“It’s locked,” Hugh said.
Sure enough, there was an old padlock with a keyhole, rusted but still in service, on the clasp.
Martina Mack had reached the lawn. “What’s happening?” she demanded in her scratchy old-lady voice.
“Don’t you dare trample my grass, Martina Mack!” Birchie ordered. “We have enough grass tramplers here already.”
When the rest of us ignored her, she went to join the Barleys, whispering at the edge of the yard.
“What’s in there?” Lavender asked Wattie. The boys flanked her, both their bodies angled toward her.
“Nothing,” Wattie said.
“Bull,” I said. Wattie had left the driver’s-side door open. I went to the car, leaned in, and popped the trunk.
“The chest itself is pretty light,” Hugh reported. “It’s not books or anything.”
“Were you running away?” I asked Birchie as I went around to the back of the car to dig out the tire iron. That was all I could imagine, that it was an escape trunk, packed full of orthopedic shoes and cotton drawers and nice housedresses, hidden in the attic in case I kept insisting Birchie had to come to Norfolk.
“Is that my hope chest?” Birchie asked, as if noticing the trunk for the first time. Mornings were usually her best time, but the crash had rattled her.
“It’s like Pandora’s box,” I heard Lav say softly to Hugh and Jeffrey. “I don’t think they should open it.”
“It’s not your hope chest,” Wattie said to Birchie. She glanced at Lavender, then me. “There’s no hope in it.”
I turned away, lifted the tire iron.
“Don’t you do it,” Wattie warned me.
I smashed down on the old lock. The chest shivered, but it held.
“Want me to try?” said Jeffrey, with a teenage boy’s enthusiasm for whacking things with sticks.
Birchie said, “It’s my wedding dress. It’s my married-lady linens.”
I brought the tire iron down again, hard as I could. The lock held, but the clasp itself broke, falling down to seesaw on one of its hinges. The Barleys and Martina Mack crept a little closer, crossing the invisible border onto our property. The kids all three leaned in, and Lavender reached out to grab both boys by their arms. I dropped the tire iron. Put my hands on the rough wood of the lid.
There was a breathless pause as I swung it open.
I saw something pale, maybe white, wrapped loose in plastic sheeting gone so old it had yellowed. I peeled the top layer of sheeting back.
Lavender gasped, clutching the boys in closer. Frank said a very bad word under his breath. I could hear Wattie panting behind me.
“What is that?” Martina Mack said, bustling across the yard, aggrieved. “We can’t see! You’re block—” Her voice cut out abruptly as she came up behind me.
“Why, that’s not my wedding dress,” Birchie said. “You’ll need to look again, Frank. My hope chest must be farther back.”
I couldn’t move, was barely breathing.
Birchie reached past me and gently, mercifully shut the trunk, covering the pile of bones and loose teeth littering the bottom. Covering the human skull resting beside its own detached jawbone, its crown decorated with a deep, unnatural cracking high up at the back. The trunk had the only lid left to close over the black pits of the eye sockets as they stared up from the depths, old and dark and empty of everything.
7
It begins with Violet.
She’s not on the first page, but she’s the light that calls my antiheroine. Makes her say hello.
So far I’d thought only about Violence, endlessly sketching her without finding her origin. The past few days, I’d even wished for a little more Violence in my makeup. Not the cannibaly parts, but as Wattie and Birchie fought me on a thousand tiny fronts, I’d longed for a scoop of her single-minded will. Violence was so certain.
I’d discounted Violet, even though when I started drawing her in middle school, she had my dark hair and strong jaw and deep-set eyes. She’d changed during my senior year of high school, post-JJ, when I invented Violence. I’d turned Violet Super Pretty, evolving her from Hilary Swank’s less glamorous third cousin into a willowy blonde with big eyes and bigger boobs. She got so sweet that I hurt my own teeth drawing her, like an old-school superhero girlfriend. TSTL, in the vernacular: “too stupid to live.” Violet skips with oblivious cheer down that first dark alley, and her near-constant state of jeopardy allows for a lot of sly feminist humor in the first half of the story. By the end it’s not funny anymore, as she and the world become wreckage. Maybe I’d made her less like me so that it was easier to ruin her.
