Lies We Bury(83)

“Do you live here?” I ask.

The gun barrel answers with a jab to my back. “Keep walking. For several months, off and on. Nora used my share of the settlement before I turned eighteen to buy this place, so it was only fitting that I take it over when she died.”

“You mean when you killed her.”

The barrel acts like a battering ram between my shoulder blades. “When you killed her,” she corrects.

I wince from the pain still throbbing from my right shoulder but say nothing.

We step out the back door and into the garden. The high wooden fence I first noted upon sneaking up the side makes sense now. The impulse to scream rises in my throat like a cough that won’t be contained, but I have no doubt Jenessa would pull the trigger and end this whole debacle. She already has everything she needs from me, all the evidence she could hope for pointed squarely in my direction.

“What are we doing out here?” I ask the flower-bush perimeter. Jenessa’s casual chuckle behind me promises nothing good.

A shovel lands next to me on a flower bed Nora must have spent hours cultivating. “Start digging. Under the white hydrangeas.”

Nausea turns my stomach. Jenessa said Nora was buried out here. “You want me to—”

“No talking,” she snaps. “Or I’ll shoot out a kneecap and still make you dig. Your choice.”

Neighbors must be able to hear us on a Monday afternoon, right? How is no one coming out to investigate? Unless they’re all at work. Or—as a delivery truck passes on the main thoroughfare out front, belching exhaust and leaving a trail of clanging noise—maybe they can’t hear us over the street traffic.

With shaking hands, I bend down and grip the shovel. Jenessa can’t see my face, so I let the panicked tears fall freely. Images of a lifeless Bethel flash to mind, lying on our blood-soaked mattress after giving birth to Lily. Nora and Rosemary wrapped her in the bedsheets that were ruined and laid her on the floor until Chet agreed to remove the body. Five days later. I didn’t want to look, but as a child, I couldn’t help it. Or help the recalled images that struck in the middle of the night for years afterward.

The shovel slides into the moist dirt with ease. I lift and remove that hunk of earth, then dig again. Repeat the same movement. Over and over. I wince at each dig, anticipating the moment when I strike a mass that’s unquestionably human.

When I turn over my shoulder, Jenessa remains poised against the fence, gun in hand and out of the neighbor’s camera’s line of sight.

The hole is four feet deep when the shovel hits something soft—softer than rock. I dig around it and discover the outline of a pale forearm, the process of decay well underway.

Rodents long ago burrowed into the skin to take their meal, followed by worms and insects, from the looks of the still-wriggling larvae spread across the ashen flesh. I clap a hand over my mouth, but my stomach won’t be quelled. I vomit on all fours into the pile of dirt beside me, retching up the scone and apple.

Nora. All this time, Nora had been struggling with the consequences of her trauma, while trying to raise Jenessa—ultimately, a killer. We should have done more to help Nora, to help them both. They each needed Rosemary, Lily, and me, more than I think anyone was aware. The way I, as a child, treated Jenessa in the past, wronged her, is what’s landed me in this position now.

“That’s enough,” Jenessa says. “Get up. Inside.”

Struggling to my feet, I don’t question abandoning the task, only partly completed.

She laughs, watching me wipe my mouth; then her smile drops. Her head snaps toward the street. “Get in the house,” she hisses.

When I hesitate, she grabs me by my bun of hair and yanks. I cry out, but her grip doesn’t lessen, and my only choice is to follow as fast as possible. I trip up the stairs and through the back door, but once we’re in the kitchen, she lets go. She raises a finger to her lips in the universal sign for quiet.

“Marissa?” A voice calls from out front, and I stiffen automatically, so close to help.

The cold metal of the gun against my head stifles the urge to answer.

“Marissa, I know you’re here. I can see it on my geo-location app, remember? I think I’m having contractions.”

Jenessa looks at me; we both recognize Lily’s voice at the same time. I plead with my eyes. Let me go to our younger sister—let me go. Her jaw pulses in response. “You always were her favorite. She can’t even go to the hospital without finding you first. Even though I’m the one who risked everything for us.”

“Marissa?” Lily calls again.

Jenessa hesitates, as if considering her options—whether to end me here and now or whether Lily already knows too much by having a record of my whereabouts.

Jesus, Lily. Go to the hospital!

I debate making a run for it, out the back door and scaling the fence, when we both hear it: the doorknob squeaks as it turns counterclockwise. Lily is coming inside.

Floorboards creak at the front of the house. “Marissa?” she calls; then she gasps, no doubt spotting Chet’s body and the small lake of blood around him. Muffled noises come from the other room, as though she’s stifling a cry.

Jenessa grips my arm with one hand and presses the gun to my temple with the other. “Not a word,” she whispers. The steel is frigid against my flushed cheeks, burning my skin.