An Unsettled Grave

by Bernard Schaffer

  He hurried toward the front door, keeping under the windows and out of sight, while pulling the pry bar out of his back pocket. He slid the pry bar’s flat surface into the narrow wedge between the door and frame, gave it a quick strike with the palm of his hand, and cranked it. The wood frame split apart, loud, and by then it was too late to hesitate. Ollie reached for the shotgun, clutching it with both hands as he leaned back and kicked the door dead center. “Police!” he shouted, barging in with the shotgun raised. “Nobody move!”

  The room was bare except for a filthy couch and several plastic lawn chairs and a large wooden trunk in the far corner. Ollie ignored the trunk, racing around the rest of the cabin as fast as he could, making sure no one was hiding inside. He found another door and kicked that one open too. It was just a small bedroom with nothing but a mattress on the floor and an empty closet on the opposite wall. He hurried back out, checking the small kitchen and closet, making sure they were empty as well.

  Sure enough, there was a phone mounted to the wall next to the refrigerator. There were two phone numbers written in pencil on the wall next to it. The first one said New York. The one just beneath it said Walt Auburn.

  Ollie looked back at the trunk, feeling the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

  If the little girl was with them, they were on their way to sell her, or relocate her, and he’d lost her forever. If she was inside the trunk, something far worse had happened. “Hope?” he called out, willing himself forward. “Are you in there?”

  He wrapped his fingers on the underside of the trunk’s lid and tried to lift, but it was sealed shut. He knocked on its hard, wooden surface. “Hope, if you’re in there and can’t talk, just give a knock or kick or something. Anything, kiddo. It’s going to be all right. I’m here now. Nobody is going to hurt you anymore.”

  Ollie laid his shotgun down on the couch and picked up the pry bar from the floor, went across the room with it, and drove it under the trunk’s lid. It was an old trunk, with a steel lock hidden behind a metal latch, and wouldn’t give. He rammed the pry bar in even farther and kicked it, crinkling the wood surface but not opening it. He beat on it, sliding the pry bar in and out like he was stabbing it to death, sending shards of wood flying, and filling the room with sharp, echoing cracks. He was out of breath by the time the front wall of the trunk snapped off. The lid never did open, but he was able to jam the pry bar into the cracks along the sides and stomp on it until he could tear the front panel up and away from the rest of it. He heaved the lid, still locked to the front panel, up and over the back in a heap of thick, splintered wood and looked down at what had been hidden so carefully within.

  He was out of breath. Sweat trickled down the tip of his nose and off the slope of his chin, dropping onto the shining plastic surface of multiple bundled packages of what could only be pure cocaine.

  The packages were packed like bricks, wide and flat, with tape around their edges. The trunk was so heavy it would take two men to lift it.

  Ollie stepped back, then bent forward with his hands on his knees, groaning in disbelief. He never heard the car come down the driveway. He never saw it cut its lights off when the occupants realized the front door was busted open. He never noticed them creeping into the living room behind him, watching him tearing apart their trunk with their million dollars’ worth of coke. He stood there, bent over, huffing, until he heard a familiar voice say, “I took you for a coward, Ollie, but I didn’t take you for no thief.”

  Ollie spun around with his hand on his pistol but stopped short of drawing it. All five of the Disgraced were standing in the shadows, each of them with a pistol in hand, pointed at him. It was too dark to see their faces except for Wombat’s. He was bathed in the last remaining light pouring in through the window. It shimmered on the nickel-plated revolver in his hand. It showed the strands of white in his narrow, pointed beard. He wagged the gun at Ollie, telling him to get his hands up.

  “I don’t care about the drugs,” Ollie said, raising his hands. “I’m just looking for the girl.”

  The other bikers cocked their heads at him. The smallest, most nervous-looking one of them dropped the hammer on his pistol and said, “Let’s smoke this idiot now.”

  “Hang on,” Wombat said. “What girl are you talking about?”

  “You know goddamn well what girl!” Ollie shouted. “The little girl. Hope Pugh.”

