, and she pushed it away. He couldn’t be dead, not on her watch. She would fix this. So she swallowed her fear and her doubts and kept walking, eyes trained on the dark path in front of her for small, scuttling creatures.

  Eventually, the path opened up into a small clearing. The guesthouse stood in the middle. It was a tiny, half-timbered storybook cottage with a thatched roof and a fieldstone chimney dominating the facade. Ivy snaked up artfully around the mullioned windows to the roofline. Vivian’s grandfather had had it built as a playhouse for his daughters. Julia, Vivian’s mother, had been the youngest by a decade and the only one actually young enough at the time of its completion to play in it. Vivian had never been able to picture that: her mother as a child playing damsel in distress among the ivy—or playing anything at all.

  When Hap was orphaned and taken into the Lang family, the playhouse had been renovated and electricity wired in to allow him some privacy when he stayed during the summers. That had never struck Vivian as odd until this moment. From the first, Hap was a member of the Lang family, yet not. He’d been both included and set apart. Then Hap had joined up when the Great War broke out, and the playhouse had been vacant for ten years or so while Hap gallivanted about the country barnstorming. She and David had taken over, and the cottage had served as Cinderella’s castle, Hansel and Gretel’s cottage, and Grandma’s house in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Yet the cottage had always been considered Hap’s, and they all knew he would come back someday.

  Then Hap had come back that summer when Vivian was seventeen. That summer when she’d left childish things behind with that late-night visit to Hap in this same cottage, and all the trouble had started.

  Vivian cocked her head to the side, narrowing her eyes. She’d expected to feel something more at the sight of it than distant, cobwebby nostalgia, but she didn’t. The cottage hadn’t changed. She had. The cottage was smaller than she remembered, and now it was dark, shut tight against the night. The curtains were drawn. The diamond-shaped panes of the lancet windows reflected only glints of sparse moonlight. Tiny and hollow, she thought. Still, it was best to take a look around. Maybe Hap had left something behind that might help explain all of this. Vivian tried the front door. The metal latch depressed under her thumb, and the wooden slatted door swung inward under the tentative pressure of her fingertips. She held her breath.

  The inside of the cottage was simple, made up of one large room. The fireplace took up the entirety of the front wall. A small secretary and phonograph stood against the wall directly in front of her. A brass daybed occupied the opposite wall, with the door to the tiny water closet next to it. But Vivian had been mistaken—the cottage was not empty.

  A lamp burned in the corner next to the daybed, casting a feeble yellow glow over the small room. Papers covered the floor; the drawers of the small secretary had been pulled out and overturned. And in the middle of it all sat a hunched figure—a man. His head was in his hands, his shoulders racked with mute sobs.

  “Uncle Bernard?” she said.

  He lifted his head. Bernard’s eyes were swollen from crying, and tears had left moist tracks down his cheeks. Vivian sucked in her breath at the sight of him. She’d never seen him such a wreck. He sat back on his heels with a grunt.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, his voice a rasp. He wiped a hand across his cheek. He reached into his back pocket and took out an immaculate white handkerchief, blowing his nose with a fantastic racket. You shouldn’t be here, she thought. An echo of what he’d said on Sunday: You shouldn’t see this.

  He’d said that after they’d all been led to believe that Charlie had stabbed Hap. At the time, she’d thought Bernard was trying to shield her delicate female sensibilities from the sight of gore and impending death. But now she realized You shouldn’t see this had simply meant that Vivian shouldn’t see that Hap wasn’t dead. What had Bernard and Hap been playing at? And how dare her uncle think he could put her off now, with all that had happened tonight! She’d had quite enough of Bernard telling her what she should and should not see, what she should and should not think.

  “I think I deserve the truth,” Vivian said, stepping into the room and letting the door close with a dramatic bang.

  She waited for Bernard to respond, but he said nothing. Vivian skirted her uncle and the papers on the floor and walked over toward the daybed. A small valise lay open upon it, and items were scattered over the bedspread—clothing, a pair of brown leather dress shoes, a gaudy green silk tie. The paltry remains of a man’s life, she thought. She slid her fingertips down the cover of a book lying facedown, then flipped it over to read the title—Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. She flipped through the pages, pausing only briefly to survey those that Hap had dog-eared. She replaced the book as she’d found it. Her eyes snagged on an unopened package of cigarettes. She picked them up and turned the small rectangular package wrapped in brown paper around in her hands. They were Gauloises, a French brand. She stared down at the winged helmet illustrated on the front, then brought the pack to her nose and inhaled. The strong, unfiltered tobacco stung the back of her throat.

