A Grant County Collection

by Karin Slaughter

  'Jesus,' Sara whispered, unable to do anything but walk away. She headed toward the road, thinking she should take the long way back to her parents in order to calm down. Her mother would have a field day with this, and rightfully so.

  Jeffrey started to follow. 'Where are you going?'

  'I'll call you in a few days.' She did not wait for his answer. 'I need some time to think.'

  He closed the gap between them, his fingers brushing the back of her arm. 'We need to talk.'

  She laughed. 'Now you want to talk about it.'

  'Sara –'

  'There's nothing more to say,' she told him, quickening her pace. Jeffrey kept up, his footsteps heavy behind her. She was starting off into a jog when he slammed into her from behind. Sara fell to the ground with a hollow-sounding thud, knocking the wind out of her. The thud as she hit the ground reverberated in her ears like a distant echo.

  She pushed him off, demanding, 'What are you –'

  'Jesus, I'm sorry. Are you okay?' He knelt in front of her, picking a twig out of her hair. 'I didn't mean –'

  'You jackass,' she snapped. He had scared her more than anything else, and her response was even more anger. 'What the hell is wrong with you?'

  'I tripped,' he said, trying to help her up.

  'Don't touch me.' She slapped him away and stood on her own.

  He brushed the dirt off her pants, repeating, 'Are you okay?'

  She backed away from him. 'I'm fine.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'I'm not a piece of china.' She scowled at her dirt-stained sweatshirt. The sleeve had been torn at the shoulder. 'What is wrong with you?'

  'I told you I tripped. Do you think I did it on purpose?'

  'No,' she told him, though the admission did nothing to ease her anger. 'God, Jeffrey.' She tested her knee, feeling the tendon catch. 'That really hurt.'

  'I'm sorry,' he repeated, pulling another twig out of her hair.

  She looked at her torn sleeve, more annoyed now than angry. 'What happened?'

  He turned, scanning the area. 'There must have been . . .' He stopped talking.

  She followed his gaze and saw a length of metal pipe sticking out of the ground. A rubber band held a piece of wire screen over the top.

  All he said was, 'Sara,' but the dread in his tone sent a jolt through her.

  She replayed the scene in her head, the sound as she was slammed into the ground. There should have been a solid thump, not a hollow reverberation. Something was underneath them. Something was buried in the earth.

  'Christ,' Jeffrey whispered, snatching off the screen. He looked down into the pipe, but Sara knew the half-inch circumference would make it impossible to see.

  Still, she asked, 'Anything?'

  'No.' He tried to move the pipe back and forth, but it would not budge. Something underground held it tightly in place.

  She dropped to her knees and brushed the leaves and pine needles away from the area, working her way back as she followed the pattern of loose soil. She was about four feet away from Jeffrey when they both seemed to realize what might be below them.

  Sara felt her own alarm escalate with Jeffrey's as he started clawing his fingers into the ground. The soil came away easily as if someone had recently dug there. Soon, Sara was on her knees beside him, pulling up clumps of rock and earth, trying not to think about what they might find.

  'Fuck!' Jeffrey jerked up his hand, and Sara saw a deep gash along the side of his palm where a sharp stick had gouged out the skin. The cut was bleeding profusely, but he went back to the task in front of him, digging at the ground, throwing dirt to the side.

  Sara's fingernails scraped something hard, and she pulled her hand back to find wood underneath. She said, 'Jeffrey,' but he kept digging. 'Jeffrey.'

  'I know,' he told her. He had exposed a section of wood around the pipe. A metal collar surrounded the conduit, holding it tightly in place. Jeffrey took out his pocketknife, and Sara could only stare as he tried to work out the screws. Blood from his cut palm made his hands slide down the handle, and he finally gave up, tossing the knife aside and grabbing the pipe. He put his shoulder into it, wincing from the pain. Still, he kept pushing until there was an ominous groan from the wood, then a splintering as the collar came away.

  Sara covered her nose as a stagnant odor drifted out.

  The hole was roughly three inches square, sharp splinters cutting into the opening like teeth.