  “Never heard of her,” Wombat said.

  “You rapist fucks took her! I was up here earlier and I heard everything. The two men you sent to New York. I heard them talking all about it.”

  Wombat closed his eyes and shook his head, chuckling. “Oh, you mean the white girl.”

  Ollie would have leapt forward and clawed the man’s eyes out if every hammer on each of the guns pointed at him wouldn’t have dropped back the second he moved. “Don’t you stand there and make jokes about her,” Ollie warned him. “I just want her brought back to her family. I don’t care what you do with me.”

  Wombat laughed and wiped his eyes. “This is unbelievable,” he said, looking at the men standing next to him. “Ain’t this unbelievable?” They nodded that it was. “Listen, genius. We didn’t take no kid. We’re businessmen. The girl you heard them talking about, well you found it.” He tipped his gun toward the destroyed trunk behind Ollie and said, “The finest Colombian powder money can buy.”

  “No, that’s not what he meant. He was talking about Hope,” Ollie said, his voice trailing off. He looked back at the trunk, seeing the packages of cocaine stacked one on top of the other.

  Man, I didn’t get to try any of that girl yet. The rest of you got some, but Wombat told me I had to wait, the one biker had said before leaving for New York.

  The hairless one had told him, That’s because he knows how crazy your ass get.

  “Goddamn, we tried to get you to play ball, you asshole,” Wombat said and grimaced. “All you had to do was tell us you were looking for a little kid, we’d have torn this town apart to find her. And if we got our hands on the fucker that took her, well, let’s just say you’d have never had to worry about him touching another kid again. But you had to be a big shot, didn’t you? You didn’t want to be associated with us, and now look where it’s gotten you.”

  “Listen,” Ollie said, lowering his hands, “we can talk about this.”

  Wombat’s gun jerked forward, eyes widening. “No, there’s no talking about this! See, I know how this conversation goes, Ollie. You tell me something like, I’ll just walk away and pretend I never saw anything. And you know what happens? Later on, you start running it all back through your mind over and over again, till it starts to eat at you. You decide to make it right, and come after us, because you just can’t live with the fact that you looked the other way. Sooner or later, you’d convince your friends in the State Police and FBI that we need to be taken down. Then, a whole lot of people have to die, Ollie. From both sides. Instead, I could just kill you right now and be done with it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Ollie said. His mind was racing to find anything that might buy him some time to either draw his gun or get them to let him leave. There had to be something. Think, Ollie, think, he thought. Say whatever it takes and fight however you have to. For J.D. That kid needs you. For Pretty Lady and that lunch date next week. Hell, even for Ben.

  “You know what the shame of it is?” Wombat said. “I kind of like you.”

  “Wait a second, guys,” Ollie said, forcing himself to smile. “Obviously I misread what you all were into, and I really screwed up today. I admit that. How about we just take a second to figure out how to handle this to everyone’s best interest?” When no one else spoke, he tried again, sounding desperate and knowing it. Hating himself for it but talking until the moment he was going to draw his gun and start shooting. He talked and talked, trying to stall, trying to decide when to go for his gun, but he did not beg and he did not blubber. Deep down, he was proud of that.

  The light
had retreated from the window and Wombat’s face was draped in shadow as he pulled the trigger. Ollie saw the bright burst of flame erupt from the barrel, a brilliant, blinding display in the dark room. At the center of the flame, moving in slow motion, Ollie swore he could see the tiny chunk of metal spat out of the barrel, spinning in midair, coming right at him.

  It was adrenaline. He knew that from something he’d read. Everything slows down except the mind. Microseconds stretch wide, leaving your mind room to whirl, and your body not even time to flinch. Leaving him time to think these thoughts even as the bullet split the distance between him and the flames from which it sprung. It hit him in the forehead so hard he felt his head snap back on impact. There was no pain. Just the shock of being struck, and then it was like all the lights went out. Like someone unplugged the TV set. Whatever story was in the middle of being shown, it all just vanished.

