“I dream a lot about the grave.” This is the first time I’ve admitted this. It also happens to be true. “The dream is always exactly the same until the end.”
“Are you in the grave? Or hovering above it?”
“For most of the dream, I’m lying in it, waiting.”
“Until someone rescues you?”
“No one ever rescues us.”
“What do you hear?”
A truck engine. Thunder. Bones crackling like firewood. Someone cursing.
“It depends on the ending,” I say.
“If you don’t mind, tell me about the different endings.”
“It is pouring rain, and we drown in muddy water. Or snow falls until it covers our faces like a baby blanket, and we can’t see.” Or breathe. I swig out of the glass of water his secretary always leaves for me. It tastes a little like the lake smells.
“And to be clear… we means… Merry and… the bones.”
“It means the Susans.”
“Are there… other endings besides those?”
“A farmer doesn’t see us and shovels dirt into the hole with his tractor plow. Someone lights a match and drops it inside. A huge black bear decides the hole is the perfect place to hibernate and lies down on top of us. That’s one of the nicer endings. All of us just go to sleep. He snores. Anyway, you get the idea.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, sometimes he comes back and finishes the job. Buries us for real.” With bags and bags of manure.
“He… meaning the killer?”
I don’t answer, because once again, it seems obvious.
“Do you ever see a face?” he asks.
Come on, doesn’t he think I would have said if I saw his face? Still, I think about his question. Rebecca’s is the only face I’ve ever seen in this recurring event. She was lovely in her first appearance last night. Big, innocent eyes, dark corkscrew curls, skin like ivory silk.
She looked very much like Lillian Gish, probably because Lydia and I had just rented Birth of a Nation.
Lydia says that Lillian Gish loved to play tortured characters, as a rebellious counter to her devastating beauty. Lydia knows this because her dad has a huge crush on this actress, even though Lillian Gish is quite dead. She said her dad especially likes the finale of Way Down East, where Lillian floats unconscious on an ice floe toward a seething waterfall, while her long hair dangles in the water like a snake. Right after she told me, Lydia said she shouldn’t have. That it might provoke more nightmares while I was in this state.
It ticked me off. She hardly ever says things like that. It makes me worry. Am I looking in more of a state than usual? Isn’t she noticing I’m more cheerful? Aren’t I getting better?
Either way, it probably isn’t relevant to tell the doctor about his daughter showing up in my dream as a silent movie queen, wearing my mother’s clothes. It was certainly weird and random, like just about everything else.
“No,” I say. “I don’t see his face.”
Tessa, present day
Once again, I’m in the shadows. Watching.
My body is tucked under the eaves, pressed against the cold, dirty siding, hopefully out of camera range for the television van camped by the curb out front.
I’m trying to steady my nerves by picturing Lydia’s yard the way it used to be: green, neat, and shady with two giant clay pots of red and white impatiens on each of the front corners of the flat concrete porch. Always red and white, like the Christmas lights that Mr. Bell strung along the front roofline that every single year ended ten bulbs short on one side. It was tradition for my father to comment on it whenever we drove by.
Lucy and Ethel used to live back here. Mr. Bell’s hunting dogs. When he wasn’t around to call them off, their excited claws left little white streaks on my calves. The old boat was usually up on blocks in the back corner, perpetually waiting for July 4th. Lydia and I used to throw off the tarp when Mr. Bell wasn’t home so we could do our homework and work on our leg tans at the same time.
But there’s a circus assembling here today. And I’m responsible for it. My gut cramps. Bill and Jo are staking their reputations on me.
It took three days for Bill to retrieve the judge’s permission to dig at Lydia’s house and another twenty-four hours to set the time for 2 P.M., which is exactly fourteen minutes from now. The district attorney was surprisingly cooperative, probably because the police are getting killed in the media. A local newspaper editorial criticized the county for “an embarrassing lack of Texas frontier justice in not identifying the bones of the Black-Eyed Susans and returning them to their families.”
It wasn’t a particularly well-written or researched opinion, just fiery, something Southern journalists are good at pulling out of the air on a slow day. But it had worked a little magic on Judge Harold Waters, who still reads newspapers and has presided over the Black-Eyed Susan case from the beginning. He scribbled his signature and handed it down from his perch on top of his favorite cutting horse, Sal.
I barely remember Waters during the trial, just that Al Vega was worried he was too wishy-washy on the death penalty. A few years ago, I saw the judge on CNN giving an eyewitness account of a UFO hovering over Stephenville “like a twenty-four-hour Super Walmart in the sky.”
“Could have been a worse draw,” Bill had told me.
And so here we are, because of my dream about Lydia, and a judge who believes in flying saucers.
Two uniformed cops are squaring off the back yard with yellow crime tape. Jo is standing on top of the Grassy Knoll with the same female detective who attended the meeting with Hannah’s family. A SMU geology professor is rolling by with a high-tech ground-penetrating radar device on wheels that will never in a million years fit through the door to the cellar. It barely fit through the gate. His grim face says he’s figured this out.
Jo has told me that GPR is still more theoretical than practical when searching for old bones underground, but she and Bill decided it couldn’t hurt to add to the melodrama. The DA agreed. He’ll make hay out of it either way.
The professor is the acknowledged local expert in the complicated task of reading GPR imagery. Still, the ground is not a womb, and Jo tells me he will not be able to discern a skeletal face. He’ll be searching for evidence of soil disturbances that would suggest someone dug a grave once upon a time. He might be able to make out a human shape, but it’s doubtful. He’s mostly part of the show.
The yard is now buzzing with conversations, an impromptu lawn party that’s starting to gel. Bill is schmoozing the pretty assistant district attorney assigned to witness this latest crazy turn of events. Her real face is buried under a Southern coat of makeup. I’m calculating the distance between them. Two feet, now one.
Mr. and Mrs. Gibson are propped up in lawn chairs in their Sunday best Dallas Cowboys T-shirts, smoking like fiends, the only two people who appear to be enjoying themselves. One of them has mowed the weeds for the occasion.
The professor is suddenly making a beeline for them. He shakes their hands. From his wild gesticulating, I’ve deduced that the professor wants to run his device over both the front and back yards. The Gibsons are vigorously nodding yes.
Are they imagining movie rights? Is that what prompted Mrs. Gibson to wash her hair and stick on flip-flops and fresh toe Band-Aids? Is she hoping to add a plaque under her No Soliciting sign that declares this house a historical landmark, like Lizzie Borden’s?
The gate clanks behind me, and the back yard suddenly snaps to attention. Four more people are striding in. Two cops in jeans, hoisting shovels and a metal detector. Two women in CSI protective gear with an unlit lantern and a large camera. Their arrival signals that my tortured wait is almost over.