“Don’t act like you’re some kind of expert; you’re new here, too. Kind of.”
“And you’re only half my size—so all God’s children got problems, when it comes to power tools and crowbars. I won’t lie to you,” he said—and that might’ve been a lie itself, but she didn’t interrupt him. “I hate this place. It scares the shit out of me, and that’s not something you’ll hear me say twice. I’ll deny it with my last breath, if you tell a living soul.”
“Then I’ll keep it to myself.”
With that assured, he told her, “I don’t want to stay here. In the daytime it’s not so bad; but at night, I’d rather sleep in a doghouse by the interstate than close my eyes up here and act like everything’s all right. If you asked Brad and Gabe, they’d say the same—I promise you.”
“At first I thought Augusta was crazy, when I heard she wasn’t even trying to save it. Now it makes more sense. Did you know that poor woman used to live here?”
“When?”
“After her parents died, she said. And not for very long, but she hung around long enough to hate the place.”
“What about Uncle Chuck? Have you talked to him yet? Did you tell him about…?”
“About the body? No. He’s got enough to worry about back in Nashville, running the shop on money fumes. He thinks I’ve got all this under control; and is counting on us to put the business back in the black this year.” She leaned forward and put her face in her hands, on top of her knees. “Fuck, Bobby. We can’t leave yet, just for being scared.”
“Okay, okay. Fine, nobody’s leaving. We’re just none too happy about staying. Let’s get this gig wrapped, packed, and shipped—fast as we can swing it. And then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Her voice was muffled, because she spoke into her closed-up fingers. “Deal.”
10
DAHLIA AND BOBBY headed downstairs together. Dahlia stopped at the landing turn; Bobby kept going, all the way down to the big living area where Brad was sprawled out on the bags, lacquered in dry mud and holding a drink. Gabe emerged from the kitchen with a stray piece of sandwich turkey rolled up like a cigar. He took a big bite out of one end and played with the rest of it, trying to hide how badly his hands were shaking.
Dahlia planted her hands on the rail, right where the prints used to be. “All right, everybody. Family meeting time. Or … company meeting, Brad. You’re in on this, too.”
“Because everything’s all my fault?” he asked. Every square inch of him was still covered in graveyard muck. He looked like a fugitive from a hillbilly zombie flick.
“No, only some of this is your fault. Me and Bobby have been talking—”
“Seriously?” Gabe interjected.
His father got cranky on him. “Yes, seriously. Now shut up and hear her out.” He went for the bourbon and helped himself. Brad held up his drink. Bobby gave him a long-distance clink for a toast. “You want one, Dahl?”
“Yes, for the love of God. Now, I want to make sure we’re all in agreement: Nobody’s calling the cops about that body in the cemetery, at least not while we’re still working the job.”
Brad and Gabe offered mumbles of assent, while Bobby called back like he was in church. “Preach it.”
“Because if we do, we’re likely to get shut down, and Brad might go to jail.”
“What about after the job?” Brad asked, warily sensing some odd loophole.
“After the job, or at the very end, we should give a heads-up to Augusta Withrow, so she can warn the contractors about the dead soldier. We can rebury him, but it’ll still be obvious that someone went digging there. Someone’s going to notice,” she said, making up some details as she went along—but feeling pretty good about her logic. “We can claim we turned him up by accident … a truck slid in the mud, or whatever. But obviously we’re salvage artists, not archeologists. It’s none of our business, and not our problem.”
Brad’s jaw fell open, and the wrist holding up his glass went a little slack. “Do you think we’ll get away with it?”
“Why not? Augusta knows we found the cemetery, and she told us there was nobody there to disturb. We took her at her word, and we drove right through it. Our bad.”
“You think she’ll vouch for us?” Gabe wondered.
“I don’t see why not.”
Brad wasn’t sold yet. “So I have to lie to the police?”
