Don't You Cry(74)

As the steel blade hits topsoil, the work gets easier; the earth puts up less of a fight and the pile of dirt begins to rise. She digs and digs, and, watching her, I lose all track of time. I’m hypnotized by her movements, but also more than a little terrified. Who is this woman and what is she doing? Why is she digging up the remains of the dead Genevieve? It feels suddenly moronic that I followed her here. Suddenly stupid. Anyone with half a mind would have immediately called the police or run in the other direction, not trailed her. But now here I am, hiding in the bushes of an all-but-abandoned cemetery while some wackadoodle unearths a corpse from the ground. I squat down to the hard, cold earth, making certain that as the fog rises I won’t be seen. I don’t want to even think what she’d do to me if she knew that I was here. For now, the bushes will keep my secret for me.

As I watch from a distance, I dredge up what knowledge I have of the little girl who’s buried in that grave. I don’t know much; she was gone before I was born. But what I’ve heard about Genevieve is that after her death the town’s members lifted the rudimentary wooden casket from the trunk of her family’s car and dropped it into this very trench in the cemetery, hastily, without the praxis of a visitation or a funeral or a procession. Instead, the body was ushered rather quickly from the car and to this ditch and nobody ever bothered to ask why. People were glad she was gone. Though she might have only been five years old, she was a delinquent, the kind of child that wreaked havoc on their own children and homes, tormenting kids, vandalizing property, chasing neighborhood dogs. That’s what I’ve been told. It wasn’t as though anybody wanted to see a little girl die, but still, they were glad she was gone. “Her mother had her hands full,” neighbors have said over the years, staring at that forsaken house, mumbling under their breaths something to the effect of, What a damn shame.

As far as I know, no one comes to visit Genevieve’s grave. I can only assume her family split as soon as they abandoned that old home and buried their child in the ground.

In time Pearl’s shovel begins to fill with silt and sand, followed by clay, terra-cotta-colored clay soil, and then, later—in the moments before the steel blade hits hollow wood—bits of broken-up rock fragments, gray like stone. It comes up in chunks, rocks that appear hard to carry. They must be heavy and as I watch on she takes her time, losing speed.

But then I hear the sound of metal on wood, and know that she’s arrived at her destination, the reason for which she’d come here.

The cemetery is quiet, short of silent save for the sound of Pearl gasping for air. She fights for oxygen in the still November air. I’m guessing her throat is as dry as the bedrock. Even I am thirsty and I’m not doing the work. She sweats in exertion, while the numb air freezes my lungs, making them ache and burn. It’s cold, winter coming quickly. Too quickly. The grass around us is a faded green, a sage green, quickly losing color, becoming dormant for the winter season ahead. It’s brittle to the touch and no longer burgeons out of the ground. Soon it will be covered with snow. The fog begins to rise, and as it does, the world materializes before me: granite and marble headstones, grotesque, ill-proportioned trees, and the church: a small, one-room rectangular Protestant church, white, with a stacked limestone base and clapboard sides. The windows are plain, no frills, as is the entire building, an 1800s structure that’s been outdone by the more modern, hip churches popping up around town. I’m not even sure if anyone uses this place anymore or if it’s just for show, a dead thing, a cadaver, hollowed out like all these bodies buried beneath the ground.

And then all of a sudden Pearl tosses the garden spade aside and stops digging. She’s reached a box, a wooden box that itself is mostly decomposed. She can’t lift the box—it’s wedged too tightly into the earth, in the final stages of decay. It crumbles to bits in her hand, and so instead she pushes what’s left of the lid aside and peers inside.

From this angle I can’t see inside Genevieve’s grave, but I watch for Pearl’s reaction. What I see is a look of smug satisfaction as if she was hoping to prove something to the world, and that’s exactly what she did. She puts her hands on her hips; she smiles.

She leaves the garden spade where it is, the mound of dirt piled sky-high, the gravesite exposed so that all of the world can see.

And then she wipes her sweaty brow with the back of a sleeve, picks up her coat and her hat to leave.

But she doesn’t leave. Not yet, anyway. Before she goes, her eyes rove the cemetery, from the old church, to century-old headstones, to me. For a second, I’m half certain her eyes linger on my hiding place, there behind the evergreen trees and leafless bushes where I squirrel myself away and try desperately to hide. She shakes her head. She sneaks a sardonic smile. She sighs.

But if she sees me, she doesn’t say a thing. And then she turns and goes.

I don’t move right away. Instead, I wait. I wait for a long time, until the squeak of the cemetery’s iron gate tells me that she’s gone for good. And then I wait some more, just to be sure. And only then do I rise to my shaky feet to see what she’s discovered inside that grave.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s what Pearl discovered.

The wooden box decomposing in the hard earth is completely empty.





Quinn

Before I climb into Detective Davies’s car, I insist on seeing a driver’s license plus one more photo ID. Vehicle registration and proof of insurance. You never can be too careful about these things. I’ve seen enough legal thrillers and murder mysteries to know the cop isn’t always the good guy. But in this case, I think he is. And this is why: he’s not that nice. He’s not that friendly.