by Deirdre Dore
Tavey managed to sound both innocent and conniving at the same time. “Well, we called him last night when you weren’t answering, just to see if he happened to be with you, and I told him the news then. He said he’d be happy to come.”
“I’m sure he did,” Raquel said.
“Oh, Quelly,” Tavey chided, using Raquel’s nickname. “He’s been very helpful. People like talking to him. Who knows what other information he’ll gather? Especially since Tyler will be laid up for at least a month.”
Raquel didn’t like that her friends called Brent looking for her. It felt too much like calling her boyfriend, and he wasn’t her boyfriend.
When Raquel didn’t respond, Tavey continued, “Is Brent there now?” She was careful to keep any innuendo out of her tone. Raquel heard it anyway.
“No, he’s not,” Raquel said shortly. But he might have been, if her mother hadn’t been kidnapped and Bessie killed. Just a week earlier she’d been happily screwing him in her kitchen. That was before he’d nearly been shot trying to help her talk to Gloria Belle, before Bessie had been taken.
“Okay,” Tavey said soothingly. “So how soon can you get here?”
Raquel glanced down at herself. “An hour,” she ventured. She wanted to take a quick run and shower before she got dressed and headed over to Tavey’s.
“Okay, the GBI team won’t be here until ten.” Tavey sounded slightly miffed.
“I’m sure they’ll be there as soon as they can.” Raquel had a vague idea of the number of charities and causes that Tavey contributed to, and it was more than any ten other people she’d ever met. There was a reason the governor took her call, even on a weekend, even when the request probably sounded insane. A dead man wasn’t likely to go anywhere, after all. If he was in his grave, then he’d still be in his grave on a weekday, but anything was possible, she supposed, and the remains of Charlie Collins could provide some evidence of what had happened that night in the fall of 1986, or perhaps shed some light on the mystery of Summer.
“I’ll have Thomas make breakfast,” Tavey told her. “Would you like an omelet?”
“Sure,” Raquel agreed, thinking that she’d go on a slightly longer run. Thomas, a French student who worked as Tavey’s chef, made excellent omelets.
“Great. Thanks, Raquel. I’ll see you soon.”
“ ’Kay. Bye, Tavey.”
Raquel hung up the phone and leaned back against the counter, coffee in hand. She closed her eyes, thinking that if Tavey was right, and Charlie Collins was in his grave, then someone had moved his body. He’d been killed at some point, probably the same night Jane said he’d killed the two couriers from the motorcycle gang, maybe buried, maybe not, that wasn’t clear, but someone had found him at some time, found him and put him back in his grave. Atohi had said to Tyler, He’s where he belongs.
Raquel straightened and walked back down the hall to her bedroom and stood in front of her dresser. On it were pictures in elegant frames with inset crystals and intricate designs. She lifted an old black-and-white photograph of her grandmother. She was young, probably in her twenties, and wearing some kind of uniform, standing in front of the fireplace in the Collins mansion. Her smile was bright in her dark face. She’d been there when Charlie Collins was born, she’d sewn the receiving blanket that he’d been wrapped in when he was given to his mother, she’d sewn his clothes; she’d loved him, and Atohi—the keeper of the Collinses’ hounds—had loved her.
“I wonder if they looked for him,” she whispered, considering her grandmother’s face. It would have been easy enough for Atohi to take one of the hounds, trained to hunt, and find Charlie, or his body. And when they found him, what then? she wondered. Had they not wanted to reveal that he’d faked his own death, essentially killed his wife and abandoned his child to meet drug smugglers in the woods? Had they not wanted anyone to know? Her grandmother was a good person, Raquel knew. How, then, had she not told?
