The Burial Society

by Nina Sadowsky

  Would she ever stop missing her mother?

  She heard the sound of a phone ringing. Her dad’s greeting.

  It was Detective Benson.

  Natalie closed her box of treasures and shoved it back into its hiding place. She edged into the hallway. Peered into the kitchen. Her father grunted a few replies and questions into the phone before clicking it off. His face was stricken.

  “What is it, Daddy?”

  A letter had been received at the station, he informed her flatly. Addressed to the officer in charge of the Burrows case. The writer claimed responsibility for the death of Mallory Burrows. He taunted the cops, informing them he’d moved on and would never be caught. The letter was typed, but claimed to be from Will Crane. In it, he said he’d killed Mallory because she was going to leave him, had chosen her family over her lover. Her father’s voice broke with emotion. Mallory had chosen them. And it had cost her her life.

  And now Crane was “in the wind.” That was the phrase Detective Benson had used, Daddy said. “In the wind.”

  Natalie wanted to scream. But if she started, she might never stop.

  If I could tell the story differently…

  It would be a tale of hope and faith and happy endings.

  Where love conquered all and good won out.

  After all, we can tell ourselves all the lies we want.

  Even if they always catch us up in the end.

  I come around the corner just as a sludge-caked prosthetic leg is thrown up on the bank of the canal. I jump back to avoid its spatter.

  In the partially drained waterway, workmen in rubber waders and fluorescent safety jackets dredge up filthy bicycles and rusty motorbikes, wine bottles and plastic containers, traffic cones and sodden clothes. It’s disgusting, but I can’t look away. The bottles and general garbage I get, but how and why did all those bicycles and motorbikes end up submerged? The fake limb?

  I pause to watch as the workmen joke and holler. One pulls a soggy inflatable sex doll from the muck. It brings about a fresh round of hilarity.

  Canal Saint-Martin was once a neighborhood occupied by working-class laborers. Now it’s on a trendy upswing. New apartment buildings, restaurants, and bars sprout like mushrooms in the rainy season. The restaurant renovation Brian Burrows was overseeing is one such growth.

  Construction is under way at full force; Brian’s death seems not to have stopped the march of progress. Located in a long-abandoned and antiquated power plant, the building is stripped down to its bones. Welders’ flames burn blue; concrete mixes and pours.

  I seek out the project manager, Lilja Koskinen. I introduce myself as Hannah Potter, a friend of the Burrows family. It’s almost sort of true.

  Lilja’s kind face crumples in distress and she asks me into the construction trailer for a coffee.

  Once we’re inside, she gestures to the two folding chairs arranged by the single metal desk. I sit in one as she removes her hard hat and fluorescent jacket. She goes about the ritual of coffee. A French press. Finely ground beans. A hotplate. Boiling water.

  She expresses concern for Natalie and Jake, those “pauvre enfants.” I use this opening to explain that I’ve come at Natalie’s request.

  “Could you repeat to me what you told Natalie? Something about her father being scared? I’m sure the poor girl misunderstood, so I’d like to put her mind at rest.”

  Lilja hands me a mug of coffee. She pours one for herself before taking a seat. I sip. Bitter. Strong. Delicious.

  Her story is consistent, but not so much that it arouses any suspicion. In fact I determine Lilja Koskinen is probably truthful about most things. It’s the way she’s made.

  “It was such a brief exchange, and then Mr. Burrows was on his way. Maybe I should have—”

  “Don’t beat up on yourself,” I interrupt as her bright eyes dim with memory and regret. “We make choices every day, turn right, turn left, miss the bus, take the call….If we second-guessed all of them we’d go mad. There’s nothing you should have done differently.”

  Lilja rewards me with a relieved smile, but then stands abruptly. “I need to go back to work….”

  I ask her if there is anyone else on the job who might have some insight into what Brian was experiencing the last few days of his life, who might know just what had frightened Brian so much. Lilja demurs. She’s happy to do whatever she personally can do to help, but since the murder, and all the press about Burrows…well, some of the men have gotten superstitious, and the project can’t afford any more delays.

