The Burying Place

by Brian Freeman

  'I already told you, I don't know. But it's not Callie, and that's good, right? I knew Dr Glenn wasn't involved. He couldn't do something like that to his daughter.'

  'What if Callie wasn't his daughter?' Denise interjected.

  Stride shot her a warning glare. He turned back to Micki. 'You told me that you lost your own son early in your pregnancy,' he said softly. 'I'm sorry, but I have to ask. Was that really true?'

  'Yes! You know what happened to my baby!'

  'OK. I know. And the light your mother saw in the woods, you're certain this was on the night that Callie disappeared?'

  'Yes, she told me about it on Saturday, and that's when I went to search. That's when I found the toy.'

  Stride nodded. 'OK, Micki. That's all for now. You can go home.'

  The girl stamped past them up the slope. Serena watched her disappear between the trees as she headed for the lights of the mobile home. 'Where does that leave us?' she asked.

  'Nowhere,' Stride said.

  Denise reached for a cigarette and put it in her mouth without lighting it. 'Look, the toy horn was obviously intended to make us think there was a connection to Callie. Right?'

  Stride thought about it but shook his head. 'No, that doesn’t make sense. As soon as we put a shovel in the ground, we were going to find out that it wasn't Callie buried there.'

  Serena thought again about someone bringing a child's body to the woods in the darkness and how much the burial felt like a religious ceremony. Something private and painful. 'What if the toy is exactly what it looks like?' she suggested. 'A memorial.'

  'What do you mean?' Stride asked.

  'I mean that no one ever expected us to find that toy. It was put there the way you'd put flowers on a grave.'

  'But whose grave?' Denise asked.

  Serena retraced her conversations with Valerie. She realized that when Stride had told her about Micki's discovery of the toy horn, it had felt familiar to her. It had already been part of her consciousness about the case, because she had heard about it before. Valerie had told her about her night at the hospital on New Year's Eve, about the staff blowing toy horns when the clock turned to midnight.

  She could almost picture the scene in her mind. See it. Hear it. Valerie drowsy with pain and drugs. The noise and excitement of the New Year in the maternity ward. The horns squealing. Lullabies playing on the hospital speakers with each new baby born.

  'Another baby,' Serena said.

  Denise looked at her. The unlit cigarette drooped in her mouth. 'What are you talking about?'

  'There must have been other babies born in the hospital that night. New Year's night.'

  'So what?' Denise asked.

  'So I'd like to find out who they were. And whether Regan Conrad was the nurse for any of the mothers.'

  'Yes, but if it was a stranger's child, why bury him here?' Denise asked. 'What does this have to do with Callie?'

  'I don't know,' Serena admitted.

  Even so, her instincts told her that the body in the ground was inextricably linked to Callie's disappearance. Somehow, she knew that this child, whoever he was, was the key to everything.

  Stride was already on the phone. Serena watched him dial.

  'Guppo, it's Stride,' she heard him say. 'I need some information. I'm looking for a list of babies born on January first, preferably those at St Mary's. See if you can find birth announcements on the News- Tribune website, OK? Boys only, don't worry about the girls. I'll hold.'

  He waited. He stared at Serena, and she stared back at him. She realized that more than anything else right now, she wanted to kiss him.

  'I'm here,' he said into the phone. 'That was fast. Give me the names and addresses of the parents, OK?' Then he said, 'Hang on, repeat that. Are you serious?'

  Stride hung up the phone.

  'We have to get back to Duluth right now.'

  Troy Grange activated the security system on the downstairs level of his house before he went upstairs to bed. It was a useless gesture. He had purchased the system to protect Trisha and the kids, and the killer had gotten inside anyway and taken away his beautiful wife. He wanted to rip the panel off the wall and throw it in the fields.

