by Chelsea Cain
Freeze,” Susan said.
“What?” Pearl said.
“That’s my Pixies T-shirt.”
Pearl poked her finger through the hem and wiggled it. “It’s got a hole in it.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “Yes, it does. That’s because it’s old. Like me. Now take it off.”
“I don’t have any clothes,” Pearl pouted. “Bliss said I could borrow yours. What am I supposed to do? Go around naked?” She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t even like half your clothes.”
Sometimes Susan could see why people committed murder. “I have terrific clothes,” she said.
Pearl pulled at the shirt over her breasts. Susan had to admit, puberty had done well by Pearl. “They don’t fit me right,” Pearl said. “Your boobs are smaller.”
“Then borrow something of Bliss’s,” Susan said.
“All of her clothes smell funny,” Pearl said, wrinkling her nose.
Patchouli. It was true.
I’ll be nice. That’s what Susan had promised her mother before Bliss had left for work. She had a deadline. She didn’t have time to argue with a teenager. “That’s my favorite T-shirt,” Susan said, “and if you stain or damage it I will kill you.”
Pearl rolled her eyes. “Oooh, I’m so scared,” she said, heading for the back door.
“Where are you going?” Susan asked.
“I’m going to hang out with Baby,” Pearl said.
“The goat is not named Baby,” Susan said.
“That’s what I call her,” Pearl said, letting the screen door slam behind her on her way out.
Susan sat down at her laptop at the kitchen table. There was a note on her keyboard. She knew it was from Bliss because she’d written it on the back of a scrap of wrapping paper.
Susan read the note: REMEMBERED WHERE I KNEW THAT WOMAN FROM. HEROES COLUMN.
What woman? Susan looked at the note for a few minutes before she realized that Bliss must be talking about Gabby Meester, the rooftop fire victim.
The Heroes column ran in the Portland Tribune, a free commuter paper. Her mother refused to buy the Herald, the paper that Susan used to write for, but she’d occasionally pick up the Trib. Susan brought up the Trib’s Web site on her laptop and then searched Gabby Meester’s name. Several stories came up about the murder, and then, farther down, from about five years ago there was another story about Gabby Meester and several other people participating in one of those kidney donation arrangements, where if you have a friend who needs a kidney but you’re not a match, you can give your kidney to someone else who has a friend who isn’t a match to their person but is a match to your person and who then gives a kidney to your person in exchange. Or something. This particular donation required six people, three of whom had kidneys removed, and three who got new ones.
Susan heard Pearl say her name. There was a terror in her voice that made Susan look up instantly. Pearl was standing at the back door, her shirt and hands covered with blood. Her face was ashen. “Something happened to Baby,” Pearl said.
Susan didn’t understand. What was Pearl talking about? The goat?
Pearl gasped and tears streamed from her eyes. She put her bloody hands over her face. “I think the coyotes got her.”
Coyotes? There weren’t coyotes in Portland. Susan leapt up and pushed past Pearl into the backyard. She scanned the yard for the goat’s friendly face, and didn’t see it. Then she ran for the shed. She knelt at the door to the shed. The goat was on her side, her fur slashed open and darkened with blood. Her mouth was full of even darker blood, almost black. Flies had already started to circle and Susan batted them away. She could hear Pearl behind her, sobbing, and she didn’t want to turn around, didn’t want Pearl to see her own tears. Susan touched the goat’s coat. She was still warm. The wounds were frenzied. Why hadn’t they heard her cry out?
Susan looked around the backyard, the privacy fence, the impenetrable wall of bamboo.
Fear prickled the back of her neck. “This wasn’t coyotes,” she said.
She’d left her phone inside on the kitchen table. Pearl was still blubbering. Susan took her by each shoulder. “When I say, ‘Go,’ ” Susan said, “I want you to run to the back porch as fast as you can.”
CHAPTER
56
They were praying again.
