by Jamie Mason
He absolutely did not want to dig Harris up. But here he was.
He’d raked aside the accumulated leaf litter to the shock of a clearly marked, though sloppily executed, rectangle. The ground had settled in a full inch since he’d last peeked. It would have taken Bayard no time at all to find the anomaly he sought. If it hadn’t occurred to Jason to move the body, if he hadn’t prodded himself into actually gathering up the rake and the shovel and the tarp, it would have been a sealed fate for him in one pass of the experts, with their radar and their cadaver dogs. There was no guarantee that this tap dance on a minefield would work at all, but now he knew he had to at least try.
Every move was weighted ten times what it would have been if he’d only had the guts to mow his own lawn, and that he couldn’t even sell his soul to unmake that call to Dearborn’s Landscaping brought him right to the wobbly edge of despair. Jason lugged the needed tools from the shed, more committed than ever, but mired in dread up to his windpipe. Before he’d even started, his neck ached from throwing desperate looks over his shoulder, and his heart kept forgetting that it wasn’t a fish flopping pointlessly in the cramped bucket of his chest. His eyes watered from the lack of blinking, peeled to flit to every crackle and night murmur in the trees.
The monotony of digging soothed the worst of the jitters for a while. The rhythm of set-push-scrape-toss forced a hypnotic competence, and the progress was steady. He worked in silence, with only the occasional grunt, for going on three hours before the blade of his shovel finally transmitted the denser tone of having found something other than rasping topsoil. He yanked the handle back, scalded anew in every nerve, and he gagged, his body trembling at the slanting edge of the pit.
From there, he worked in tightening ovals until he couldn’t deny that the remaining layer of dirt was finer than could be answered with a shovel. It was time to get his hands dirty—so to speak. It’s beyond absurd to don a pair of yellow rubber house gloves to slip a ripe corpse from its clod of muck, but Jason did it anyway and cinched the ends down to his wrists with wide rubber bands. His hands went instantly hot and heavy, but he flexed away the tingles and carried on. The heat of fear stewed with the heat of exertion in his grave-robbing getup, and the sweat ran down his sides in tickling tracks under his layered shirts. The bike shorts with jeans over them offered a two-ply barrier against the damp dirt, while tucking the cuffs of his pants into his socks and boots assured him of unsoiled feet. He’d have worn a suit of armor had it been handy, clanking be damned. Jason was sharply aware of, and grateful for, every millimeter of separation he could contrive as he pulled at the heap.
The sheet was rotted, the lawn bags slick and yielding, and his efforts served more to unveil Harris than they did to move him. In a goal-line attempt to avoid deshrouding the very last thing on earth he wanted to see in the moonlight, Jason knelt in the hole and wrapped his arms around the man he’d hated more than anything that had ever drawn a breath near him.
He braced his back against the stubborn pull of the bundle that was so bogged down in the trench it felt glued and stapled there, and he hoisted it to his chest. The clay sucked at the plastic and dragged against Jason’s labor. For every increment he gained, the floppy weight countered. In his concentration, he ignored gravity just long enough to let the tipping point drift beyond his control. Realization dawned, buggy-eyed and a heartbeat too late. Even a flailing slew of adjustments couldn’t save it. He lurched forward and threw out a bracing arm, only to have it plow a furrow, the heel of his gloved hand sliding away as if it wanted to steal third base. Jason, for all his trying, landed hard, pinning the body, missionary style, in its bed of filth, his face inches from Harris’s bagged head. Jason’s tongue surged at the back of his throat and he scrambled to the edge of the grave, flinging himself belly down in the grass to wash his lungs in fresh air. He sagged on his hands and knees and rode the bucking nausea until the sweat cooled on his face.
Spurred on by a sudden solo from Mrs. Truesdell’s dog in the near distance, Jason scuttled back into the hole, limbs quaking. He planted his knees wide, sipped a deep breath over his shoulder, and wrapped his arms back around the body. And pulled. His face flushed hot against his reluctance to breathe up the filthy air.
