Abruptly she stood up, propelled to her feet by a sudden surge of adrenaline. She grabbed her sister’s backpack and slung it over her shoulder. When Bronwyn didn’t immediately jump up—too stunned no doubt—she barked, ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’
The United Methodist Church was all the way out on South Grandview, a mile and a half from where Grandview Avenue proper ended and the road began its meandering journey into the hills around Windy Ridge. Built in the late 1800s, it might have served as the model for the churches you saw scattered throughout New England: sturdy white clapboard with a steeple from which a bell tolled the hours on Sunday. Alongside a red-brick path flanked by neatly mown grass, a spotlit bulletin board encased in glass held an announcement of upcoming services and special events. As the two women approached on foot, having cautiously parked the Volvo a quarter of a mile or so down the road, Noelle’s eyes fell on the large block letters spelling out the spiritual message of the week:
RUNNING ON EMPTY?
STOP IN FOR A FILL-UP.
She indulged in a small, grim smile.
Well, Lord,
she thought with a certain macabre appreciation,
it looks like I’ve come to the right place.
Whatever came of tonight’s expedition, she wouldn’t walk away empty-handed.
She recalled the services she and Robert had attended with his parents. In her drinking years it was the only time she could sit and reflect in peace on the muddle she’d made of her life. Later, after she’d gotten sober, she was glad simply for the chance to rest her mind and spirit after the endless, numbing rounds of dinners and cocktail parties. Another, less comforting thought crept in.
Wasn’t there a part of you that liked it, too? The rosy picture it made, you and your handsome, successful husband seated beside his socially prominent parents.
Robert wasn’t entirely to blame for the sham of their marriage, she thought. Hadn’t she bought into the myth -lock, stock, and barrel? The quietly toiling office Cinderella plucked from obscurity by her handsome, much older boss. Transformed overnight from an ordinary young woman leading an ordinary life into a fairy princess.
But as long as she’d had Emma, none of it had been wasted. There could be no regrets. And if tonight’s mission, however foolhardy, put her one step closer to her child, then the risk would have been worthwhile.
She glanced about, struck by how cinematic it was: the deserted church, the full moon, the low-lying mist courtesy of God’s special effects department. Imagine Lacey finding out what she’d been up to tonight; her lawyer would think her certifiable. She wouldn’t be too far off the mark, either.
A narrower path led alongside the church to the field out back. In the misty moonlight, amid pale spears of grass, the faint outline of the original church, which had burned down sometime in the mid-1800s, could still be seen. Golden yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace had sprung up between the ancient moss-covered stones, and wild raspberries formed a tangled shroud over what was left of the chimney.
The title of one of the Nancy Drew books she’d foolishly passed on to Bronwyn came to mind now:
The Clue in the Crumbling Wall.
Yes, that’s what this was, she thought, something even sillier than a movie, a Nancy Drew novel. She suppressed a giggle. If she started to laugh, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.
Fifty feet or so beyond the ruins of the old church, a dirt path sloped up to a clearing enclosed by a low wrought-iron fence. The graveyard was well maintained and normally wouldn’t have struck Noelle as spooky. But before this she’d only seen it in broad daylight. Now, in the moonlight, the shadows that had slipped out from under headstones and obelisks wreathed in mist made it look menacing somehow.
She shivered. A breeze smelling faintly of pine rattled the leaves of the densely packed trees overhead. She remembered that the church bordered on state forestland. Anyone who could have heard them shout for help was miles away.
Turning to Bronwyn, she whispered, ‘Suddenly this doesn’t seem like such a great idea.’
Her sister shrugged. ‘The best ones never do.’
‘I hope you remembered to put a tape in that thing.’ She tapped the video camera in Bronwyn’s hand, thinking,
Great. A home movie of two women scared out of their wits.
‘Shh. They might hear us.’
Who
might hear them? This place was as silent as the—
Noelle thought better of completing the thought.
Bronwyn took her hand, gripping it tightly. Together they started up the path. Crickets chirped in the tall grass, and tiny night insects could be seen glimmering in the moonlight that fell in broad bands between clumps of barberry and low-growing shrubs. A picture flashed through Noelle’s mind of her sister at nine, standing stiffly beside her mother’s freshly dug grave: a skinny little thing with huge eyes, her small dark head drooping on the pale stalk of her neck.
