Dig Two Graves

by Kim Powers

  “She does it to bring back her mother,” I said, thinking I was making perfect sense. “The snowballs. The day Patti died, there was snow. We made snowballs. Skip doesn’t know I know that’s why she makes them, but I know . . . ” And then, “She said she wished it was me who was dead instead of her mother. She was right. Her mother would know what to do right now.”

  “Mr. Holt, we know what to do. So just let us do our jobs. Go somewhere else. Please.”

  Mizell found me in my bedroom.

  “She gave me the finger. That’s the last time I saw her. I yelled at her, and then she gave me the finger. Do kids even do that anymore? The finger? I’ve raised her better than that. I promise. She was just mad and . . . this isn’t happening. It can’t be. This isn’t real.”

  I thought about Skip’s finger—telling me to go fuck myself—because it was real. The rest of this wasn’t.

  “I gave my mom the finger for about four years straight, every time somebody made fun of me for having the name Aretha.”

  “Try living up to Hercules.”

  “And Skip . . . that’s really . . . ” she flicked through her notes. “Elizabeth?”

  “Yeah, but she’s always just been Skip. I don’t know why we even bothered with anything else. Her mother said she felt her skipping in the womb, and . . . we wanted more kids, not just one. But we wanted to be settled more, before we had another one. And then Patti died and you can’t have kids if you don’t have a wife so . . . I was an only child so I know what it’s like growing up alone. No fun. Too much pressure to be perfect. I wanted Skip to have a friend. I mean, she has friends. At school. But somebody here. All the time. At home. A brother or sister but . . . ”

  I was shaking like the Ice Age had come back and I was outside, naked, trying to outrun it.

  “Mr. Holt, you have any liquor in the house?” Mizell asked me.

  “Yes, but . . . I don’t drink it. I mean, not too much. We had a party last night and . . . ”

  “What I’m saying is I think you should get a drink. You’re gonna shake yourself to death. I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to calm down.”

  I barely heard her; my mind was a million miles away. My mind was down the hall, in Skip’s bedroom. My mind was everywhere, and nowhere. I picked up a framed photo of Skip from my night table. “You’ll probably need this, I mean, after I make my flyer. Then you can have it. It’s last year’s, but . . . this is what she looks like.”

  It was one of those school things they took every year. Skip, with her mother’s freckles. The braces she hated, even though they were supposed to be invisible. The little scar on her upper lip, from where she got the clasp of her school ID bracelet caught there in the first grade. Skip had always hated the picture, and to counteract it had tucked a photo booth strip into the edge of the same frame it was in. She called it a “Strip of Skip.” Her official school picture on one side, the real girl tucked into the corner. Goofy. Sticking her tongue out. Crossing her eyes. Pulling her mouth wide open. Those were the pictures that should go on a missing person’s flyer. That’s what she really looked like, who she really was.

  “Now we’re just taking extra precautions here . . . don’t wanna get caught in a scramble, but we’re setting up a phone trace downstairs in case there’s a ransom call . . . ”

  “Ransom? A college teacher? Money?”

  “Didn’t you get a bunch of endorsements after the Olympics?”

  “One cereal box. And that mostly paid for grad school.”

  “Any family money?”

  “Are you kidding? I went here on complete scholarship. Academic. I did all the sports on my own.”

  “Any bad blood with them? Any brothers or sisters?”

  “No. Nobody. Just me. Only child.”

  “Why’s that?” Mizell asked. “No other kids? You the apple of their eye?”

  “You’d have to ask them. Besides, they had their hands full with just me, grooming me to be . . .” I wasn’t sure how to answer. The real answer was ‘a machine.’ A winner. Whatever it took.

  “On the cover of a Wheaties box?” Mizell filled in, when the silence sat too long.

  “Yeah, something like that. And they died years ago, right after the Olympics.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “What?”

  “The Olympics. One win, and . . . you’re gone.”

  “Is this gonna help find Skip?”

