I went back to the yard. Sam was scouting around, examining the space with his nose. His floppy ears were hanging forward. I’d read that this pushed the scent up to a bloodhound’s nose. Amazing. I personally thought he was very cute as a bloodhound, but that got into kind of queasy territory, so it was a thought I had to banish.
“He’s working hard,” Quiana remarked. She’d perched on the edge of one of the yard chairs, her hands tucked between her bare knees. Her thick dark hair was twisted and secured on top of her head with a clip or two, because it was too hot for long hair. My own was piled up in much the same way.
“You two have been friends a long time,” she said, when I didn’t respond to her last comment.
“Yes,” I said. “A few years, now.”
“You have a lot of friends.”
“I have a lot of friendly acquaintances. It’s hard to have close friends, when you have a mental thing like mine.”
“Tell me about it.” Quiana shuddered delicately.
Frankly, I didn’t know if I wanted to be Quiana’s friend or not. There was something in her that put me off. I realized this was pretty damn ironic, since that was the way people often felt about me, but I didn’t think Quiana made me uneasy simply because she had an unusual ability. She made me anxious because for a few minutes the day before she hadn’t been alone in her skin. Someone else had been there with her.
I turned my eyes away from the girl. I didn’t want her wondering what I was thinking about. I watched Sam instead. He was sniffing the ground with the efficiency of a vacuum cleaner.
The lot was long and narrow, with the house leaving very little room on either side. On the north side of the house, there were maybe five feet between the air conditioner sticking out of the kitchen window and the fence that surrounded the yard from the front wall of the house to the rear property line. Naturally, it was in that narrow strip that Sam found a promising scent. He went over it anxiously, and then he raised his head and bayed.
I hoped all the neighbors really were at work. At least the fence blocked the view.
Sam’s doleful bloodhound face swung toward me, and he pawed at the ground at his feet. “Awwwrrrrhr,” he said.
I got the shovel from the toolshed. This was not going to be pretty. I was trickling with sweat after the first few shovelfuls, and I was maybe a little peeved that Quiana didn’t ask to take a turn digging. She looked down into the gradually increasing hole with an unnerving and unswerving fascination.
I looked at Sam, who was licking one of his paws. “You better go inside and change back,” I said. “Thanks, Sam.” He started ambling toward the steps and paused, stymied. I pitched a shovelful of dirt at Quiana’s feet. “Quiana,” I said sharply, “You need to open the back door for him.”
It was like I’d stuck a pin in her, she looked so startled. “Sure,” she said. “Sure, I’ll do it.”
I watched her go over to the door, and it seemed to me she stumbled a little, was a bit shaky on her feet. Her mind was blurry, foggy, with strong impressions coming from God knows where. After Sam was in the house, I resumed digging. The faster I went, the sooner we’d know if Sam had found an old turkey carcass or human remains.
After another five minutes I had to pause. Quiana had returned to her place at the edge of the hole. Her stance was rigid and her eyes were fixed on the upturned earth.
I heard a couple of slamming car doors. JB and Tara had returned. I felt a surprising amount of relief.
I was leaning on my shovel when they all came into the backyard—all the adults, that is. The twins were still sleeping. Sam had resumed his human form, and he was in his cutoff jeans again. His Hawaiian shirt looked cool with its loose drape around his torso. I envied him. My tank top felt wet and clingy.
JB and Tara were still wearing their workout clothes, so they were as sweaty as I was, but they both looked more relaxed.
“So, there something in there?” Tara asked, peering down at the hole I’d made.
“Sam thinks so,” I replied. “JB, you want to shovel for a while?”
“Sure, Sook,” he said amiably, and he grabbed the shovel. I sank to my haunches and watched him work.
Sam squatted by me. He never wavered in his expectant posture.
And with a terrible predictability, the shovel hit something that scraped instead of crunched. Without being told, JB started to scratch at the dirt with the shovel blade instead of sinking it in.
We didn’t need the monitor to hear the babies begin to wail.
Quiana tore herself away to go in to them. Tara seemed relieved to leave it to her.
JB uncovered a femur.
We regarded the bone in silence.
“Well, we got us a body,” Sam said. “Now we need to know who it belonged to.”
“How are we gonna explain what we were doing?” Tara asked.
“We could say you were going to plant some beans,” I said. “I know it’s late for beans, but a cop would believe that.” I left unspoken the fact that Andy would believe that if we said it was JB’s idea. “We can say we were digging the holes for the runner poles.”
“So they’ll come get the bones out, and then what? Will things get better in our house?” Tara’s eyes were bright with anger. “Will we stop being miserable? What about the babies? I think we have to find out who this guy was.”
“It’s not Isaiah Wechsler, and we know Albert lived, and we know Carter was sent away after the murder. So who could this be?” I looked around, hoping someone would look as though he had had a revelation, but everyone looked blank.
JB, shovel in hand, was standing by the crouching Sam. They were silently regarding the hole that was a grave. Sam was scowling.
“Tara, we can’t ignore this,” I said, as gently as I could. I was fighting a rising wave of irritation.
“I know that,” she snapped. “I never said we could, Sookie. But I got to figure out what’s best for me and my family.”
