When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Ah, come on – we've done worse,” Jack said, waving his hand indifferently. “You beat Julian Wynne's face in with Jane Eyre to get into Barker's, and we thought he was a serial killer.”

  “Right: we thought,” I reminded him. “But he wasn't, so I wasn't really in harm's way.”

  “It was Barker, Nim: you were definitely in harm's way,” Jack countered. “And this might be what it takes to solve this thing once and for all.”

  He looked at me imploringly, but I lowered my eyes to the floor.

  “You do want to figure it out, right?” he asked, uncertain from my silence.

  “No, sure – of course I do,” I said, giving a halfhearted shrug. “It's just ...”

  “Just?”

  I shook my head.

  “It's just, what're we going to do when we do solve it?” I said.

  Jack looked at me, his expression clouded with confusion.

  “What do you mean? Like what if no one believes us again?”

  I frowned. The idea hadn't occurred to me, though now that he had mentioned it, the thought became all too apparent. The Perennas owned the town just as Barker had controlled Bickerby every bit and more, and even if we were to find solid proof of what had happened, I didn't think that the police officer who had collected us from their house on my first day in Kipling would be so quick to march back up to their door to arrest one of them.

  “I hadn't thought of that,” I said, my expression falling further. “Though maybe the town would turn on them – they all liked Tommy, right?”

  “Yeah, that's a good point,” Jack said, nodding. “But what did you mean, then?”

  I glanced up at him quickly.

  “Nothing.”

  “Ah, come on, Nim,” he said in his familiar way. “Tell me.”

  I shrugged.

  “Nothing, I just meant … What're we going to do when this is all over? You know … do you – I mean – would you stay here? Would you … go somewhere else?”

  Jack shifted.

  “I guess it depends on everyone's reaction,” he said truthfully.

  “But what do you imagine doing after this? You can't – I mean, you don't want to work in that bookshop for the rest of your life, do you? And I don't – I mean – I don't really have any idea what I'd want to do.”

  Jack stared at me for a long moment.

  “We don't have to decide right now, Nim,” he said.

  “But I think that we should,” I argued. “I mean, the last few times we didn't plan well enough – after Bickerby, and then after Albertson, even. We got all shifted out of place, and things were – things never got right again.”

  “But it's not over yet – we've still got time.”

  “I don't know; it doesn't feel that way.”

  “There's time,” he repeated. “And it'll get right again – it will.”

  I ran my fingernail over my lips; they were so dry that the skin was peeling away again. The thought of spending another stretch of time wasting out the days in either a treatment facility or an empty house, looking but finding no sense of relief for months or years on end, was pressing itself so tightly to me that it felt as though I would never push it off again. And I didn't want life to be as meaningless as it seemed to be, or as I told myself it was: I didn't want to fade away before it should have been over.

  “It won't be like before, Nim,” he said, knowing what I was thinking.

  “It might be.”

  “It won't,” he said more firmly. “We'll be together this time – just the two of us – like we always were.”

  I raised my eyes slowly to his, that sense of carelessness that I so often saw on his face gone and replaced by one of utter seriousness, and the pressure lifted just slightly from my ribcage to make room for something else that I hadn't felt it quite a long time.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding as I decided that it would be true. “Yeah, you're – you're right.”

  He grinned.

  “I usually am.”

  He finished his cigarette and put it out against the windowsill before striding forward and giving Mea a pat on the head.

  “Sorry, Mea,” he said, “I meant, 'the three of us.'”

  Her tail flopped from side to side, smacking against my leg as it went.

  “So let's go up to the Perennas' and take a look at that ledger,” Jack said, waving me up. “We'll figure this out once and for all, and then we'll pack our bags and get on to the next adventure.”

  “The next?”

  I rolled my eyes. I had had quite enough of his adventures for a lifetime.

  “There's always a next adventure, Nim,” he said knowingly. “And the next one – I can feel it – will be the best of all.”

  Ch. 17

  We made our way up to the Perennas' house, trudging through the thick snow and clutching our arms to us in the deep chill that had been made worse by our lack of coats, with Mea trotting at our sides. As the sun had begun its slow descent in the sky, the dollhouse-like home came into view against the white backdrop and Jack pulled his face up from his sweatshirt and turned to me.

  “So if they're home, we say we're here to see Father Taggart,” he said, repeating the plan to me again.

  “Right.” I shoved my hands further into my pockets. They were so cold that they felt as though they would snap off. “And what happens if Father Taggart wants to know why we're looking for him?”

  Jack shrugged.

  “Spiritual guidance.”

  “I'm going to need a lot more than spiritual guidance by the time this is through,” I murmured, sticking my face back into my sweater.

  The Perennas, it seemed, were not at home. While Mr. Perenna was at work, Mrs. Perenna was undoubtedly part of the organization that had formed to help out with the ruins of the church, and Eliot would still be at school. Even so, we looped twice around the house and peered into the windows before entering.

  “You'd think they'd have started locking their doors by now,” Jack said, turning the knob and letting the wind push it open. “Honestly, they could have all sorts of people in here.”