  “We’ve gotta look at everything.”

  “Shit. Why haven’t they called? How do I get money? What the fuck do I do if they want money?”

  “They’re not gonna want money, and let’s just slow down for a minute.”

  “Why won’t they want money?”

  “They only want money when they know you have money, and we already know you don’t. So do they, if they’ve done their homework like us . . . ”

  I gave her a look.

  “We checked. We move fast when a little girl goes missing.”

  “So you do think . . . ”

  “I think we want to be prepared for anything. Open your mouth.”

  She stuck a Q-tip inside before I saw it coming, and had it out just as fast. “What was . . . ”

  “DNA. Like I said, we need to count you out. There’s no problem with that, is there? I mean, we can get a lawyer if . . . ”

  “Anything. Whatever it takes. I’ll do anything. I want to go searching. Now. ”

  “Um hmm.” She was focused on putting the Q-tip into a little vial.

  “Have you done kidnappings before? You find the people?”

  I meant the victims, but I don’t know how she took it. Maybe she thought I meant the kidnappers. She didn’t answer either way. I had to keep filling the silence, when she wouldn’t.

  “I know my daughter. This isn’t a prank. She didn’t run away. We fight, we make up. We’re a team.”

  That’s what I’d said this morning, a million years ago. We’re a team. We’ve talked about this.

  Mizell put down the framed picture of Skip, then put on rubber gloves to take the note that had been on Skip’s bed out of its evidence bag. She was avoiding my question—if she ever got the people back or not.

  “‘You’ve kept me waiting long enough.’ This . . . it seems so directed at you, so personal. It’s about the person finding the note, not the person he took. Otherwise, why leave anything? Is there somebody you, I don’t know . . . somebody you . . . stood up or something? Who’d want to get back at you?”

  “Maybe I was late grading papers or something. Jesus, I don’t know, I’m a teacher. A fucking teacher. All the kids think you’ve done something to them. You didn’t grade ’em high enough. You didn’t write their letter of recommendation in time. Jesus, what the fuck do they want? You’ve gotta get out there, start looking around . . . ”

  I didn’t want this woman to see me fall apart, any more than she already had, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing her. And then starting to cry.

  A student in one of my classes had written an ode for an assignment, which she then had to translate into Latin: “It is no time to make your fathers cry.” That flew back into my head, and made me cry even more. It made me squeeze Aretha Mizell’s wrists so hard, I saw her dark skin turn red for just a second.

  “Look, I’m begging you. I don’t have any family any more. My parents are dead. My wife’s dead. I never had any brothers or sisters . . . no aunts or uncles or cousins . . . Skip’s it. She’s all I’ve got. You’ve gotta get her back. I’ll do anything. Just tell me. She’s all I’ve got.”

  Mizell didn’t understand. Nobody could understand.

  “Janice Miner,” Mizell said, gently moving my hand off her wrist, and then using that same hand, now free, to pick up the framed photo of Skip.

  “What?” I said, starting to pull myself back together.

  “You asked. Janice Miner. Fifteen years old. We got the guy who took her.”

  “That’s good then, right? You have experience . . . you
know what to do. In case . . . in case this turns out to be . . . ”

  She seemed to have drifted away somewhere, not really listening, lost in the memory of that old case. “We got him, but only because we knew all the enemies. The family told us. So start making those lists. We’ve got to figure out who would want to hurt you. This is about you, not her. She’s . . . Skip . . . she’s just the messenger.”

  “What? They took her.”