  Troy cried. He didn't let himself cry often, never in public, and never in front of his children. He needed to be strong for them. He couldn't bring back their mother, so the only thing he could do was go on with life. Keep them safe. Try to keep them happy. But when he was alone, in his private moments, he cried. He remembered Trisha's face as vividly as if she were still there beside him. Her touch. Her laugh. How her skin felt when they were in bed. He pounded the wall as he realized that those sensations would begin to dim now, and eventually they would slip out of his memory altogether.

  Safety. Security. There was no such thing. You could live in a fortress and still not keep out the monsters. The sensors, the alarms, the locks, the bars were mostly an illusion. If someone wanted to come in, they could. People like Nick Garaldo would always figure out a way. Sometimes their motive was no more than mischief, to say they went where no one else wanted them to go.

  Sometimes their motive was to kill.

  Troy thought about Nick Garaldo. And Maggie. And the ruined school. He wondered if they would find Nick inside, trapped, suffocated, neck broken, or blood drained from his body. There were so many ways to die in ruins.

  That was when the thought, the memory, poked into Troy's head.

  He stared at the security panel on the wall and remembered the man who had installed it a few weeks earlier. A tall man with scarred skin and eyes like a dead fish. The kind of man who smiled in a way that made you think he wasn't smiling at all. Troy hadn't liked him.

  He didn't know why his mind had dragged up a memory of the security man's face, and then he remembered that he had been thinking about Maggie's phone call. A security guard had called her about Nick and the pistachio shells. A security guard out at the old school.

  Jim Nieman. That was the name. He was almost sure of it.

  Nieman was the same man who had been inside his house.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-nine

  The rope snapped Kasey's chin back as she fell, and a shiver of pain coursed through her spine. She felt a crushing weight on her throat as her body dragged the thick cord into a vise around her neck. Her legs danced spastically. She clawed at the cord with her fingers, but the knots held, and all she felt was blood oozing from her abraded skin. She reached above her head to pull herself up and relieve the pressure, but she had no strength to lift her body.

  Her mind grew cloudy. She knew she was dying.

  Then the frayed section of rope where she had sawed with the metal plate split and gave way. The rope broke, and she fell in darkness and landed with an agonizing, bone-deep blow as her calves slammed the cement floor below her. A loose nail drove into the meat of her leg, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from wailing in pain.

  But she could breathe. Sweet air flooded her lungs. She collapsed on to her hands and knees and air swelled her chest.

  Something scurried across her fingers, and she reared back. It was a rat, and it wasn't alone. The squeals of the animals were excited and close. She clawed the tape from her ankles and lurched to her feet. The blackness made her dizzy, and she waited for her head to clear. She listened for the noises of her captor, but for the time being, she was alone. Alone with no light. No weapon. No phone. She may as well have been lost in the fog again.

  She started to walk with her hands and arms outstretched in front of her. Almost immediately, she tripped and fell. When she squatted and ran her fingers along the floor, she found a jagged block of concrete, three feet by four feet. She traced its edges and then stepped around it. As she inched forward, her numb feet crushed against pebbles of glass with each step and bled. Water dripped on her face. She kicked a piece of scrap metal that clanged on the cement and hissed in pain. She bent down and picked up an L-shaped joist, heavy and rusted. She nestled it in her
fist and felt better that she had something she could use in self-defense.

  Her hands touched a smooth wall ahead of her. She explored it with her fingers and felt lines of grout between square tiles. With her palms flat, she followed the wall, letting it lead her steps. She found the opening of a door frame where the wall ended, but the doorway itself was blocked with a sodden, rotting stack of wooden planks at least three feet high. She stopped, squinting, trying to see if there was an escape route on the other side of the doorway, but the interior was black.

  Beyond the doorway, the wall continued, and she followed it until her fingers bumped into a new wall, made of plywood, not tile. She had walked herself into a corner. She turned, making her way along the perpendicular wall, moving more quickly than before. Her hands missed a wooden beam propped against the wall at waist level, and before she could stop it, the beam toppled noisily to the floor. She froze, expecting him to come for her, anticipating a cone of light stabbing through the darkness.