Dahlia rolled her eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. No one’s asking you to lie to the police. I’m telling you that I’ll lie to the woman who sold us the estate, and she can tell them whatever she wants. The dead guy’s on her family’s land, isn’t he?” She tossed her hands up, almost spilling her drink. “Or, you can go ahead and open yourself up to grave-robbing charges, if you’re that hell-bent for honesty. I don’t give a damn. But until we’re done, we keep that corpse to ourselves. Or…” She took a swallow too big to call a sip. “We’re all out of a job.”
“No pressure…” Brad stared anxiously down into his glass.
Bobby refilled it, and put the bottle back on the fireplace mantel.
“And now for item of business number two,” Dahlia continued. “First, we keep our mouths shut about the soldier in the cemetery until we’re halfway back to Nashville. Second, we quit pretending this house isn’t haunted as fuck.”
Brad and Gabe lowered their eyes, and generally acted like guilty children.
“We’ve all seen things, and some of those things have been pretty freaky. But we only have two more days on this gig before Daddy shows up, and we’re going to make the best of that time like sane, reasonable people who don’t want to go bankrupt because we ran away from a job. This may be a shitty work environment, but OSHA doesn’t have any guidelines when it comes to ghosts. We’ll have to make up our own as we go.”
Brad gulped his drink like he was mad at it. “Are you even listening to yourself?”
“Says the grave robber who saw the dead soldier’s ghost before anyone else did,” she accused, not specifying that she’d seen him too. “The soldier is spooky, but I don’t think that he’s dangerous. His friend, on the other hand … she’s a real bitch…” She slowed. A possibility occurred to her, but she filed it away. “So we need to talk about tonight, and tomorrow night.”
“What’s the plan, boss?” Bobby asked gamely.
“Tonight we’re all sleeping down in this central living room, and if everything goes all right with that arrangement, then great, we’ll do it tomorrow night, too. If things get scary or outright dangerous, then I’ll tell my dad we ran into trouble and I’ll get us a couple of hotel rooms on the company card.”
Brad frowned. “That’s an option? Why don’t we do that now?”
“Because we are trying to keep him from knowing that things aren’t okay!”
She didn’t mean to shout. She didn’t want to let things get even further out of control than they already were, but she was still shaken up from the corpse, and the shower; and she was getting tired, and the bourbon didn’t take the edge off anything. Or it didn’t do enough. One more gulp from her glass, in case the next one would.
Calmer by liquor or by force of will, she said, “I’m trying to keep us on schedule, and keep this gig together. We need every useful scrap we can pry off this wreck, and we’ll need every hour of daylight to get it. What Daddy doesn’t know won’t hurt him. And it won’t hurt us, either. Not if we keep our heads on straight, and stay cool. We can do this—just give it one more night. If it sucks, we take a vote tomorrow, and I’ll find us a Motel 6.”
Brad wouldn’t look up at her. He stared down past his glass, at his knees or at the floor. But Gabe nodded like he understood, and Bobby flashed a thumbs-up.
She exhaled, and finished her drink. She smacked the glass on the rail for emphasis, and let it balance there. “So that’s the plan. Those are the items of business. Oh, and one more thing,” she added. “When it comes to taking your showers…”
Then she told them about letting the
steam out, and keeping the water away from your face and head. It hadn’t worked perfectly, but it might be better than nothing. “I know it sounds weird, but it kept me from having a freak-out. Whatever’s hanging around in there…” She said the name, in case names had power after all. “… I think it’s what’s left of Abigail Withrow—she leaves you alone if you don’t get your head wet.”
“That is completely insane,” Brad marveled. There was a slur around the edge of his wonder.
“Yeah, but it works. Give it a try, unless you want to freak out, fall, and bust your head open. I don’t want to explain ‘murdered by a ghost’ to Daddy’s insurance company.” She said that last bit with finality.
The moment hung in the air, until Brad officially gave in. “Well, all right. I’ll try it, and see if it helps. But it’s … it’s awful in there. I don’t even want to close the door.”
“That’s why we’re teaming up, and keeping watch for each other. It’s a little weird, but two’s company.”
“And three’s a séance,” Bobby said, with a wry little laugh that didn’t suit him.
Gabe chucked a shoe at him. “Ugh. Seriously. Don’t.”
