He pulled on a thread hanging down from the left sleeve of his sweatshirt. “An accident of some kind?”
She shook her head, looking hard at him pulling that thread, and the words came out in a burst, but lifeless and without fury or pain. “He died in prison,” she said, her eyes still on that gray thread.
He nearly fell off the sofa with surprise. He stared at her, unable not to. “Why was your husband in prison?”
She shook her head. All right, so she wasn’t ready to face that yet with him. He shifted gears. “So you found his family’s phone number—where?”
“The warden sent all Martin’s stuff to me. There was pitifully little, to be honest. There was this lone phone number in a small black notebook—no name, only an out-of-state phone number—and so I called it to see who it was he knew in Georgia. It was his family.
“I spoke to his mother and told her Martin was dead. She wept, Ethan. Then she begged me to have him buried with his family, not in cold Boston where he hadn’t known anyone except me and his daughter. Did we feel he had any deep foots there? ‘No, not really,’ I told her. Then please,’ she begged me, ‘please bring him home.’
“She begged me, Ethan, and she was crying again, so I said yes because she was right. I didn’t have family in Boston—no family anywhere, for that matter. And so after a memorial in Boston with all our friends, Autumn and I drove Martin’s urn from Boston to Georgia so his mother could bury it in the family cemetery.”
He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She sat there as if frozen, as if her words were stuck in her throat.
He said quietly, “Your husband never told you about his family, You never asked?”
“Yes, of course I was curious, but Martin refused to talk about them.
“He didn’t change his name? He kept Martin Backman?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why he didn’t change his name. With the Internet, you could probably find a missing pet. Didn’t he care if they found him? Bigger question—why didn’t they find him? They found you and Autumn, didn’t they? Real fast.”
She nodded. “They did find us fast, but I don’t understand how they did it.”
“You must have talked to them some about your own family. Did you mention Titusville?”
“I’m sure I didn’t, not directly. When I first met him, married him, I simply let it all go as not being important to me, important to us. I loved him, found him fascinating and funny. But now—it’s obvious I didn’t know him, didn’t know a big part of him at all. Who was the man I married? Believe me, I would really like to know.”
She lowered her face into her hands.
“I’m sorry, Joanna.”
She jerked up and Ethan saw sudden anger and pain radiating off her, like waves of heat laced with poison.
18
HE ROSE. “I’m going to lock us in for the night, Joanna, then we can go on.”
She followed him out to the foyer, watched him lock and dead-bolt the front door, and turn on the alarm.
They checked Autumn. She was curled up asleep on his bed, Mackie in her arms. Ethan covered her with an afghan.
He got them two mugs of tea and motioned her back to the living room.
“You started to tell me about his mother when you first arrived in Bricker’s Bowl.”
She nodded. “His mother was alone when we drove up. At first I thought she was his grandmother, but she wasn’t. Like I told you, Martin was born long after Grace.
“She was very nice, showed me the Backman cemetery, but I knew she was upset that I’d cremated Martin and brought him in an urn, not in a casket as she obviously expected. There were a lot of graves in the cemetery, maybe upwards of forty, maybe more. Must be an old family, I thought, looking out over it. I remember all the graves were set in overlapping triangles, so there were no rows or paths. I asked her about all these triangles, and she said her husband’s grand-parents designed it that way when they’d moved to this spot from the other end of the bowl, and had all the caskets moved here. Then she said the weirdest thing: ‘They knew to keep the old ones with them, because the old ones know how to draw the power from the earth.’ I was so surprised—so creeped out, really—that I didn’t pursue what that meant.
“There were all these oak trees, nearly growing together, some branches pushing down on others, vying for space, and they seemed to huddle over the graves as if trying to protect them, or hide them.
“But then, the next morning, I thought I’d overreacted because it was peaceful and warm, a sun bright overhead—serene, even. It felt right that Martin would end up being buried with his family. His grave was already dug. It hadn’t been there when we’d arrived the day before, so I guessed Blessed and Grace dug it out after Autumn and I went to bed. She told me the space was meant for her, but she could always move, now, couldn’t she? I remember watching her wrap the urn in a lace tablecloth she said her mother had made herself. I watched Blessed climb down a small ladder and lay the urn on a wooden platform at the bottom of the grave. It looked so small in that deep hole. Then she handed Blessed a wood-framed mesh sort of thing that looked like a chicken coop and he set it over the wrapped urn. Grace climbed down and smoothed another white tablecloth over that. Both Blessed and Grace were wearing shiny black suits, and they took turns filling in the grave. It was just the five of us, no one else, not even a minister. Blessed read from an ancient Bible—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—read on and on for quite a while, in a low drone. When I realized no one was going to say a prayer, I did. Then we all stood staring down at Martin’s grave, the raw dirt piled high, all loamy and black. Autumn was clutching my hand, but she wasn’t crying. Her hand was terribly cold. She was so still, never made a sound.
“I wanted to leave immediately after we’d buried his urn, but his mother begged me to stay, just one day, she said, only one single day so she could spend some time with her granddaughter. She reached out to touch Autumn. Autumn didn’t move, didn’t seem to even breathe when her grandmother stroked her hair.”
“And did you stay for one more day?”
She shook her head. “We couldn’t stay not after what Autumn saw—”
She looked terrified. He waited a beat, then asked, “What did Autumn see, Joanna?”
“She said she saw them burying dead people in her daddy’s grave.”
She’d said it, insane words, unbelievable and terrifying.
Ethan’s expression didn’t change, but she saw clearly he wasn’t going to accept that.
Ethan knew there were all kinds of monsters out there, but this was a story from a little girl. He said, “Who did she see burying dead people? Blessed? Grace? Shepherd? All of them? Come on, spit it out.”
“It was that night—”
Autumn appeared in the living room door. “What’s wrong, Mama?”
Joanna looked pale and exhausted, but she looked up and smiled. it was well done, Ethan thought, but Autumn wasn’t buying it. She came running to her mother, grabbed her arm. “Mama, you were telling Ethan about Daddy’s funeral, weren’t you? You look all white and stiff, like you did that day.”
There’d been too many lies, to her daughter, to herself, to others. And so she told her daughter the truth. She nodded. “I was telling Ethan about your daddy’s family, sweetheart, about how they behaved, what they were like.” Autumn tightened all over. Joanna said, “Did you get some rest, sweetie?”
Autumn nodded. “I woke up from my nap, Mama. Big Louie was licking my toes and Mackie hissed at him.”
Ethan asked, “Big Louie only licks big toes. Did you keep them from lighting?”
