Bury Me in Satin

by Seanan McGuire

  Mary, who was still trying to come to terms with the six-armed bear, tore her eyes away from the taxidermy and followed.

  The hall gave way to a blessedly normal-looking kitchen, with linoleum on the floor and fresh paint on the walls. Alexander Healy, who Mary mostly knew from the days when she'd still felt comfortable visiting the town library, was sitting at the table with a mug of tea and a large, leather-bound journal. His head was bowed, and his hand moved across the paper in quick, practiced arcs.

  Fran stopped in the kitchen doorway and cleared her throat. "Afternoon. We've got company."

  "Company?" Alexander raised his head, blinking in bemusement. Then he saw Mary, and his eyes widened. "Mary. I...see."

  "No, you don't, I'm afraid; neither did I, until there was a little incident with the cookies," said Fran. "She's dead."

  "Um, hi," said Mary.

  Alexander went very still. Then he glanced to the window. Noting that the sun was still well above the horizon, he relaxed ever so marginally before turning back to Mary. He gave her an assessing look, careful to avoid her eyes until the last. Then he met them, and his shoulders sagged.

  "Crossroads ghost," he said. "Oh, Mary, my dear, I'm so very sorry. Is that why your father has been missing work this past week?"

  "No," said Mary. "I mean, not really. I mean, I didn't die that recently. I mean..." She stopped, looking to Fran for help.

  "She means she's been dead since 1939, and none of us noticed, because she was going about her business like nothing had changed," said Fran. "Her father's been missing work because he passed away, and Mary here just kept waiting for him to wake up."

  "Oh, Mary," said Alexander again, this time more softly, more sadly. "Not everyone who dies comes back. Most don't, in fact. It's only when a person feels they've left things undone that they're sure to rise. Did your father...was he aware of your condition?"

  Mary almost burst out laughing. The way he said "condition" reminded her all too clearly of the way the teachers back at school had talked about one of the senior girls when she'd gotten herself into trouble with her boyfriend. The girl had been sent away to stay with relatives somewhere in Ohio, and the boy had been packed off to join the Army. Neither of them had ever come back to Buckley.

  Then again, maybe catching dead was a little bit like catching pregnant. No one wanted to use the word. You didn't get to do the things you used to do anymore, no matter how much you enjoyed them. Your life, as you had always known it, was over. One way or the other, it was over.

  "He didn't know," Mary said. "Nothing really changed, so I figured telling him wouldn't be fair. It wasn't like he could bring me back just by being mad at the car that killed me."

  "So he probably thought that when he died, you'd get on with your life. Find a job, find a husband, move on. He was freeing you, Mary." Alexander rose slowly. Then he just stood there, his hands dangling at his sides, looking like he didn't know what to do next. "I'm sure he loved you very much. I'm very sorry for your loss."

  "Don't you love how he just glossed over the part where you've been dead and babysitting for Alice this whole time?" asked Fran. "It's like he doesn't care that I've been handing his grandbaby off to a ghost at least three times a month for basically her entire life."

  "Honestly, I'm still a little shocked that you weren't more upset," said Mary.

  "Oh, I was. Still am, really," said Fran. "But Alice has always adored you, and she's a pretty good judge of character. It'd just upset her if I went and tried to lay you to rest, and you're a nice girl. A little deader than I might like, but that's not your fault."

  "Oh," said Mary. She wasn't sure what else to say.

  Fortunately for her, Fran had never been one to have trouble filling a silence. "Mary's body was never found, which is why she's been able to haunt her own house this long without anyone catching on. Can you call the police and come up with some excuse for why you dropped by the Dunlavy house? Benjamin's been dead long enough that it's past time for him to get buried."

  "I can do that," said Alexander. "What about Mary? Did anyone see you driving away from the house with her? I don't want to deal with the police coming here and asking why you were seen smuggling a dead man's daughter away. Especially not when the daughter in question is also dead."