  “Superstitious?” I can’t hide my surprise.

  Lilja swings open the door to the trailer and gestures outside. I turn in time to see a shower of sparks rain down in a glittering, sweeping arc from a welder’s torch.

  “It’s the history of the building,” Lilja explains. “Tunnels under the plant were used as a hiding place for Parisian Jews during World War II. This was especially daring because while the plant was operated by locals, it was under Nazi supervision.” Lilja puffs out a breath. “But shortly before the city was liberated, the hidden families were betrayed. Men, women, and children—marched into the street and shot dead, the bodies left there to rot as warning.”

  My breath catches in my throat. Even after all I’ve seen and done, man’s capacity for barbarity still shocks me.

  Lilja continues, “Members of the French resistance retaliated, planting a bomb on the site. The explosion rendered the power plant inoperable but also killed seventeen people.”

  I am silent, muted by sorrow for the innocent dead.

  “After the war, the building fell into ruin. It was a squatters’ paradise for decades.”

  But reconception and renovation were inevitable now that the area was growing so hot, Lilja explains. Brian’s design of the club/restaurant had paid respectful but daring homage to the building’s history. A fierce press and political battle debating the design’s merits had delayed construction, and they are in even deeper trouble now after the delays caused by his death.

  “Some of the men on our crew feel the building’s ugly past is somehow tied to Brian Burrows’s ugly now. I’m having a hell of a time keeping things on track. I don’t know if I can afford to have you talk to anyone else.” Lilja ushers me from the trailer.

  I raise my voice to be heard over the noise. “I can see you care about those two kids as much as I do. So sad. Natalie, especially.” I catch Lilja’s eye. “I’d do anything to help her.”

  Lilja chews her lip. Then asks me to wait.

  “Just don’t meet around the site,” she instructs a few moments later, thrusting a square of paper into my hand. After all, pauvre enfants.

  Locked in the suite’s bathroom, perched on the edge of the bathtub, Jake lays out his theories for his friend Rami over Skype. Jake misses Rami. It feels great to look into his expressive eyes, see his brow narrow in concentration as he listens to Jake’s deductions.

  Rami’s face fractures into digitized squares; his voice scrambles into static. Jake thumps his fists on his thighs in frustration. He was only midway through his theory!

  There’s a knock on the bathroom door.

  “Give me a minute,” he calls. With Jake sleeping in the living area of the suite, the bathroom is the only place he has any privacy.

  “I have to pee.” It’s Natalie.

  From the laptop screen, a pixilated Rami tries to reassure Jake. “Listen to the cops. If they say it was a robbery, it probably was. All this speculation…You’re just making yourself crazy.”

  Jake knows he’s making himself crazy. But he can’t help it. He can’t stop.

  “Jake!” Natalie is pissed. She pounds on the closed door.

  Jake flushes the toilet he didn’t use and says goodbye to Rami. Exits the bathroom, snapping his laptop shut.

  “It’s about time,” Natalie huffs as she darts past him and slams the door behind her. Jake wonders if she’s going to hurt herself in there. More making himself crazy.

 
; Natalie emerges just a few moments later, zipping up her jeans.

  “Why were you hiding in the bathroom? Who were you talking to?”

  “Rami.”

  “He your boyfriend now?”

  Jake feels the scarlet stain his face. Turns away and grabs the remote, snapping off the babbling TV.

  “Hey! I was watching that.”

  “And now you’re not.”

  “You’re in a mood.”

  “Can I ask you something, Nat?”

  “If I answer, will you give me back the remote?”

  “Do you think that what happened to Dad was…related to Mom?”

  “How do you mean?” His sister pales. “Like what the nut jobs are saying? That we’re cursed?”

  “Of course not. But what if Crane was back somehow—”

  “No!” A cry of pure terror bursts out of Natalie, loud enough to draw Frank from his bedroom.

  “What’s going on in here?” he demands.

  Jake puts an arm around Natalie’s narrow shoulders. Realizes she’s shaking. “Sorry, Nat,” he says to her. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  He draws Natalie over to the sofa and eases her onto its cushions.

