Only way to dig out the roots without damaging them would’ve been to use a shovel.
Why would Sarah dig out her sister’s roses with such care if she was intent on destroying what Diana loved?
The same Sarah who was a ghost.
Getting up out of bed, I stared at the house across the road, its windows aglow with light. I knew what I had to do. It was all so clear now. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.
60
It was cold, a light misty rain had just stopped falling, and the sneaker on my good foot was wet, dirty, while the large trash bag I’d tied around my moon boot kept threatening to make me slip. The trees of the watching forest shivered in the twilight darkness. I didn’t know how long I’d been digging, but it had to be at least an hour. I’d managed to uproot the roses, but it was hard going through the packed soil.
Sweat plastered my T-shirt to my skin despite the cold, and my back ached, but I thrust the shovel into the earth and dug. I hadn’t been able to sleep or even relax after my epiphany. I’d stayed awake, eating fudge and chocolate, and drinking Coke while staring at Diana and Calvin’s house, waiting for the lights to go out. The house had finally gone dark at eleven-thirty.
Then I’d had to wait for everyone else in the Cul-de-Sac to go to sleep.
Isaac, of course, had been up, and I’d seen glimpses of light through the trees that told me Anastasia’s family was still awake, but the holdouts had surrendered before two. I’d waited another half hour until all was silent, unbroken even by the passage of distant cars, then crept out of the house, picking up the shovel I’d seen in Shanti’s vegetable patch on my way.
As I’d crossed the Cul-de-Sac by the light of the moon, the streetlights off for some reason, a small part of me had said this was a very bad idea, but that voice was wiped out by the overwhelming wave of certainty in my blood.
The roses, the way Diana babied them, the way she wouldn’t let anyone else near them.
“It all adds up,” I muttered. “It all adds up.”
I dug and dug, until I’d made a hole so big I had to stand inside it to dig any further.
“Sarah’s dead. Diana buried her here.” My head felt thick, my tongue woolly.
I stopped midshovel, unsure what I was doing here in the dark, but then the break in my certainty faded as fast as it had struck, and I began digging again. It all made sense, the pieces fitting together like a jigsaw.
Diana had killed Sarah because Sarah had been having an affair with Diana’s perfect Calvin. Then my mother had helped Diana bury the body—because my mother would do that for her best friend. But the two fought for some reason, leading Diana to no longer trust her to keep the secret, and so she’d killed her.
I paused. No, something was wrong with that picture.
That image of my mother helping Diana in the morning sunshine. There had been no hole, just dug-up plants and a ruined and trampled garden bed. Maybe Sarah had used a shovel to dig them up when she left, for reasons I couldn’t yet see.
Stopping, I shook my head.
No, Sarah was dead.
My mother and Diana must’ve buried her the night before, just been doing the tidy-up the next day.
Yes, that was it. That made perfect sense.
My brain throbbed against my skull, the echo going through my bones.
The scrape of movement on wet grass was light, but it crashed like a drum against my over-sensitized hearing. Twisting in the hole, I looked up in time to see the shovel coming down at me. I had a moment of incomprehension—wasn’t I holding the shovel?—before instinct made me throw myself sideways inside the small space.
I hadn’t dug a very wide hole. It was only big enough to jump inside and go deeper. But it proved just big enough to avoid the first blow.
The sharp edge of the shovel dug into the soil beside my head.
Grunting, the person wielding the garden implement wrenched it out. I thrust up the end of my own shovel into their gut in that increment of time. But I had barely any purchase, and my bad leg was threatening to buckle.
Hissing out a breath, my attacker—a formless silhouette, black against the spotlight of the moon—staggered but didn’t fall, and then they were coming at me again. And I knew. I’d done Diana’s job for her. I’d dug my own grave. She’d kill me, scrape the dirt over me, and have the roses replanted before morning broke.
Why would anyone look for me in my neighbor’s rose garden?
