Page 120 of Stay Buried

“Do as I say!” he snarled.

I nodded, backed away.

I was up in his room when I heard Luther and Henry arrive. They’d come to fetch Benjamin’s body and bring him to the church to be buried. They’d gone this morning with a group of men, including Reverend Davies, to bury the remains of the knackerman at the edge of the cemetery.

I came downstairs with the leather case and found my uncle, Luther, and Henry in the surgery.

“What’s all this?” Luther asked, looking at the row of specimen jars and test tubes laid out on the table, the piles of notes.

Uncle Thomas coughed, then cleared his throat. “Documentation of the outbreak. I’m sending Frankie to Boston with it. The doctors there, they have much more experience—more tools for studying and diagnosing.”

“No,” Luther said flatly. “No outsiders can know what’s happening here.”

“If it’s about what happened at your barn last night—” Uncle Thomas began.

“No,” Luther interrupted. He walked over, picked up a jar with a sliver of Benjamin’s lung inside, and set it down quickly, wiping his hand on his trousers. “Your… collection here. It needs to be destroyed. It’s not leaving town. Neither of you are leaving town.” He touched the revolver he wore strapped to his hip.

“As you wish,” Uncle Thomas said with a sigh.

“But, Uncle—” I started to argue.

Uncle Thomas shot me ajust play alonglook.

“He’s right,” Uncle Thomas said, picking up one of the pages of notes I’d carefully taken and crumpling it in his hands. “Build a hot fire out back, Frankie. Burn it all.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Uncle Thomas started to cough violently, putting a dirty handkerchief to his mouth to catch the blood-speckled mucus. Luther backed away.

“That’s settled then,” he said with satisfaction. “We’ll take Mr. Stoddard to the church. There’s a coffin waiting. We’ve already dug the grave. The reverend will do a service at four, and we’ll get anyone we can from town to pay last respects and have him in the ground before nightfall.”

“We’ll be there,” Uncle Thomas said. “Four o’clock.”

We led Luther and Henry to the sewing room, where they collected Benjamin’s body and carried him out of the house. I shut and latched the front door behind them.

“We’ve got to hurry,” Uncle Thomas said when I returned to the surgery. He had the metal lockbox that he kept certain medications in and was dumping out its contents. “They’ll be back. Back to make sure we’ve destroyed all the evidence.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“You’re going to hide it. Hide it in a place no one would dare look. But they may be watching.” He hurriedly told me his plan. “Quickly now. I’ll pack these things up.”

I dashed down to the cellar and into the pantry, then out to the shed for kerosene, rags, and an armload of dry firewood. Outside, I built a small, hot fire. Into it went glass canning jars of beets and pickled onions, a few old rags tied into odd shapes, pieces of scrap paper we used for starting fires in the kitchen. Great clouds of black smoke billowed up like terrible phantoms. The jars crashed and exploded in the heat.

Back in the house, Uncle Thomas had wrapped the real specimen jars in cotton bandaging and placed them in a leather satchel along with our notes, then tucked the satchel into the metal lockbox.

“Go now,” he told me, pressing the box into my hands. “Make sure you’re not seen. Out the back door and through the woods.”

I buttoned up my old wool coat, stained with Pearl’s blood and singed from the barn fire, fetched my knapsack, and stowed the box in it. I stopped by the shed for a shovel and slipped onto the path into the woods, the same path I used to follow to meet Pearl, a lifetime ago. Once again, I did what I was good at: not being seen, blending in, moving through the dark, secret places of town like a ghost.

FIFTY-THREEASHLEY

October 18, 2016

Ashley looked at the ceiling of the root cellar. Was the knackerman up there now with his long coat and bone face? Her heart thudded, vibrating in her ears, blocking out all other sounds.

Malcolm stared down at the dolls on the table, ran his hands over his face. “We should never have come here! We should have listened to Gram.”

“She was trying to protect us. That’s why she lied, did everything to keep us away from here. She was trying to keep us safe.”