He’d seen pictures. Members of the support group had passed photographs from hand to hand. Robb had shown them a tiny casket of polished rosewood that glowed almost red. Hardly the size of a suitcase. Pictures of Mai and her family tossing flowers into the open grave. No pictures of the body, but there wouldn’t be, not after Trevor’s daylong suffering in a hot car.
The same way Blush had used the sharp end of the lug wrench to pry away plywood, Foster stabbed it under the vault lid and muscled the concrete. He told himself this was only a movie. He was only a character in a cheap drive-in-theater horror movie. The lid tipped up and slid aside, revealing the casket that seemed smaller than it had looked in the photographs. Movie or not, the casket lid wouldn’t open. It needed a key. A socket deal. Otherwise the lid was locked down to make it watertight.
Careful not to step on the casket itself, he planted his feet on the concrete edges of the vault. Movie or not, he reared back with the shovel and swung it down like an axe. The blade sinking into the varnished wood, wood even now so red he half expected it to bleed. A second blow split the casket lid. A third tore the lid down the center, and Foster dropped to his knees and clawed at the splintered wood. Tearing aside the satin and padding. Ready to see, hoping to find the sad horror, the tragic withered body. He ripped away the padded and pleated lining.
Under the weak beam of his flashlight his hands tossed back the quilted satin blanket and pillow. Buried here and honored with toys, wept over in photographs, inside this beautiful shattered casket Foster found nothing. The little mattress was unstained.
Even here, sunk a man’s height into the damp soil of a graveyard, his phone got a signal. He dialed.
A voice answered, the voice from the tape he’d erased in the studio said, “Hello?”
“Friend,” said Foster.
After a blip, a breath, a shudder, after a beat of nothing, Robb Laurence said, “Gates.” He asked, “Where are you calling from?”
Foster asked, “Is the support group still meeting on Thursdays?”
Over the phone Robb said, “Are you okay?”
“Are you going to group this week?” asked Foster.
Robb answered too loud. As if getting someone’s attention, he said, “Am I going to the support group, you mean?” As if there might be someone there to triangulate the call and locate Foster.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Foster said, and broke the connection.
Mitzi opened a third bottle of wine before she could listen to the voicemail.
She’d seen some of the video shot inside the Dolby Theatre that night. Bits had played on television, the cleaner bits. The worst were on the web, but she’d not gone to look there. Alone in her condo, she set her phone on the desk in front of her and pressed Play.
The recording replaced the world around her.
“Mitz,” a voice croaked. “My baby girl.”
A voice from the grave, it gave her gooseflesh all up her arms.
It continued, “Mitz, it’s good you don’t pick up.” Like a man shouting at the hands-free phone in his car, it said, “God forbid you should pick up and hear this.” Screams, human screams and a noise like thunder muffled his words. “…so much dust a person can’t breathe,” Schlo shouted. “Can you hear it?”
Mitzi pictured the footage from inside the Imperial Theater. Cracks running through every surface, cracks branching into more cracks. The walls and ceiling shifting. Crumbling. Thick dust sifting and settling over everything below.
“Choking I am. Mitzi, my baby girl, I want you should know how proud I am for you. A good life I’ve lived.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Words can’t go there, but the balconies, they’re pancaking together. Oh, the horror of so many…just gone.”
The screams diminished, but now the thunder of steel bending and glass breaking grew louder.
Mitzi could picture this from the video she’d seen on the news. The concrete slabs of the walls had fractured into chunks, shattered into pieces, busted into rocks of cement already blasting into sand. “So much dust,” Schlo said. He coughed into the phone. “I should suffocate before I get smashed. Blinded I am, half blind from such dust!”
Mitzi shook tears from her eyes.
“Baby girl,” Schlo’s voice continued, hoarse, “I love that you tried to rescue me. I swear by all the blood of all the martyrs that I didn’t know.” He asked, “How was I to know?”
Schlo, like all the people she’d loved, now reduced to a recording.
It was too much.
In the last moment of his life, Mitzi lost her nerve. To keep from hearing her friend die she switched off the phone.
The voice belched and gasped. His breathing bubbled and gargled. In nasal tones the man on the tape panted, fast, panted-panted as if his lungs had shrunken to dime sized. Over Foster’s headphones he gurgled and coughed as if his chest were filling with water.
He moaned, “My sweet girl.” He spat, and a stream of something liquid splashed against something flat and hard. Clearer now, he said, “Everything I’ve done I’ve done…” He swallowed. “To coax you to this moment.”
Foster tried to plug the man’s voice into a movie. Some drama about a sinus infection sufferer. An Academy Award winner about a severe head cold.
Within the headphones the man took a long, ragged breath. “You’re not to blame,” he said, his voice hardly rising above a whisper. “I’ve groomed you to do this since the day you were born.” He said, “I know the terrible power you feel at this moment.”
In the darkness of Foster’s mind, the man gagged. He vomited an invisible stream, of what Foster couldn’t imagine. Gobbets and clots spattered in some long-ago sickroom. Every sound rang with a bright echo that suggested concrete or tile. Nothing soft. In the background he could hear a child, a young person, sobbing.
His airway cleared,