Raquel swallowed, struck again by the thought that her grandmother would never again hang sheets on the line near the rose garden on Tavey’s property. She would never again show up on Sunday afternoons in her church dress and hat and make dinner for Raquel, Tavey, and Chris. She would never again send them to Atohi with a jug of iced tea so that they would have an excuse to visit the puppies, with their floppy ears and round pink bellies. Bessie had always said Atohi’s name with a special sigh. Raquel had often wondered if he’d been her grandfather, the kind man with the dark red-brown skin and quiet ways. He’d always let them play with the dogs, even when Tavey’s grandfather had told them it was inappropriate.
Raquel replaced the photograph and finished her coffee in one swallow. She would run for a while, she decided; it would clear her head, and then she’d meet Tavey and the others back in the graveyard to look for Charlie Collins in his own grave.
What if Summer’s in there as well? The thought stopped her. Jane had suggested that Charlie might have taken Summer.
Raquel changed her mind about running; she was going to Tavey’s now. She would dig up Charlie Collins’s grave herself if it looked as if Summer was in there with him.
4
JANE—WHO WAS also Circe on occasion—didn’t like the small room where she was held. The walls were a pale blue that was too white to be soothing—the air itself seemed to throb whenever she looked at them. She was in trouble.
She’d lied, she thought, picking at the thin blanket on her bed. Maybe she hadn’t been lying at the time, but now that she was Jane, she knew she’d lied. She frowned at her nails. They were ragged and torn, scraped and swollen at the knuckles and blistered at the palm. She usually kept them perfectly buffed and moisturized with the essential oils she sold her in shop, but they hadn’t brought her any, no matter how many times she’d asked.
Jane scowled, confused. Had she asked?
There was a noise in the hall outside her door, the sound of voices, one raised as if giving a lecture.
“This is an interesting case. Patient shows signs of PTSD, multiple personality, delusions, and narcissistic personality disorder. We’re keeping her under observation until she can undergo further questioning,” the voice said.
There were other voices—questions—but Jane couldn’t quite hear the details. They talked about her like she couldn’t hear, like she didn’t understand. She understood sometimes. She understood now.
I am a rat in a cage, Jane remembered. Circe. Circe had been talking to the doctors. She didn’t understand why she was there.
Lying back against the pillows, Jane crossed her fingers and laid her hands on her chest. Her heart was racing. She closed her eyes and immediately opened them. No, not there. Nothing good waited in sleep, nothing that meant her well.
She stood and paced her small room. She needed to calm down. If she didn’t calm down, they would come in here again and give her drugs to make her sleep, and when she woke up she didn’t know if she’d be Circe or Jane or some mix of the two. Mostly she was Circe, but the drugs they gave her made her Jane sometimes.
She clamped a hand over her mouth, hard, and forced herself to breathe in and out of her nose. Mark was dead. He’d made her dig in the basement for the money.
This was the key point, the point that made her heart race. Mark—her own husband—had put her in a hole, had thought about killing her. She’d seen him do it, seen the thought in his head, like a movie. It made her wonder if he had ever been real, if everyone was two people, but not everyone had two names.
We killed the couriers. She remembered that. Had it been yesterday? No. It had been too long since she was all the way Jane. She felt like it had been a long time since that night, a very long time, but she couldn’t be sure. Summer!
She had to get out.
She went to the door and jerked at the handle, sure that it would be unlocked this time, but it wasn’t. She knocked lightly, listening, pressing her right e
ar up against the door. The sound seemed loud, so loud, like a great knocking ship. What was on the other side? Where was she?
Circe straightened, frowning. “Hello? Why am I here? Hello?” She smoothed the T-shirt she was wearing. Where are my clothes? “I need to prepare for my solstice celebration. Hello?”
The door opened and a large black woman with apple cheeks came in the room with a small tray. She was wearing pink scrubs, and several plastic ID badges hung at her waist.
“Good evening, Miss Jane, how are you feeling?”
Circe didn’t remember the woman, but her name came from somewhere in her head, from the voice in her head. “Keisha.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m Circe,” she said, and wondered where Jane had gone.
“If you say so, honey.” The woman handed her a small paper cup with pills and another cup filled with cold water.