  "I watched the windows as we were pulling out. Not a curtain was stirring, and I took back roads all the way home. Her room's so full of dust that it's pretty clear she hasn't been living there for a very long time. I think that'll throw off anyone who wants to start looking, and it's not like there's going to be any proof that she was ever here, what with her not being alive and all."

  "I suppose that's true," said Alexander. "What will you be doing while I deal with the police?"

  Fran smiled sunnily. "Finding her body and making sure she gets a decent burial, of course."

  Somehow, Alexander managed not to groan.

  It was a pretty simple plan, if you were the sort of person who thought plans like this made any sense at all. Alexander had gone back to the Dunlavy house, intending to call the police from the payphone down the street, so that he wouldn't have to go inside. Fran had called her husband home from the library, and he was watching Alice while his wife and his mother took Mary down to Old Logger's Road to search for the place where she'd been hit.

  It was a pretty simple plan, and Mary was pretty sure that it proved the Healys were, as a group, completely out of their minds.

  "I just don't understand," she said, as they hiked across the fields separating Mill Road, where the house was, from Old Logger's Road, where she'd been killed. It was a little over a mile, all told, but it seemed longer, in part because they were wading through waist-high sticker bushes and brambles. "Why are you doing this?"

  "Because it's polite, dear," said Enid. "You've always been an excellent babysitter, and it's not nice to leave your babysitters to lay in unmarked graves by the side of the road."

  "Nope, you put 'em in unmarked graves in the backyard, so you'll always know where to find 'em," said Fran, far too cheerfully for the circumstances.

  Enid rolled her eyes, but didn't say anything. Mary just kept trudging along, the briars grabbing at her legs and feet the same as they did the living. There was something uncomfortable about that, like the girl was violating the laws of nature by obeying them.

  "You died by the road, dear?" said Enid.

  Mary nodded. "A car just came up out of nowhere and hit me." She could still remember the lights, bright moons against the darkness, coming so fast that she hadn't had the opportunity to jump out of the way. If there was one moment she wished she could take back, it was that one. If she'd jumped just that little bit quicker...Mary shook off the regrets of the past, and said, "It knocked me into the corn. We were coming on harvest, and there's that big old field near the old Parrish Place, the one nobody picks from anymore. Kids back at school always said that it was haunted." The words seemed to startle her. She laughed.

  "What's so funny?" asked Fran.

  "If it was haunted, I sure didn't notice. I just got out of there as fast as I could, because I was scared. But I was haunting the field while I was there, wasn't I? I've been haunting everything I touched for these last three years."

  Enid patted Mary reassuringly on the shoulder. "I'm sure you did an excellent job of haunting the place, and I'm sure you'll do an even better job of haunting our back field."

  Mary gave her a sidelong look. "Aren't you worried about somebody digging the place up and finding my body and deciding that you murdered me?"

  Fran actually burst out laughing at that. "Mary, nobody is going to dig up our field. You think anyone in this town wants to know what they would find there?"

  Much as it pained her, Mary had to admit that the older woman was right. Everyone knew that the Healys went into the woods and swamp of their own free will, and that whatever it was they did there, it kept the town safer than it would have been otherwise. It was part of why they were tolerated, despit
e three of the four having come from parts unknown--which should have made them social outcasts, not interesting conversation pieces. Why, Enid had been seen covered in blood and standing on the lakeshore more than once, and the Friends of the Library had never so much as said boo. If you wanted to hide a body in Buckley, you could do a lot worse than burying it in the backyard of the Healy place.

  "Hush, you two," said Enid. "We're here." They had reached the end of the field, and with it, Old Logger's Road.

  The road--which barely deserved the name, being only semi-paved, and pitted with potholes that no one had gotten around to patching in the last ten years--stretched out in front of them, running away from town and into the deep woods. The driveway of the Old Parrish Place snaked out of the overgrown fields a hundred yards or so up the way, creating a makeshift crossroads.