Violet begins to break in an abandoned warehouse where she and her boyfriend have been taken by a drug lord. It’s a huge, dark space, filled with pallets of crates and stacked boxes, and thugs are stationed at the edges and entrances. The cartel guy wants to know what happened to his crew. The boys from the alley. As Violet cries and swears she doesn’t know, the rabbits and sweet-faced mice and puffy birds begin to gather around her. Their pleading expressions match her own.
The animals are a tell; rabbits and robins are present only when Violet is seen through Violence’s eyes. In the black-and-gray shadows near the frames, bits of her appear: a jag of hair, the edge of one boot, a sharp-nailed hand. Every distance shot shows one less thug guarding the perimeter, more viscous liquid pooled in corners and running down walls.
The cartel guy loses patience right after the last thug’s feet disappear near the top of the frame. He steps close, and above him Violence’s deep purple silhouette glows faint near the ceiling. She’s clinging like a spider with the corpses of the henchmen draped and hanging in the pipes around her.
He pulls a pistol from his waistband and puts five bullets in the boyfriend.
“Last chance,” he says to Violet, and brings his gun to bear.
That’s when Violence drops between them, so lightly that the snick of her knives unsheathing is writ larger than her landing. There is a moment of surprise, some prefight banter, and then Violence is pretty much eating him.
The panels zoom in on Violet. Her face is in her hands, but she’s peeking through her fingers. Her eyes are filled with tears, but her lips . . . she might be smiling. Her palms are pressed hard into her cheeks, though, so it might be the pressure of her hands pulling the corners of her mouth up.
It’s hard to tell, until you notice the rabbits. While the mice and birds work tenderly, comforting Violet and drawing a corner of her skirt over the dead boy’s face like a shroud, the rabbits are watching Violence. They stand up on their haunches, and their white pelts are splashed with gaudy blood. They witness this murderer get eaten up alive, and the rabbits kind of like it. They have begun to change.
Maybe that was why the graphic novel went viral in the first place; Violet’s story happened to everyone. All of us, every innocent babe born on this planet, gets broken eventually. We could all reach back in time with certain fingers to touch those places: Someone you love died, you watched your mom or dad walk out the door, you had sex for the first time and learned exactly how expendable you were. Or you peeled back the lid on an old trunk.
I hadn’t looked at Birchie since she’d closed it again for me. My eyes didn’t want to turn that way. What would I see? Guilt? Defiance? Pure fury at my ham-fisted insistence? My grandmother, who made me icebox pie and called me “sugar,” had human bones hidden up in her attic. Who was this woman? I didn’t want to look at Wattie either, not now that I’d let sunshine touch this thing that should have stayed in darkness. This thing that never, ever should have been.
But when I looked, I saw only my grandma and her bosom friend, small and frail and dear to me. Wattie was looking back, and the compassion in her large, round eyes almost undid me. Forgiveness, even, and under her gaze I knew I’d marched us all to this dark moment.
Once I’d hired the estate-sale folks to help sort out the attic, Wattie had to move that sea trunk. I’d given her no
choice. And Wattie had tried to warn me. She’d told me on my first night back to leave things lie. She had begged me not to open the chest. I’d known her my whole life, but it had never once occurred to me to trust her. I hadn’t thought, If Wattie is stealing a car, then she must have good reason. Maybe I should let her take that trunk and go.
Birchie herself looked stricken. Her lips moved, muttering or maybe praying. She stepped back from the closed trunk, and Wattie took her arm again, rejoining them at hip and elbow.
“Oh, sweet Lord! Who is that? Who did you kill?” Martina Mack screeched from the sidelines.
I lurched to my feet, saying, “Shut up, Martina.”
It didn’t matter whose bones they were or how they came to be there. Birchie and Wattie were standing right by human remains, but as I looked at them, I could not believe that they were murderers or evil things of any stripe. I didn’t understand the bones, but I understood these women. I trusted them. I didn’t need to know this origin story, or Birchie would have told it to me years ago.