  Nothing happened. Only the rats continued to stalk her.

  Kasey grew bolder as she wondered if he had left her entirely on her own. She decided that time, not noise, was her biggest enemy now, and she stumbled quickly along the wall. Water dripped louder and faster, and her fingers banged into cold pipes hanging from the ceiling like spider webs. She collided with a concrete I-beam and weaved around it. The wall ended, and she took two steps into open space, in the middle of a dark nowhere.

  She heard something close by. Soft, like a distant hiss. Wind.

  The outside world wasn't far away. She steered for the sound and realized she was near a boarded-up window, and on the other side of it was freedom. Her fingers frantically examined the frame, looking for a spongy weakness where the water had softened the wood. Snow pecked against the window an inch away from her. She could feel the cold.

  'Let me out,' she whispered.

  Before she could punch through the heavy plywood with the metal joist in her hand, she ran out of time. She heard voices. His voice.

  Down the long, black tunnel, she saw light streaming through the cracks.

  Maggie climbed out of her yellow Avalanche outside the Buckthorn School. The moon, which was no more than a haloed glow behind the gray clouds, illuminated the desolate ruins. Snow drifted against the tan brick walls and weighed on the flat roof. The school, or what was left of it, was sheltered by two giant oaks with spindly branches that looked like witches' fingers. Every window was shuttered with heavy plywood. Every metal door was looped with chain and locked shut.

  She imagined the school as it had been after the war, beside a dusty dirt road, surrounded by corn fields, with farm boys dropped off at its doors in shirts and ties. That was long ago. Now it was forgotten, falling down, eroding a little more with each bitter winter. After thirty years of abandonment, the animals and the weather owned it. That was what attracted explorers like Nick Garaldo.

  Maggie saw a tall, athletic man in his early thirties approaching her truck. He wore a black fleece jacket, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and gave her a cocky smile. He had a backpack over one shoulder.

  'Nieman?' she asked.

  'That's me.'

  'Thanks for sticking around,' she told him.

  'No problem.' He gestured at the school with a flick of his head. 'You want to go inside?'

  'Let's take a walk around the perimeter first.'

  'Sure thing.'

  He led her across the field, which crackled with snow, oak branches, and dead leaves. The ground sloped sharply downward as they hiked around the western wall. She shuffled down the hill in her boots past a cluster of towering spruce trees. Where the ground flattened, they were at the rear of the school. The lower level was open to the elements. She poked her head past the exposed concrete pillars and studied the mess of bricks and pipes.

  Nieman turned on a flashlight and pointed it at the ground. 'Those are the pistachio shells,' he said. 'That means something to you, huh?'

  'It does. Keep that light on them, will you?'

  Maggie bent down. The ground was littered with shells, and she noticed that they weren't covered with dust and that their color was still bright red. Nick Garaldo had been here recently. She stood up and asked, 'Have you noticed any evidence of intruders recently? Anyone prying back the window coverings or tampering with the locks?'

  'No, nothing like that. The place is sealed up pretty tight.'

  Maggie nodded. The wind shifted, swirling snow down from the roof of the school and into the debris of the lower level. She smelled the sweet, cold air, but somewhere in the eddy of the breeze, something else came and went. It was so fleeting she wasn't sure if it had really been there, or if her senses had imagined it.

  She backed up into the field behind the school and looked at the upper level, which was boarded shut with a wall of plywood covering the rear windows. Nieman eyed her curiously.

  'Something wrong?' he asked.

  'I'm not sure. Did you smell something?'

  He shrugged. 'Lots of dead animals inside. Raccoons. Dogs. Squirrels. Rats. They don't pay me to play animal control officer.'

  'Yeah.'

  The stench that had flitted through her nostrils was vile and fresh. She stood in the field as the choppy currents of the storm fought with each other, and when the air blew directly toward her across the roof of the school, the smell hit her again. This time, it lingered, and even in the crisp night, it made her pinch her nose shut.

