Trixie scrambled to the other side of the narrow cargo hold. She was supposed to fly to Bethel next to a coffin?
“At least you know he won't talk your ear off.” The pilot laughed, and then he sealed Trixie inside.
She sat on the duffels and flattened herself against the riveted metal wall. Through the mesh web that separated her from the pilot and the vet, she could hear talking. The plane vibrated to life.
Three days ago, if someone had told her she'd be riding in a flying bus beside a dead body, she would have flat-out denied it. But desperation can do amazing things to a person. Trixie could remember her history teacher telling the class about the starving man in a Virginia settlement who'd killed, salted, and eaten his wife one winter before the rest of the colonists ever noticed she was missing. What you'd deem impossible one day might look promising the next.
As the plane canted off the ground, the pine box slid toward Trixie, jamming up against the soles of her shoes. It could be worse,
she thought. He might not be in a coffin but in a body bag. He might not be some random dead guy but Jason.
They climbed into the night, a rich batter mixed with stars. Up here, it was even colder. Trixie pulled down the sleeves of her jacket.
Oooooh.
She leaned toward the mesh to speak into the front of the cockpit. The vet was already asleep. “Did you say something?” she called to the pilot.
“Nope!”
Trixie settled back against the side of the plane and heard it again: the quiet long note of someone singing his soul. It was coming from underneath the lid of the pine box. Trixie froze. It had to be the engine. Or maybe the veterinarian snored. But even louder this time, she could trace the origin to the coffin: Ohhhhh.
What if the person wasn't dead at all? What if he'd been stapled into this box and was trying to get out? What if he was scratching at the insides, splinters under his fingernails, wondering how he'd ever wound up in there?
Ohhh, the body sighed. Noooo.
She came up on her knees, grabbing through the mesh at the bush pilot's shoulder. “Stop the plane,” she cried. “You have to stop right now!”
“You should have gone before we left,” the pilot yelled back.
“That body . . . it's not dead!”
By now, she'd awakened the vet, who turned around in the passenger seat. “What's the matter...”
Trixie couldn't look back at the coffin; if she did there would be an arm reaching out of that box, a face she couldn't lose in her nightmares, a voice telling her that he knew the secret she hadn't told anyone else.
Ooooh.
“There,” Trixie said. “Can't you hear that?” plane and it puffs up after liftoff? That's all you're hearing
- air going over the vocal cords.“ He grinned at her. ”Maybe you ought to lay off the caffeine.'
Mortified, Trixie turned back toward the coffin. She could hear the pilot and the vet bonding over her stupidity, and her cheeks burned. The body - dead as could be, dead as the wood it was surrounded by - continued to sing: one lonely note that filled the hold of the plane like a requiem, like the truth no one wanted to hear.
* * *
“This really is a shock,” said Jeb Aaronsen, the principal of Bethel High. “Trixie seemed to be getting along so well in school.”
Bartholemew didn't even spare him a sideways glance. “Before or after she stopped coming altogether?”
He didn't have a lot of patience for this principal, who hadn't noticed any change in his own daughter's behavior, either, when she'd been a student here. Aaronsen always put on his tragedy face but couldn't seem to keep the next one from happening. Bartholemew was tired. He'd traced the Stones to the airport, where they'd boarded a plane to Seattle. That would connect to one that landed in Anchorage just shy of midnight. They'd paid
$1,292.90 per ticket, according to the American Express agent who'd
given the detective the lead.
Now he knew where Trixie was headed. He just had to convince a judge that she needed to be brought home.
Bartholemew had awakened the principal and waved the search warrant. The only other people in the school at this time of night were the janitors, who nodded and pushed their rolling trash receptacles out of the way as the men passed. It was strangealmost eerieto be in a high school that was so patently devoid of commotion.
“We knew the .. . incident was . . . difficult on her,” the principal
said. “Mrs. Gray in guidance was keeping an eye on Trixie.” Bartholemew didn't even bother to answer. The administration at Bethel High was no different from any other group of adults in America: Rather than see what was right under their noses, they pretended that everything was exactly like they wanted it to be. What had Mrs. Gray been doing when Trixie was carving up her skin and slitting her wrists? Or, for that matter, when Holly had skipped classes and stopped eating?
“Trixie knew she could have come to us if she was feeling ostracized,” the principal said, and then he stopped in front of a drab olive locker. “This is the one.”
Bartholemew lifted the bolt cutters he'd brought from the fire department and snipped the combination lock. He opened the metal latch, only to have dozens of condoms spring out of the locker like a nest of snakes. Bartholemew