  Jeffrey put his eye to the break. He shook his head. 'I can't see anything.'

  Sara kept digging, moving back along the length of the wood, each new section she uncovered making her feel like her heart would explode from her mouth. There were several one-by-twos nailed together, forming the top of what could only be a long, rectangular box. Her breath caught, and despite the breeze she broke out into a cold sweat. Her sweatshirt suddenly felt like a straitjacket, and she pulled it over her head and tossed it aside so she could move more freely. Her mind was reeling with the possibilities of what they might find. Sara seldom prayed, but thinking about what they might discover buried below moved her to ask anyone who was listening to please help.

  'Watch out,' Jeffrey warned, using the pipe to pry at the wooden slats. Sara sat back on her knees, shielding her eyes as dirt sprayed into the air. The wood splintered, most of it still buried, but Jeffrey kept at it, using his hands to break the thin slats. A low, creaking moan like a dying gasp came as nails yielded against the strain. The odor of fresh decay wafted over Sara like a sour breeze, but she did not look away when Jeffrey lay flat to the ground so that he could reach his arm into the narrow opening.

  He looked up at her as he felt around, his jaw clenched tight. 'I feel something,' he said. 'Somebody.'

  'Breathing?' Sara asked, but he shook his head before she got the word out of her mouth.

  Jeffrey worked more slowly, more deliberately, as he pried away another piece of wood. He looked at the underside, then passed it to Sara. She could see scratch marks in the pulp, as if an animal had been trapped. A fingernail about the size of one of her own was embedded in the next piece Jeffrey handed her, and Sara put it face-up on the ground. The next slat was scratched harder, and she put this beside the first, keeping a semblance of the pattern, knowing it was evidence. It could be an animal. A kid's prank. Some old Indian burial ground. Explanations flashed in and out of her mind, but she could only watch as Jeffrey pried the boards away, each slat feeling like a splinter in Sara's heart. There were almost twenty pieces in all, but by the twelfth, they could see what was inside.

  Jeffrey stared into the coffin, his Adam's apple moving up and down as he swallowed. Like Sara, he seemed at a loss for words.

  The victim was a young woman, probably in her late teens. Her dark hair was long to her waist, blanketing her body. She wore a simple blue dress that fell to mid-calf and white socks but no shoes. Her mouth and eyes were wide open in a panic that Sara could almost taste. One hand reached up, fingers contracted as if the girl was still trying to claw her way out. Tiny dots of petechiae were scattered in the sclera of her eyes, long-dried tears evidenced by the thin red lines breaking through the white. Several empty water bottles were in the box along with a jar that had obviously been used for waste. A flashlight was on her right, a half-eaten piece of bread on her left. Mold grew on the corners, much as mold grew like a fine mustache over the girl's upper lip. The young woman had not been a remarkable beauty, but she had probably been pretty in her own, unassuming way.

  Jeffrey exhaled slowly, sitting back on the ground. Like Sara, he was covered in dirt. Like Sara, he did not seem to care.

  They both stared at the girl, watched the breeze from the lake ruffle her thick hair and pick at the long sleeves of her dress. Sara noticed a matching blue ribbon tied in the girl's hair and wondered who had put it there. Had her mother or sister tied it for her? Had she sat in her room and looked at the mirror, securing the ribbon herself? And then what had happened? What had brought her here?

  Je
ffrey wiped his hands on his jeans, bloody fingerprints leaving their mark. 'They didn't mean to kill her,' he guessed.

  'No,' Sara agreed, enveloped by an overwhelming sadness. 'They just wanted to scare her to death.'

  TWO

  At the clinic, they had asked Lena about the bruises.

  'You all right, darlin'?' the older black woman had said, her brows knitted in concern.

  Lena had automatically answered yes, waiting for the nurse to leave before she finished getting dressed.

  There were bruises that came from being a cop: the rub from where the gun on your hip wore so hard against you that some days it felt like the bone was getting a permanent dent. The thin line of blue like a crayon mark on your forearm from accommodating the lump of steel as you kept your hand as straight to your side as you could, trying not to alert the population at large that you were carrying concealed.

