Better Left Buried

by Frisch, Belinda

  She stood, holding onto the railing and intending to go back to the master bedroom. The drugs worked quickly and she stumbled across the kitchen threshold. The spongy wood floor groaned as she veered far enough to the left to knock a lamp off the living room end table. Ceramic chips scattered, one of them lodging in the bottom of her foot. The painkiller kept the agony at bay, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of a rock in a shoe she wasn’t wearing. Her heel broke through the rotting floor and she flung herself forward, collapsing on the mold-covered couch and choking on the acrid smell as the particles aerosolized. Confusion set in, then finally exhaustion. Her eyes rolled closed, tears spilling down her cheeks as her breathing became labored. Her chest heaved, her body fighting its own death, no matter how much her mind welcomed it.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  There comes a point when there’s so little time left between falling asleep and waking up that it’s not worth fighting the insomnia. Brea had hit that wall when Adam’s call came in. She didn’t recognize the phone number, but seven consecutive attempts at getting through said the matter was urgent. She hurried out of the house to meet him.

  “How long ago did she send the message?” She climbed into the passenger’s side of his truck and put on her seatbelt. The two of them had never seen eye to eye, but with Harmony in serious trouble, that didn’t matter.

  “A little over an hour ago.” The tires squealed on the pavement.

  Brea didn’t even care if the sound woke her mother. Blocking Harmony’s number had been a knee-jerk reaction, an easy fix that let her enjoy Jaxon without having to stand up to her to do it. She felt terribly guilty, wondering if Harmony had tried to call first. She’d never forgive herself if something serious had happened. “What did the message say exactly?”

  Adam handed her his phone. “I love you, too. I’m sorry. Goodbye.” He was right about the finality of the message. “Goodbye” wasn’t in Harmony’s vocabulary. Adam ran his hands through his black hair, a motion he must have repeated a dozen times as he made his way through the village of Reston. “I’ve been everywhere, Brea. Everywhere.” His eyes were red and swollen from crying.

  “Turn here.” She pointed for him to make a right.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The only place she could be. You know the construction area on Maple Avenue?” He nodded. “Head that way.” She was playing the odds that Harmony never told him about her mother’s house.

  “Brea, what’s going on?”

  She dialed Harmony’s cell. “There’s no time to explain.” The phone rang and rang before finally going to voicemail. She hung up and called Harmony right back, getting the same result. “I might know where she is.”

  “We really can’t be wasting time. Are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure about anything.” She kept her eye on the speedometer. “Can’t you go any faster?” He was already doing eighty in a forty-five.

  He turned on Maple Avenue, kicking loose gravel up into the wheel wells. “Where to now?”

  “There.” Brea pointed at the only house left standing.

  Adam turned into the crumbled remains of the driveway and slammed the truck into park. Brea was out the door before he had a chance to pull his keys from the ignition.

  “Harmony!” Fresh wood covered the front door. “Harmony!” Brea ran around the back, her feet sinking into the thick mud. “Harmony, are you here?” She knocked, the rough two-by-fours biting into her knuckles.

  “Harmony!” Adam shouted.

  “Over here!” Brea climbed on an overturned five gallon bucket and lifted the garage window. “Hold this. Come on.” The single pane glass made the window too heavy for her to manage while climbing through. “I’ll open the door from the other side. I remember seeing a toolbox in here. You can pry the boards loose.”

  Adam gave Brea a shove and she braced for impact.

  Two inches of standing water covered the garage floor and Brea landed with a splash.

  The red tool box she’d seen had been moved. “Harmony? Are you here?” She hurried into the kitchen and froze when she saw Harmony’s purse turned out on the table. “Adam, she’s here!” The empty pill bottles had Brea fearing the worst. She swept the light across the living room and saw Harmony’s lifeless body lying on the couch. “Harmony, please answer me.” Brea rolled her ankle on a piece of broken ceramic, but ignored the pain. She ran to Harmony, blinking to clear the tears from her eyes, struggling to see by the dim light of her cell phone. “Harmony, wake up.” Her lips had taken on a bluish tint and her skin was sickly pale. “Oh, God. No.” Brea set two fingers to the side of her neck, unable to find even a weak pulse. Her body was cold. “No! No!”

