Graveyard Games

by Sheri Leigh

  "How're you doing?" he asked, shoving his hands into his jean pockets.

  "Surviving, I guess.”

  "Yeah."

  They both stared at the grave, neither knowing quite what to say. They had never been friends—more like passing acquaintances. Nick had been their connection, but now he was gone.

  "How'd you get here?" Dusty asked, unable to recall seeing a car parked anywhere.

  "Oh, uh..." He hesitated and looked up, first at her and then away, off into the distance. "Shane gave me a lift."

  "He's here?" Her eyes following Chris' gaze to where Shane sat on the hood of his car, just outside the eastern fence, a beer bottle resting against the crotch of his jeans.

  "Yeah, but he wouldn't...he didn't feel like coming in."

  "No?" As she watched, Shane tipped the bottle at her and then put it to his lips. Dusty fingered the rose, turning her gaze back to Chris. "How come?"

  Chris shifted his weight back and forth and shrugged. "I don't know. Gave him the creeps, I guess."

  "Shane Curtis—scared?” she scoffed. “Come off it, Chris. He's never been afraid of anything in his life—except maybe jail."

  "I don’t argue with him.” Chris met her eyes and then looked away.

  She nodded, pursing her lips, and looked down at the headstone. "Can I ask you something?"

  "Uh...sure." Back and forth, he shifted his weight from one foot to another.

  "Did you see Nick that night?"

  He laughed, shaking his head, but his eyes fled hers. “You playing detective?”

  "No.” Dusty lied. She was better at it than he was. “Just wondering. He mentioned he might see you guys that night. He mentioned Shane specifically."

  "We were all at the Starlite.” Chris straightened, pulling his hands out of his pockets and crossing his arms over his chest. “Me, Shane, the gang. We were drinking beers and playing pool.”

  “And Nick?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked down at his boots. “He wasn't with us."

  "Hmm." Dusty gazed toward the fence where Shane was parked. She raised her hand to him and he nodded in her direction.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Chris’ words brought her attention back to him. “I don’t know what to believe, to tell you the truth.”

  “I wasn’t there,” Chris insisted, his arms tightening around himself, as if he were cold in the warm September sunshine.” I don’t know what happened…but I wish I did.”

  “I wish I did, too.”

  “Teri wanted me to tell you she’s real sorry.” He gave her a small, tight smile at her blank stare. “My wife, Teri.”

  “Oh. Teri…” Dusty frowned, trying to remember. “Teri Calhoun?”

  “She’s Teri Jackson now.”

  She shook her head, smiling, remembering the Chris she knew from high school, wearing a leather jacket and tagging after Shane, like they all did, wannabes. “It’s hard to picture you married.”

  “We just had a baby.” He sounded proud and that made Dusty smile. “That’s why she didn’t come, you know, to the funeral.”

  “Well, congratulations.” Dusty looked down at her brother’s headstone and the sudden realization that Nick would never have the opportunity to make her an aunt made her feel sick and dizzy. “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl.”

  Chris married with a kid—it was almost too much to comprehend. Dusty changed the subject. “So, what are you doing now?”

  “I’ve got a good job over at the steel mill in West Lake,” he said, again with that tight-lipped smile. “We just bought a house out on Deer Trail Road. The old Avery place.”

  “That’s a great house,” she admitted, knowing it well. The Averys had moved downstate not too long ago, according to Julia. “You really like living in this town?”

  “Yeah, I do.” He nodded. “Everyone knows everyone else.”

  She laughed softly, hugging herself. “That’s why I hate it.”

  “Nick didn’t,” he replied, catching her eye. His gaze was soft now, more open.

  “I know.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Maybe that’s why he came back, because he loved it here.”

  Chris raised his eyebrows at her and then frowned. “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  He glanced down at the headstone and then lifted his gaze off into the distance. “I think…honestly, I think he came back because this town loved him.”

  Dusty smiled, blinking back tears. “I did, too.”

  “Yeah, so did I.” Chris’ voice broke when he said it and she looked up at him sharply.

