Graveyard Games

by Sheri Leigh

  FIDO publishing

  Graveyard Games © 2010 by Sheri Leigh

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  FIDO Publishing, LLC

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  Cover art © 2010 Michael Mantas

  Edited by Michael Mantas

  First published by Excessica Publishing

  Second Edition – February, 2010

  A Smashwords Edition

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Graveyard Games

  By Sheri Leigh

  Part One:

  Suspicion

  Chapter One

  Dusty stood, hands clenched, nails making little red crescents in her palms as she listened to the Reverend's perfect monotone. He read Psalm 23—Julia's favorite and Julia's choice. Chewing her lower lip, Dusty looked down the sloping hill, past slanting headstones, and saw the procession of cars lined up on the asphalt drive. Shane's black Mustang was among them.

  Bastard.

  She tasted blood, coppery and bitter.

  Her father's hand found hers, coaxing her fingers open, squeezing. Dusty didn’t look at him. Her palm stung where the small half-moons absorbed the sweat from his hand. Julia, her stepmother, wept at his right into a monogrammed handkerchief.

  From this angle, Dusty could see beyond the fake green of the astro-turf and into the open darkness beneath her brother's casket. She had skipped sad and had gone straight to anger in the infamous Kubler-Ross stage of grief, but the sight of the infinite darkness beneath her twin’s coffin made her knees feel weak. For the first time, a wave of real sorrow hit and stopped her as if she’d run full-tilt into a brick wall.

  Oh Nick, this can’t be happening, she thought, staring into the darkness beneath the satin-lined box where his body now rested. He was going to be lowered into that yawning hole when everyone was gone. John Evans, who only worked at the cemetery part time from the spring to the fall, and drove the twenty-five minutes to the Wal-Mart in West Lake in the off-season to greet shoppers, would get a local kid to help him, one on each side, and they’d use the straps to lower the box into the ground. Then Evans would rev up the backhoe and fill up the empty space with dirt.

  Who fills the empty space up here? She wondered, fighting a wave of nausea and tears. The empty space in my life? In my heart?

  Dusty leaned against her father, his big shoulder a safe place to rest her dizzy head, and she ignored his concerned look when he glanced down and slipped an arm around her waist for support. She fixed her gaze on the darkness, forcing herself to look there, knowing it only existed for the sole purpose of swallowing what was left of her brother’s body. He’s not in there, she reminded herself, trying on a reassuring smile as her father’s hand squeezed her hip and pulled her closer.

  Yes he is, a deeper voice whispered in her head. What’s left of him.

  She shivered then, in spite of the warmth of the sun, her gaze moving up the casket again, back toward the light, where an enormous blanket of red roses cascaded over the sides. Those had been Julia’s idea, too. Dusty had suggested yellow—Nick’s favorite color—but the idea had been shot down in horror. Too cheerful for the occasion, dear. Definitely not proper.

  Proper?

  That was Julia for you.

  She gave up after that on suggesting anything for the service. She let Julia make her little plans, get her way, as usual. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Dusty unpacked her suitcase in the room where she’d spent her childhood, feeling her life moving back in time as she did. There was nothing to remind her of the world she’d just left behind in Chicago. Even her gun and badge, the two things she hadn’t been without since she’d started as a rookie on the force, had been stripped from her two days before she got on a plane to fly back to Detroit for her brother’s funeral.

  She had expected her father at the gate, but it was Julia who’d picked her up from the airport to make the long drive up north to their little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. She was glad, because if it had been her father, she probably would have tearfully blurted out the circumstances surrounding her suspension like she had, as a little girl, told him about the mean boys at school. She would have told him everything, even as ashamed as she was about her own part in it.

  But with Julia, she was safe. Her stepmother talked while Dusty watched the strip malls give way to fields and farm land. She watched her past returning, as if on an infinite conveyer, and remembered how much both she and Nick had talked about getting away from small town life. They had both made it out, and yet here they were again, like nothing had ever changed.

  Except Nick is dead.

  Stop it, she told herself, biting the inside of her cheek, concentrating on the pain.

  Who says you can’t go home again? Even if it is in pieces…

  Stop it, stop, just stop! The taste of blood filled her mouth.

  Even when she’d been away, living a decidedly urban life in a land of concrete and steel, this little town had been home. She and Nick had talked about it occasionally, how growing up rural had made them different somehow in the midst of born city-folk, as her father always called them.

  This place had always been home, and she remembered it with a vengeance as she stood in the middle of her little upstairs room, her dead brother’s door open just down the hall. She stood and felt Nick profoundly as she’d known him then, the twin brother who teased and taunted but loved her, she knew, above all others.

  Well…almost all others. That dark voice came again, and this time she didn’t stop it as her gaze darkened and scanned the group gathered around the casket. Relatives and family friends formed a circle, like druids dressed in black.