The body shifted when it wasn’t sticking, a puppet of physics, but feeling for all the world as if it were resisting eviction. Jason pleaded with Harris, with God, with himself, in a desperate whine against the direly inconvenient while vowing in his heart never, never to do anything wrong ever again if only he could get this body out of its hole and onto the waiting tarp. Fireflies of strain flitted at the edge of his vision as he struggled for inches in the yielding ground and fought, against all probability, his dead nemesis one more time.
Jason’s lungs clamored to fill. He tottered at the threshold of choice—black out or let go—but the hindrance suddenly gave way, flinging the body into his arms. A long rope of glistening, viscous, bit-of-Harris slingshotted from the breached wrappings and curled around Jason’s exposed neck to slap against his cheek and slide thickly onto the useless protection of his third shirt. His guts recoiled into a low, greasy knot, and the blood pulled heavy in his ears as it rushed from his head. Shivers twitched and chased circles, looping down his spine, away from the scene of the insult—the putrid, wet streak on his face that burned like a brand.
To Jason, the sound signaling the end of his tether was a sharp crack, like thick glass giving way. To Harris, had he been able to hear it, and the creatures in the woods that didn’t care, it was only a feeble bleat trickling from Jason’s throat. His arms lost the imperative of their nerves and he let Harris slide back into the mud.
The breaking-glass sound had put an out-of-place period on his internal dialogue. The constant narrator in his head was banished to silence at the resounding clink. But there was no peace in the quiet. Jason was just as blind and nearly as slack as Harris was, but one sense had usurped the potency of the other four, drawing every scrap of awareness to the cooling, gelid trail that Harris had drawn down the slack curve of Jason’s jaw. His mind was a void, save for one achingly keen sensation—the itching outline of slime already drying at its edges in the night breeze.
The spark of self-preservation is the last to go. It needs no cheerleading from the body’s other systems. It doesn’t celebrate the company of civility, and it certainly never asks sanity’s permission. It allowed Jason his moment of disconnect, while it kept its own radar sweeping away in the silent background. Back there, in the recesses of Jason’s mind, it registered the stealthy thunk of a car door being closed by someone trying to be quiet. The engine had cut out just opposite Jason’s driveway.
So, the force that fights until the last, that elemental wish to continue, pulled Jason to his feet and moved those feet furtively into the deep shade of the trees. And it remembered to bring the shovel.
• • •
The snuffling at the window plugged her back into reality. A bellowsy exhale against the glass snapped her eyes wide open. For Leah, sleep, especially the inadvertent nap, was sometimes less like rest than it was a model of total annihilation. In these upright comas, she simply didn’t exist. No dreams, no twitches. When she came to, there was no groggy transition. The world was precise, freshly drawn in colors that had just been invented, like watching Genesis unfold for her approval. The clarity would fade with a pang after a few heartbeats spent in awe of awakening at the alien edge of creation.
A tawny dog snout sniffed along the gap where Leah had lowered the window to let in some fresh air.
“Tessa! Mercy!” A woman tugged at the dog’s collar. “I’m sorry. She’s very friendly.” The woman dragged the dog’s head away from the window. Her hair was braided into an impressive rope that hung to her waist, and it swung with her battle to corral the straining Tessa. “And very nosy.”
“It’s fine,” said Leah.
“Are you okay, honey? It’s awfully late.” The woman smoothed the wispy strays back into line a
gainst that remarkable plait of graying hair. It was as thick around as Leah’s wrist. The dog had abruptly lost interest in Leah and strained to the limits of the leash, and to the teetering of its mistress’s strength, to jam its nose into an abandoned fast-food bag. That the bag was on the ground four feet from an overflowing trash bin at the park’s entrance spoke to the general upkeep of the place.
“I just meant to close my eyes for a minute.” Leah bookmarked the receipt into the paperback that had been steepled on her lap and laid it on the passenger seat.
The woman pulled her sweater closed and looked at her watch. “Well, it’s a quarter to one in the morning, honey. Tessa and I are insomniacs, but I wouldn’t be out here at this time of night without her. It’s a sad thing, but times as they are, I think I’d have to warn you off snoozing alone in the park.”
