the cheap gravestone that stated his name, birthdate, and death was wrapped in colored beads. There was a little doll's head in front of the stone with melted wax on top of it where a candle had burned down. Part of the doll's head had melted, and wax had run down over the painted eye.
'Empty,' Tim said. 'All this shit was put here after we dug the grave up officially. Me, Cantuck, Reynolds, and the Ranger. You wouldn't believe how hard it was for me to act surprised when we opened it.'
'Why all this stuff?'
'Voodoo,' Tim said. 'It's to keep Soothe in the ground.' He strolled over to the grave next to Soothe's, stuck his shovel into the dirt at its base. 'Old Mrs. Burk has company.'
'You put Soothe in there with her?'
'Florida's idea,' he said. 'Just temporary. Way the weather's been, washing the place and all, no one could tell we'd done anything when they dug up Soothe's spot.'
'Clever,' I said. 'Let's do it.'
Grave digging is not nearly as easy as you might think. It's backbreaking, and next to picking corn out of pig shit with tweezers it's the most boring thing in the world. I tried to focus on things other than my injuries, my sore muscles.
I tried not to think about Florida possibly being down there, and I began to hope I was wrong. If she was dead, I wasn't sure I wanted to find her now. I tried not to think about her being forced to bring those Klan idiots out here, show them where Soothe was buried. I tried not to think about what they did to her afterwards, before they put her down here with Soothe and Mrs. Burk.
As we dug, the water ran down the hill and tried to fill the grave. We could hear the woods crackling as the water ran over the dried branches and leaves, and in the distance I could hear a roaring, which I figured was the rush of the creek swelling. But we kept digging, slogging into the mud, and after about an hour my shovel hit something hard. We scraped it clean. A coffin. Wood.
I stood there on top of it, not knowing exactly what to do next. Tim said, 'Mrs. Burk, she's under that box.'
I had a sudden uncomfortable thought. I said, 'What if Florida told the Klan folks you helped do this? You think your father will have you done in?'
I looked at Tim. He shrugged. 'If she'd told, and they were going to do something, I reckon they would have done it already. Let's widen the grave a bit.'
'It's wide enough. Let's pop the lid.'
'Let's widen it so we can pull it out. I think we got to pull it out, don't you? You lost the tarp, so we have to somehow get the coffin up the hill.'
We started digging again, widening the grave. That nasty snake of my subconscious began to work at me again. It was trying to tell me something, as it often did.
Tim climbed out of the grave. He got the big flashlight he had carried with him, turned it on, tilted it at the edge of the grave so that it shone down on the coffin. It had grown nearly dark as midnight in the time we had been digging. Water was nearly to my knees, and rising.
'Why don't you pop the lid now,' he said. 'Use your shovel.'
I looked up at Tim. He was standing above me, leaning on his shovel, one hand in his pocket. The rain was so thick, it seemed to be a sheath around him. Lightning sawed across the sky in bright, crooked explosions.
'All right,' I said.
I took the tip of my shovel, started forcing it under the lid of the cheap coffin. It wasn't really an official coffin, which would have taken tools to open. It was one of those cheap kind they called pressed wood, which was essentially high-caliber cardboard. It was already starting to come apart due to all the rain since Soothe had been buried. Then reburied.
It popped free, and the stench from it was horrible. Lying on top of what had to be Soothe, though there wasn't much of him to recognize—bones and skin stretched over a skull so tight it looked like a stocking mask—there was another badly decomposed body. The features were basically gone and the hair was patchy. Flesh hung from the skull like chunks of dried glue and above the right eye socket the forehead was pushed in. The rain splashed on it, made the flesh loosen and it slid off the bone as if it were alive and seeking shelter.
In spite of the damage, I recognized the short blue dress the corpse wore, and there was one blue earring dangling from a rotting lobe, and in that instant, I knew I had been a sap all along. I knew what that blue thing under Tim's stove was suddenly, and I knew why Tim wanted the grave widened.
It had to accommodate me. Then Leonard.
I dropped the shovel, reached for the gun in my coat pocket, tried to turn, but didn't make it. Tim hit me across the back of the head with his shovel, knocked me against the grave wall.
My head was splitting. I assumed I had only been out for seconds, because when I came to Tim was stepping into the grave, a foot on Florida's corpse. He reached the pistol that had fallen from my hand out of the coffin and pointed it at me. I was too dazed to do anything. There were just enough brain cells cooking to know I ought to be doing something and wasn't.
I was standing up, lodged between the coffin and the wall of the grave. There hadn't been room to fall down. Tim was squatting in the coffin now, still pointing my gun at me. If that wasn't enough, he pulled a little automatic from his coat pocket with his empty hand, aimed it at me too.
Two-Gun Tim.
'It's nothing personal,' he said. 'I didn't want to kill you and Leonard, but I got to now. I kept thinking you'd just go off. I mean, I like you. I liked Florida. It was just one of those things. You knew though. Right there a while ago. You knew. How?'
It took me a second to make my mouth work, but I wanted every second I could buy. 'Her earring is missing. I realized it's under your stove, at the store.'
'Thanks for telling me,' Tim said. 'I'll get rid of it. Me and her, we struggled. I figure it got caught in my coat,