The Mountain View Cemetery did, indeed, have a view of Mount St. Helens. But no budget to water the grass. The pile of earth next to Dusty Beaton’s open grave looked hard and dry. The grass was bleached. Even the trees looked thirsty.
Archie sat in one of the folding chairs next to the grave.
Henry stood on the other side of the grave, hands folded, head down.
Josh Levy was somewhere squatting behind a gravestone with a telephoto lens.
A few polite congregants from the Church of Living Christ had shown up, and Archie saw Huffington leaning against her parked squad car. But Colin Beaton had yet to make an appearance.
Archie took off his suit jacket and then laid it across his lap to cover the weapon clipped to his belt.
He could see the sweat glistening on Henry’s bent head.
Reverend Lewis said some closing words and tossed some of the parched earth into the open grave. It bounced and skidded on the wooden coffin.
Everyone started to pack up.
No one tossed a rose into the grave or broke down in tears.
Archie scanned the cemetery. Some of the gravestones were old, their engravings worn, weeds grown high around them. The newer, slick marble slabs blinked like mirrors reflecting the sun. The trees in the cemetery were as old as the town. Their grizzled branches, heavy with leaves, bowed over the graves. Archie could hear the hypnotic whirring of the cicadas in their branches, singing happily in the heat.
He turned around in his chair and took in the three-sixty view.
The congregants headed for their cars, their feet crunching the dead grass. Henry came and sat down next to Archie.
“I am so fucking hot,” Henry said.
“Give it a few more minutes,” Archie said.
Henry got a handkerchief out of his pocket and swabbed his forehead.
Two grave diggers stood ready with shovels next to the hill of dry dirt.
Reverend Lewis walked over to Archie. “They want to get her underground as quickly as possible.” He looked up at the sky. “The heat.”
Archie nodded, and the men started to heave shovels of dirt onto the coffin. Archie watched it drop into the deep rectangular grave. They used a backhoe to dig graves, but they filled it in with shovels. No one wanted to see a dead loved one buried by a John Deere.
Archie leaned forward. The sides of the grave were dark. The earth on top was drier, sun-parched.
“Wait,” Archie said.
The men with the shovels stopped and looked at him.
“When was this grave dug?” Archie asked.
One of the men said, “Last night.”
Archie stood up, put his hands behind his neck, and stared down at the final resting place of Dusty Beaton. He could feel the grease of sweat soaking through his shirt. The grave had been empty all night. Beaton had wept over his mother’s corpse. If he had decided to stay away from the funeral, he’d find another way to say his good-byes. Archie loosened his tie. It couldn’t be helped. “We need to dig her up,” he said.
CHAPTER
57
The back door was open, and Susan could see her phone sitting on the table in the kitchen.
It was eight steps from the back door to that table.
Pearl was hunched on the back porch, sniveling.
“I’m going to go in and get my phone,” Susan said.
Pearl grabbed on to Susan’s arm. “I’m going with you,” she said.
Susan took a couple of breaths. They should stick together. Susan shouldn’t leave Pearl alone. She nodded. Pearl released Susan’s arms, leaving behind a perfect set of bloody fingerprints.
Ushering Pearl behi
nd her, Susan crept through the back door into the kitchen. It looked just as they had left it, but it felt stiller somehow, like the dead air that fills a house whose owners have been away on a long vacation. All the little noises were magnified. The flap of Susan’s flip-flops on the kitchen floor. Pearl’s sniffles. The whir of the fans. The faucet dripping in the sink. Susan got to her phone and snatched it up and immediately felt something was wrong. It was wet. She looked at the phone. It glistened with water. The screen was black. There was a puddle on the table where the phone had been.
“What is it?” Pearl asked.
Susan turned to the landline. The phone line had been cut. She could see it dangling uselessly against the wall.
She tried to turn on her iPhone. It was dead. Waterlogged.
Pearl whimpered. Susan took her hand. Front door, Susan mouthed.