  She had forgotten about him almost, but Shane startled her when he stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

  Chris glanced over his shoulder. "Gotta go." Shane motioned to him. "Take care of yourself, Dusty."

  He headed down the hill, not looking back at her. Like a trained puppy dog, she thought as he climbed carefully over the chest-high spiked fence.

  She watched them get into the Mustang. Shane stepped hard on the gas, dust flying from underneath his tires as he skidded down the path running next to the fence and up onto Hubbard, heading toward town. He never was one to use a front entrance, she thought.

  He's lying—or he's covering up for someone.

  She knelt in front of the headstone, putting the yellow rose down. She traced his name, the dates. Dominick William Chandler. May God Have Mercy Upon His Soul. Dusty frowned. That was another of Julia's touches.

  God have mercy, she thought, looking up, her eyes falling on the space Shane had vacated.

  May God have mercy upon his soul.

  Chapter Four

  The door was closed.

  She had to pass it every day, and it was beginning to bother her. In spite of what was going on back in Chicago, it bothered her so much she almost wished she were back in her apartment, even if her roommate’s cat liked to curl around her head like a hat at night. She didn’t know which was worse, the investigation hanging over her head, or the closed door she now had to pass every day.

  A month, that’s what she told her father and stepmother—and Jack. She told him, too, making the call in Nick’s Jeep, calling from her cell on the outskirts of town, where she actually could get more than just a few bars on her phone. After that, she’d called her roommate, Kathy, who had agreed to ship her some of her clothes and personal things. She was taking a month off. A mourning vacation. None of them had been happy about it, including her. She didn’t want to stay here, with memories of Nick around every corner, but she couldn’t go either. Not yet.

  And still, the door stayed shut, a poster of Murphy's Law thumb-tacked to it. "It's okay to be a pessimist once in a while, Nick,” she remembered saying when she gave the poster to him.

  She passed it on her way to breakfast. She passed it coming down the hall late at night, when she was tired enough she might be able to get some sleep. She passed it, wet and shivering and wrapped in a towel, after taking a shower. She had passed it at least twice a day, every day, for the past two weeks...but she still didn’t have the nerve to look inside.

  Julia hadn’t mentioned cleaning it out or going through his things again. She had changed his sheets and made his bed and Dusty had watched all of that with mixed feelings of horror and awe. Then the door had been shut again.

  It scared her.

  Not so much the fact that the room was there and she had to go by it, or that all of his things were still in it, or that there were clean sheets waiting for him. Those things bothered her, but it was more than just that.

  It was the door—the closed door.

  One of Julia's favorite gripes when they were kids had been that Nick never shut his door when he was changing. Dusty had always been able to go by on her way to her room and see him sitting on his bed, doing his homework, reading, munching on pretzels and drinking Mountain Dew. Sometimes he would call her in, sometimes he was gone—but the door was always left wide open.

  In the middl
e of the night, if she would get up to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom, she would hear him breathing. Sometimes, if the moon was full—and Nick left his shade up, his curtains open and, whenever possible, the window gaping—she could see him curled up, the covers mostly kicked off.

  It was unsettling to see the door shut. It was unnatural. Julia had shut the door and had somehow managed to shut Nick out of their lives without having to deal with it, and Dusty didn’t have the nerve to open it back up. She passed it, feeling guilty, knowing it just wasn’t right for it to be closed. It stung. Nick's door stayed open. Always open.

  Dusty put her hand on the doorknob.

  Her palms were sweating, trembling. She stared for the longest time at Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong, will. Oh, that was the truth. Everything had gone wrong, and it was getting more and more and more wrong every day. It had never occurred to her things could go wrong, as wrong as this, and never get any better.

  Everything was out of focus, as if the world were tilting. Her hand felt disconnected from her body as it turned the doorknob, and

  What are you doing? Oh my god, you aren’t really going in there you aren’t really

  pushed it open.

  It was easy. Somehow she thought it would resist, but it swung open wide—no squeaky hinges, no cobwebs.

