Graveminder

go inside again?”

The simplicity of it made Byron pause. The law was relative in Claysville. Chris and the town council were the first and last step for all legal matters—and sometimes for social ones, too. If they had been anywhere else Byron had lived, he wouldn’t have been able to just walk into a dead woman’s house; if they had been in a proper city, he couldn’t expect the police to open a door for his curiosity. Here, if Chris said he could go in, that was as good as having a warrant.

Byron shrugged off his jacket and laid it over the seat. “Tell me you collected evidence that makes some sort of sense of this.”

Chris had gone up Maylene’s walk, but he paused and looked back at Byron with challenge clear in his posture—shoulders back, chin up, and lips curved in a smile that was not genuinely friendly. “Why are you being difficult? There’s nothing to this, Byron.” Chris waited until Byron caught up with him and then he said, “Maylene’s gone, and whatever happened, it’s happened and done. She died, the door was open, and something bit on her.”

“You can’t think that. I saw her. We can look for fingerprints or ... something.” Byron wasn’t a detective, didn’t know what clues he’d even look for—or if he’d recognize them if he saw any. “Let me call up some people I met. One of the women I knew in Atlanta was just finishing up a program in forensics. Maybe she could come here and—”

“Why?”

“Why?” Byron stopped midstep. “To find out who killed Maylene.”

Chris gave him the same sort of inscrutable look that William always did. It was galling to see it on the face of a man he’d once partied with. “They’re probably long gone. No sense chasing up the road after some vagrant. Maylene’s dead and gone. It won’t help anything to go asking questions. Not you or Bek.”

Byron paused. He hadn’t said it, but that was part of it: he wanted to have something to say when he faced Rebekkah. At least he’d had that when his mother died, an explanation, an answer of some sort. It hadn’t made the loss any less, but it helped.

I can’t protect her from this. I can’t fix it ... I can’t deal with her blaming me again either.

“Just open the door.” Byron motioned at the key in Chris’ hand.

Chris shoved the key in the lock and pushed the door open. “Go on, then.”

For the second time in twenty-four hours, Byron crossed the threshold he hadn’t crossed in almost a decade. One of the last times he’d been in there was when Ella and Rebekkah had tried to sneak him in the upstairs window. The girls had shushed him and giggled; they had all tumbled together into an untidy pile, too high to do much more than that.

“She’s going to need a friend more than anything. I know you’ve had your ... whatever it is, but you need to be there for her.” Chris stood just inside the door. The kitchen was now immaculate. No dishes waited in the drying rack. No blood remained on the floor.

“They cleaned already.” Byron wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but the simple fact of the situation was that any clue he might possibly have found had been wiped away with the bleach he could still smell.

“ ’Course they did.” Chris shook his head. “Can’t have Rebekkah coming back to Maylene’s blood on the wall. Would you want that?”

“No, but”—Byron swept his hand around—“how are we going to find who did this if everything’s all bleached and vacuumed and whatever else they did? Maylene was killed .”

“Maybe you ought to take your concerns to the council.” Chris didn’t follow him any farther into the house. “If it makes you feel better to look around, go ahead. Just pull the door behind you when you’re done.”

Byron took a calming breath, but didn’t reply.

“I’ll see you at the service tomorrow ... with Rebekkah?” In that one short phrase, Chris asked all of the questions that he wasn’t verbalizing: did you reach her and is she coming and will you help her?

“Yes,” Byron confirmed.

“Good.” The sheriff turned and left Byron alone.

Because there is no crime scene to preserve. No sense of law or privacy or any damn thing that makes sense.

Byron walked through the house. If he knew what was normal for Maylene’s house these days, it would be easier to see what was amiss. Or if they hadn’t already cleaned. The kitchen had always seemed uncommonly large, but in an old farmhouse, that wasn’t too peculiar. The pantry, on the other hand, was enough to make him wonder if every single person in Claysville was hiding some sort of eccentricity. Years ago, the girls had been adamant that they weren’t ever to open the door to it, and at the time, he hadn’t cared. Now he stood speechless. The room itself was the size of some of the kitchens he’d had outside of Claysville. Shelves ran from floor to ceiling, and as he looked he realized that there were runners in the floor so as to slide any of the front shelves forward and to the side. Behind these were another set of equally stocked shelves. Maylene had enough food to cook for the whole town.

He slid a shelf forward and to the left.

“Damn,” he whispered. Floor to ceiling was stocked with whiskey and Scotch. Bottle upon bottle lined the shelf, all label forward, sorted by brand, five deep.

Maylene had never seemed drunk, didn’t smell like the bottle, but unless she was running some sort of speakeasy, there was no way any one person could need this much liquor. If she got drunk every night, it still would’ve taken years to drink this much. If it had always been so, it wasn’t any wonder now where Ella and Rebekkah had found their never-ending supply of liquor all those years ago.

Byron slid the next shelf over and saw the same sort of overstocked shelf, this one full of unmarked bottles of clear liquid. He took down a bottle and twisted the cap. There was no seal to break.

Moonshine?

He sniffed. It didn’t have any scent.

Not shine.

He dipped a finger in the neck of the bottle and touched his finger to his tongue.

“Water?”

The town’s water was tested regularly. There wasn’t a thing wrong with it. The grocers didn’t carry much in the way of bottled water, finding the idea of buying water foolish, and these bottles were clearly not from any store.

“I don’t get it.” Byron examined the bottle in his hand, turning it around, looking on the bottom and under the lid. The only identifying mark was a date written in black indelible marker on the bottom. Home-bottled water, a distillery worth of whiskeys, and enough food for years of living. Short of preparing for End of Days–style catastrophes, this didn’t make sense. Maylene wasn’t any more religious than the rest of Claysville, and she certainly hadn’t seemed like she was planning for any sort of Armageddon.

And stockpiling food and booze doesn’t explain why anyone would kill her.

Byron closed the pantry door, set the bottle of water down on the countertop, and walked upstairs. He didn’t know where to send a sample for testing, but it was something.

Except bad water doesn’t result in torn-up bodies.

Upstairs, everything looked perfectly in order. Even the beds were made. In the bathroom that Ella and Rebekkah once shared, someone had set out a hand towel, bath towel, washcloth, and one of those little seashell- shaped soaps. It looked homey.

The guest bedroom that was once Rebekkah’s room had a quilt folded at the foot of the bed, and Maylene’s bed had fresh linens on the night table as if whoever tidied up wasn’t sure if changing the linens was a good idea or not. Byron wasn’t sure either. His father had kept his mother’s things out for months, even going so far as to spray her perfume in the air every so often. The shadow of her presence had lingered long after she was gone.

For a moment he considered sitting down, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. It was one thing to come into Rebekkah’s home to look for something, some clue, some anything to answer the questions he knew she’d have. It was another altogether to make himself at home.

He paused in the doorway, remembering the first time Rebekkah had dealt with the death of a loved one.

Rebekkah sat on the edge of her bed. Her face was wet with tears, and her sobs were the