  “What on earth did you say to her?” Frank hisses at Jake.

  “I raised the possibility of whether that prick Crane could have had something to do with Dad’s murder.”

  “Why on earth would you say that?”

  His voice urgent, Jake lays it out for them just as he had for Rami. “Crane disappeared three years ago; he could be anywhere now. Why not here in Paris? Maybe he came after Dad? Or maybe Dad was on Crane’s trail? Trying to lure him out…”

  Frank takes an involuntary step away from him, his lip curling with—anger? Disgust? Jake can’t tell.

  “Shut up!” His uncle’s voice has an edge as sharp as a blade. “Don’t you see what you’re doing to your sister?”

  Her knees are drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her shins, her spine curled tight, as if she wants to fold into herself and disappear through the other side.

  Jake sees the edges of a bruise (or is it a burn?) on the tender inner flesh of Natalie’s right wrist. Her left thumb snakes under her cuff in order to press deeply, rhythmically, at the wound over and over again. Her eyes are unfocused. Her jaw slack.

  Jake shuts up.

  Lilja had given me two names: Ursine Fournier, the secretary/assistant who was Brian’s local hire, and Hank Scovell, a junior on Brian’s team from New York, who is now the acting head of the renovation.

  Scovell is in the States for a few days, scheduled to return by the end of the week.

  Ursine Fournier is just where Lilja said she would be, at an Indian restaurant on nearby rue de Lancry, eating green curry and flirting with the sexy waiter who’s serving it. Ursine is a pretty girl in her early twenties with glossy dark hair and almond-shaped eyes.

  I again introduce myself as Hannah Potter, friend of the Burrows family, and tell Ursine that Lilja told me where to find her. I ask if I might join her for a few moments, ask a few questions about her former boss. The girl puffs up in importance for the sake of the hot waiter. “It’s a murder investigation,” she boasts to him, as she gestures for me to take a seat.

  Ursine answers my questions readily. She’d been working for Brian since the project started; she was his “woman on the ground here in Paris,” even when he was still traveling back and forth to New York in the preliminary stages.

  And yes, she liked him very much. Her eyes mist. He was very good to work for, Monsieur Burrows. Fair, communicative. But he’d seemed different this summer. Worried. It made him irritable and distracted.

  She lowers her voice and confesses that Hank Scovell is not nearly the man Brian was. He’s got a temper, that one. Her eyes darken as she pushes a pile of curry-soaked rice around on her plate with a fork. I make a mental note to learn more about Hank Scovell.

  I steer her back to the subject of Brian. What did he tell her? What was he worried about?

  “I don’t know. When I asked what was wrong, he said it was personal. But he used the word afraid. And that struck me. Because, you know, he was such a vital man. It was hard for me to imagine he was afraid of something. Or someone.”

  Ursine nods sagely as if she has uttered some great and fundamental truth.

  Mallory Burrows had been afraid. Had reached out to me. And I had failed her. And now her husband? Also afraid. Also dead. Were these two tragedies connected? If I had prevented the first, would I have also prevented the second?

  The curry spices rise through my nostrils, making me suddenly feel stifled and queasy. “L’eau, s’il vous plait,” I command the sexy waiter.

  I gulp the cool liquid down as soon as he sets it on the table. “Do you have any idea who Brian might have confided in, if not you?”

  Ursine’s eyes narrow. “He didn’t confide in you? I thought you were his friend.”

  Sharper than she appears, Ursine.

  “He shut me down too,” I lie solemnly. “I wish he hadn’t been so closemouthed. Maybe one of us could have saved his life.”

  Ursine nods at me in mournful agreement.

  “Here’s my number.” I slide over a sheet of notepaper with a burner cell number on it. “If you think of anything else, please call me.”

  I thank her for her time. Add a whispered, “He likes you,” about the waiter. Ursine blushes deeply as I leave.

  It’s after three A.M. and she hasn’t slept. Natalie’s heart thuds against her rib cage. Trapped. Just like her. Caged within a cage within a cage. Ad infinitum.

