Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  Tim nodded and stroked Tessa’s ears, crooning to her. She’d cast off her playmate as soon as she’d seen him arrive.

  “So which one?” Ford sucked his teeth and smiled sidelong at his sappy friend.

  “Which one what?”

  “Which one’s yours? Which one’s going home with you?”

  Tessa picked for Tim. The male had broad russet marks for eyebrows, giving a lively mischief to his face. He trundled up to Tessa while she sat contentedly against the gate getting her dose of head-scratch. He wrapped his paws around her nose and wrestled her head from side to side. Tessa ducked out of his lock and turned to Tim, tongue dangling through a wide dog-smile. She and the youngster pressed jowl to jowl and looked to the men staring down on them, Tessa knowing, the other all wide-eyed openness.

  “Are you sure, Ford?” Bayard asked. “You could probably sell these guys for a good chunk of change.”

  “The day I sell a dog is the day you need to cart me off. We’re keeping the other one.”

  Tim laughed. “Okay then, I guess this one. Christine’s going to kill me.”

  Ford swept the latch on the gate and all three dogs spilled out into the kitchen. “He’s ornery. But you know how he loves Tessa. Always has, since we had him here as a pup. Loves her ears and her tail and her feet . . . that’s why named him Tug.”

  “Tug.” Bayard squatted down and gave him an experimental pat on the flank, and the dog immediately leapt up to rest his paws on Tim’s shoulders. They each looked into the other’s eyes. “Hello, Tug.”

  32

  It took a discreetly hired investigator over four months to figure out, definitively, that there was never any such person as Gary Harris. The VIN number on the motorcycle had eventually yielded a lead. In the weeks after Harris’s death, Jason had dismantled the bike and tossed it away, piece by piece, a task both satisfying and exhausting at turns. He felt a primate’s triumph at each bit of bodywork that he peeled off the metal skeleton, and a winner’s relief at every bolt that finally relented in the grip of his wrench. But Jason found himself scrubbing tears out of his eyes as often as he did grease from the whorls and lines in the palms of his hands.

  Somewhere between a trophy and a headstone, he’d kept the last pieces closed up in a box in the spare room, but had never found the time to get rid of it. Or so he’d told himself. He felt fuzzy-headed and unable to concentrate knowing it was still there even after Harris was not.

  It was a rare model, though it hadn’t looked like all that much to Jason. The PI traced the registration to a collector in Canada, who had, oddly, never reported it stolen. The anecdotal chain of I heard/he told me/I think I saw it once pointed to its last rider as being a young man named Harris Trumble, whom no one in his hometown had seen more than once or twice in nearly a decade. Harris was the son of Jolene and Gary Trumble, and he was banded directly, or as a person of note, to a long police record of vandalism, petty to not-so-petty larceny, and an after-school fight that had left a boy in a coma until he awoke blind in one eye and permanently forgetful.

  Harris had been remanded, for his last years as a minor, to a state-run farm designed to take in unruly boys and turn out upstanding young men through the miracle of stall-mucking and haybaling. But the records of his time there trailed off in an irritable summary at the back of a confidential file. The bored clerk had exchanged a few moments alone with the paperwork for nothing more than the distraction of an interesting and utterly false tale of intrigue from Jason’s hired snoop.

  Harris Trumble never completed his required time on the farm. When he was sixteen, his father, Gary, had charmed the administration into a flagrant breach of protocol. They allowed him to take the boy out, just for a few hours, for a motorcycle ride. It was Father’s Day after all.

  Gary Trumble died a handful of years later, a bruised John Doe in a gutter on a winter’s day in Minneapolis. He was, eventually, identified by his fingerprints. None of his notified kin bothered to claim his remains.

  The investigator had delivered facts enough for Jason to piece together the origins of the name Gary Harris. The complications of the history between father and son hinted at what might have ignited such a furious fight over the reshuffling of his alias, but knowing the what of it didn’t do much for the why. Was it out of remembrance of his father? Was it simply to protect his privacy? Or was it really for the reasons he’d given—an affront to his offer of friendship, such as it was?