  “That note says it all. They took her, to get to you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Skip could tell it was getting late, even with gauze wrapped around her eyes and her glasses off under that; it felt like it must be near her bedtime, although maybe it was just the shot that was still making her sleepy. Her father would have been home for hours by now. She hoped he saw the bag of groceries she left on the kitchen counter; that would let him know she wasn’t mad anymore. She never went shopping. She never cooked. And now, maybe she never would again—but she wanted her father to know that she had tried. Meatloaf, with hamburger and ground-up spicy sausage in it, for extra kick. Really gooey and tomatoey. That’s how he liked it. And buttered noodles on the side, sprinkled with the same bread crumbs she used to put on top of the meatloaf for crunch. She wondered if the meat would go bad if he didn’t put it in the fridge, after being out for six or seven hours. That’s how long she figured she’d been gone. She knew she got hungry every five or so hours, and she’d had lunch at school at noon, then she’d had a snack at home when she got there at three-thirty, and then . . .

  Then he took her.

  He must have been in the laundry room off the kitchen, after she’d put the groceries down on the counter and turned around to walk upstairs. Her whole body jolted when he grabbed her; something tickled, like when you stick your tongue on a battery. Maybe he used a stun gun on her. That’s what they did when they took kids on TV.

  She’d been looking at her mother’s recipe card for meatloaf and remembering she had to put the smoke vent on after she preheated the oven, because it got all smoky, even with nothing in it, and she felt a sting, a jab, and dropped the recipe card. She thought, for just the second that she was falling, that she saw the index card fall too, under the refrigerator.

  She hadn’t woken up until she was here, in the chair, so she didn’t know how far they had traveled. In town, out of it, into Vermont, she didn’t know. All she knew is that she’d cried four times already. The one time she didn’t cry was when he slapped her; it hurt, but she wouldn’t let him see how much. She only cried when he wasn’t there, but it made things worse. It wasn’t just the tears falling under the gauze and burning her cheeks, but her nose getting all runny too; the snot got on her face and made her skin feel sticky, and she couldn’t use her hands to scratch.

  They were tied up, with duct tape. When she tried pulling her wrists apart, behind the desk, that’s what she felt. All her girlfriends at school made things out of duct tape; that’s how she knew what it felt like. They’d get ziplock bags and cover them with it, to turn into purses. She had one; that’s where all the change was, from the money she spent buying the meatloaf ingredients. They’d put duct tape over their book covers too, to make them extra strong, lacing different colors together. They made bracelets with it; one girl even said she was going to make her prom dress out of it. And now, Skip was tied up with it. She opened her mouth and that’s when she felt the duct tape there too, sealing her lips together. He’d put it back, after he’d given her the water. After she spit on him. Trying to pull her mouth open to make a sound hurt more than trying to pull at her wrists to get the tape loosened up. She could hear the sticky sound it made, like something coming unpeeled. Thwacking, high-pitched, like when her father pulled off a strip of it to close up a cardboard box.

  Her father. She started crying again, knowing how scared he must be. She never stayed out late. Or maybe he was still mad at her from this morning and didn’t care if she ever came home again. That’s what kidnappers did to kids, to get them not to run away. They told them that their parents didn’t want them anymore. That’s how they kept the kids quiet and too afraid to scream.

  She wasn’t going to fall for that. She was going to scream. But if she screamed then he’d slap her again and she didn’t know how to keep from crying again, it hurt so much . . .

  She didn’t know what to do.

  He was going to kill her. He was going to rape her. He was going to make her his sex slave even if she didn’t have breasts, and then he was going to kill her.

  She heard it on the news all the time.

  She started crying again, even though she knew how much it was going to make her face itch.

  NO.

  She snorted the snot back into her nostrils and tried to think. She needed something to focus on, that wasn’t about being hurt or being raped or being dead.

  Her mother’s recipe index card, for the meatloaf. If she could remember that, then it would take her mind off this place and she would stop crying. So she tried to remember everything about the card that she could: pulling it out from where it was stuck in with a bunch of other recipes, between pages of her mom’s old Silver Palate Cookbook. The grease stains on it, and smears where the blue ink from her mother’s pen had run, maybe after she washed her hands. And all the ingredients. Two cans of tomato paste. One can of tomato sauce. One egg. A red pepper, even though the recipe called for green. Onion. That was red too; Skip liked everything red, to go with the tomato paste. Mashing it all together with her hands, the egg yolk exploding and the yellow of it mixing with everything else that was red or meat colored.