I only wished I had let Wattie steal my car, let her drive that chest away and hide it elsewhere. Hide it better and forever. When I saw her backing down the drive, I should have grabbed two giant cinnamon rolls and gotten me and Digby drunk on sugar. I should’ve sat down with Lavender and said, What’s so dern interesting on my computer? Thirteen’s secrets would be innocent and fresh, sweeter than this box of bad history on the lawn.
“Is that . . . Was that a person?” Lisbeth Barley called. “Was that bones of a person?”
“I’m calling Cody,” Martina Mack announced.
God help us. Birchville had five full-time policemen, and one of them was Martina’s grandson. “Jackass” did not skip any generations, at least not in the Mack family. Cody was the last thing I needed in our yard right now.
“Miss Wattie, you and Miss Birchie go inside,” Frank said quietly.
Birchie leaned in with worried eyebrows. “I need to put my trunk away,” she said, one hand reaching for it. Wattie held her fast, kept her from touching it. “I need—”
I cut her off, saying, “Go on inside. It’s okay.”
I was scared of what she might say next. She’d just publicly claimed ownership of a box of human bones. I would not let the Lewy bodies convict her of God only knew what else on the lawn in front of the Barleys and Martina Mack.
Martina was already barking into her cell phone, “Naw, naw, Cody, I’m saying! You get your butt over to the Birch house, right away!”
“Come on, now,” Wattie said. “Leia and Frank will handle this.”
I nodded, reassuring, though I had no idea what “this” was. Once they were moving in the right direction, I turned back to Frank. “Should we take the trunk inside, too?”
“Don’t you move that,” Martina called. She was off the phone now and pointing at the sea chest with one quavering old finger. “That right there’s a crime scene!”
Lavender and both boys watched, big-eyed and quiet. Hugh loomed over her, protective. Jeffrey had only a couple of inches on Lav, but he was doing his best to loom protectively over her other side. My bare feet were cold in the dew-wet grass. Down the road I could see the blue-clad teardrop shape of Cody Mack, already speed-walking up from the square. His officious gait set his Maglite swinging.
“It’s not a crime scene, Martina,” Frank said, mild and dismissive. “We don’t know what it is yet.”
“I own almost every season of Law & Order on DVD. I know a crime scene when I see one.” She turned her beady glare on me. “Y’all uppity Birches! I shoulda known. I hope they bring cadaver dogs and dig up the whole yard.” She gave the Barleys a knowing nod and added, “I bet you anything there’s a whole slew of bones and folks and suchlike buried under there.”
The Barleys actually looked alarmed.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped.
Martina looked down her nose at me, tilting her head back and flaring her nostrils so wide I could practically see all the way up into the dark cavity where her brains ought to have been. “My daughter took me to see Arsenic and Old Lace over at the Montgomery theater. I know what’s what!”
She’d prepped her grandson about what was what as well, because as Cody bustled up, I saw he’d brought a roll of glaring yellow crime-scene tape with him. It was so old it was dusty.
“What in blue blazes is going on?” he snapped, glaring from Frank to me. “Gran says you’ve got a body in that chest?”
I started to answer, but Frank put one calm hand on my arm.
“We’re not sure what we’ve got here, yet,” Frank said.
“I’m going to need to open it,” Cody said to Frank. “I need to see.”
Frank waved his hand in a be-my-guest gesture. Cody pushed in close and dropped into a crouch.
I turned my face away and looked at the Barleys, huddled close and whispering to each other. I heard the chest’s lid creak, heard Cody grunt. Down the road Della Brody was standing on her porch, peering over at us. Next door to her, the Maxwells had come outside, too, so First Baptist’s super-efficient phone tree was already working. We’d have most of Birchville on our lawn within ten minutes. I kept my face pointed safely at the neighbors, watching them coalesce, until I heard the click and creak of the chest closing again.
Cody was asking Frank about the car with its smashed bumper and how the chest had come to be resting in the grass in the first place.
“It was in the back of the car.”
“Where was it before that?” Cody asked. “Where did it come from?”