Quiana had been gone a handful of minutes by now. I could still hear the babies crying. Why hadn’t she found out what was wrong and fixed it?
The normally placid JB nudged Sam to make him move away from the grave. Sam’s jaw set in a way I knew meant he was barely holding on to his temper.
I didn’t trust any emotion I felt.
Tara was angry with me, which wasn’t normal. Sam and JB were glaring at each other. The anger in the air was affecting all of us. I made myself run into the house to find out why the babies were weeping. Tara should be doing this! I followed the sobs to their little room.
Quiana was sitting in the rocking chair crammed in beside the cribs, and she was crying, too.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Snap out of it.”
Her tear-stained face looked at me with resentment written all over it. “I have a right to grieve for what I’ve lost. Only my brother knows the real me,” she said bitterly.
Uh-oh.
“Quiana,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot calmer and a lot more nervous, “you don’t have a brother.”
“Of course I do.” But she looked confused.
“You’re being haunted,” I said, trying to sound matter-of- fact. I didn’t want to say the word possessed, but it was definitely hovering in the air.
“Sure, that’s right, blame me because I’m the one who’s different,” she snarled in a complete emotional about-face.
I flinched, but I had to pass her to get to the babies, whose cries had redoubled. I decided to take a chance. “You want to go outside?” I said. Then I made a guess. “You can see your bones.” I watched her carefully, since I had no idea what she’d do next.
There was someone else behind Quiana’s face, someone both anguished and angry. All I could think about was getting her out of the room.
And then Quiana got up and left the room, her face blank. She was
n’t even walking like herself.
I scooped up Sara, who was shrieking like a banshee.
“Sara,” I said. “Please stop crying.” To my amazement, she did. The baby looked up at me, her face red and tearful, panting with exhaustion. “Let’s get your brother,” I said, since Robbie’s wails continued unabated. “We’ll make him happy, too.” Robbie also responded to my touch, and in a moment I was walking slowly holding the two babies. It was awkward and terrifying.
What would have happened if Quiana had been utterly overrun by the ghost while she was here alone with the twins?
Now that the bones had been uncovered, the emotional miasma in the house was intensifying, without any doubt. It was a struggle to get out of the house, aside from the difficulty of carrying two children. Though I wanted to leave more than anything, I stopped in the kitchen to put them in their child seats. I opened the back door and passed Sara to JB. I went down the back steps with Robbie, moving very carefully. Sam, Tara, and Quiana were in the corner of the yard farthest from the bones, and JB and I joined them there.
In sharp contrast to the lighthearted meeting we’d had when we were planning the renovation, our conference in the backyard was grim. The late-afternoon sun slanted across the bricks of the patio, and the heat of them radiated upward. Even the heat was preferable to the haunted house.
We waited. Nothing happened. Finally, Tara sat in a lawn chair and started feeding Sara after JB fetched her nursing shawl. Robbie made squeaky noises until it was his turn. They, at least, were content.
Sam said, “I dug some more, and I think it’s a complete skeleton. We don’t know whose bones, whose ghost, or why it’s angry.”
An accurate and depressing summary.
“The only neat stories are the ones made up,” Tara said.
Quiana, who seemed to be herself at the moment, sat slumped forward, her elbows on her knees. She said, “There’s a reason all this is happening. There’s a reason the haunting started when the hammer came out of the wall. There’s a reason there’s a body buried in the backyard. We just have to figure it out. And I’m the psychic. And it’s trying to live through me. So I got to try to take care of this.”
I looked at Quiana with some respect. What she was saying made sense.
“It’s tied to the hammer,” Quiana said.
“So, okay, if we want to know what happened so we can fix it,” I said, “and since I can read minds, and since the ghost can get into Quiana’s mind . . . I’m wondering if maybe Quiana and I can do something with the bones and find out who the spirit—the ghost—is.”
Quiana nodded. “Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s get this bitch settled.” She reached over to the old patio table and took the hammer.
We stood, full of purpose.
JB and Sam shot out of their chairs. Sam said, “You don’t need to do this, Sookie.”
Wild horses couldn’t have held me back from this experience. I stepped away from Sam and took Quiana’s left hand, bony and strong and cold. We went over to the excavated skeleton. Its skull gaped up at us from its grave. Quiana was holding the hammer in her free hand. Then she gasped and jerked, and suddenly I was holding the hand of someone completely different.
And I was seeing what Quiana saw, but not through Quiana’s eyes. I was seeing . . . faces. A round-faced woman working over a kitchen table. I recognized what she was doing; she was making piecrust. She was looking up, bewildered and sad. Mama. A burly man bending over something on a tool bench, with the same air of worry about him. Father. And looking at a boy—older than me, but still a boy with an open, honest, freckled face, a face that was serious and full of doubt. Albert. I would have done anything to remove the anxiety from their faces, anything to silence the cruel words that had caused that unhappiness.
Words spoken by that devil, Isaiah Wechsler.
Part of me could still be only Sookie, and that part felt the growing resolution, the horrible resolve, as the entity in Quiana played out his plan.