“Right.” Leah smiled and squirmed a stretch against the seat to circulate some heat into her limbs and numb backside. She wished she had thought to bring a sweater. “Thank you. I was just killing a little time.”
The dog gave the woman a yank and an imploring look. The deserted park was beckoning, and if you had a wrap or a pelt, the night was beautiful.
“You sure you’re all right?” Both the woman and her dog watched for Leah’s blessing to move on.
Leah nodded. “Thanks for the wake-up call. And for looking out for me.”
The woman smiled back as the dog trotted away with her in tow. “It should always be so easy,” she called over her shoulder.
Leah watched them on the path until they were swallowed up by the gloom that hunkered low under the trees. The glow of the moon was generous, even feeding the shadows a second helping of contrast. On a night like this, you either knew where you stood or you were invisible. Leah started her car and double-checked the directions for the route back to Old Green Valley Road.
• • •
In the starlit night, the drive back to the Getty house took on the air of ritual. She had pinned her peace of mind to this ceremony of her own devising. She’d kneel and cry. She’d absolve and, in turn, be granted absolution. At the last bend before the house, Leah held her breath and thumbed the switch, extinguishing the headlamps. She eased off the accelerator as her eyes adjusted, finding that the moonlight was enough of a guide at that tame pace. She coasted to the curb opposite Getty’s driveway and twisted the key slowly, as if the jangle of her key ring would make the difference between success and discovery. She reined in the closing door to a muted thump.
The house was dark, as she had hoped it would be. Leah closed her eyes and, not believing it for a second, reached out for a sense of Reid—for which sad, police-taped plot to approach first. Drawn to the right by intuition or perhaps by just the pull of her dominant hand, Leah skirted a wide path around to the west side of the house, eyes glued to the windows for light or movement. And with barely a pause and only a cursory scan of what she’d come for, she kept to the tree line and continued around to the backyard, a magpie, distracted by the glint of light from the far edge of the lawn.
The human animal is the only creature that willfully suppresses instinct. Admittedly, there isn’t much left of it in the mostly hairless, thin-skinned monkey, softened by air-conditioning, bottled water, and mall melodies piped in so that we don’t feel lonely while we shop. But such as it is, excuses to meddle in shiny other business trumps innate knowledge all the time.
Leah’s scalp crimped in tingly patches, and chills stippled the backs of her arms. Some unlabeled sentience swimming in the pit of her stomach waved a flag of warning, and the ominous banner rippled in hot and cold surges, but she kept to her course. The moon was high and white, but the golden glow of two camp lanterns rose from the ground near the trees at the apex of the curved border of woods. Curiosity drowned out the mewling certainty that something was terribly wrong with this scene—it was the middle of the night and a gaping hole in the ground was bookended by battery lamps. Ribbons of stench were layered in with the perfect night breeze, wrinkling her nose midbreath. A rumpled tarpaulin had been laid out on the near side of the hole.
Keeping just inside the shadow of the trees, she laid each footfall gently, and as silently as she could, on the pad of leaves and old pine needles. She stopped her breath to feel the crush of quiet around her. It was heavier than the sum of just the wind whispering and the boughs clicking. Paranoia put the weight of watchful eyes on her, but she shook off the notion. She’d twice looked into the trees and both times found only trunks, branches, and moon shadows. Her concentration flicked back and forth between the back facade of the darkened house and the lanterns at the pit’s edge.
She drew even with the hole in the ground. The light skimmed the edges and showed that the crumbly rim was still moist, but the slope was steep enough to shade the bottom from view. Leah swept another wide-eyed look over the lawn and inched from the safety of the shadows to peer into the pit. She quick-smothered a scream against the back of her hand. Her heart, which had been hammering since she’d diverted from Reid’s erstwhile grave, thrashed out of rhythm, flinging terror into every limb. The lamps showed her the shape she’d almost expected to find lying there; the only outline that would sensibly complete the macabre tableau.
But the bright glare had also pinpointed her pupils, so that when she whirled to the snapping rustle rushing up from behind her, she saw only blackness. She heard the flat clank of metal on bone, but crumpled senseless to the ground before she felt it.