That was the real question, wasn’t it?
“The attic,” Frank answered, calm and brief, supplying truthful information, but only the exact things Cody asked for.
While they talked, I picked my way over to Lavender and the boys, the damp cuffs of my pajamas flapping at my bare ankles.
“You kids go make Birchie and Miss Wattie some hot sweet tea, please? Or cocoa. I think they’re in shock.”
“Can we have cocoa, too?” Lavender said, her kidcentric interest lured by chocolate and sugar. Jeffrey’s smile sparked hopeful at the question, but Hugh’s face remained grave, a mirror of his father’s. He was only two and a half years older, but they were big years; I hoped that Lav had picked the safety of a crush on Jeffrey. Lavender wasn’t ready for a high-school boy, minutes from driving, with a full complement of adolescent testosterone thundering through his body. But I looked at how close he stood beside her, so protective, and I knew he was there whether she was ready or not.
“Sure,” I said. They started off.
“I’m going to need to question Miss Birchie,” I heard Cody say behind me, and I whirled back.
Frank said, “I’m her lawyer. You can talk to me.”
“That dog won’t hunt,” Cody said. “I been questioning you. You don’t know jack-all.”
“I’ll have to do. I can’t let you talk to my client. You were at the Fish Fry, so you know very well Miss Birchie is not competent.”
“Bullpucky. Seems to me like Miss Birchie only spoke some true words at the Fry. If what she’d said was craziness, your wife wouldn’t be living at her mama’s right now, would she?” Cody said, and Frank’s lips went white.
Damn, but that was a low blow in a fresh wound. Why hadn’t God made jackass genes recessive?
“Birchie has Lewy bodies.” I stepped in, trying to sound calmer than I felt. “It’s a form of dementia, and you can confirm the diagnosis with her doctor. You absolutely may not question her.” I shot Martina Mack a look of pure venom. I’d seen Law & Order, too, if only once or twice. It wasn’t really my kind of thing. “You talk to Frank and no one else, and you keep a civil tongue in your head while you’re doing it.” It was a line straight out of Birchie’s lexicon.
Now one of our two police cars was driving slowly up from the square. It looked like the chief, Willard Dalton, was behind the wheel. He was a reasonable guy, older and calmer, worth about fifteen Codys. I willed him t
o drive faster.
Cody glared back and forth between us. “Get me Wattie, then. She hasn’t gone demented, all sudden and convenient, has she?”
“Miss Wattie, you mean. Who raised you?” I was all Birchville in this moment, speaking for my grandmother and doing it well enough to shame him. He was in our own yard. Hell, he was in our own town. He should have called Wattie “Miss,” given his age and hers, especially in front of his own grandma, and he knew it. “I see your boss coming, and he will talk to Frank, and me, and anybody else who might need talking to. You stand out here in the yard like the dog you are. Let human beings pick what happens next.”
I turned smart on my heel and walked off toward the house.
“Wait here,” Frank ordered Cody, and followed me up onto the porch. He leaned in, talking soft. “Don’t you ask Birchie any questions. She might tell you.”
“Tell me? Tell me what?” I said.
“Anything. You need to be careful what you know. Don’t ask, and do not let her explain.”
I was already shaking my head. “Frank, I have to—”
He interrupted me, quiet but urgent. “Hear me on this. These are old, old ladies, and Birchie is sick. I’m not going to let anybody question her. Not if I can help it. But for sure someone is going to question you. If you know the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, you could do a lot more harm than good. Let me protect y’all.”
I held my hands up in surrender, though it would not be easy. As I went inside, I tried hard not to even think of questions to not ask, and failed. Who was in the trunk? It must be someone who belonged to Birchie in some way. It was her house, after all. Exactly how long had it been up there? I’d only had one look at the bones, but they were old. Old enough to unhinge entirely from one another. Also, the trunk had been buried deep in the back room. When I was a girl, that back room had already been too packed to allow me entrance. Had the trunk been present, moldering and foul, while I played dress-up? It could have been there longer than I’d been alive, the heaps of history growing up organically around it, burying it deeper every year.