  Nick’s friends, the people they’d graduated high school with eight years ago (god, had it really been so long?); his once high-school and sometimes-college girlfriend, Suzanne; his still-best-friend, Shane—they all huddled together, slightly separated from the family, almost breaking the circle.

  Dusty tried to hang onto her anger. Without it, an unbearable emptiness moved in, numbingly cold. Without the heat of her rage, she felt husked out, a fat Halloween pumpkin with a twisted visage, sitting helpless while the world finished the job bit by bit, scraping out all the extras.

  Do I look like that? Dusty stared at Suzanne, eyes downcast, blonde hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Like an enormous hand plunged into me and pulled out my insides?

  Her gaze moved down the line to Shane, flanked on either side by the same gang of guys he’d hung around with since high school—Jake, Billy, Evan and Chris. They’d been Nick's closest friends at one time, too, next to Shane. What about you? That dark voice again. She tried to push it away.

  She’d known them all since—well, it seemed like forever. Since you were eleven and Nick met Shane and you became just his sister again.

  Damnit! She shoved the thought away
with brutal force.

  Where are you, Nick? You're not in that box, you can't be. Where are you really?

  He couldn’t be gone. Even as she looked into the darkness beneath his coffin, she denied it. He wasn’t in there. The person she’d shared her sweatshirts with, her secrets with, the womb with—he wasn’t in there.

  "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..."

  They were standing in the valleys of his death, she thought bitterly. Valleys and green pastures littered with graves and mausoleums—killed in the very cemetery he was being buried in.

  Across the coffin, Shane's gaze was on her, but when she glanced at him, he looked away.

  Bastard, she thought again. Her heartbeat quickened and the resentment and mistrust she’d always felt around him surfaced and congealed, like an oil slick on a lake.

  The sun blazed on his blonde hair, turning it almost white, matching his pallor. He looks guilty. The way his eyes fled from hers told her that much. He had the look of a man whose entire world had collapsed and he was being buried alive beneath the rubble.

  Was he with you that night, Shane? Was he?

  Her gaze returned to her brother’s coffin and she remembered talking to Nick for the very the last time.

  * * * *

  "It’s suspension with pay.” Dusty closed her eyes even as she said it, resting the warmth of her cheek against the bathroom door. It was private enough in here, and her roommate, Kathy, didn’t know yet. She didn’t know if she was going to tell her or not. “But please, don’t tell Dad. Not yet.”

  “They don’t honestly think you’re really some high class escort…do they?” Nick’s voice was muffled, and then she heard the sound of him crunching.

  “What are you eating?” she asked, ignoring the cat’s paw sneaking under the door, looking to play. It was Kathy’s cat, and it never failed to try to get into the bathroom whenever the door was closed. “Anyway, the suspension is pretty much standard procedure during any sort of investigation like this.”

  “Doritos,” Nick mumbled, still crunching. “But really, come on, how stupid would you have to be, to actually be turning tricks after you busted that guy last year—what’s his name, that deputy mayor guy?”

  “Marx. David Marx.”

  “Yeah, him. I mean, you blew the lid off that whole pot, Dusty!” Nick sounded so proud of her she wanted to cry. “You even uncovered the kickbacks that dirty cop was getting, the one who tried to cover it all up, right?”

  “Right.” She closed her eyes, remembering the headlines, her name in the papers. “I think that’s actually the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dusty sighed, not wanting to tell him—but if she couldn’t tell her brother, who could she tell? “Nick…there’s a video.”

  “A…what?” He sounded like he was choking on something.

  “Remember how I told you about Stephen?” She hated even saying his name now. God, she’d been so taken in. How could she have been so stupid, so naïve? Her father used to tell the story about Nick coming home one day and telling his twin sister, “My teacher says the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary”—and Dusty had actually gone to check. Nick always told her she was too honest to be a cop. Maybe he was right.

  “Stephen? That senator’s aide guy you were seeing? What’s he got to do with this?”

  She took a deep breath and blurted it out. “Somehow the department now has a video of me and Stephen.”

  “A video of what?” Nick was quiet and she let it sink it, waiting for him to understand, hoping she wouldn’t really have to say it. “Oh.” It had finally dawned on him, thankfully. “No way. No way!”

  “The whole thing is a setup.” She hated the pleading sound in her own voice, as if she was trying to convince him of her innocence. Already, she felt assumed guilty. “But I can’t see a way out of it. I haven’t seen it. They won’t let me until the disciplinary hearing—and I can’t even imagine seeing it then. Christ, Nick. I can’t sit there in a room full of my colleagues while that plays…” Her face was red and burned at the thought.

  “I bet they’re counting on that!” He sounded as angry now as she had felt when she found out, but she knew it was useless. There was nowhere to direct it—the cards had been played, and her hand had been trumped. Hell, she hadn’t even known she was in the game.