  You are an uncle, and a brother, and a human being full of life and aspirations and hopes and needs and plans and a place in this world. You go from being all that, and one instant later, you are nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 22

  The knock on the front door came early the next morning, in the dim hours before sunrise. J.D. was awake already, lying in bed waiting for his alarm clock to go off, thinking about Hope. He’d seen her in his dreams each night since she’d vanished. Each time, they were together in school and she was sitting at the desk next to him, confused about why he’d thought she went missing. She’d been visiting her grandmother, she said, or on a family trip, or hadn’t been missing at all. Her going missing had been the real dream and now she was back. But she never was.

  In the last dream, he’d looked up from his desk and seen her sitting there next to him, working on a complicated math equation. She wrinkled her nose the way she did when she was concentrating, making all the freckles bunch up, and swept a long strand of dangling red hair back over her ear. She caught him staring and said, “What are you looking at, Jacob?”

  “Where are you?” he asked her.

  She looked confused. “I’m right here. You see me, don’t you?”

  He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it, feeling it as if it were real. The rest of the seats were empty. It was just them in the classroom. “Hope, just tell me where you are, and I’ll come find you. No matter what.”

  She opened her mouth to say, “I’m near the—” but choked on her words. She grabbed her throat, eyes wide and straining, and something wriggled at the bottom of her nostril, black and slimy. J.D. watched in horror as a thick, reticulated worm slithered out of her nose and spilled down onto her shirt. Another fell out after it, and then another, until they were pouring out of her nose and open mouth. They splashed J.D.’s hand and he tried to pull away, but Hope wouldn’t let go. The worms slithered up his arm toward his neck. He gasped, trying to shake himself free. Hope sat in her seat, pinning his hand to the desk, staring at him while the worms fell out of her.

  J.D. woke then and hadn’t been back to sleep. He lay in his bed, haunted by his dream, listening to his father snore down the hall. When the knock came at the front door, his entire body stiffened. The second knock was louder, and someone called out, “Ben Rein? It’s Chief Auburn from Liston Police. Anybody home?” The knocking grew more insistent. “I need you to open up the door and talk to me. It’s important, Ben.”

  J.D. slid his bedroom dresser out of the way and opened his door, then peeked around the corner. Downstairs, the living room was dark and there was no light flickering from the TV. That meant his dad had gone to bed that night instead of passing out on the couch. He’d probably run out of liquor. J.D. counted the days in his head and that made sense. It was the sixteenth. Two weeks since Ben’s last disability check from the government. He’d drunk all that money away long ago. The knocks kept coming, with the man on the porch saying, “Hello? Somebody home? Open the door.”

  He stared down the hall at his father’s bedroom. The door was closed. J.D. swallowed, realizing his father’s bedroom had gone silent. The door at the far end of the hall creaked open and Ben Rein stood in the darkness, naked and covered in sweat. He crept down the hall on his toes, moving silently. J.D. backed up, staying out of sight.

  Ben slid down the steps and bent so low he was nearly on his knees as he crossed the room toward the farthest window from the door. He tilted his head to peer through the curtains. Lights were coming on from the front porches of the houses around the street.

  “Ben Rein?” the man outside called. “It’s Chief Walter Auburn. I need to speak with you. Are you in there? It’s about your brother.”

  J.D. crawled to the top of the steps and saw his father emerge from the shadows to stand behind the door. Bathed in the moonlight, the muscles of Ben’s legs and back were drawn tight. Scars of all shapes slashed across his flesh. A ruined patch ran down his right side from the small of his back to his upper thigh from where he’d been struck with white phosphorus. He pulled the door open to reveal Walt Auburn standing on the porch, holding his police hat in his hands.

  Walt’s eyes were lowered already, and the first thing he saw was Ben Rein’s dangling privates, framed in the doorway’s narrow opening. He jerked backward, using his hat to cover the sight of Ben’s crotch. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Walt said, “but I’m afraid it couldn’t wait. Do you want to go put some clothes on?”