  When Lena was a rookie, there were even more problems: back aching, gunbelt chafing, welts from her nightstick slapping her leg as she ran all out to catch up with a perp. Sometimes, by the time she caught them, it felt good to use the stick, let them know what it felt like to chase their sorry ass half a mile in ninety-degree heat with eighty pounds of equipment flogging your body. Then there was the bulletproof vest. Lena had known cops – big, burly men – who had passed out from heat exhaustion. In August, it was so hot that they weighed the odds: get shot in the chest or die from a heatstroke.

  Yet, when she finally got her gold detective's shield, gave up her uniform and hat, signed in her portable radio for the last time, she had missed the weight of it all. She missed the heavy reminder that she was a cop. Being a detective meant you worked without props. On the street, you couldn't let your uniform do the talking, your cruiser making traffic slow even if the cars were already going the speed limit. You had to find other ways to intimidate the bad guys. You only had your brain to let you know you were still a cop.

  After the nurse had left her sitting in that room in Atlanta, what the clinic called the recovery room, Lena had looked at the familiar bruises, judging them against the new ones. Finger marks wrapped around her arm like a band. Her wrist was swollen from where it had been twisted. She could not see the fist-shaped welt above her left kidney, but she felt it whenever she moved the wrong way.

  Her first year wearing the uniform, she had seen it all. Domestic disputes where women threw rocks at your cruiser, thinking that would help talk you out of carting off their abusive husbands to jail. Neighbors knifing each other over a mulberry tree hanging too low or a missing lawn mower that ended up being in the garage somewhere, usually near a little baggie of pot or sometimes something harder. Little kids clinging to their fathers, begging not to be taken away from their homes, then you'd get them to the hospital and the doctors would find signs of vaginal or anal tearing. Sometimes, their throats would be torn down deep, little scratch marks inside where they had choked.

  The instructors tried to prepare you for this sort of thing in the academy, but you could never be really prepared. You had to see it, taste it, feel it for yourself. No one explained how terrifying it was to do a traffic stop on some out-of-towner, your heart pounding in your chest as you walked up to the driver's side, hand on your gun, wondering if the guy in the car had his hand on his gun, too. The textbooks had pictures of dead people, and Lena could remember how the guys in class had laughed at some of them. The lady who got drunk and passed out in the bathtub with her panty hose caught around her ankles. The guy who hanged himself getting his nut off, and then you had this moment when you realized the thing he was holding in his hand wasn't a ripe plum. He had probably been a father, a husband, definitely someone's son, but to all the cadets, he was 'the Plum-Nut Guy.'

  None of this got you ready for the sight and smell of the real thing. Your training officer couldn't describe the feel of death, when you walked into a room and the hairs on the back of your neck stood up, telling you something bad had happened, or – worse – was about to happen. Your chief couldn't warn you against the habit of smacking your lips, trying to get the taste out of your mouth. No one told you that no matter how many times you scrubbed your body, only time could wear away the smell of death from your skin. Running three miles a day in the hot sun, working the weights in the gym, the sweat pouring off you like rain coming out of dark clouds until finally you got the smell out – and then you went out on a call – to a gas station, an abandoned car, a neighbor's house where the papers were piled in the driveway and mail was spilling out of the box – and found another grandmother or brother or sister or uncle you had to sweat out of your system again.

  No one knew how to help you deal with it when death came into your own life. No one could take away the grief you felt knowing that your own actions had ended a life – no matter how nasty that life was. That was the kicker. As a cop, you learned pretty quickly that there was an 'us' and a 'them.' Lena never thought she'd mourn the loss of a 'them,' but lately, that was all she could think about. And now there was another life taken, another death on her hands.

  She had been feeling death inside out for the last few days, and nothing could rid it from her senses. Her mouth tasted sour, every breath she drew fueling what smelled like decay. Her ears heard a constant shrill siren and there was a clamminess to her skin that made her feel as if she had borrowed it from a graveyard. Her body was not her own, her mind something she could no longer control. From the second she had left the clinic through the night they spent in an Atlanta hotel room to the moment she had walked through the door of her uncle's house, all she could think about was what she had done, the bad decisions that had led her here.