  She couldn’t breathe. Her heart, quivering near the back of her throat, was getting in the way. She leaned against the door frame, wide-eyed and frozen, rejecting the possibility, even as her brother, her dead brother, smiled at her from his bed.

  She found her voice.

  Then she began to scream.

  “Dusty?”

  Julia. It was Julia calling up from downstairs. Dusty took her hand away from her mouth and for a moment she felt everything slipping sideways. She could barely get air into her lungs, as if there were something heavy sitting on her chest. She felt like she was falling, or the floor was dropping away.

  And then it was okay again. She was leaning against the door frame, staring into the Kodak paper-eyes of Nick and Shane (a picture!) lying on the bed.

  “It’s okay,” she called, her voice surprising her, how steady it was. “It was…nothing.”

  She moved into the room.

  His bed, his dresser, his CD collection—everything was still there, as if waiting for him to return to it.

  His models—the ’68 Corvette she’d helped him do one rainy afternoon, the Blue Angel planes—sat collecting dust on his shelves. His walls—Angelina Jolie from Tomb Raider, a Detroit Red Wings pennant, a bright red Porsche Carrera GT. A well-loved and often used skateboard that hadn’t seen pavement in years stuck out from his closet. His skis stood propped against a chair in one corner, just waiting to be waxed so they could hit the slopes.

  He was everywhere. He filled all the available space, nearly tangible. His presence followed her as she moved about the room, just looking, not daring to touch. There was a half-eaten bag of Doritos sitting on his dresser, neatly clothes-pinned shut. Waiting. She realized with a sinking feeling that Julia would never be able to yell at him again for having food in his room.

  Ultraomnipresent. Wasn’t that the word Nick loved, from that e.e. cummings poem? If I was a superhero, he said, that’s what my powers would be. Somehow she could feel him that way now. He was here that way…somehow…because he was…

  “Hey there, Dusty.”

  The voice, the finger poking her shoulder, was unmistakable, even as she whirled around. The life felt sucked right out of her body, her heart forgetting how to beat. She knew it was. She knew, because Nick was…was…

  Here.

  She screamed, looking into his face, looking into his face. He looked as if someone had tried to piece him back together like a gruesome puzzle, but hadn’t been quite successful. Flesh hung loosely from his scalp, flapping wetly as he smiled at her. His eyes—what eyes?—were gaping holes in his head where blood trailed like tears down his face, running through those places where hunks of flesh were just gone missing.

  She screamed and screamed and screamed.

  “Dusty.” The voice, rough and gritty, made her shudder. That wasn’t Nick’s voice. It couldn’t be.

  He grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her, looking for all the world like he was grinning, but he wasn’t, there was just no skin left over his teeth, and the blood, so dark it was black, tracing rivulets from his—holes—eyes, that loose piece of flesh flopping against his head with a wet sound and she couldn’t help it, she screamed and screamed…

  "Dusty! Wake up! Dusty!"

  The real world slipped slowly back and her father was shaking her. She was dizzy.

  "Are you okay?" He peered into her face. He had his fuzzy blue robe on and she saw his outline in the faint light from the hall.

  "Dead," she whispered thickly. "His eyes, there was...was..."

  "Okay." He pulled her close, holding her. She shuddered against him, and when the world clicked back into place, the sobs came, the force of the tears tremendous.

  "Okay, it's okay." He stroked her hair and she clutched him, trembling, her eyes closed tight. "It's only a dream. You're all right."

  Dusty recognized the words and they terrified her. She’d heard them all of her life, and she knew their meaning all too well. They were a parent's words, comfort words, Band-Aid words. They were false words.

  "It's okay," he told her, and she heard the tightness in his voice. "Everything's going to be all right."

  They were lies. Gentle, sugar-coated words of comfort—just facades to keep life in focus, maybe even to keep insanity away. They twined themselves through the heart and mind, numbing their way.