  “Probably,” she admitted.

  “But I don’t get it…you were dating this guy. He wasn’t…I mean…no money exchanged hands…right?”

  She winced, closing her eyes tight against her own words, reluctantly telling him, “He left two thousand dollars in cash on the night table before he left.”

  “What the hell for?” he cried.

  “He says it was for sex.”

  Nick snorted. “What was it really for?”

  “It was…” Dusty cringed, not wanting to tell him.

  He groaned. “You loaned this idiot two thousand dollars, didn’t you?”

  “It was short-term,” she went on, trying to explain. “An investment. And he paid me back!”

  “But wait a minute!” Nick sounded excited. “He can’t just set you up like that. I’m not a cop, but I am a lawyer, and I know in these cases, it has to be clear just what was being paid for!”

  She sighed. “Yeah, well, it’s sure going to look like he was paying for sex.”

  “Huh?” Nick was back to crunching Doritos. How could he eat at a time like this? She wondered.

  “He knew all about it, my working for vice, the whole sting. We used to joke all the time,” she explained, her voice getting smaller as she talked. “So when he put the money on the table, he said… he said, ‘For services rendered. Where do you want it?’”

  Nick groaned. “Ohhh no.”

  “Oh yes,” she agreed. “And I said, ‘Leave it on the night table.’”

  “Oh god. You didn’t!”

  “I actually did,” she admitted, wincing at the memory. It was all caught on tape, she was sure. She remembered Stephen chuckling and responding, “Of course, where else?” and leaving the cash in an envelope next to the lamp. She didn’t tell Nick that she followed that up with the amused comment, “Good thing you paid up, John, or else the pictures will go to your wife.” She’d thought it all so amusing at the time, two lovers teasing each other, joking around. She couldn’t even fathom the idea she might have just kidded herself right out of her career.

  Her brother sighed and she could almost feel his disappointment through the phone. “Are they busting this guy?”

  “No, Nick,” she explained softly. “They’re busting me.”

  He was quiet for a while. Then he asked, “What does Jack say?”

  “Jack knows me.” Dusty shrugged. Her captain knew her well enough to know she just wasn’t capable of such a thing. Dusty was a lot of things—impulsive, hot-headed, often rigid in her beliefs and thinking—but dishonest wasn’t one of them. She’d worked undercover as a rookie in vice for almost a year when it all first went down. It had been Jack she’d turned to, revealing what David Marx told her about her fellow officers taking kickbacks to keep quiet about the whole high-priced-escort operation that provided girls to all the local politicians and their friends. It had been Jack who helped her set up the sting that brought the dirty cop and everyone under him down.

  That Dusty would then turn around and moonlight as a high-priced escort herself, just for the cash? It was ludicrous, and Jack knew it.

  “He’s in my corner,” Dusty insisted. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know how high this goes up. I have a feeling…” She swallowed hard. “Remember the headlines last year? Rookie Cop Busts Dirty Vice Ring?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just imagine the headlines now.” She sighed. “Cop Who Brought Down Dirty Vice Ring Kicked Off Force For Turning High-Priced Tricks.”

  He gave a low whistle. “You are so screwed.”

  “No pun intended.”<
br />
  Nick laughed. “That’s not funny.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Anyway, Jack’s in my corner. I’m sure he’ll get them to see the truth.” Dusty tried to make her voice sound more sure and confident than she felt and thought she almost succeeded. “So tell me again why it is you’re back at Dad and Julia’s?”

  The crunching stopped for a moment, and then Nick coughed.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah…” The sound of him drinking something was almost louder than the coughing fit and she pulled the phone away. “Swallowed wrong. Sorry.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So what is this? You said you were going back for a visit, but when Julia called last week, she said you were moving back home. What’s the deal?”

  “It’s temporary,” he insisted. “Definitely temporary.”

  “But why?” Dusty flicked at the cat’s paw under the door and it disappeared. “I mean, come on, you have to admit, it’s not exactly our favorite place in the world.”

  “Home isn’t so bad…”

  Dusty sighed, rolling her eyes. “Hey, I was honest with you about what’s going on here… it’s the least you can do. What’s really going on?”

  “I got fired.” Now it was Nick’s turn to sigh.

  “Fired?” She sat up straighter. “What for?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He was crunching Doritos again.

  “Of course it matters!’

  Dusty waited because Nick didn’t answer for a minute, still crunching. “I’m just staying here for a little while, until I can find something else, I guess.”

  “Ummm…not to burst your bubble, but there’s not much in the way of job opportunities for hotshot lawyers in Larkspur.”

  He laughed. “No, but they do have the Internet now.”

  “Yeah, sure, by satellite at the town library maybe.” Dusty snorted, poking at the persistent cat’s paw again.