  Lying in bed now, Lena looked out the window, staring at the depressing backyard. Hank hadn't changed a thing in the house since Lena was a child. Her bedroom still had the brown water stain in the corner where a branch had punctured the roof during a storm. The paint peeled off the wall where he'd used the wrong kind of primer and the wallpaper had soaked up enough nicotine to give it all the same sickly jaundiced cast.

  Lena had grown up here with Sibyl, her twin sister. Their mother had died in childbirth and Calvin Adams, their father, had been shot on a traffic stop a few months before that. Sibyl had been killed three years ago. Another death, another abandonment. Maybe having her sister around had kept Lena rooted in life. Now she was drifting, making even more bad choices and not bothering to rectify them. She was living with the consequences of her actions. Or maybe barely surviving would be a better way to describe it.

  Lena touched her fingers to her stomach, to where the baby had been less than a week ago. Only one person was living with the consequences. Only one person had survived. Would the child have had her dark coloring, the genes of her Mexican-American grandmother surfacing yet again, or would it have inherited the father's steel gray eyes and pale white skin?

  She lifted up, sliding her fingers into her back pocket, pulling out a long pocketknife. Carefully, she pried open the blade. The tip was broken off, and embedded in a semicircle of dried blood was Ethan's fingerprint.

  She looked at her arm, the deep bruise where Ethan had grabbed her, and wondered how the finger that had made the swirling print in the blade, the hand that had held this knife, the fist that had caused so much pain, could be the same one that gently traced its way down her body.

  The cop in her knew she should arrest him. The woman in her knew that he was bad. The realist knew that one day he would kill her. Some unnamed place deep inside of Lena resisted these thoughts, and she found herself being the worst kind of coward. She was the woman throwing rocks at the police cruiser. She was the neighbor with the knife. She was the idiot kid clinging to her abuser. She was the one with tears deep inside her throat, choking on what he made her swallow.

  There was a knock on the door. 'Lee?'

  She folded the blade by the edge, sitting up quickly. When Hank opened the door, she was clutching her stomach, feeling like something had torn.

  He went to h
er side, standing there with his fingers reaching out to her shoulder but not quite touching. 'You okay?'

  'Sat up too fast.'

  He dropped his hand, tucking it into his pocket. 'You feel like eating anything?'

  She nodded, lips slightly parted so she could take a few breaths.

  'You need help getting up?'

  'It's been a week,' she said, as if that answered the question. They had told her she would be able to go back to work two days after the procedure, but Lena didn't know how women managed to do it. She had been on the Grant County force for twelve years and never taken a vacation until now. It'd be funny if this were the sort of thing you could laugh at.

  'I got some lunch on the way home,' he said, and Lena guessed from his neatly pressed Hawaiian shirt and white jeans that he had been at church all morning. She glanced at the clock; it was after noon. She had slept for fifteen hours.

  Hank stood there, hands still in his pockets, like he was waiting for her to say something.

  She said, 'I'll be there in a minute.'

  'You need anything?'

  'Like what, Hank?'

  He pressed together his thin lips, scratching his arms like they itched. The needle tracks scarring his skin were still prominent even after all these years, and she hated the sight of them, hated the way he didn't seem to care that they reminded her of everything that was wrong between them.

  He said, 'I'll fix you a plate.'

  'Thanks,' she managed, letting her legs hang over the bed. She pressed her feet firmly to the floor, trying to remind herself that she was here in this room. This last week, she had found herself traveling around in her mind, going to places that felt better, safer. Sibyl was still alive. Ethan Green hadn't come into her life yet. Things were easier.

  A long, hot bath would have been nice, but Lena wasn't allowed to sit in a tub for at least another week. She wasn't allowed to have sex for twice as long as that, and every time she tried to come up with a lie, some explanation to give Ethan for not being available, all she could think was that it would be easier just to let him do it. Whatever harm came to her would be her own fault. There had to be a day of reckoning for what she had done. There had to be some sort of punishment for the lie that was her life.