Up close the graveyard seemed less creepy than it had from a distance. Maybe it was because she saw no evidence of Robert’s dogsbodies
…
and frankly doubted they’d show. Or maybe it was just that part of her—the part that jumped at sudden noises and walked more quickly down darkened streets—had simply shut down like an engine on overload. The mind’s version of an arm or leg falling asleep, when all that was left was the queer prickle signaling the return of feeling.
She looked about. At its farthest reaches the graveyard was steeped in shadow cast by the trees that crowded up against the fence, dense and black as a fortress. But the headstones that were visible were well kept, most adorned with flowers and wreaths. You could tell a lot about a dead person, Noelle thought, by how conscientiously his or her grave was tended. Especially if the date on the headstone was a recent one. The most lovingly looked after, and saddest, were those of young children. Briefly she played her flashlight over a polished granite plaque inscribed with:
DEAREST DAUGHTER THOU HAS LEFT US
AND THY LOSS WE DEEPLY FEEL
BUT GOD WHO HATH BEREFT US
CAN OUR SORROWS HEAL
The bedtime prayer Nana used to recite with her when she was a child came to mind now.
If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Noelle shuddered. What a ghastly thing to teach a child: that you could go to sleep and not wake up. No wonder she’d had nightmares.
Beside her Bronwyn let out a strangled squeak. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Noelle clicked off the flashlight.
‘It sounded like it was coming from over there.’ She pointed toward the dense thicket to their right. But Noelle saw nothing, and the only sound she heard was the hooting of an owl.
The tiny hairs on the back of her neck were standing up nonetheless. ‘I’ve seen enough,’ she hissed. ‘Unless your idea of fun is sticking around all night and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.’
Her sister had cried wolf once too often. Noelle knew it wasn’t malicious. Bronwyn’s imagination was like the book she’d read aloud to Emma so many times its binding had come loose,
Where the Wild Things Are.
A forest swarming with boogeymen and monsters.
‘I
swear
I heard something.’ Bronwyn’s eyes were black as the surrounding shadows. ‘Are you sure you didn’t hear it?’
‘The only thing I’m sure of is that we’re acting like a couple of idiots.’ Noelle, more annoyed at herself than at her sister, started back the way they’d come.
The gate creaked loudly as she was letting herself out, making her think of the grange hall that every year on Halloween, as far back as she could remember, was made over into a haunted house.
There’s nothing to be afraid of,
she used to tell herself.
It’s all fake. Just a bunch of fake skeletons and fake blood and noises on a tape recorder.
But there was nothing fake about this graveyard.
Just then a sudden movement by the fence caused her to jerk about. But it was only a tree limb swaying in the breeze, she saw. Something below it caught her eye: a mound of dirt half obscured by shadow that could have come only from a freshly dug grave. The prickling sensation in her head grew stronger, like circulation returning to a deadened limb.
They’re all buried here,
she recalled.
Not just Buck. His whole family, going back generations. Over there, under those trees.
When she opened her mouth to call to Bronwyn, only a dry croak emerged. She cast a panicked glance over her shoulder. But her sister, who a moment ago had been right behind her, was nowhere to be seen. There were only the headstones, staring back at her in blank disregard. Terror rose in Noelle like a solid thing rushing at her out of the darkness. She told herself,
The shadows are playing tricks on me. She’s there; she’s
got
to be there.
Every instinct screamed at her to run, but she found herself moving like a sleepwalker instead, drawn in the direction of the Van Doren family plot. It was as if she were underwater, drifting amid the sunken remains of a lost civilization. In the dappled moonlight she floated past the plain, lichen-encrusted headstone of Jacob Van Doren, born 1775, died 1850. A stonemason, some distant part of her brain recalled. She noted the graves of Jacob’s wife and children before pausing at a marble monument flanked by stone urns, far too grand for this simple graveyard, one that could belong only to Thomas Van Doren, Robert’s great-grandfather. A cold-hearted man according to local legend, responsible for the deaths of six workers who’d been crushed when the substandard scaffolding on one of his buildings collapsed.