  Mary looked at that crossing and went pale. Not just pale: insubstantial. She seemed to fade out until Enid could see the waving grass and thorn bushes right through what should have been the girl's body.

  "Mary?" she asked, as gently as she could. "What's wrong?"

  "I died here," said Mary. She raised a shaking, semi-transparent hand and pointed to the crossroads. "I died here, and then I was standing there, and why don't I remember what happened next? It's all a blur. I just know...I just wanted to go home. That was all. I'd do anything if it meant that I got to go home."

  "Where, Mary?" Enid kept her voice low and soothing, like she was afraid that Mary might bolt. And she was, in a way. She didn't know much about ghosts--not compared to Alexander, who had at least made a cursory study of the afterlife--but she knew that most of them spent the bulk of their time in someplace where the living simply weren't. It wasn't Heaven or Hell: Purgatory might have been a better name, except that none of the accounts she'd seen had placed any religious labels on the place. It was just where the dead went when they disappeared.

  As far as she knew, Mary had never spent any time in that place. She had died, and then immediately gone back to her life, as if being dead had no more importance than being late for homeroom. If Mary got so upset that she lost her grip on the mortal plane, there was no telling how long it would take her to come back. That might be for the best, in some ways, but it would definitely make it harder to find the girl's body.

  "Mary?" prompted Fran. "Come on, sugar, we can't go home until we find you, and you know Alice will worry if we're not back by bedtime."

  The color and solidity flowed back into Mary's body like wine flowing back into a bottle, filling her up until she looked as ordinary as anyone else. She took a deep, unnecessary breath, pressing the hand that wasn't pointing at the crossroads against her sternum. Then she turned, ever so slightly, until her outstretched hand was pointing at a patch of corn on the other side of the road, not too far from where they were standing.

  "There," she whispered. "Please don't make me look. Please, please don't make me look."

  Enid and Fran exchanged a glance. Enid patted the bag she was carrying. It contained everything they'd need to clear away the weeds and gather the pieces of what had once been Mary Dunlavy, three years and a lifetime ago.

  "It's all right Mary," said Fran. "You just wait here. We'll take care of everything."

  Mary, who was fighting to stay solid, didn't say anything. She just nodded.

  In the end, it was easy to find her body. They just looked until they found a place where the corn grew too lush and too green, like it was being tended. Then they pulled the stalks away, a fistful at a time, until they found the sadly grinning skull of a girl who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was still wearing the decaying shreds of her Buckley High School letter jacket, and in some ways, that was the saddest thing of all. She would never wear anything else. If she had to be buried, she should have been buried proper, in satin, in a churchyard, with her father to lay roses on her grave. Not like this. Never like this.

  "It's not fair," murmured Fran.

  "It never is," said Enid. "Now help me dig."

  It took them less than ten minutes to fully free her skeleton from the ground. They lifted it up and rolled it in the tarp Enid had produced from her bag, tucking the girl in as carefully as if they were putting her to bed for a long winter's nap. Then they carried her across the road to where her ghost was waiting.

  Mary looked at the long gray shape of the tarp, and asked, "Is that me?"

  "You know, there's men who've spent their whole lives arguing about that question," said Fran. "No, honey. This isn't you. This is just the house you used to live in, and you don't live here anymore. That's all. Now come on; let's go home before Alice starts to worry."

  Again, Mary didn't say anything. She just nodded, and followed the two Healy women across the field back toward their house. There would be time, later, to wonder why the crossroads scared and called to her so; to ask herself what she was going to do, now that her father was gone and she had no one left to haunt. Three years dead, and she was finally about to get on with her life. There would be time for a lot of things. Mary was only just coming to understand, dimly, how much time she had.

  But all those things were for later. For now, it was just the three of them, Fran and Enid serving as pallbearers in a funeral that had been put on hold for a long time, but not forever, and one heartbroken, orphaned ghost girl, following them toward the distant lights of home.