The night, the darkness, only streetlights in the distance where town lay. (That almost threw me out of Quiana’s mind. Since when had Magnolia Street been out of town?) Running silently across the short distance between the windows, from my window to his, and his was open in the warm night . . . through it quietly enough not to wake him, Father’s hammer in my hand and . . . then he raised his hand, oh . . . oh, no. In the moonlight the blood looked black.
Back out the window, breathing hard, and over to the one in my house, safe now, back home hide the hammer under the bed but Albert woke up, Albert beloved brother, and Albert said what did you do? And I said I shut his foul mouth.
And there was more, but it was too much for me, Sookie. I had to pull Quiana out of this, but that was impossible until we saw the end.
Then we did. We saw the end.
I gasped and choked, and Quiana folded silently to the dirt as if her strings had been cut.
Sam caught me, braced me, as JB supported Quiana.
JB said, “What happened? Why were you all holding hands, Sookie?”
Tara said, “They’ll tell us, honey. Wait a minute.” The twins were silent, and when I could see, I realized they were back in their infant seats, at the base of the tree. The evening was closing in. The shadows had gotten so long they almost covered the yard. I could hear a car door closing next door. Andy had gotten home. Should I call out, get him to come look?
“Do you know who it is?” Sam asked, keeping his voice low, pointing at the open grave.
I went over to it. “This boy killed Isaiah Wechsler. This boy is Carter Summerlin.”
“But you said his folks sent him away,” Sam said.
“In a way, they did,” Quiana said weakly. Tara had propped her up against the fence and was giving her a bottle of water. Quiana looked as if she’d survived a death march. “This boy killed himself because he couldn’t stand what he did. He climbed through the window at night—the window of the house next door—with the hammer he took from his dad’s toolbox. Came back in his own bedroom window, blood all over.”
I shuddered. The others stared at us, their mouths open.
“But his big brother saw? Is that right, Sookie?” Quiana asked.
I nodded. “Albert took Carter’s nightshirt and burned it in the backyard in the middle of the night, and hid the hammer in the closet wall. Later on, he closed it in. The fight he’d had with the Wechsler boy, it was because—well, Isaiah had made fun of the, what he thought was the effeminate ways of Albert’s little brother. And to Carter it was so terrible, so unthinkable a slur, that he had to wipe out the one who’d voiced it. Albert believed he should have protected Carter better; he thought he should have shown Carter how to behave in a more manly way.”
“But I felt terrible about killing Isaiah. And about how people thought Albert was to blame. The next week, I killed myself,” Quiana said. She was unaware she was saying anything odd. “I hanged myself in that same closet, from a hook. I figured that would make things better for Albert. When they found me, Albert started crying. He told them what the fight had been about and how he’d helped cover up for me. They had one son dead, so to protect Albert and the family’s good name, my folks buried me in the yard in the dead of night and told everyone they’d sent me off to live with relatives.”
“And Carter haunted them?” I said, not liking how shaky my voice was.
“He haunted his parents, because they were ashamed of him,” Quiana said, and I welcomed her return to perspective with huge relief. “But not Albert. Albert had tried to keep faith with Carter, but he must have felt terribly guilty himself every time he saw the Wechslers.”
“So Carter started making his presence known again now because . . .”
“Of the hammer. When you found the hammer, that was the trigger for his . . . activation.” Quiana shrugged. “I don’t know much about ghosts, but I got t
hat from him. He was full of anger—well, we all got that. He was confused, and agitated.”
“What can we do? To get rid of him? He can’t stay here,” JB said, his mouth set in an uncharacteristically hard line.
“We can call the police,” I said. “They’d come get the bones and take them away for evaluation and burial. They’ll take the hammer, too. The closet has been reconfigured, so it’s no longer the place where Carter died.” I wondered, if we sent the bones and the hammer to the police, would the ghost manifest at the police station? I tried to imagine Detective Andy Bellefleur’s face.
“Will that do it? End his presence?” Tara asked.
“Ought to.” Quiana looked at me.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
There was a doubtful silence.
I cleared my throat. “Or we could just take everything, bones and hammer, and bury the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle in the cemetery. By ourselves. And no one would ever need to know, which was what the whole Summerlin family wanted.”
They all thought about my proposition for a few seconds.
“I’m for that,” JB said. “I don’t want people coming around to see where the body was buried. The babies wouldn’t like that. People might not let their kids come over to play with Robbie and Sara.”
Tara looked at her husband in surprise. “I didn’t think about that, JB. Sookie, since your house is right by the cemetery . . . can you and Sam . . . ?”
“This isn’t a usual best-friends job,” I said, maybe a little tartly. “But okay, I’ll do it. You got an old sheet?”
She vanished into the house and came back with a white percale double fitted. Quiana laid it out by the grave, and Sam and JB disinterred the bones. Wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, they transferred the remains of poor Carter Summerlin to the sheet. The ground was so shadowed by the side of the house, I needed the help of a flashlight to sift the earth, searching for anything they might have missed. I came up with two teeth and a few little finger bones. After a while, we were reasonably sure the entire skeleton had been harvested from the soil. Tara put the hammer on top of the bones, gathered up the sheet corners, and tied them in knots.