Wait.
Susan squeezed Pearl’s hand, signaling to be still. The steady thrum of the fan in the living room was slowing. Susan knew that sound. It was the sound that fan made when someone turned it off.
The man stepped from behind the open pocket door, like a performer taking the stage. He was about forty, with a friendly clean-shaven face and short brown hair, and he was tall, and dressed like a missionary in black pants and a white button-down. Blood splattered the shirt and dripped off the machete he held in his right hand. His eyes gleamed. “Pray with me,” he said.
CHAPTER
58
Susan stepped in front of Pearl.
The man with the machete was between them and the front door. The backyard offered no escape. They had to buy time.
“You’re Colin Beaton,” Susan said.
He smiled. “I’m the guy who has come to kill you,” he said.
“It’s him,” Pearl said. “He’s the one who tried to grab me.”
No shit, thought Susan. “She didn’t see you,” Susan told the man. “She can’t testify that you were there. This is a mistake.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not a mistake. It’s God’s plan.”
He lifted the machete, and Susan pulled Pearl toward the stairs and pushed Pearl up ahead of her.
She could hear Beaton behind her, laughing.
They scrambled up the stairs and down the hall into the bathroom, which was the only room on that floor with a lock on it.
It was a stupid lock, not suitable for keeping a machete-wielding madman out, but it was the only lock they had.
Pearl crouched next to the Guatemalan basket that Bliss used for a laundry hamper. The cast-iron claw-foot bathtub was lined with candles. Bliss had painted the wooden floor light blue and the walls indigo. A framed picture of Che Guevara hung over the toilet. Hasta la victoria siempre.
“Now what?” Pearl asked.
The tiny muslin-covered window was too small for either of them to crawl out of.
“What time is it?” Susan asked.
Pearl looked around helplessly. “I don’t know.” She flapped her hand at Susan. “What’s wrong with your phone?”
Susan hadn’t even realized she still had it in her hand. “He dipped it in water or something.” You could drop an iPhone off a building and still make a call. Get the thing wet, and you had an expensive hockey puck.
The doorknob rattled.
Pearl and Susan froze.
They heard him moving on the other side of the door. Then he said, “I see you.”
Susan grabbed a towel, lunged forward, and began stuffing it under the sizable crack under the door. She saw a glint of metal and heard Pearl wail. She managed to jump back just as the machete sliced underneath the towel.
She scampered back to Pearl.
“Look,” Susan whispered. “If I don’t call, Archie will get worried. I texted him an hour or two ago.”
“An hour or two?” Pearl said through tears. “Which was it?”
“I’m bad with time,” Susan growled.
Pearl sobbed. “We’re going to be macheted to death,” she said.
Susan stood up. “That’s not even a word,” she said. She opened the medicine cabinet above the sink and began sorting through it.
“What are you doing?” Pearl asked.
“Looking for anything we can use.”
“What?” Pearl said. “Like bandages for when he chops off our arms?”
Susan squatted in front of Pearl. She touched the eraser-sized scar on her own cheek. “Your boyfriend did this.”
“Ex-boyfriend,” Pearl said. “Dead ex-boyfriend.”
“He pierced my fucking face with a needle while you watched.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“I don’t want sorry,” Susan said. “I want hard as nails. I want headstrong. Fierce. I want the little bitch who Tasered a cop. So get your shit together and help me stop this motherfucker.”
Pearl was nodding. Her face was streaked with blood and tears. She sniffed.
“I don’t hear you praying,” Beaton said through the door.
Pearl reached up and slowly pulled a hand towel off the rack above her head. Then she stood up at the sink. Susan thought she was going to wash her face, but she didn’t. She looked in the mirror.
“Stand back,” she said.
Susan took a step back.
Pearl dumped the toothbrushes out of the earthenware toothbrush cup and then tapped the cup hard on the center of the mirror.
