Page 119 of Stay Buried

October 15, 2014

I just found the mark on my motel room door. There was knocking a little after midnight, but I didn’t dare answer, didn’t open the door until the sun had come up. I never knew what “her blood ran cold” really meant. Ido now.

All packed up, leaving now. I’ve got to get help. Bring the police back.

“Uh, Ash?” Malcolm called from somewhere out of sight behind her. His voice sounded strained, far away. “I think you’re gonna want to come see this.”

“Did you find a way out?” she called.

He didn’t answer.

She began to pick her way toward Malcolm, using her phone to light the way over to a stone-lined doorway that led to a small room off the main basement.

It was a root cellar, shelves stuffed with home-canned goods in glass jars: applesauce, pickles, tomatoes, each carefully labeled and dated. Ash thought of her great-grandmother Margaret filling the shelves each summer and fall, of Thomas and Frankie coming down here to get provisions. When Gram was a girl learning to can from Margaret, her first attempts must have lined these very shelves. Ash reached out and touched a jar of pickled beets, tears pricking her eyes.

“Ash?” Mal’s voice sounded small, frightened. A little boy’s voice. She turned from the glass jars. Mal was standing in the center of the room, using his phone to light up a table in front of him. Ashley moved closer.

She saw immediately that it was the worktable where Josephine created the dolls. There was a box of blank clothespins, along with little plastic bottles of acrylic craft paints, spools of wire and thread, and a small basket of scrap fabric, all neatly arranged along the edges of the table. Ashley spotted a work light clamped to a shelf nearby, its cord snaking off through the doorway to the main basement. She flicked the switch and the scene was bathed in bright light.

In the center of the table were two new dolls. A man with dark hair and a beard, a red T-shirt, and jeans, and a woman with shortdark hair dressed in jeans and a blue chambray shirt.

“It’s us,” she said.

FIFTY-TWOFRANKIE

March 16, 1919

It’s not true,” I said. “What the knackerman said about Aunt Margaret. It can’t be.”

It was just before ten a.m. and we were back at home in the surgery. Pearl was sleeping in my bed. Aife was in the room with her, curled up on the floor, keeping watch.

I had not told her about her parents yet. She had not asked, which was a relief and meant I did not have to lie.

Benjamin was still in the cot in my aunt’s sewing room, lying cold with a stitched Y-incision in his torso, covered by a sheet.

I was applying salve to the burns on my uncle’s face. The heat coming off him from the fever and the burns was tremendous. His lungs wheezed like old bellows, and it was difficult for him to speak without coughing. The smoke in the barn certainly hadn’t done his already compromised lungs any good. The smell of ruined fruit was on his breath, seeping from his pores. He flinched as I touched him, either from the pain or the touch itself.

Even as I spoke the words, I knew they were a lie. I felt the truth tucked inside of me like a dark, heavy stone: the child my aunt carried was not Uncle Thomas’s. That was why she’d gone to Charlotte Albone and asked to end the pregnancy. That was why she’d told the old midwife Thomas would not want the child.

I knew my uncle felt the truth inside him too.

He did not reply.

“You’ve got to get the samples to Boston,” he said. “Bring help before everyone in town is dead.”

“I can’t leave you and Pearl. Not now.”

He gazed up at me, his face greasy and red, his eyes yellow, his eyebrows and the front of his hair singed off. “Now isexactlythe time you must leave, Frankie. They’re going door-to-door shooting the sick.”

“But Pearl—”

“If you want to save Pearl, you’ve got to bring back help. She isn’t safe here. No one is. Everyone—the sick and the uninfected—we’re all dangerous.” He spoke the words with fury, his hands balling into fists.

I said nothing, only nodded. And I thought of how he himself had chantedburn, devil, burnbeside the pyre last night as the knackerman screamed.

“Go into my bedroom. Get my leather traveling case. We’ll pack the specimens up in that. Wrap them carefully.”

“But, Uncle, I—”