“I don’t take Western medication,” Circe protested, but she was lifting the cup to her lips. She took the pills, hating the foul plastic taste of them, and quickly drank the water.
“You do now, Miss Jane,” the woman said with something like sympathy. “Now you just lie down and rest. You got a big day tomorrow.”
“Yes,” Circe agreed. “The solstice is coming. Summer.”
The woman used her body to move Circe in the direction of the bed without actually touching her, and Circe’s body obeyed, climbing into the sheets.
“That’s right. And your attorney is coming to talk to you now that you’re a little better. He’s coming to talk to you this week sometime, or maybe next week if you’re still feeling poorly.”
“Attorney?” Circe felt a shiver run through her, and the woman patted her arm in response, like she’d felt the shudder and wanted to soothe Circe.
“That’s right. He’s coming to talk to you. And then I think the police might come by again, and that FBI agent.”
The woman’s voice was warm when she talked about the agent, and Circe knew she thought he was handsome. Circe thought he was the big man with glasses and reddish hair—Agent Ryan Helmer. He’d asked her questions. He had and so had some other people and now there was a man who sat behind a desk and asked her questions. Circe didn’t care much about them. She talked and talked, and they went away eventually, frowning. But she didn’t have an attorney. Didn’t want one. She hadn’t done anything.
“I don’t want to talk to an attorney,” Circe protested.
Keisha clucked her tongue. “Well, all right, honey. Why don’t we see how you feel in the morning, okay?”
Circe didn’t think it was okay, but dark was falling like a black curtain, like night fell in the woods. There and then gone. Like Summer.
5
TWO DAYS LATER, Brent stood in the Collinses’ graveyard again, only no one was being buried. This time, a body was being removed. Brent had seen a body exhumed before, when he was working on a documentary about lost graveyards, but that didn’t really explain his lack of attention to the proceedings. She did. Raquel. She still wasn’t talking to him. Hadn’t returned his texts.
He’d thought about asking her why she’d suddenly decided to drop him like an incriminating bag of weed, but he’d held himself back out of pride and well, shit, the woman’s grandmother had just been shot and killed, and her mother had been kidnapped. What’re you gonna do, moron? he asked himself. Ask her why she doesn’t want to play with you anymore? Jesus. Get a grip.
Brent stood a little behind her, trying to stay out of the way, while she stood with her left arm linked at the elbow with that of her friend Tavey. Her other lifelong friend, Chris, stood on Tavey’s other side. He liked the image they made together, two friends supporting the one in the middle, supporting each other.
Most of his attention was on her, though, on the blue dress that clung to her curves and snapped in the breeze, her toned calves descending from beneath the hem of her dress to delicate ankles crisscrossed with the slender leather straps of her sandals. He found himself wondering what was beneath her dress. She wasn’t wearing stockings today, probably because it was so hot. He wondered why the women had chosen to wear dresses for the exhumation. He would have thought they’d dress more practically, like he had, but he supposed the press was waiting back at the Collins house.
The sonar tool that they’d used on Sunday to look into Charlie Collins’s grave had showed that there was indeed a body buried in the casket, but just one male, not a little girl, as the three women had briefly hoped. The story was just too salacious to escape the notice of the press. Charlie Collins’s body had mysteriously appeared. It was the stuff of a reporter’s dream. Brent was sure the reporters would have massed at the grave site if Tavey hadn’t taken steps to prevent it. Of course, she’d been helped by the remoteness of the location, but the vultures were waiting back at her mansion.
Brent had even been called by a couple people who’d recognized him, and they’d asked him, as a fellow journalist, to provide some kind of detail of the event. He’d turned them down—politely but firmly—knowing that Raquel would never forgive him, and more important, he wasn’t a journalist, at least not in his mind. Brent tried to capture the human experience, but not at the expense of his subjects, though Raquel would probably disagree with him on that point.