  He was going to kill her; why else would he take her? That’s why they took girls.

  No.

  Back to the recipe.

  Her mother told Skip she got it from one of her roommates in college, in a suite she shared with three other girls. They’d gone to the girl’s parents for the weekend and that girl’s mother had made this delicious meatloaf and . . .

  Skip was never going to college.

  She could have gone to Canaan for free—professors’ kids could, so she’d save her dad all that money. Canaan was expensive, but she didn’t know if they had to let her in if she turned out stupid—but now she wasn’t going to go anywhere. She wasn’t even going to make it to high school.

  Mushrooms. She forgot the mushrooms. They were on the recipe card too. Sliced ones, not pieces and stems. The ones in the glass jars were buttery tasting, better than the ones in cans, better than fresh ones even.

  She’d never eat mushrooms again.

  She was so hungry, so thirsty.

  She wanted some of the birthday cake she’d made for her dad, a big gooey piece of German chocolate with two scoops of coffee Häagen-Dazs on it. That would make her feel better, but then if she had the ice cream she’d want some water to wash it down with, and having water meant he’d have to stick his fingers near her face again. She could try to bite them the next time instead of just spit at him, but then he’d get mad and God knows what he’d do.

  He was going to do it anyway, even if he wasn’t mad at her.

  He was going to stick things in her mouth, and other places.

  NO.

  At the party Skip had made for her dad, she’d bit into a little piece of pecan shell that got mixed in with the German chocolate icing and it had cut the inside of her cheek. She’d tasted the blood. That’s how she knew. She hoped that hadn’t happened to anybody else, even though it wasn’t her fault. She’d bought the pecans already shelled, so some factory worker let it slip through. Not her. It wasn’t her fault. None of this was her fault.

  If she could just keep thinking about meatloaf and mushrooms and birthday cake and how this wasn’t her fault, then she wouldn’t have any room in her brain left over for crying and freaking out, because she wouldn’t be thinking about what was happening now, or what was going to happen. If she just kept thinking about how she’d go looking for her mother’s recipe card under the refrigerator once sh
e got out of here, then maybe . . .

  She was never going to get out. She didn’t know where she was; nobody knew where she was and he was going to kill her and nobody would know anything about her ever again. She wasn’t going to be an actress or an artist or make meatloaf or go to high school or college, or do anything except keep crying and peeing on herself.

  NO. Meatloaf. Cake. Her mother’s recipe card.

  She was going to get away. She had to.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was 11 P.M.; it should have been pitch dark outside, November dark, but instead, our street was teeming, alive. The police had set up portable lights outside, cherry red beams were flashing from atop their patrol cars, and it looked like a war zone. But nobody on the block was getting woken up because nobody had gone to sleep. The neighbors were shuffling around on the sidewalk and street like zombies, the walking dead, waiting for information.

  But there was none.

  Everybody kept asking if they could bring food over. They’d done the same thing when Patti died, but Skip had taken charge then—barely eight years old, stepping up to be the adult in the house while I fell apart—dutifully recording all the names of people who’d brought over covered dishes. We were loved. Patti was mourned. Then, when it was all over, Skip had returned their plates one by one, always with the perfect, tailored remark. Those cupcakes were delicious, with that green dyed coconut! How did you know I loved macaroni and cheese so much? That turkey was better than the one we had for Thanksgiving. A little girl with perfect manners, even when she was mourning her mother.

  Now, I wanted to tell all those people thanks but no thanks. You bring food when somebody dies, and nobody’s dead here. Nobody’s gonna die here. I appreciate the thought but Skip’s gonna be back any second now so we won’t need any extra food. It’ll all be over soon. I’m gonna take her out to Bobby Flay’s Burger Palace to celebrate and . . .

  No. Please, everybody just leave. Thanks, but please leave.