  The newest and most improved why, though, no matter what Jason could learn of the facts, was the question of the pull and sway that Gary/Harris/Trumble still held over Jason Getty so long after he’d been bundled off the lawn and into the lab. Why was he still there in Jason’s expectations when he raised his face to the mirror? And why was he so much more present, such a noisy ghost in Jason’s memory, as the days went by? The answer, Jason knew, was woven into the last advice given by a friend he didn’t really know.

  He hadn’t spoken to Leah since they’d met at the side door of the police station. They’d been released from the hospital within the same hour and had shared only one urgent glance in the hall as they were led away to separate interview rooms.

  She was waiting at the curb for her ride, tearing at a hangnail with her teeth, when Jason was sprung from the precinct office to make his own way back home. He knew immediately that she also knew that they’d cleared the first hurdle if they were both uncuffed on the sidewalk in the painful midmorning sun.

  “You okay?” he’d asked.

  “Uh-huh.” She laughed into the stupid pause. “What the hell do you say after all that?”

  They watched the circle-headed crosswalk icon through a cycle of green, flashing, and then red.

  “There’s only one way this will work,” she said. “Every answer to every question is the same: we don’t know anything. No matter what they ask. No matter what they tell us that the other one had said. It’s ‘I don’t know’ and only that. Every time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Jason, it’s everything. You have to swear. You have to be strong. This is all for nothing if we screw it up now. There’s no statute of limitations on what you did, and I’m pretty sure I just aided and abetted.”

  “I don’t know why you did that.”

  “Because it was the only thing to do. You can thank me, but it’s what I wanted, too. I did it to end it. We’re square.” She looked straight into him to punctuate the point.

  “But your head, I almost—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  A patrol car whooped a short blat on its siren and streaked away from the motor-pool at the top of the street. Jason and Leah flinched in unison.

  “We have to be smart,” she said. “We can’t talk about this. We can’t talk about anything. We can’t see each other. Not for a long time. Maybe forever.”

  “Yeah, I understand,” Jason said to his shoes, red-faced.

  “I doubt it,” she said with a small smile. “Can you please at least believe there’s no hard feelings?”

  Jason’s anchor pulled loose. His life was receding in a small spark of terror and an even smaller thrill of something else, something both finer and sadder.

  “I wish I could take it all back,” he said. “That’s the truth.”

  “The truth.” A shiver rocked her. “I don’t know about truth, what it is, what it isn’t. I just don’t know. But maybe there’s a scoreboard instead. You saved my life. Probably more than once. Maybe I saved yours, too. As far as first-line commandments go, could be that we’re both plus one, minus one. Maybe it’s good enough for a reset?”

  A smoke-colored minivan pulled up, and Leah raised her hand to the woman inside.

  She turned to him and the sun fought through the last of the morning haze to light up the bruised shadow that aged half her face so that Jason saw her now and saw her decades from now in one image.

  “Be safe,” she said, and craned to the farthest reach of her tiptoes to press a rough and too quick kiss into
the bristle of his jaw. She dashed for the van before he’d felt it all the way through. “Or better yet,” she called, “be the guy you want to be. It’s not like anyone can tell the difference anyway.”

  • • •

  It changes a man to discover his wants. Envy, especially of Harris’s ease, had been a crowbar to pry the cover off Jason’s hidden box of cogs. He had seen how his own heart worked and found a treasure trove of shiny, dexterous spare parts lying around. With all that had happened, it seemed he should have looked different. He kept being disappointed to search his reflection and see only Jason. Very only.

  • • •

  Jason lost his aversion to his own backyard. In fact, he stared out on it for hours. What wasn’t there anymore drew his eyes over and over. Once he’d said “I don’t know” to Bayard enough times to make it stick, it began to tickle, the truth of it, the not knowing if it was really finished. At some point, the police were bound to run out of missing persons named Phil to try to match to the slides they’d made from the muck in the grass.