  Adam tried to force his way inside, but had a hard time getting through.

  “She’s not breathing!” Brea went to help him, but her feet broke, one by one, through the wood. The decaying floor gave, mold and moisture having eaten to the subfloor. Blinding pain shot up to Brea’s hips, her body hanging half-in and half-out of the room. “Help!” She struggled to pull herself up and the hole widened. She was wet from the garage flood, slippery and unable to secure a firm grip.

  “Hang on!” Adam finally broke in and rushed toward her.

  “Adam, no!”

  The floor caved, sending both of them crashing to the basement.

  A heavy piece of wood pinned Brea’s leg.

  Adam had hit his head and a cloud of red swirled in the water around him. He was unconscious.

  Brea remembered Jaxon measuring the basement’s square footage, saying that the room was too small for the footprint of the house. He was right. Someone had built a wall and she was on the other side of it.

  Her, Adam, and the skeletal remains she could only assume were Tom’s.

  The couch sank into the first floor, tipping Harmony’s body dangerously close to the edge.

  Brea prayed not to be buried alive with her dead best friend.

  “Adam? Adam, can you hear me?”

  The faint glow of her cell phone, on a cinder block ledge, granted her a glimpse of the tiny room within a room, a void behind a dummy wall where she was terrified no one would ever find her.

  The floor gave, spilling things on top of them.

  Brea crossed her arms over her head, screaming when the end table came at her and knocked her phone into the water. The light cut out the minute it went under, her vision not long after.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Brea opened her eyes and then quickly closed them. The bright light over the head of her hospital bed burned to look at. She tried to talk, but her throat was raw, nearly swollen shut.

  “How did I get here?” she whispered.

  Jaxon appeared in the doorway, a cup of coffee in each hand. He looked exhausted and his clothes were covered with dried mud.

  “You found me.” She clenched her burning throat.

  He nodded, his eyes red with tears.

  “Don’t talk, honey.” Brea’s mother adjusted her pillow. She looked terrible for maybe the first time in her life. Her red hair hung in tangled ropes around a face devoid of makeup, her skin mottled and unflatteringly pale, revealing the age spots she’d always worked so hard to keep hidden. “It’s from surgery. They had to put a breathing tube in.” She held a Styrofoam cup to Brea’s lips for her to take a drink. The water made her queasy and the relief of the cold temperature disappeared as soon as she swallowed.

  Pins stuck out of the cast immobilizing her left arm. She tried to wiggle her fingers, but even drugged, the slight movement ignited terrible pain.

  “Adam?” Her whispered voice was foreign and gravelly.

  “He has a head injury, but he’s alive in a room down the hall. He still hasn’t come to.”

  “And Harmony?” Her eyes filled with tears and her mouth bent into a frown.

  Jaxon set the coffee cups on the tray and held her hand, careful to avoid the scrapes on her skin.

  “Mom?”

  “They say the damage
is minor, considering. A head injury is never minor, I guess. But you broke your arm in three places and have two cracked ribs.”

  “Mom, why won’t you answer me?”

  Jaxon moved aside and Brea saw a nurse talking to her Uncle Jim in the hallway. Pat and Bruce stood behind him, both wearing their police uniforms.

  “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

  Again, her mother deflected. “Hey, look who’s here to see you.”

  “Dad?” She almost didn’t recognize him. His once brown hair had turned almost completely gray, the lines on his face deeper than she remembered.

  He walked around the far side of the bed and roughed her hair like she was five again. “Good to see you, kiddo. You gave us one hell of a scare.” His smile appeared forced, insincere.