  The image of him standing there, grinning, sightless, his scalp flopping, made her shudder and she drew a shaky breath. The numbness wasn’t enough. She needed something more powerful.

  It was never going to be okay again.

  * * * *

  It was becoming an obsession.

  The still closeness she felt when she entered the cemetery was calming, but it was more than that. It became a steady bit of normal. She longed for order, a sense of reality, but she couldn’t even bring herself to call Jack and ask how the investigation was going. That represented responsibility. Getting back into the swing of things, as her father said. Forgetting Nick was what it came down to, and above everything, she refused to do that.

  They seemed to be managing quite well, her parents. Life goes on and all that. Julia cooked dinner and did her crosswords and laughed at the jokes on Everybody Loves Raymond re-runs. Her father went to work, took out the garbage, read the paper, watched football on Sundays.

  They had reestablished a routine.

  But there was a space they couldn’t ignore, no matter how hard they tried. An empty space at the dinner table, an empty space in the living room when they were watching Lost or The Tudors. Dusty didn’t want to go back to the way things were, not without Nick.

  So, here was her order, her routine. In the cemetery, she could talk to Nick. She wasn’t crazy enough to think he heard her, but somehow it made her feel better. She wasn’t forgetting him, like everyone else seemed to have done. It was keeping him alive, and that was the most important thing.

  "Hi, Mr. Evans!" Dusty yelled, although she was only standing five feet away from him.

  "Well, hi." He waved as he walked toward her car. "You were out early this morning."

  "It's prettiest here in the morning." She fished for the keys in her purse and, when she found them, zipped up her jacket. It was starting to get colder.

  "What was that?" He tapped his right ear.

  "I said," Dusty raised her voice. "The morning is so pretty here!"

  "So true! I love this place." He ran a hand through his white hair. "I spent my life here. I suppose I'll be spending death here, too."

  "Oh, God, here we go," Dusty said with a sigh, looking out across the cemetery. Evans had been the caretaker since she could remember, and because there weren’t many p
eople to talk to out here, once he got going, he never wanted to stop.

  "What was that, Dusty?" He tapped the hearing aid in his shirt pocket. "I have to get new batteries for this thing."

  "I've gotta go!" Dusty was practically yelling. "I've got to pick up something at Cougar's!"

  "All right, I'll see you tomorrow then." He turned away and limped toward the main office.

  He's getting old, she thought, and it was a sad thought. He had to hire kids around town to help with the place now. He did love the place—and he really probably was going to be buried here.

  "Bye," she called, getting into the car. She didn’t think he heard her.

  * * * *

  For Dusty, if there was one place in Larkspur filled with memories of Nick, it was Cougar's General Store. The force of the memories was still unbearably painful, but there just wasn’t anywhere else to get the essentials without driving all the way out of town. She hadn’t gone into Cougar's because she didn’t want to remember. She didn’t even like to look at the store front with its rotting wooden porch, and windows so filled with handwritten specials it was impossible to see inside.

  She couldn’t avoid it forever. Cougar’s dog, Sarge, thumped his tail as she approached and she bent to pat his head before she went in. Cougar's door had never had bells on it to let him know when someone entered.

  "I ain’t deaf," he would say. "What do I need bells for?"

  The store smelled of coffee and the tobacco Will Cougar used to fill his pipe. It wasn’t a huge store, not like the Krogers in Westlake, but he kept a good variety.

  "Anything you want I got, and if I don't have it, you don't need it!" he was fond of saying, and when she was little, Dusty would have sworn it was the truth.

  She went down the third aisle and picked up a box of Tampax. She used to be embarrassed to buy them, especially in Cougar's, but the awkward shyness passed after she was fifteen or so.

  It had surprised and scared her to find her period had started. It had happened the morning after her dream and the sight of blood had made her sick. She’d even stayed in bed with cramps, something she didn’t often do. It had startled her, although she knew she was due. Somehow, she still hadn’t expected it. That—more than the rising and setting sun, her parents’ continuing lives, time ticking away on the grandfather clock in the living room—hit home for her.