14
The darkness wasn’t as much of a hindrance as was the undergrowth. The wind through the leaves fluttered the moonlight, strobing everything to the beat of a murky, old newsreel, but it was enough light for him to get by. The cords of ground cover twisting underfoot, though, were relentless. They yanked him off stride every time he’d stray into any sort of confident pace. Forging ahead at anything more than a crawl was becoming a surefire bid to eat dirt. But he didn’t have all night to get done what needed doing, and he came as close to cursing the booby-trapped trail as he ever got to cursing at all.
He had no quarrel with the distinction between right and wrong. He appreciated it better than most, that was for sure. Heck, he’d beat the snot out of Greg Plumb in the sixth grade for swearing and talking filth about Miss Avery’s chest. He watched the preachers on television most Sunday mornings to keep the Sabbath. He even always held the door for old people and pregnant ladies, and he’d never been cruel to an animal that wasn’t asking for a good, strong swat to guaran-dang-tee its attention. But what did scorch him a freshly chapped backside was the sheer stupidity of people who couldn’t admit that there were, from time to time, circumstances beyond a man’s control.
Show Boyd Montgomery a man who claimed he would stand idle after watching his wife wiggle her hips underneath another man’s zipper and he’d show you a liar. At first he’d thought it was a girl on top of Katielynn, kissing her and tickling up under her T-shirt to set her giggling. The soft-looking, brown curls had dipped low enough to cover both their faces and mingle with Kate’s straw-straight, straw-colored hair on the bedspread. Boyd had wrestled a moment of muddled conviction, because while he’d brook no infidelity from his wife, he’d sometimes read the letters at the front of skin magazines, tall tales about men walking in on this very type of thing. As unnatural as it was, he couldn’t deny that those stories had always left him shuffling away from the rack, titty mag left tucked into the hot-rod weekly he’d covered it with, hunched over a bit to hide the urgent bulge below his belt buckle. The letters, with their detailed descriptions of surprised and delighted sin, had sorely tempted Boyd to buy a few of those rag sheets, but bankrolling pornography was immoral, and he’d always resisted.
As soon as that tickling hand had scuttled from Kate’s bare ribs, Boyd had seen his mistake. The man’s watch was a giveaway, but Boyd’s shame was spurred into full-fledged disgrace by the rising pressure in his Jockey shorts. He’d not recognized, at first, the firm shoulders for what they were, or how
they tapered down to hips narrow enough to fit snugly between his wife’s. That he had swelled to the sight of it made him sick.
He’d ducked back behind the doorframe to catch his breath while his hard-on shriveled to disgust. Then the revulsion partnered with the fury that was biting and clawing its way up his spine. A loaded .357 waited in the nightstand, but Boyd wouldn’t risk getting beaten to it by that poufy-haired faggot.
He had crept down the hall, his full attention aimed at rolling heel to toe to mute his steps, so the shock nearly knocked him over when he saw his brother. Bart stood in the living room, sad-faced and lost-looking as always. The instant the ghostly image didn’t fill in more completely, Boyd recognized his own reflection in the glass of the gun cabinet. This happened to him occasionally. He’d see an image in a mirror or a window, and before placing himself in the picture, he would stand in all-out wonder for a fraction of a second at the coincidence of running across his twin in such an unlikely place.
The scare had spiked his blood with acid, and now he had the shakes to deal with, though he’d been calm, even if absolutely furious, just the second before. Boyd’s feelings always tagged along like a third twin, or a second shadow, sort of one step behind and off to one side. He was resolutely a head man, knowing what he knew, but never quite feeling what he felt. Not even enough to be concerned that this constant double-exposed state was less than normal. Shock and surprise, and gooey suffering over sad stories about animals, seemed to be about the only things that could build a temporary bridge from his heart to his mind, and he found that he wished his brother were really there, forcing a reason for him not to do this thing. Bart’s slower wit and easy smile softened every edge that had ever come down on the boys. Trouble had rarely found anyone in Bart’s mild company.