  Ben’s voice was flat. “What about my brother?”

  “Well, it’s just, you see, there’s been a terrible tragedy.” He looked up, waiting for Ben to say something, but the man’s eyes were like hard black stones, shining in the darkness. The eyes of madness. “I hate to have to tell you this, but we found Ollie about an hour ago. It appears he took his own life.”

  Ben’s jaw tightened, but he did not move. “How?” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “How did he take his own life?”

  Walt cleared his throat and cocked his head to one side like he was trying to shake water out of his ear. “Well, it looks like he put his gun up to his forehead and pulled the trigger. He was sitting against a tree out in the game lands. Somebody heard the gunshot and called it in. I went out there looking for him and I’m the one who found him. Now listen, I don’t want you to think less of him because of this. Sad to say, but it’s common in law enforcement. People go through suffering others can’t even imagine, even if they never talk about it. I seen it a lot over the years.” Walt’s voice petered out. Ben Rein still hadn’t moved or shown any sign of comprehension of what he was saying. “So, I just wanted to let you know how sorry I am. You and your boy going to be okay?”

  “Where is he?” Ben asked. “His body. Where did you take it?”

  “I called Claus Schumacher, the funeral director. He’s a friend of mine and didn’t mind coming out. I’m pretty sure I can convince the borough to pay for the funeral, so as not to put a burden on your family.”

  “I’ll be dressed in five minutes. Take me there.”

  “Come again?”

  Ben closed the door in his face. He turned around, seeing J.D. looking down at him from the top of the steps. “Get dressed,” he said.

  “Is it true?” the boy sputtered. “Is Uncle Ollie dead?”

  Ben was already coming up the steps. “I said get dressed.”

  * * *

  J.D. cried behind his cupped hands the entire ride, while Walt Auburn looked at his passengers through his rearview mirror. Ben Rein sat in the backseat next to his son, motionless, his hands folded in his lap, never once reaching to comfort the boy.

  Walt reached into his glove box and fiddled around with the contents while he drove, until he felt a few napkins stuffed in the back. He passed them back to J.D. “Here you go, son. It’s going to be all right.”

  J.D. took them and wiped his eyes and blew his nose, but the crying continued. “I’ve got a son about your age,” Walt said. “Maybe a few years younger. His name’s Steve. You two probably seen each other in the hall at school and didn’t k
now it.” He kept driving. The sun was coming up. “You like school?”

  The boy never answered. His eyes were red, but they’d stopped spilling. Now the car was quiet, and Walt liked that just fine.

  * * *

  They arrived at Schumacher Funeral Home at the far end of town. It was a small, squat home that had been converted. The bodies were processed in the basement. The living room and kitchen had been renovated to form a viewing parlor, complete with a dozen metal folding chairs. It was decorated in somber colors with framed photographs of flowers and uplifting spiritual sayings.

  Claus Schumacher greeted them at the front door, dressed in a dark suit. A crown of thick white hair surrounded the bottom half of his head and a bald dome shined on top. His liver-spotted hands shook as he held the screen door open to let them in. He smiled with closed lips at Ben as he walked up and lowered his head as Ben walked past him. “My condolences. I’m sorry for your loss.” He lifted his head again to J.D., repeating the same words and movements.

  “Where is Ollie?” Ben said.

  The old man looked at Ben in confusion, then turned to Chief Auburn. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I thought you all were coming to make funeral arrangements.”

  Ben’s hands tightened into fists. “Where is his body?”

  Schumacher flapped his hand in the air as though he were trying to swat the entire discussion away. “I’m sorry, but no one is allowed into the processing area,” he said. “We have safety precautions. You have to be licensed and bonded, that sort of thing.”

  Ben’s face reddened and Walt stepped in, calm and slick, saying, “I know it’s not usual, Claus, but I’d like you to make an exception just this one time. Ben here just wants to see his brother and say a prayer over him, given the circumstances of how he passed. I’ll go down with you and make sure there’s no trouble.”