  “Hap didn’t die on Sunday,” Vivian said. Bernard was facing away from her, and he didn’t turn at her statement of fact.

  “It’s a long story,” he said softly.

  “No better time to tell it, in my opinion.” She turned and sat on the edge of the daybed, training all of her attention on Bernard’s back. Sweat had soaked through his shirt, leaving semicircular stains under the armpits.
The fabric clung to his back. It was stifling inside the guesthouse, and she realized all of the windows were shut tight.

  Bernard turned slowly to face her, but he did not stand. It was strange seeing a man like Bernard sitting on the floor like a child. She’d always known him to be powerful, demanding, in control.

  “Hap had gambling debts,” Bernard said.

  “Gambling debts,” Vivian repeated. She picked up the pack of cigarettes again, suddenly wishing for nothing more than a smoke to calm her nerves. She felt a bead of sweat forming along her hairline and wiped it away with her free hand.

  “Yes, a lot of debts. He’d run through his family fortune quite quickly in Europe. He made enemies of some powerful people there. He escaped it for a time with the Spanish war, but those people he was indebted to have long memories.”

  “You’re saying Hap faked his death to escape some money he owed?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Vivian dropped the pack of cigarettes onto the bed before standing and walking slowly toward the window. She lifted the roman shade with her index finger and looked outside. Blackness greeted her. She unlatched the lock and lifted the sash, but the air outside was only slightly less stifling and provided almost no relief.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Bernard and let the shade fall back into place. “I don’t buy it.”

  Bernard’s eyebrows were raised so that they were visible over the metal frames of his spectacles.

  “I mean, that’s the type of problem that’s easily remedied in a family like this,” she continued. “That’s a problem you can truly throw money at. Why wouldn’t you have just given Hap the money to repay his debts? Why would he need to go through the considerable trouble of faking his death over something so simple?”

  She paused to give Bernard a chance to chew on that and to decide whether to think up another lie or to give in and tell her the truth. She glanced around the room. Her eyes came to rest on the phonograph near the secretary—an old Victrola, the kind you had to crank to get going. The song “Stardust” flitted into her mind in the tinny, far-off way Bing’s voice had come through the metal trumpet speaker that night eight years ago.

  Hap had put that record on and then played it again and again. The anger and sadness inside her grew into an impotent lump in the pit of her stomach, and she pressed her fingertips to it. Hap did that, she thought, a living, breathing man. And now that man had been killed in front of her—twice.

  “What’s the real story?” she said softly.

  Bernard sighed. Then he struggled to his feet inelegantly and trained his eyes on her. He wiped his brow with the handkerchief and stuffed it in his trouser pocket. “Hap was a spy,” he said.

  Vivian blinked. She felt one of her eyebrows rise of its own accord. Was Bernard having a laugh at her expense? Had she taken a huge gulp of Constance’s nerve tonic?

  “A spy,” she repeated with a snort of disbelief.

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “I don’t, but I’m listening.” She sat back down on the daybed and settled in. “Begin at the beginning, please.”

  Bernard turned on his heel and took a few measured steps toward the small fireplace at the opposite side of the room. There wasn’t much room to pace in here, but he was going to give it a go. He turned back toward her and jingled the coins in his pocket before he spoke again.

  “Hap had been in Spain, you know.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Flying supplies to the rebels.”

  “It started out that way, but he quickly became a squadron leader. The Republicans were short on supplies, short on manpower, short on everything. It was a losing battle from the first, I’m afraid.” Bernard fell silent. He looked up at the low ceiling as if he would find the way to proceed stamped on it.

  “It started out that way…” Vivian prodded.

  “Yes, well, eventually he was shot down, you see. Captured and put in a Nationalist prison.”

  Vivian gasped. “I never knew that,” she said.

  “No one did. We’d lost all contact with Hap after he’d gone to Spain. I knew nothing of what had happened to him there until he came back to the States a few months ago.”

  “And what had happened to him?” Images of Hap sprang into her mind: filthy, shivering, shackled, and sharing a dank, dark cell with rats and lice.

  “He was kept there for a month or so. Tortured.” Bernard waved his hand to indicate that he wouldn’t go into detail about that and resumed his pacing. “But eventually, Franco’s men realized what they had in Hap. He wasn’t just an enemy pilot. He was a rich American with connections. And eventually, they realized he was more useful to them alive than dead. In short, they offered him his life in return for turning on everything he stood for. Hap became a member of Franco’s fifth column.”

