gasped.
The entire surface of the marble was covered with the large insects, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, climbing all over each other. They covered her husband's name, the dates between which he had graced the world, his identity as a loving husband and father. The singing cicadas even obscured the majority of his epitaph, save for two small gaps where no insects crawled.
Two words were clearly framed between the writhing bodies. Not once did a single insect so much as crawl across either.
Vanessa leaned closer, her heartbeat racing to catch up with the rhythm of the cicada song. She focused on the words of the epitaph:
She could only read two words between the scrabbling insects:
They didn't speak as they rode back to Vanessa's house. Trey had seen the cloud of cicadas descend upon his sister from the driver's seat, but by the time he reached her, the swarm had settled and she was ready to leave. Sure, he remembered seeing the insects swarm years ago. Just not like that, not directly around someone. They had walked to his car in silence, a silence that hung between them until they were nearly to her house before she finally spoke.
'Is it possible the body they found wasn't Emma's? I mean, is there any way the identification could be wrong?'
He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She seemed strangely composed, as though he was returning with an entirely different person than the one with whom he had left. Her eyes were glazed, focused on nothing in particular, her posture almost relaxed. He debated the merits of sugar-coating the truth, but he couldn't bear to offer her false hope.
'No,' he said after a long pause. 'The comparisons of the DNA from her hair and her dental records were conclusive.'
'But they didn't test the body itself, did they?'
Trey's Cherokee coasted to a halt in front of her house. Vanessa climbed out without another word and walked up the path toward her front door. She didn't wave, didn't even look back in his direction. Just opened the door with her key and vanished into the darkness.
He sat there under the glow of the streetlamp. Small dark shapes swirled around the light, casting strange, shifting shadows. He heard the distant hum of cicada song from the ancient trees lining the lane.
Vanessa needed help, just not the kind of help he could give. He was worried about her. Terrified for her. She could simply walk straight to her medicine cabinet, grab a bottle of pills, and curl up alone in bed one final time. Was it possible that he had just seen her alive for the last time? Would their next encounter require him to break down her door to find her dead in her bed?
He grabbed his cell phone and flipped it open. The small screen stared back at him. He debated calling someone to stay the night with her, but he was all she had now and there was no way she would allow him to baby-sit her. He thought about calling a shrink or a pastor, someone who could help her sort through her feelings, who could convince her not to do anything to harm herself. But she hadn't appeared suicidal. In fact, she almost seemed more at peace than she had been in a long time. Was it possible her doubts were justified?
In the end, he settled on a different number entirely and listened to the phone ring until someone eventually answered.
'Packard?' he said. 'Walden here. From Jefferson. I'm glad you're still there. Remember when you said if there was ever anything else you could do for me...?'
Vanessa passed through the dark living room and entered the kitchen. Her thoughts were a chaotic mess and she was emotionally spent, yet at the same time, she felt remarkably calm. Memories assaulted her. The bear her daughter had made crumbling as the cicadas emerged from their molted skins. A ghostly hand pressed against the glass. The swarm descending upon her from the trees at her husband's grave. Covering the headstone with the exception of two conspicuous gaps.
'Still lives,' she whispered to the shadows. It was a homophonic interpretation, a verb instead if a noun.
It couldn't all be coincidence, could it? Any one of those events could have been an anomaly, a random freak of nature, but together they formed a message. And there was no denying what that message was.
Perhaps she was only seeing what she wanted to see. Maybe something deep inside of her had finally broken under the weight of her loss. Or maybe, just maybe, her interpretation was correct. Regardless, there was only one way to find out for sure.
She flipped on the kitchen light and stared at the table. The glass case lay in ruin. The base was still flat on the surface under a mound of dirt. The support post stood erect from it like a little metal cactus. But the panes were shattered. Gleaming shards littered the tabletop. She glanced up at the overhead fixture, at the window that overlooked the back yard. There was no sign of the cicadas anywhere.
Vanessa headed back through the living room toward the staircase and ascended into darkness. She was exhausted, but she knew there was no way her brain was going to shut down long enough for her to sleep. She didn't feel like trying anyway. Those two words repeated over and over in her head.
Was it possible they were true? That Emma was somehow still alive?
She contemplated the evidence as her brother had described it. The dental records had proven that the teeth had been Emma's based upon comparisons of a forensic odontologist's physical reconstruction and the existing x- rays. Could the films in the file have been switched? Could another child's teeth have been filled to pass for Emma's? And then there was the DNA. The hair they pulled from the shallow grave had been identical to the sample she had procured from Emma's hairbrush herself. Was there any way the samples could have been switched in the lab or somehow contaminated?
Everything boiled down to one simple question. With the preponderance of easily verifiable physical evidence, had anyone formally evaluated the body itself?
She turned left at the top of the landing and started down the hallway. Her transferred weight made the floorboards creak, startling the hidden cicadas. Their song reverberated from the walls, creating the impression that it came from all around her at once. She passed Emma's bedroom on the left and switched on the light. It was exactly as her daughter had left it. Dirty clothes on the floor at the foot of a rumpled bed. Muddy shoes in the corner beside a short table still covered with crayon drawings on butcher paper and a film of dust. A rainbow array of teddy bears lining the tops of her dresser and bookcase. But not a single cicada clinging to the window or swirling around the overhead fixture.
Vanessa crossed the hall and checked the bathroom. Emma's hairbrush, toothbrush, and half-squeezed tube of toothpaste were still on the counter next to the sink, her smudged fingerprints on the corner of the medicine cabinet mirror. She saw hazy shapes through the opaque glass of the shower stall at the rear: bottles of shampoo and conditioner stacked on the edge of the tub. Used towels hanging on the rack. It still smelled like Emma's soap.
The noise definitely originated from farther down the hall.
Her bedroom---the master she had once shared with her husband---was to the left. Directly ahead, a small linen cabinet barely large enough to hold some towels and cleaning supplies. To the right was a bedroom slightly smaller than Emma's that they had converted into Warren's home office. The sound was coming from in there, on the other side of the door that was always kept closed. She hadn't been able to bring herself to go in there since his death. She knew that once she did, she would have to begin boxing up and clearing out his belongings, which would