I had nowhere to go, no way to climb out of the hole without exposing myself to her. Realizing in the last second that we’d been fighting in silence, I opened my mouth to scream, hoping to wake up the other neighbors … when I heard a voice.
“Calvin? What are you doing?” Diana’s bewildered tone.
Above me, Calvin spun on his heel. “It’s a burglar. I came out to see.”
“What? What are you talking about?” A familiar face looking down into the hole. “Aarav, oh my God, what are you doing down there?”
“Don’t turn your back to him!” Panic was a screaming banshee inside my head. “He killed and buried Sarah here!” I’d gotten it wrong. So fucking wrong. It had always been Calvin, not Diana.
“Ignore him, Diana.” Calvin lowered the shovel with which he’d tried to hit me. “Ishaan told me the boy’s under the care of both a neurologist and a shrink. Serious psychological and mental problems. Jesus, Aarav, I almost took off your head.”
My eyes had adjusted to looking up at the moonlit world and now I saw Diana turn toward her husband, then glance back at me. “Calvin?” Her voice trembled. “Why would you attack him if he’s just digging in the garden?” The silk of her nightgown fluttered in the breeze, the matching robe she’d thrown over it liquid silver in the moonlight. “It’s weird, not dangerous.”
“I wasn’t thinking, Di. Just decided to get some air because I couldn’t sleep, then got scared when I heard someone out here.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “We should call an ambulance, get him sectioned for his own safety.” He reached for her.
Diana stumbled back a step. “You’re a surgeon, Calvin. You’re obsessive about protecting your hands. Gardening is the one thing with which you never help me. Why would you go back to my garden shed, remove a shovel from its hook, then come out here when you could’ve just called Ishaan or the cops?”
“Diana.” Calvin’s voice was ice calm, the tone of a surgeon dealing with a histrionic patient.
But Diana was having none of it. “What’s he saying about Sarah?”
“He’s rambling, raving as a result of drugs. I didn’t say anything because I know how much you like him, but Ishaan says his drug habit is spiraling out of control.”
I parted my lips to speak, then turned and began digging again.
“Aarav.” Calvin’s voice. “Stop.”
“Why?” Diana asked. “Leave him be. He’s not doing any harm—he can’t even get out of there without help. Leave him be—we’ll go get Ishaan.”
“He’s ruining your rose garden.” Calvin’s voice was closer now. “I said stop!”
I spun back, ready to dodge another attack, but Diana’s voice cut through the night like a sharpened blade. “Why can’t Aarav dig, Cal?” Brittle words. “What did you do to Sarah?”
My eyes still acclimatized to the moonlit scene above my head, I saw the exact moment when Calvin made up his mind. Shifting his balance, he took a step forward and began to bring up the shovel again, this time to swing at Diana. Both of them seemed to have forgotten I was there. Screaming a wordless cry, I thrust the top end of my shovel out of the hole and toward Calvin’s knees.
I hit with little force. But it was enough.
He went down hard just as my foot gave up, shooting pain through my leg, searing my brain with agony and crumpling me to the dirt in a cramped position that left me helpless and exposed. The last thing I saw before my brain stopped was a silver streak launching itself at Calvin’s fallen form,
a woman’s scream shattering the night.
61
Blue and red lights flashed against my retinas, dull color against the fog that was my vision. I stared uncomprehendingly at the white tent several white-suited people were putting up around Diana’s rose garden.
Ghosts in a ghost tent.
“Don’t let this slide off, honey. You need to stay warm.” Firm brown hands pulled a silvery blanket around my seated form, the fabric reminding me of …
“Diana.” It came out a rasp. “Is Diana all right?”
The voice that answered didn’t come from the plump woman who’d put the blanket around me. It was harder, firmer. My brain supplied a name: Constable Sefina Neri. “Mrs. Liu is a little bruised but otherwise fine. Physically at least.”
I looked to the left, in the direction of her voice. She was haloed in the lights from the police vehicles behind her, her body clad in a heavy high-visibility jacket and her hair pulled back in an untidy knot.