  “Do you want anything?” Jaxon asked. “Hungry? I can go to the cafeteria or out if you want something.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and she could tell from the sweat on his palm he was nervous.

  “Can I talk to Dad alone, please?”

  “Brea, we all want to sit with you,” her mother protested.

  “Mom, please?”

  Her father gestured for her mother and Jaxon to leave. “Why don’t you give us a minute?”

  “I…”

  “Jo, she’ll be fine. Let me talk to her.”

  Joan reluctantly agreed. Both she and Jaxon left, closing the door behind them.

  “Harmony’s dead, isn’t she?” Brea shifted in her bed and reached for the cup of water, the searing rib pain like a spear through her side.

  Her father lowered the bed rail and sat down next to her. “They did what they could, but she was gone by the time paramedics got there.” He sighed and reached for a tissue. Knowing the truth and hearing it spoken were two different things. She wept. The smell of the mold and damp that had been Harmony’s final resting place filled her runny nose. Mud caked the fingernails of her right hand and she remembered clawing to try to get to her when the weight of the couch caused the last of the rotting section of floor to collapse. “I tried …” Her voice trailed off.

  “There was nothing you could do.” He sniffled and set his hand on her shoulder. “Why were you there? Why were either of you there?”

  Only one answer made sense, even if it wasn’t entirely true. “Harmony remembered what happened to her father.”

  “What did she tell you?” Her father looked uneasy, like he was about to be implicated in wrongdoing.

  “Nothing, really. Everything came to her in bits and pieces. I know Tom beat up on Charity and that she was hiding how bad things really were. Mom and Uncle Jim filled in some of the blanks, but I still don’t understand how you got involved, or what Charity and Tom’s issues had to do with you leaving. Mom says you got in a fist fight with Tom before he took off. He didn’t leave, did he?”

  “No.” Her father’s shoulders rounded and she sensed he wanted to finally clear the air of whatever family secret had divided them most of her life.

  “And it wasn’t a fight that made you a suspect?”

  He shook his head. “No. But I had nothing to do with killing him. We had been there that night—you, your mother, and I—and we left when things got heated. Tom and Charity got into their usual fight and everyone cleared out. No one wanted to have to step in between friends. Tom implied there was something going on between Charity and me, which was ridiculous, but he was wasted. There was no point in trying to convince him of anything at that point. He grabbed Charity’s arm hard enough that she was fighting back tears. Harmony pleaded with him to let her go. It was all I could think of the rest of the night. By the time I got back to the house, Tom was already dead.”

  “How?”

  “Charity shot him. Their marriage had been troubled, Brea. The kind of stuff that was going on in that house, we all should have known … we did know … it was going to be either her or him.”

  “And she won.”

  “There was no win, Brea. She was bleeding out of a knife wound that ran down her whole side. I wanted to take her to the hospital, to take Harmony and call the police and an ambulance, but she begged me not to. She said no one could know I was there. She took off before I could stop her and all I kept thinking was that what she did wasn’t wrong. He’d have killed her if he could have. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  A light went on, the pieces of the stories finally fitting together. “You hid his body.”

  “I was a stupid kid. What the hell did I know about legal proceedings at twenty-years-old? Charity could’ve probably gotten away with killing him. It was self defense. But once it was covered up, there was no uncovering it. The police found my prints in Tom’s blood which is when we made up the story about a fight. Charity did everything she could to divert attention away from me, and for that, I’m grateful. The fact that they never found his body helped. Evidence went missing and the investigation was dropped, but there was so much speculation.”

  Missing evidence pointed at an accomplice. “Uncle Jim?” She’d have never believed him capable of bending the law he lived by.

  “I’m not proud of involving him, Brea, and he didn’t want to do it, but family sticks together. You mother begged him to make sure nothing happened to me.”

  “But he made you leave.” The spark of anger became a flame.

  “It was the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life.”