  “Like a schizophrenic and a former escaped convict.”

  “I wasn't an escaped convict, Nim – I was an innocent citizen who evaded arrest,” he said.

  “Which will be much more welcomed by Mr. Perenna, I'm sure.”

  He only grinned in response.

  “So here we go,” he said a moment later, taking down one of the ledgers and laying it open on the desk. “Townspeople O through Z. They should be in here.”

  He flipped through several pages, not bothering to care if he smudged or wrinkled the pages, before flipping back again and frowning.

  “What?” I asked.

  “They're not in here.” He made a face and slammed the ledger shut. “He's got three pages on Old Mrs. Vandernorff and not one on his own family.”

  “Well, maybe he doesn't need to write stuff about his wife and kids down,” I considered, giving him a shrug. “He probably knows and remembers more about them than he does the townspeople, right?”

  “Maybe,” Jack said. “Or maybe he's just got something to hide about them.”

  He flipped through the rest of the pages as though hoping that theirs were simply out of place, but then reached the end and sighed.

  “Well, that was a waste,” he said. “Although at least now we know that Mr. Zapatero opened his store nearly thirty years ago. Imagine, a local taxidermist can stay open for all that time, but last year the hunting instructor left town because he claimed didn't get enough business in a town where hunting is more popular than attending Sunday Mass.”

  I paused.

  “Wait, what?”

  Jack glanced over at me.

  “That was a joke,” he said. “Everyone goes to Sunday Mass – including the Protestant family that lives down by Mrs. Coffey's.”

  “No, not that,” I said, waving his statement away. “The other thing – the hunting thing.”

  “W
hat, the hunting instructor?” he said. “He's no one. He left town after people stopped signing up for lessons. Which isn't really a huge surprise, mind you, because anyone who lives in this town knows their way around a shotgun –”

  “So there was a hunting instructor?” I asked, cutting him off mid-sentence.

  Jack shrugged.

  “Sure. He had a shop here, too, selling guns and equipment and whatnot, but someone else took that over.”

  “And why didn't you mention this before?”

  “What do you mean? Why would I?” he said unconcernedly. “He left a few years ago: he didn't kill Anna.”

  I shifted, uncertain of why it seemed so important.

  “No, I guess not,” I said.

  “You've got to stop this obsession with grouse-hunting,” Jack told me. “Really, Nim: it's clouding your better judgment.”

  “Do people here own guns?” I asked, largely ignoring him.

  “What type of question is that?” he said. “I just told you that everyone here hunts.”

  “But do they own their guns?”

  “I ...” Jack wavered in his spot, suddenly contemplative. “No, I guess not. They mainly rent them during the seasons.”

  I nodded to myself, still trying to untangle my thoughts properly, and my eyes rested on the ledger laying out in front of us.

  “Is it important?” Jack asked.

  “No, I don't know ... I just … Do you have to sign out a gun?”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Well, you can't just take them from the shelf,” he said. “And I hope that's not what you were planning.”

  “Of course it's not,” I said. “But if you have to sign them out, then wouldn't there be a ledger or account or something of everyone who took one on the day Tommy was shot?”

  Jack shifted his jaw back and forth.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I'm sure Mr. Perenna already looked it over, so it probably didn't say much.”

  “Or maybe it did, and he just didn't want anyone else to know,” I said. “Hence why the hunting instructor suddenly felt the need to leave town three years ago, right after Tommy was killed.”

  Jack eyed me warily.

  “Right, but … it'd be gone now,” he said. “If there was anything incriminating, it definitely wouldn't still be in the shop.”

  “No, that's true,” I said. “But it might still be in here.”

  He glanced around Mr. Perenna's office as I said it, momentarily looking excited before his face pulled down into a frown.

  “Or he might have burned it, like any normal person would've done,” he said.

  “Jack, the guy has a section in a ledger devoted to someone in town who died twenty-six years ago,” I said, pointing to the page next to Mr. Zapatero's. “I think it's safe to assume that he kept something as important as a claim as to who killed his son.”

  “Fair point.” His eyes lit up mischievously. “You take the left bookshelf, I'll take the right.”

  We broke off to search our separate halves of the room, working both as quickly and carefully as we could to find the missing document before the Perennas returned to the house. As the office was fairly organized into meticulous sections, it wasn't difficult to move from one shelf to the next flipping through journals and records. Mea watched us curiously from her spot on the floor.

  As I stooped to check the wooden cabinets below the shelves, opening the first drawer and pawing through an assortment of old photo-albums, I was momentarily distracted by a family picture on one of the pages. In it, the Perennas were huddled together outside what must have been the Summer Fair that had taken place years before: they were standing in a line with their arms over one another's shoulders, smiling fully at the camera, and there was no trace of discontent on any of the faces. Mr. Perenna's hair was still whitish, but his glasses were off and his eyes were bright, and Mrs. Perenna showed no sign of the unhappy housewife that she had always seemed to be whenever I saw her now.