  Vivian didn’t recognize that name.

  “What’s that?”

  “Franco’s Nationalist sleeper agents in Madrid,” Bernard said. “Hap was outwardly Republican, a member of the International Brigades. But he was really an agent for Franco and the Nationalists, out to undermine the rebel’s cause and make the city ready for Franco when the time came to take Madrid.”

  Vivian leaned forward, elbows on her knees.

  “Hap was fighting with Franco…” Vivian’s mind struggled to latch on to that information. If he was fighting with Franco, then he was also fighting with Hitler and Mussolini by extension. Germany and Italy had heavily supplied the Nationalists with provisions and troops. The Germans sent bombers specifically, and airplanes were what Hap knew best. She felt her stomach sink.

  “Yes, and I think he actually started to believe in the Nationalist way of thinking. Believing in the cause of a united nationalist Spain, a Catholic Spain. He was raised Catholic, you know. Well, until his parents…” Bernard waved his hand again. “But then he started to see what was really going on there. He saw a lot of horrible things. Priests murdered. Priests murdering. He was exposed to horrible ideas from the Germans and Italians. He could see what was coming…what is coming.”

  “War,” Vivian said.

  “Spain was a sort of practice ground for the Germans and Italians,” Bernard said. “They aided Franco with supplies and men and planes in order to test out strategies and fight a practice war, so to speak. So when Hap saw that the Spanish war was coming to an end and that Franco would triumph, he also saw the writing on the wall. He had German associates…high-ranking members of the German Luftwaffe. He knew he was valuable to them as an American pilot. Hap knew important people like Lindbergh. The Germans would send Hap back to the States and ask him to spy for them.”

  Vivian sat up straight. “Lindbergh?”

  “He has been in Europe the past couple of years, touring German airplane factories and reporting on the strength of the German Luftwaffe for the American government.”

  “Is he…is he working for the Germans?” The idea terrified her, and she could barely speak the words.

  “I doubt it. Lindbergh’s an isolationist. He wants to keep America out of the war entirely. That’s what Germany wants too. So they get Lindbergh to tour their factories, put on a show to impress him, so that he’ll warn Roosevelt off getting involved. I assume the Germans also wanted an inside man to let them know just how much they’d influenced America. Hap would have been perfect for that job.”

  Vivian sat back again, her mind spinning. As crazy as it sounded, her uncle’s story did make a certain sort of sense. Of anyone she’d ever known, Hap would be the perfect choice to take to spying.

  “And he didn’t want to do that?” she said. “Spy for Germany?”

  Bernard shook his head. “He wanted out of all of it. It was becoming too much. What he’d seen in Spain weighed heavily on his mind. But he couldn’t just run away from his troubles. The Germans had him up against the wall. He saw no other way out.”
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  “So he faked his death.”

  “Yes. They had people watching him all the time, hounding him. He’d come to me, and we’d worked it all out. A plan for his death. An aneurysm, something quiet and simple. To avoid as much mess as possible. I would be the only witness, and I would be the only one who would ever know he was still alive. He wanted to have time to say goodbye to everyone he’d known and loved. That’s why he came to the garden party. But then, at the party, Hap saw someone he recognized. Someone from his time in Spain. He knew he’d been found, and he knew he didn’t have much time. So he came to me and begged me to let him die right then. What could I do but say yes? He was in a bind. Kill himself or possibly be killed for refusing to cooperate.”

  “Who did he see?”

  “He didn’t say who. He just said he’d recognized someone and had spoken to them. That they were here for him, and this was it.”

  Vivian thought of the party. There had been so many people there, most of whom she didn’t know. She needed more to go on. A member of the band perhaps? The staff? There had been the gardener that Charlie had knocked over. Why had a gardener been working in the middle of a garden party on a Sunday? She shook her head. If she followed the rabbit too far into that hole, she would lose the plot entirely. Charlie, she thought. Keep this focused on Charlie, and find a way to get him out of this mess.

  “So how did everything get so mixed up? How did Charlie get involved?”

  “We were going to put the aneurysm plan into effect. Hap would go into the game room when everyone was certain to be outside…when the band started, perhaps. He would collapse, and I would find him. He would be whisked away to the hospital where he would die without anyone else witnessing or being the wiser. Hap had wanted to add some fake blood from his nose and ears to make it look more realistic to anyone who might see him carried from the house. I thought that was a ridiculous idea, an unnecessary complication. But he must have had the fake blood in his hands when Charlie entered the library.