  This was no dead squirrel. This was a corpse smell, the kind of revolting gas that a body gives off when it's shut inside with the dead air.

  'What the fuck is that?' Maggie asked.

  Nieman sniffed the air. 'Shit, you're right. That's new. It wasn't like that over the weekend.'

  'Let's go. Somebody's dead in there.'

  She led the way this time, back up the hill and around the corner to the front of the school. Four concrete steps led up to a series of steel doors. Here, where the wind didn't reach them, she didn't notice the smell. She felt an urge to hurry, but she knew the urge was irrational. If Nick Garaldo was inside, he wasn't alive.

  'Open this up, will you?' she asked.

  Nieman hunted for the key to undo the lock that held the chain together on the doors. When he found it, he unlocked the padlock and slid it in his pocket. He let the chain fall on the steps. Maggie pushed past him, swung open the door, and bolted inside. Nieman followed, letting the door swing shut behind him.

  She stopped, because she couldn't see. The world turned black.

  The smell suffocated her. Locked inside the ruins, the stench multiplied like a runaway strain of bacteria, turning the air rank. It was so sudden and overwhelming that she could barely breathe, and she wanted to bend over and vomit. She clapped her hand over her entire face, trying to keep out the smell, but it wormed inside her anyway.

  'Oh my God,' she screamed. 'Turn on your flashlight!'

  Nieman didn't answer. Maggie reached out in the dark to make sure he was there, and as she did, she heard her phone ringing in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw on the caller ID that it was Troy Grange.

  'Troy—' she began, but then someone slapped the phone from her hand, and she heard it shatter on the concrete floor.

  When she tried to shout, the words died in her throat as a steel wire encircled her neck.

  * * *

  Chapter Fifty

  Stride and Serena barely spoke on the drive across the empty night highways. He drove fast. They both felt the urgency of time and of not knowing what they would find when they arrived. He concentrated on the road, which was slick with snow, but every now and then he stole a glance across the front seat at Serena. He knew she felt his eyes, but she never looked back. Her face was in dark profile beside him.

  'Watch out for deer,' she warned when they entered a long stretch of highway bordered on both sides by thick forest. 'They come out when you least expect it.'

  'I know.'

  He thought about the advi
ce that Minnesota drivers learned in school. Don't steer for deer. Drive right over them. Kill them. Better them than you, because you're more likely to kill yourself trying to avoid them. He'd hit deer a few times over the years. Each time, he told himself it would be different if he slowed down, if he kept his eyes on the road, if he used his high beams. But it didn't matter. You couldn't stop deer from running, and if they crossed the road at the moment you were there, you were going to have a collision. The best thing to do was come out of it alive.

  They come out when you least expect it.

  Serena wasn't talking about deer. She was talking about the two of them. Or maybe the three of them. Their collision.

  He knew that, at the end of the day, she didn't care about Maggie. Serena had known all along about Maggie's feelings for him, and she had dealt with them for better or worse. What mattered was whether he could walk away from the accident alive. Whether he could walk away and leave Maggie behind. That was what she was waiting for him to say. He didn't know if she could live with the idea of him working side by side with Maggie every day, but the first step was his. He had to tell her. I love you more. I want you to stay.

  He thought about Maggie. He could still feel her in his arms. After all their years together, it had been strangely easy to glide across a line from friends to lovers. His feelings for her had become entangled with their history. That was why he couldn't say what Serena wanted. He couldn't lie to her when he didn't know what he felt. By not saying anything, he knew he had told her something she didn't want to hear.

  They didn't speak for the rest of the trip. They crossed back into Duluth, and then into the north farmlands, in silence.

  Stride parked on the shoulder of the highway, and they both got out of the car. Guppo was parked in a pickup truck on the other side of the road, and he squeezed out of his truck when he saw them. The highway was deserted. Snow whisked across the pavement.