  Eliot was still scraggly-looking, especially in comparison to his elder brother, who was reminiscent of the lacrosse player Josh Brody who had exuded self-assurance and the idealness that I had sought to achieve during my time at Bickerby with him: his head was tossed back, his pose caught mid-laugh, and his free arm was raised as though waving to the picture taker. He looked every bit as perfect as everyone in town seemed to have thought that he was, and yet there was no resentment in Eliot's eyes as he glanced over at him despite the fact that he must have known that he paled in comparison to him. But what struck me most, I decided, was how Anna looked. She, too, was staring up at her older brother, and there was an admiration in her eyes that was unmatched by any of the other family member's. It was clear that she adored him, and clear how greatly his death would have affected her, as well.

  “Nim – I got something.”

  I snapped the album shut and shoved it back into the drawer, looking around as Jack spoke. He was standing up on the desk in order to reach to the topmost shelf, and in one hand was a thick book that had been opened to reveal where a lone page had been hidden.

  “The list of names?” I asked, scrambling up to go over to him. “Does it say who borrowed a gun that day?”

  He ran his hand through his hair as he looked down it, looking neither excited nor discouraged to have found it.

  “Yeah, it looks like it,” he said, hopping down so that he could show it to me. “See, it says Swanson's at the top – that was the instructor's name – and this is where everyone signed, but ...” He trailed off and shook his head. “I don't see anything that we didn't already know.”

  He pointed to each of the names in turn, explaining whom each belonged to. Of the eighteen or so listed, half were friends of Tommy's that he had gone hunting with that day, and the others were part of a separate party. All of them had been accounted for already.

  Jack let out a heavy breath.

  “Nothing new,” he said, giving me a shake of the head. “So I guess it's another dead end.”

  “But he kept the list,” I pointed out. “And he kept it hidden – so that's got to mean something.”

  “Like what? It was the instructor?” Jack shook his head. “That doesn't make sense unless the guy had some sort of personal vendetta against the family, which I somehow doubt that he did.”

  “He might've,” I tried. “You said a lot of people don't especially like the Perennas –”

  “Yeah, but even if that's true, then why would Mr. Perenna just drive the guy out of town instead of having him thrown in jail?” Jack asked. “Unless you're suggesting that he secretly murdered Swanson, and then pretended that he left town … And even if that wasn't a far-fetched theory, even for me, it wouldn't explain why Anna died.”

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, turning away from me as he swore under his breath. As he muttered something unintelligible, I continued to stare at the list, uncertain as to why something seemed off about it.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What's this?”

  I pointed to one of the last names on the list, my finger shaking slightly as I did so. Jack leaned over to read it.

  “Perenna,” he said simply, giving me a shrug. “Yeah, that's Tommy.”

  “Then what's this one?” I said, pointing to the same surname near the top of the list. Jack's eyes darkened. The handwriting for both signatures was different.

  “So one of the Perennas was in the woods that day,” he said, “and Mr. Perenna obviously knows about it.”

  “So it's him?” I said. “You think he – he shot his own son?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “I know, it doesn't make sense,” he agreed. “But … I mean, it's like we said: he wouldn't defend his wife or Eliot for killing his golden-boy, so it must have been him.”

  “But why? And what about Anna? Why would he be killing off his children?”

  Jack continued to shake his head.

  “No idea,” he said slowly. “Maybe it's … I don't know
… a power thing? Or something to do with his money?”

  “Like what, though?” I said, not feeling any clearer upon making the discovery. “I mean, killing a stranger is one thing, or an enemy, even – but your own kid?”

  “Maybe he was just fucked in the head, plain and simple,” Jack concluded. “The best of them are.”

  I ran my hand along the back of my neck, still largely uncertain. The picture in the photo-album was burning in front of my vision, and I couldn't get the image to fade away.

  “But what about Anna?” I said. “Or do you think just he kills all his kids before they turn eighteen or something?”

  “That's a possibility,” Jack said, even though I hadn't been fully serious. “Maybe it has something to do with how their inheritances are worked out. Maybe – maybe they get a chunk of his money when they're adults, and he's changed his mind and wants or needs to keep it for himself.”

  “But there's probably a better way to do that,” I argued. “You know, like visiting his lawyer or something.”

  As Jack opened his mouth to respond, the distinct sound of the front door opening and shutting came from down the hallway, and we both froze.

  “Get rid of the book,” I said, slapping the list back inside the pages before he shut it and jumped up onto the desk to put it back on the highest shelf.

  There was no way out of the room other than through the door that would lead us out into the front hallway where we would undoubtedly meet one of the Perennas, and we both hurriedly looked around for any place that we could hide. As the room was so meticulously ordered, though, there was little more than an empty coat rack that we could stand behind.

  As the footsteps neared the room, we both ducked down behind the desk, me grabbing Mea and holding her closely to my chest as I went, all too aware that we would be found just as soon as Mr. Perenna came around it to sit down. Just as I was wracking my mind for a possible excuse to get us out of trouble this time, though, the footsteps bypassed the door and moved on to walk up the stairs.

  Jack let out a breath.