Bobby picked it up and tossed it back. “All right, I won’t. Gabe, I’ll keep watch outside your shower, if you want. Dolly, you and Brad can haul all your stuff down here, and we can have ourselves a slumber party.”
“Stop calling me that,” she said, without any real push behind it. “You’ve been doing it all night, and it’s making me crazy.”
“Sorry.”
“I still need a shower, too,” Brad noted.
Bobby corrected him. “No, I still need a shower. You need a fire hose and a gallon of bleach.”
Dahlia smiled in spite of herself. “We’re short on fire hoses, I’m afraid, and the bathrooms have worse things in ’em than ugly tile. So to recap: Open the bathroom window to let out the steam, and leave the door open so your shower buddy can keep an ear out. Don’t get your head wet until you have to—and don’t dunk it, just splash it. You ought to be all right.”
“This job has the weirdest rules of anyplace I ever worked.” Brad picked himself up off the lumpy place where he’d been sprawled, having flattened a few rolls of paper towels, some rags, extension cords, and folded tarps. “Weirdest coworkers, too.”
“And on-the-job hazards,” Gabe added, stomping back down the stairs with an armload of sleeping bags and pillows. “But you get some cool scars out of it. Ladies dig scars.”
“What the hell would you know about ladies, kid?” Dahlia teased as he passed her on the stairs.
“About as much as the next guy. So … basically nothing.”
“Ladies do like honesty,” she said helpfully. “Scars are a distant second.”
* * *
When everyone was cleaned up from the day’s work, and no further unsettling incidents had occurred, Bobby headed out for the bar. It annoyed Dahlia, but didn’t surprise her, and she didn’t have it in her to yell at him when he announced his plan and jangled his keys to say good-bye. Mostly, she was just tired of being mad at him.
“And to think,” she groused weakly. “For an hour there, I almost didn’t want to kick your ass.”
“I won’t be gone all night.”
“You swear to God?”
He shrugged. “Sure. God, and whoever else. This is where all the action is. It’s just … not where all the alcohol is.”
“There’s still…” She checked the bottle. “Almost no bourbon at all. Goddammit, Bobby.”
“The one you hid in the empty cooler is mostly full. I hardly touched that one.”
“Goddammit again,” she repeated. “Tomorrow, you’re going on a field trip to the liquor store on your own fucking dime.”
“Yes ma’am,” he agreed, the door clapping shut behind him with a bang.
Gabe appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Was that my dad? Did he seriously just leave again?” He took an angry bite of whatever new pre-midnight snack he’d made. “I thought you were the boss, Dahl. You should’ve made him stay.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the fireplace. “Baby, it’s after hours, and I’m too wiped out to give a shit. I hope he doesn’t get himself killed. I pray he doesn’t wreck the truck, or hit somebody with it and get Daddy sued. He’ll be back soon, up early, and ready to go in the morning.”
“You think?”
“I think he’d better be, since there’s nothing left to tackle but the house. Not even your father can sleep through a Sawzall.”
Gabe chewed on, unconvinced. Around a mouthful of food, he declared, “Sometimes he really is an asshole.”
“Oh, honey … I am begging you, do not make me defend him. He’ll be all right. We’ll all be fine. He’ll just be drunk and fine. And I have to tell you, I envy him for it: He didn’t leave us hardly anything behind. Maybe me and him should go to meetings or something. It’d be cheaper than blowing all this money on booze.”
Gabe wasn’t sure what to say to that, which was fine by Dahlia. She only said it out loud because it wasn’t the first time she’d thought it since the divorce.
But she didn’t go to any meetings, mostly because she told herself she was living in a post-divorce window, and it was fair game to fall apart for a while. A friend of hers had said there was a formula to it: You were allowed to mourn a relationship for half its length—but that sounded excessive. Dahlia and Andy had been friends for twenty years. They’d dated for two, and were married for six. Did that mean she could take ten years to drink herself stupid? Four years? Or only three?
She’d go broke, trying to drink like this for three whole years.
