I was digging up my wife’s grave.
“You buried her here,” I said.
“I buried somebody here,” he said. “Question is, is she still there? If she’s not, that’s a problem. And if it’s not who it was supposed to be, that’s a problem, too.”
This was all starting to feel like a dream, or, more accurately, a nightmare. This could not be happening. I was not here. I was not digging this hole.
“Thought she was dead when I put her in, and even if she wasn’t, the dirt should have smothered her.” Matt seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. “Can’t imagine her digging her way out. Be like some kind of Stephen King movie.” He focused on me. “You one of the ones that spotted her?”
The recent sightings of Brie. He’d clearly been informed.
“No,” I said. “But I heard from others who did.”
Matt’s head drifted slowly from side to side. “Makes no fucking sense.”
What do you know? Something we could agree on.
I had to try and keep my head clear. Inside, I was shaking, and if I hadn’t been holding that shovel, my hands would have been trembling, too. My stomach was rising up into my throat, and it was taking everything I had not to double over and vomit.
“Who hired you to kill my wife?”
Matt shook his head.
But I persisted. “What’d she do? Why would anyone want her dead?”
He continued to shake his head. “Dig.”
I tossed a few more shovelfuls of dirt before pausing to ask, “How far?”
“You should hit something about a foot down.”
“You’re scared she somehow dug her way out,” I said.
Matt bristled at the word. “I’m not fucking scared.”
“Could have fooled me,” I said. “You’re scared she won’t be here. Who told you about the sightings?”
Another head shake.
I tried to recall all the people who had seen the woman who was, or was not, Brie. There was Max, and maybe the people who lived in the new house next to him. There was Albert and Isabel, and her husband Norman. And, finally, Elizabeth.
I forced the shovel down into the dirt, but with less force than I could have. It wasn’t that I was trying to buy time, although that was part of it. I was afraid of what I might hit, and how hard I might hit it. Like driving the shovel blade into what might be left of Brie would somehow do her greater injury.
“Gotta take a piss,” Matt said.
Would this be my chance? Was Matt going to disappear behind a tree long enough to empty his bladder?
Evidently not. He transferred the gun to his left hand, evidently more skilled at pulling down his zipper and digging out his dick with his right. The stream landed about four feet from where I had been digging, his piss soaking into what might be the foot of my wife’s grave.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him more than I’d ever wanted anything in my entire life.
Matt shook, then zipped back up. “Did I ask you to stop?”
“So let’s say we find her remains,” I said. “We’re done? You could have come out here alone and dug her up.”
“I need you to tell me if it’s her.”
I almost laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
“Maybe there’ll be something,” Matt said, still training his gun on me. “Like, maybe she had a filling in one of her teeth. Something like that you’d recognize. She was your wife. Who’d know better than you?”
I had created a hole a foot and a half wide, two feet long, and more than a foot deep. I hadn’t encountered anything but dirt. I took a step back so that Matt could give the hole a cursory inspection.
“Hmm,” he said.
Now my mind was considering the unimaginable: that Brie really had been buried alive, and somehow escaped. But if that was really what had happened, why had she gone into hiding for six years and suddenly reappeared Saturday?
“Hmm,” he said again.
I cleared my throat. “Maybe you got the wrong spot.”
Matt rubbed his chin. He looked to the rock, back to where I’d dug, then back to the rock again.
He pointed at the ground about two feet over from where I’d been digging.
“Try there,” he said.
Forty-Four
Yellow police tape surrounded the property at the end of Rosemont Street. Two Milford police cars, parked up by the corner, blocked access to the street. Out front of the house were two more police cars, one unmarked.
Inside the house, wearing paper booties, her hands gloved, Detective Marissa Hardy surveyed the scene.
A woman, mid-thirties, sprawled out on the kitchen floor on her back, her eyes open and staring vacantly at the ceiling, her head haloed by a pool of blood that appeared to have stopped spreading. There were no signs of a fight. No upturned chairs, no broken plates or glasses, although Hardy did notice that the edge of the counter, above where the woman’s body lay, had been chipped.
The countertop was not done in quartz or granite, but covered with a cheap laminate. Something, presumably the back of this woman’s skull, had hit the edge. When Hardy leaned in close, she saw some blood, and a hair. She wouldn’t be surprised to find that laminate chip on the back of this woman’s head once the body was sent to the forensic center.
So maybe she’d been pushed, hit her head, then went down. The blow hard enough that it killed her.
Somebody pushed her very hard.
A uniformed officer, also wearing the slip-on booties, was standing at the entrance to the kitchen.
“The neighbor who called it in is outside,” she said.
“Okay,” Hardy said. “What’s the victim’s name?”
“Candace DiCarlo,” the officer said. “Works at a fitness center.”
“Husband?”
“Neighbor says she and her ex split up a couple of years ago. She got the house and he moved out West to Nevada, or so the neighbor says.”
“What’s his name?”
“The ex?”
“The neighbor.”
“Hunt. Gifford Hunt. Retired guy.”
“Tell him I’ll be out in a second,” Hardy said.
The officer retreated. Hardy took another couple of minutes to take in the scene before deciding to go outside. Hunt, visibly shaken, was waiting for her out front of his house.
“Mr. Hunt?” she said, removing her gloves and extending a hand. “I’m Detective Hardy.” She took his trembling hand into hers for a second. “Are you okay?”
“Kind of in shock, I guess,” he said.
“You live here, sir?” she asked.
“That’s right. My wife, she’s gone to visit our daughter for a few days in Cleveland. I’m here on my own. I called her. I hope that’s okay.”
“Sure. That’s fine.”
“I told her not to come home, but I think she’s going to anyway.” He took a breath, put his hand to his chest. “I hope I don’t have a coronary event.”
“Do you have a history of heart problems, Mr. Hunt?”
“No, no, I’m kind of a hypochondriac, is all.”
“You found Ms. DiCarlo?”
“Yes. I went to the door after I heard all this shouting and saw the man ride away on his bike.”
“What was the shouting about? Was it two people arguing?”
“No, it sounded like one person. Just profanities. Yelling, ‘Oh shit,’ several times.”
“Did you recognize this man?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Never seen him before.”
“Ms. DiCarlo lived alone?”
“Yes, that’s what I told the other officer. She and her husband got a divorce and he moved away.”
“Boyfriends?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t really pay much attention. It was only by chance that I happened to step out of the house when I did. I was on my way to the driving range. I retired a couple of years ago. I worked for the city, maintaining and servicing traffic lights. If a traffic light went out, I was the guy they called.”