He mentally shook himself. He had to stop thinking about Raquel. About Raquel in his Jeep, about Raquel half naked in the rose garden near Tavey’s house, about Raquel period. Shit, she was mourning her grandmother, and apparently avoiding him, but he didn’t want to stop thinking about her. He wanted her to talk to him, but he supposed he didn’t need to be that obvious about it. He should at least be showing the tense curiosity of the women about the exhumation. After all, the sonar had showed that there was something else in the grave with Charlie Collins.
Several men from the GBI were struggling to get straps beneath the rotted casket in order to lift it from the red clay that had molded around it. Brent wondered if the body would be recognizable after almost thirty years. He hoped the women hadn’t gotten their hopes up.
Ryan, Chris’s lover, bent and whispered something to her, his red-gold hair glinting against her light brown curls. He was an FBI agent who’d met Chris while investigating a serial killer who had made Chris his target. Interesting story, actually, Brent had made a few notes about it. Brent made notes about everything. He looked for stories; he collected them, and sometimes he made documentaries about them. Technically, he should be filming the proceedings now; he’d gotten permission from Tavey, but the other group of people at the grave site—the FBI investigators and the forensic analysts with the GBI—had asked him not to. They were filming everything, they assured him.
He wasn’t aware that a faint smile curled the corner of his mouth. He did that often, smiled at the private thoughts inside his head. In this case, he was smiling because he had a small button camera capturing the proceedings and two more that he’d hastily installed in nearby trees this morning.
Brent looked at the straight line of Raquel’s back as she watched her friend, wishing he could see her face. Wishing—as he often did—that he’d never decided to make the documentary about her mother all those years ago.
He’d gotten the idea from his uncle George, actually. He’d been struggling after he’d graduated from NYU film school, looking around for a project that would get his name on the map. He’d seen Gloria Belle sing as a kid. Uncle George had taken him to hear her, but when George had explained that she’d fallen into drugs and prostitution, it had made Brent wonder what had happened to her.
So he’d made the documentary about an amazing singer who’d fallen on very hard times, questioning her old friends, family. He’d known about her relationship with Charlie Collins, though he hadn’t remembered it until he’d started researching, and he’d interviewed Tavey’s family and Bessie, and had attempted to speak to Raquel. When it was released in the late ’90s
, it had made him famous—true enough—but he wasn’t sure it made up for the way Raquel looked at him sometimes, as if he were a suspect in one of her cases, someone who wasn’t to be trusted that deeply, someone who, at any moment, might take out a knife and stab her in the heart.
She was standing with Tavey and Chris again, leaning slightly forward with interest, as men used a winch to haul the casket up and swing it out of the grave. All three of the women were tense, frozen in place as the men hauled the casket out and set it down.
There was some scurrying around for several minutes as investigators and crime scene techs took photographs of the casket, the muddy sides and tool marks that already marred the crease between the lid and the base. Samples were taken, and they dusted the casket for prints.
It was quite a while before the men in their mud-stained blue jumpsuits began prying open the lid of the casket.
The day was just as warm and breezy as it had been three days ago, when they’d stood at Bessie and Atohi’s funeral, but now Brent and the others were standing downwind of the grave site, and the stench of half-dried corpse wafted over to them.
Brent coughed a little as the smell hit him, and he saw Raquel discreetly lift a hand toward her face, probably to cover her nose. This body had never been embalmed, that was clear.
The four men handling the removal of Charlie Collins’s coffin used a pry bar to work open the time-rotted wood. A sharp crack made them all jump. They opened the lid, and Tavey took a step forward as if compelled, her hand going to her lips as if to stop a cry. Shoulders straight, dark hair pulled tidily into a bun at the nape of her neck, Tavey stepped free of her friends and watched as the decomposing body of a man was revealed.
One of the men waved Tavey forward—they wanted to see if she recognized anything about the body. Chris and Raquel remained behind, but stepped so that they were standing closer together.