“Did we wake you?” Neri asked.
“What?” I couldn’t quite put the pieces together, images and thoughts floating away like drifts of snow. “Diana? Hurt?”
Her look was piercing. “No.” She enunciated the word very carefully. “Beau and Mia Liu, and Ariki Henare, all woke and came to her aid. Diana has no major injuries.”
“Pink roses,” I muttered.
“I can’t tell if you’re in shock, or zoned out.” A glance over my head. “Is he high or did he take a blow to the head?”
“No knock that I’ve been able to see.” The gentler, warmer, older voice. “But he’s not mentally present. You know your business, Sefi, but I don’t think you should be talking to him now if you want anything admissible.”
I saw people beyond the rim of painful light. Isaac, that was Isaac. Why was Mellie wearing a bright green blanket? “Where’s Phil?”
“Phil?” Neri’s tone was confused. “You mean Isaac Brennan’s father? He’s in an elder-care facility. Do you believe he knows something about this?”
Her words holding no meaning for me, I stared at the ghost tent. “Sarah’s down here,” I got out past the thickness of my tongue. “He buried her there. Ghost Sarah in her ghost house. Ghost gifts.”
“Shit. Take him in.” Neri was already turning away. “I’ll tell Regan he’s not fit to be interviewed.”
I went to ask her something, tell her something, but my tongue was too fat and my head full of blackness.
62
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I lifted heavy lids, my lips so dry and cracked that they felt alien.
“Here.” A sliver of ice cold against my mouth, droplets of water seeping in. I sucked desperately at one piece, then the next, until at last, I could swallow, could focus, could see again.
Lily’s dark eyes looked down at me, her hair framing her face in strands of black silk.
“What?”
Somehow, she understood. “Ambulance brought you to the hospital two days ago,” she told me, the comforting scents of sugar and coffee in her every movement. “How much do you remember?”
Shovels, fighting, a woman made of fluid silver. “Calvin,” I croaked.
“Yup. No one saw that coming—except you, apparently.” She brushed my hair off my forehead. “He’s in police custody.”
The curtains parted before I could ask her anything else, and I saw Neri and Regan. Lily scowled. “He’s barely awake. Go away.”
“No.” I coughed. “I want to speak to them.”
“Fifteen minutes,” Lily said to the cops with steely authority. “I’ll tell the nurses so they know to come kick you out.”
“Did you find Sarah?” I asked as she left, the curtain swinging behind her.
“Yes.” Detective Regan sat down in the chair Lily had vacated, while Neri moved around a second chair so I could see them both.
“We need to take your statement,” Regan continued, purple shadows under his eyes and his skin even paler than usual. “After that, you can ask us more questions and we’ll tell you what we know.”
I had no reason to hold back now. I told them all I knew. All I remembered.
“My head isn’t right,” I admitted again afterward. “My memories are patchy and there’s a film or fog over everything. My neurosurgeon was right to worry.”
The two cops exchanged a look before Regan gave a small nod. Neri shifted her attention to me. “There are indications someone tampered with your food. Labs are still working on exactly what was added, but it’s nothing you should’ve been consuming alongside your prescribed painkillers and other medications.”
Nausea battled with relief. “Who? Shanti? No, it can’t have been her.”
“It was in the fudge. Possibly also in some of the other sweets.”
Staring at them, I waited for the punchline. But neither of them laughed. “Diana makes the fudge.”
“Yes, and since it’s your favorite, Mrs. Liu’s been making extra just for you. According to her, Calvin not only volunteered to drop off the bags, he added chocolates to the package because”—she looked down at her notes, then quoted—“ ‘he felt so helpless, and he wanted to do something for Aarav, and Aarav’s always had a sweet tooth.’ ”
She glanced up. “We discovered a doctored bag of fudge in his office at work. We believe he was taking fresh bags, adulterating them with drugs, then swapping them out with the bags Diana prepared for you.”