  The urge to run didn’t leave. The town was spoiled for him. He’d wake up in the dark, sweating, gulping down lungfuls of air that tasted just the same as the stuff he’d heaved in when Harris was only newly dead. Every trip down the hallway outside his room was a tightrope line skirting the baseboard to keep from treading on the long-vanished luminol track in the rug. Each realization that he’d forgotten to remember to step here or not step there spurred back the dread from when Bayard had prowled, ready to pounce on Jason’s smallest mistake. Sometimes a particular quality of light glowered in through the front windows on a stormy day that brought surges of goose bumps so rigid they stung. And at every sound of tires slowing down on Old Green Valley Road, the best his imagination would let him expect was Bayard back with a righteous clue and a new golf shirt.

  Jason wanted to call Leah, to tear it all down to its parts as he had the motorcycle, so that at the least he’d actually know what he knew and not have to be left alone with it. But he wasn’t allowed.

  At the back of his yard, the hole full of dirt and no Harris taunted him almost as much as it had when it had been full of horror and secret. But the secret, at least, no longer required any tending. The grass growing over it, however, still did.

  Jason huffed over the lawn-mower handle. Sweat slipped into the waistband of his shorts, and a mosquito whined in his ear. He’d ducked it twice, but the eye-watering yowl climbed up the musical scale again, right beside his cheek. He yanked off his hat and swatted the air around his head. When he was free of the bug, and feeling utterly foolish for his flap-dancing, he smiled up into the sunlight and found that a plan waited for him in the corner of his mind. He’d just tilted it loose.

  He wanted a sunburn. Actually, he wanted lots of sunburns, cancer be damned. He wanted a new skin, thick and leathery, with lines that proved that he laughed and frowned and that he wasn’t just a blank page or a canvas to accept what others painted there. He’d go south. But he’d stroll, not bolt in a fugitive scamper in the middle of the night.

  The man in Harris’s magic mirror wasn’t real, but who could tell the difference anyway?

  The spell of the lie’s power became a worry, became a niggle, became part of who he was.

  • • •

  There is very little ease for a man who wears a stranger’s name. Jason Getty had grown accustomed to stutter-starting his signature, his heart leaping into his throat when the pen looped a J automatically, instead of the R he’d adopted at the first stride away from Stillwater. He’d learned to keep his eyes steady and his excuses primed for when he failed to answer at the first call of the name that was not his. The new backstory was an ill-fitting coat, which was the only sort he’d ever worn anyway. So instead, he’d changed his posture to make it look like a better fit.

  He sang karaoke on Friday nights and slapped on a little cologne every now and then. His dog went with him everywhere. His smile was infectious and he was known to flirt up the waitresses on occasion. He always made himself drive just a little too fast, and he played cards. Inexplicably, he often won at cards. The man he saw reflected in the bar mirror wouldn’t know the man staring out of the glass over the bathroom vanity back home.

  But strangely, it wasn’t these things or even the jealous guarding of his dwindling stash of money that wore lines of worry into his forehead. Nor was it the eyestrain born of staring at the Spanish-to-English dictionary late into the night until his head ached and the words blurred together on the page as they did on his clumsy tongue. No. It was his preoccupation with wondering if the story had held, back there in Stillwater.

  Was there any more than a passing interest in his disappearance? He had dotted the i’s and all that, then shed his habits and his name on a meandering westward feint. Jason had no way to check on any of it. He knew enough to be afraid of Internet tracking. Newspaper articles could be out there naming him a vicious thug on the run, sighing over his trail of senseless murder and mayhem, or local columns might have updates on the survivor’s tearful tale of triumph.

  But he’d never know, even if he risked a computer query. His hopes would always be pinned on the absence of a story. Knowing that nothing had happened—yet—wasn’t even comfort’s ghost. A simple phone call would damn him or put his mind at ease, but it was out of the question for a long time, though maybe not the forever that she’d suggested.