Then something wrong, something that jolted her. Here and there headstones had been cracked in two as if with a sledgehammer, leaving chunks of granite scattered amid the grass, their jagged edges gleaming white as bone. A stone figure lay toppled on its side, the statue of a little girl cuddling a dog: Robert’s great-aunt Martha, who at thirteen had been run over by a drunken Fuller brush salesman driving a Packard, and whose beloved Scottie, MacPherson, died from a broken heart (or so it was told) not more than a month later.
Noelle came to a stop before the freshly dug grave she’d glimpsed from the path. Who in Robert’s family had died recently? His ailing uncle Pete from Providence? His sickly cousin in New Haven?
Then her eyes fell on something protruding from the freshly turned earth: the rotting remains of a coffin. Her heart began a long slow-motion free fall.
God, dear God.
She didn’t want to know whose coffin it was, oh, how she didn’t want to, but she knew all the same. Her gaze was inexorably drawn to the headstone jutting at an angle alongside it, on which was carved:
JAMES BUCHANAN VAN DOREN I948-I969
A cry lodged in her windpipe like something swallowed the wrong way. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she were choking.
Then she
did
hear something. It might have been the rustling of leaves overhead or a field mouse scampering among the dry twigs that littered the ground. ‘Bron?’ she croaked. ‘Bron, is that you?’
A sudden movement out of the corner of her eye. A twig snapping that definitely was
not
a mouse. She spun about, her heart boomeranging in her chest. In the darkness her head smacked up against a low-hanging branch. A cracking blow that delivered a lightning flash of startled pain—anger, too, at her clumsiness—followed by a crimson-spotted darkness that skated lazily before her eyes. She was dimly aware of crumpling to the ground. Then the branch spoke.
Through the roaring in her ears, Noelle was surprised to hear a voice that sounded very much like Robert’s say mildly, ‘Happy anniversary, darling.’
CHAPTER 17
F
IVE MILES AWAY,
in the two-story building housing the
Register,
where several of the newly replaced ground-floor windows still bore strips of masking tape, Charlie Jeffers looked up from the article he’d been proof-reading to note with surprise that it was nearly midnight. He glanced at the clock on the wall to see if the one on his desk was correct. How had it gotten to be so late? Bronwyn must be wondering what was keeping him. She might even have tried to reach him, but at this hour the switchboard took all incoming calls. He was picking up the phone when Tim Washburn, the new security guard, tapped on the door. Charlie looked up to find the retired county sheriff, a middle-aged man built square as a juggernaut, peering in through the glass partition.
‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Jeffers, but there’s a young fella outside wanting to see you. I told him it was kinda late, but he was real insistent.’ Washburn’s small mouth, bracketed by fleshy jowls, made no secret of his disapproval.
Charlie scrubbed his face with an open hand. He was tired. He was also accustomed to oddballs showing up at all hours, claiming to have spotted anything from an alien spaceship to some guy they swore was the spitting image of James Dean (never mind that Dean, were he alive, would be an old man by now). One of the jobs of the two-man skeleton crew that worked the nine to midnight shift was fielding such ‘hot’ news tips. He’d have Freddy Slater handle this one. Freddy had been on staff nearly as long as Charlie had. He’d seen and heard it all.
‘Did he say what it was about?’ Charlie asked.
‘No, just his name.’ The guard scratched the back of his neck, where a thick fold of flesh was covered in a fine, furlike stubble. ‘Dante Lo Presti. You know the guy?’
Charlie felt his exhaustion drop away, replaced by an odd, buzzing energy. ‘Yeah, I know him. It’s okay, you can bring him on up, Tim.’
He watched the blue-uniformed guard lumber off through the newsroom, which was deserted except for where Freddy’s and Greg’s computer screens glowed. His mind raced. When Dante Lo Presti was arrested, he’d sworn he was innocent. … and Charlie believed him. Not, as he’d told Mary, because the kid was so squeaky clean, but because to his reporter’s nose it had the smell of a frame-up.
What Dante
was
guilty of, though, was sniffing around his daughter.