Either that, or she’d die of liver trouble—that’s what her dad would say if he knew about the formula. So it was just as well that he didn’t.
Dahlia was about to ask Gabe what was left in the way of sandwich stuffings, but a clatter upstairs stopped her cold.
A door banged open, then slammed again, and after a series of loudly stumbling steps, Brad stomped to the top of the stairs holding a toothbrush and waving a washcloth. “Fuck that!” he shouted, to her and Gabe and the house at large. “Fuck that sideways.” He grabbed the rail like an aging movie star in a turban, and clutched it as he descended. “You called her Abigail? That thing in the bathrooms?”
“What’d she do this time?” Dahlia asked, only kind of caring.
“Same thing as last time, that crazy bitch—all I did was try to wash my face, and she grabs me, and pulls me, and she … she shocks me, and it gets all bright, and there’s somebody there in the room with me—someone who will murder me the second I close my eyes. I can’t work like this!”
“Brad. Brad. Brad. It’s happened to all of us, okay? I understand exactly how you feel, you have to believe me. Finish up and come on down, have a drink. We can commiserate.”
“There isn’t enough booze in the whole world. Literally. Like, not if I stood here and drank myself to death on the spot,” he complained at top volume, barefoot and pissed, clomping down the remaining steps.
He stormed past her into the kitchen. Gabe ducked in after him, saying, “I’ll clear off some stuff. Got to get all the food away from your corpse-enriched hair products.”
“Shut up.”
Dahlia left them to it, took the last of the bourbon—Bobby’d only left a couple of fingers in the bottom—and dropped herself onto her sleeping bag and extra blanket. She arranged the pillows she’d brought. One was filled with buckwheat, and it rustled like a beanbag; the other was an ordinary feather jobbie. She fluffed them both, positioned them where she wanted them, and lounged against the marble mantel.
There was no point in bothering with a glass. She didn’t intend to share the rest, and the boys could have the cheaper bottle that her cousin had hardly touched. She swigged from her own with her eyes shut.
Gabe came back from the kitchen. His footsteps were heavy, and his pace was familiar; Dahlia knew it instantly, and it didn’t worry he
r. He came and sat down beside her.
“Hey Dahl?”
She still didn’t open her eyes. “Yes, baby?”
“Who do you think the soldier was?”
She opened one eye, then the other. “He might be … private Reagan somebody or another. Whatever it said on the stone.”
“Dad said he didn’t think so. Dad thinks maybe he was murdered, and someone hid him there.”
“That’s what he told me, too, and I bet he’s right. No casket, shallow grave. Brad’s no lumberjack, and he didn’t dig very deep. Someone buried the poor kid fast and cheap.”
“But if he’s not the soldier on the tombstone, then who is he?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I can make a guess. He’s connected to this place. To that family.” She sat up straighter, leaned forward, and put down the bottle. It was easier to talk when she could use her hands for emphasis. “See, there were three children: Abigail, Hazel, and Buddy. Buddy, like I told you, was Augusta Withrow’s father—so that ought to give you some idea about how long ago this was. Supposedly Abigail tried to elope with a boy, but it all went to hell. Augusta acted like her grandfather just forbade the whole thing, but what if he went further than that? What if he murdered the kid to keep him away from his daughter? Then he buried him in the last place anyone would ever look: a cemetery that was all for show. Everyone knew nobody was buried there. No one would’ve ever thought to look.”
“I like that theory.” Very, very casually, he picked up the bottle. “It’s way cooler than just … everyone forgetting where some soldiers are buried.”
Dahlia thought about reclaiming the bottle, but she wasn’t really feeling it anymore. Another mouthful and she’d regret it in the morning. Such was the privilege and despair of being thirty-seven: she’d learned her limits, and they weren’t what they used to be.
He removed the lid, wiped off the bottle’s mouth, and downed half of what remained in a single swallow.
Brad emerged before the bottle was entirely empty. He wore long plaid sleeping pants and a Hanes T-shirt that used to be black, paired with flip-flops, so he wasn’t running around barefoot, collecting splinters and spiderwebs.