  She longs to char her flesh or slice into her skin, anything to relieve her urgent fears and electrifying anxiety, but Uncle Frank searched the entire suite and confiscated her carefully hoarded tools. After he yanked up her sleeves and splayed her scarred and scabbing arms in front of Jake.

  She thought she’d been clever. She ate enough to keep her weight from alarming anyone and restricted her injuries to areas covered by pants and sleeves. The thing on the wrist, well, it was an aberration. She couldn’t help herself.

  And the simplicity with which she had convinced one of the gendarmes to smuggle the lighter to her! Sneaking cigarettes, she told him. He didn’t care if she smoked. He was French.

  Jake was horrified when he saw the burn and the other injuries. Worried, of course, and contrite about upsetting her. But Natalie could tell he’d also been repulsed. She doesn’t judge Jake (or anyone else for that matter) for finding her repulsive. She finds herself repulsive.

  Will Crane. No. She can’t even think about him. Natalie shudders. Presses her thumb deeply into the open burn on her wrist. A satisfyingly painful curve of nausea arcs through her, and then, oh rapture, that past-pain thrill of pure ecstasy.

  Treatment.

  Uncle Frank threatened to ship her right back when they got home to New York.

  No wonder she can’t sleep.

  The memories surge over her. The late-night intervention.

  Daddy. Uncle Frank. Jake. Her best friend, Melissa Masterson, along with Melissa’s mother, Sunny. All of them so pious. So riddled with guilt. But also lit up with the drama of it all.

  The orderlies, the doctor, the syringe.

  Jake fighting tears as they carried her out. The salty stream leaking from her own half-mast eyelids.

  A long ride in a featureless van.

  Drifting off. Bouncing back. Into a reality that was completely unreal.

  A forbidding brick building in the middle of fucking nowhere.

  Feeding tubes. Restraints.

  Sleeping.

  Weeping.

  It got better. It did.

  The place wasn’t so scary in the light of day. The grounds were actually quite beautiful and shifted with the seasons, crayon-colored summer flowers giving way to the cinnamon-hued leaves of fall.

  Natalie mourned her missing mother. Raged at her too. She forgave her wounded father and perhaps even more essent
ial, forgave herself the irrational fury she harbored toward him.

  Uncle Frank brought her cousins to visit and they played doubles Ping-Pong in the break room. She cried in Jake’s arms when he came alone.

  She shared in Group and went to art therapy. Endured the lectures on nutrition. Explored the grounds. Made a friend or two.

  She experienced a different way of feeling in control of her own body, more nurturing, less harmful. She shut the doors to the past. Locked them. Tossed the keys.

  She learned to be in the present. Began to plan a future. Was grateful for every day. She learned to love herself.

  Mostly. Until she just couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Char. Scar. Trich. Bit. Old habits die hard.

  She glances at the time. 3:27 A.M.

  Let’s try a patented Dr. Bloom challenge: Make a list and do ten other things before you let yourself self-harm. If after all ten, you still want to, go ahead.

  At first, that had shocked Natalie. Thrilled her too. Dr. Bloom was giving her permission to hurt herself.

  Natalie learned fast it was a mind fuck—more often than not the compulsion, that indescribable achy need to Char, Scar, Trich, Bit, was stilled by number 8.

  Okay. One. Ask for help. She twiddles her phone between her fingers. Makes a decision. Taps a text.

  To Natalie’s surprise, the dots indicating a reply in progress flicker on her screen. She waits for what seems like an impossibly long time.

  The text finally comes up: Spoke to Lilja and Ursine. Waiting to talk to Hank Scovell. More soon. Hang in there.

  Natalie fires back: What did they tell you?

  She waits, staring anxiously at the phone screen, but there is no further reply.

  I toss my “Hannah Potter” burner cell into the deep recesses of a drawer, deeply conflicted about having responded to Natalie.

  I should shut that whole thing right down. Let my hastily resurrected alter ego disappear into the ether and not contact any of the Burrowses again. At least until after the Elena exchange. Despite my guilt, despite my profound sadness about the way I failed the Burrows family, I have bigger fish to fry right now.