  She struggled to blow her nose one-handed and wadded up the tissue at her side. “They found Tom’s remains, didn’t they?” Guilt compounded her sadness. Not only had she not been there for Harmony when she had needed her most, she’d reopened a case that would undoubtedly lead back to her father.

  “It’s not your fault.” Her father must have read the blame in her expression. “They’d have found it when the house was torn down, anyway.”

  Charity had held on to the house to keep her crime hidden.

  “And Charity?”

  “Uncle Jim notified her about Harmony. She’d already made arrangements to sell the house and had it closed up to preserve anything left inside. Hopefully it’s enough to exonerate her. She said even without what happened to Harmony, she’d been putting things in order to turn herself in. Jim’s allowing her a week to finish her treatment and—”

  “And bury her daughter.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Sitting in her hospital room, dark except for the flickering glow of late night television, the tension between Brea and Jaxon was palpable. He had stayed by her side since her admission, but they’d yet to talk about what happened.

  Details had come back in pieces, the most clear being the lack of expression on Harmony’s lifeless face. She couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  “How did you know where to find me?” Brea rolled her head toward him, the pain meds making her dizzy.

  “I didn’t. Not for sure.” He looked awful. The hint of normally well-groomed scruff on his chin had almost become a beard. His hair was disheveled, dusty from the mud and dirt he’d brushed out of it, and dark circles swallowed his hazel eyes. “Your mother called me in a panic. She was sure you were with Harmony. I doubted it, but I took her to the one place I figured the two of you would go.” His gaze went distant. “You scared the crap out of me. The front door was busted in and I—I don’t know what I thought happened. I ran into the house so fast I nearly fell in that hole with you. Your mother called 9-1-1. I tried to get you out.”

  “I should’ve been there for her.” There were a lot of reasons to accept blame, including blocking Harmony’s cell number, but Brea simplified.

  “You were,” Jaxon said.

  “I mean before.” The event didn’t require definition. “I had no idea things had gotten so bad.”

  “You can put that on me if it helps.” Jaxon looked down at the floor and chewed the corner of his thumb nail. “I was the one telling you to get away from her—”

  “You weren’t the only one,” she interrupted.

  �
��But I was the only one you’d listen to. I didn’t realize how much she leaned on you, or what she was going through. My friends’ biggest problems are what car to ask for, who made homecoming court, and whether or not they can get away with sneaking a few beers. Their lives are the same with or without me. We’re all interchangeable. Like Rachael. She’s gone and no one even misses her. I shouldn’t have pushed.”

  “There was no way we could all be friends. Harmony would never have gone for that.” Brea needed to let Jaxon off the hook. Yes, he’d brought the fact to light, but that didn’t make any of this his fault.

  “She was a complicated girl, Brea. I can’t stand to see you beating yourself up over that. I might be out of line here, but how long could you have held her together? This wasn’t the first time—”

  “I know.” The fact she’d attempted suicide before didn’t make her success an inevitability. Brea was convinced she could have stopped her if she hadn’t been so damn selfish. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Absolutely. How about some of this great hospital TV?” He reclined in the lounge chair next to her bed and opened a bag of chips. “Late night talk show, infomercial, or black and white movie?” Ten channels left limited choices.

  “Surprise me.”

  “Infomercial it is.”

  The last one she watched gave her the overwhelming urge to steam clean everything within a quarter mile. The fact that he watched them, too, was just one more thing to love about him.

  “And whenever you need to talk about it, I’m here.”

  She wasn’t ready and he knew it, like so many things he seemed to understand without her having to say it. “I know. Thank you.” She stared at the vegetable chopper ad that had her thinking of French fries.

  “You want some?” Jaxon held out the salt and vinegar chips, her favorite under normal circumstances. He had dirt from the basement caked under his fingernails.

  She shook her head, her stomach still queasy from the pain medication she’d been weaning herself off of. “Are you sure you don’t want to clean up?”