  So he’d rolled what was left of his old life out of the real world and into his dreams. He’d had no choice—he wasn’t a monster. In his own mind, he wasn’t a liar either, but facts are facts.

  Even if no one knows them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So, here we are on the back pages together. Throughout these eighty-some-thousand words, I hope you and I have felt the same things. If I wrote it right, you and I, for a few hours, have ignored time and space, and the fundamental solitude of living alone in our own skulls. Thanks for being in here with me.

  But I guarantee we feel very differently from one another now, way back here on page three-hundred-whatever. At “The End,” I know I always look to the back pages of a book in the same way I sometimes linger in a littered theater as it clears out. The show’s over, but I dunno, maybe there’s still something to see that will bridge the gap from the spectacle back to my regular life. . . .

  But me? This book? Back here, I’m just awash in gratitude. Whatever I got wrong in Three Graves Full was willful or I forgot to ask, because so many good people helped me get it right. My agent, Amy Moore-Benson, is one of my all-time favorites and the rekindler of snuffed enthusiasms. My editor, Karen Kosztolnyik at Gallery, is a lovely, wise, and patient person, and a rudder to steer with when I think I’m out of ideas. Heather Hunt and the team at Gallery took what was always going to be an exciting time and made it manageable and fun. Their talents get labeled with “friendliness” and “competence” but that doesn’t begin to cover how much they add to the publishing world. They’ve been wonderful to me. Steve Boldt is flat-out a prince among copyeditors.

  For content, I owe a terrific debt to Special Agent Mike Breed-love of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. In helping me understand a detective’s thoughts and deeds, he was invaluable. In friendship and support, he was just as priceless. Also, many thanks to Captain Terry L. Patterson of the Chesterfield County Police Department, a man so generous with his time and expertise, I could pick his brain for days. Again, if I got it wrong, no fault can be accorded to either of them.

  The heart of the book, though, whatever is good about the storytelling, is obligated to a few people who held my hand, sometimes literally, sometimes cyber-ly, and sometimes just in spirit during the process:

  My husband, Art, and my daughters, Julia and Rianne, are always the first line of defense. Nothing too awful gets past them, either incoming or outgoing. I love you more than I can write out. I hope you always feel that.

  My friend and writing partner, Graeme Cameron, is nothing short of a genius, an
d also a man of extraordinary generosity. AuthorScoop’s editor in chief, William Haskins, invited me onboard, putting me at least wrist-deep in the writing business every day, but I owe him even more for his humor, utterly brilliant poetry, and a friendship that has sustained me in all the hair-tearing times. The influence of these two extraordinary writers cannot be overstated.

  Tana French, best-selling and award-winning author of incredible literary suspense, extended encouragement and friendship when she was too busy to do so. She treated a fan like a peer, and I don’t know why she did it, but it’s one of the finest things that’s ever happened to me.

  My fraternity of writers—Alex Adams, Chris Hyde, Sharon Maas, Rob McCreery, Nichola Feeney, Kim Michele Richardson, Butch Wilson, and Trish Stewart—thank you, thank you, and always be mine.

  For steeping me in art, music, and laughter from the start, I love my first family: my mother, Jeanne-Miller Mason, and my sisters, Carmen Mason and Natalie Sherwood. Katie Delgado deserves my devotion threefold for friendship, bookishness, and web design. And for being the people I’d pack in my suitcase for the hypothetical desert island stranding: Jessica Coffey, Kelly Coffey Colvin, Lisa Fitchett, Kristi McCullough, Mary Rollins, and Patience Siegler.

  Ursula Osterberg was always to be included in these acknowledgments, but my dear friend passed away before the book went to print. I will never plant anything in this hole you left in my heart, and I will miss you every day.

  My nephew, Tommy Eccleston, caught a very menacing spider in exchange for a special mention here. What can I say? A promise is a promise and he’s a lovely guy. Also very brave.

  And Dr. David Arpin. Yes, I am acknowledging my chiropractor. He keeps me comfortably upright, which is no small feat. He loves books, too, which makes neck-cracking a social event I look forward to.