I’d known that Calvin had dropped off that one bag, but it had meant nothing to me. Calvin did stuff like that for Diana all the time. “Dr. Binchy thought I was doing drugs. Why did you even check the food?”
“Because Dr. Binchy is an excellent physician,” Neri responded. “He took another look at your results in light of Calvin’s arrest, had the hospital run more blood panels, and came to the conclusion that the mix of drugs just didn’t make sense.”
A small smile from Regan. “Honestly? The two of us still thought you were doing some designer drug, but then we interviewed your sister—don’t worry, we were very gentle, and her mother was with her throughout.”
I scowled, lifting my head a little from the bed. “Why would you interview her anyway?”
“Because children notice things, and they remember more than people realize,” Neri said.
“We asked her if she’d seen you eat anything strange,” Regan began, and I got it—they’d wanted to see if Pari had unknowingly spotted me taking drugs. “You know what she said? That you mostly just eat candy and drink Coke, but she took a little of your favorite fudge to school one time and it made her sick, so she didn’t know why you liked it so much.”
I sucked in a breath, remembering that day she’d come home sick from school. “I always told her she could take whatever she wanted from my drawer.” Guilt twisted up my insides. “Is she—”
“No serious effects,” Regan said. “She had only a minor dose.”
“My doctor told me I shouldn’t be having so much sugar,” I said on an exhale. “Guess I should’ve listened.”
No smile on her face, Neri said, “We also found your notebook in your pocket. One page has writing noticeably dissimilar to yours, referring to your father’s secretary—is it possible Dr. Liu had access to it?”
Pain stabbed my head. “I don’t know. The memories are erratic.” Flashes of a glove box, of a hospital, of Diana’s worried face. “Why did Calvin come after me anyway?”
“He’s not talking, so we don’t know.”
Regan leaned forward. “How did you come to suspect him?”
“I didn’t. I thought it was Diana.” I told them how I’d tried to track down Sarah and failed, and of the sudden resurgence of a critical memory: my mother in Diana’s rose garden. “My mother wouldn’t have helped bury Sarah. Not if it was Calvin who killed her. That’s not why Mum died.”
“We currently have no evidence linking Calvin to your mother’s murder, though of course, we’re—”
I was alre
ady thinking about something else, my mind unable to hold on to the present. “You should check up on a doctor he had an affair with who died of a sudden heart attack. She had little kids, so she must’ve been young.”
Both officers stilled.
“Alice probably knows her name.” Laughter bubbled up out of my gut. “You don’t even have to go far—she’s in another ward of this hospital.” I’d seen the label printed on my sheets, realized we were both in the same facility.
The nurse bustled in at that moment to usher Neri and Regan out.
“Is Lily still here?” I asked her after they’d slipped away. The two hadn’t given me much, but right now, I felt oddly disassociated from it all.
“Who, dear?” The thin brunette plumped up my pillows.
My heart started to pound. “My friend. She’s petite, part Thai, with black hair.”
“I haven’t seen anyone like that.” She smiled at me before leaving the room, pulling the curtain shut behind her.
I gripped the sheets in my fists, a scream building inside me.
The curtain moved. “Hey. I went and got you a candy bar.” Lily waggled it in the air. “Your sweet tooth has to be aching.”
I pressed the buzzer and held it.
Lily tilted her head. “What’s the matter?”
The nurse ran back in. “What’s the problem? Are you in pain?” She nudged past Lily. “Excuse me, young lady.” A pause. “Oh, you’re the one he was looking for.” Then she glanced at me, her eyebrows lowered. “What was so urgent that you had to light up the call button?”
Lily made a “you’re in trouble” face at the same time.
I grinned and said, “Can I go for a walk?”
“I don’t see why not—as long as you use your crutches,” the nurse said with a reluctant smile. “Your foot’s had a bit of a rest after that stunt you pulled. Digging a hole, I hear! That’s not how breaks heal, young man.”
Quiet in Her Bones Page 32