The mirror splintered, and wedges slipped out of the frame and dropped into the sink. Pearl fished out a knife-shaped piece and wrapped the bottom of it in the hand towel. She handed it to Susan by the towel hilt, and started to make another one.
“Where did you learn that?” Susan asked.
“Juvie,” Pearl said. She opened one of the built-in cabinets. “Do you have any drain cleaner? If you throw it in someone’s face it really burns.”
CHAPTER
59
By the time they got the coffin out of the grave, Henry had his shirt off and they were all coated with soil, except for Reverend Lewis, who had bent his head in prayer at the moment of the first whisper of the impromptu grave digging.
They had used straps to lift the coffin out, along with some creative gymnastics on behalf of Henry and the larger grave digger, a man named José.
Henry and José sat by the coffin, breathing hard. Guillermo, the other grave digger, made the sign of the cross.
José said, “You sure this is legal, man?”
Archie looked at Huffington, who had come over from her car at the first sight of the dirt coming out of the grave.
“It’s not an exhumation,” she said. “We’re just burying her a little slower.” Her large aviators made her expression hard to read. “This isn’t going to be for nothing, right?” she said to Archie.
Archie sat down on the board on the edge of the grave and dangled his feet below. Without the coffin, the six-foot-deep rectangular pit looked especially deep and dark. He slid in. It was a farther jump than he thought and he landed in a crouch.
“What are you doing?” Henry called.
“Give me a minute,” Archie said.
It felt fifteen degrees cooler down here and the damp earthy smell tasted sharp in his mouth. He stood up. The top of his head was just about level with the surface. When he craned his neck back, he could see his friends’ feet.
“Huffington,” Archie said. “Toss me a flashlight.”
She knelt down and held out a long black flashlight and Archie took it, turned it on, and ran the beam in a search pattern along the bottom of the grave.
“See anything?” Huffington asked from above.
Archie didn’t answer. He was hunched over, focused on the soil at his feet. The heat and sun and sky felt very far away right now. Worms wiggled soft and pink in the soil. Tiny black beetles crawled over his shoe. Archie made a mental note to make sure his will called for cremation. Then the light caught the edge of something bright white. He stopped, and looked closer. It was a corner of paper, half covered in dirt. Archie squatted and br
ushed aside the soil and then very carefully extracted the paper. It was about the size of an index card, torn from a larger piece.
“I need an evidence bag,” he called.
Huffington lowered one down to him and he slid the paper into the plastic bag and zipped it closed. Archie handed the bag up to an outstretched hand, and then two more hands lowered and then, with a lot of grunting, Henry and José pulled Archie roughly from the grave.
Archie rolled over into a sitting position, squinting in the sun. His suit was filthy; he had dirt in his hair, and he had rocks in his shoes.
Huffington held the evidence bag up and read what was written.
“ ‘The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.’ ”
Reverend Lewis said, “Genesis 6:5.”
Archie reached for the evidence bag and studied the note. It was handwritten in careful print letters, hard to analyze or match. He’d used a black felt-tip marker.
Under the biblical quote, in the same black ink, he’d drawn a heart.
Archie felt a chill settle on his shoulders.
Reverend Lewis was standing next to the head of the coffin, his hand resting lightly on it, as if he were communicating with the dead.
“Gretchen Stevens,” Archie said.
The reverend looked up at Archie.
“She was a foster kid that the Beatons took in right before James Beaton was murdered. Ring a bell?”
Huffington stepped beside the reverend and laid a gentle hand on his arm. “If you’ve got something to say, Reverend, you better say it.”
“It was a long time ago,” the reverend said. “She wasn’t with them long.”
“You met her?” Archie asked.
“They would have brought her to church,” the reverend said.
“Did they?” Huffington asked.
Reverend Lewis looked at Huffington. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t this occur to you when I asked yesterday if you remembered any teenage girls being around?” Archie asked.
“I barely knew her,” the reverend said.