Page 97 of Stay Buried

There was a second barn beside it, an old horse stable, maybe, but there was only one wall standing now, the rest in ruins.

There was a rustle behind her. She spun, and spotted the rabbit watching from the edge of the clearing. A cottontail with black eyes, who knew better than to come any closer. It could smell the suffering and old blood too, she thought. It hopped off into the woods.

Mini had had enough.

There was nothing here. No clues. It was stupid to have come, to have believed there might actually be something to find here after all this time.

She moved away from the rubble of the barn and stable and was making her way back to the path she had followed up the hill when a sound broke the silence. Not a scream or a moan or a whisper, but a single high-pitched chirp.

The chirp of a late-season cricket. Another warning.

She told herself to get out of there, to run back down the hill, sneak back into her house.

Still, she found herself moving toward the sound of the cricket. Maybe, if she was lucky, she could find it, see it, say hello to it, ask it what it knew. Crickets weren’t like spiders, with their eight legs and biting fangs, their sticky webs. Lots of people said a cricket in the house was good luck. A cricket played music, a song that called out:This way, Mini. This way.

She moved around the left edge of the ruined barn, listening, searching. That was when she saw it: not the cricket, but a door made from wide planks of rough-hewn wood set into the ground, hung on heavy iron hinges gone orange with rust.

She walked slowly over to it.

The clearing was now totally quiet. No birdsong. Even the cricket had gone mute.

A chill ran through her whole body, creeping up from the ground, working its way through her toes, up her legs and spine, all the way tothe back of her neck—a warning.

She put her hand on the old corroded handle of the door.

She could feel him there behind it.

She knew he was there, waiting. Listening. Knowing she was out there. Little Mini Fitzpatrick who had broken the rules.

Her heart hammered. Her mouth went dry.

She counted to three and yanked the door open.

The smell of damp earth hit her. She wished she’d brought a flashlight.

“Hello?” she called, voice creaky and strange.

There were narrow stone steps that led down to an earthen floor. She crept down them, the sunlight coming through the doorway giving things a dim glow. She was in a dark little room with shelves on all sides. She found an oil lamp on a shelf, gave it a good shake—plenty of fuel left inside. There was a pack of matches beside it; she lit one and set the flame against the wick, filling the room with a warm glow.

It was a root cellar. Her best friend, Bea, had one.

The cellar at Bea’s house was full of big jugs of hard cider, bushels of apples, potatoes, turnips, squash, and carrots.

This one was different.

Mini stared at the shelves, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. But was there another sound behind it? The faintest of hoofbeats? She held still and listened. Was that a snapping twig, somewhere in the distance? She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being followed—that something was out there.

Lantern in hand, she quickly crept up the stone steps and eased the heavy door shut.

Feeling just the slightest bit safer, she began to study the contents of the cellar.

Shelves lined the walls, and Mini studied the objects on them: coins, five- and ten- and twenty-dollar bills in stacks, bottles of rum and whiskey, jars of jam, packs of cigarettes, pretty stones, noteswritten in faded ink. She held the lamp up to the shelves and spotted a familiar object: the little clay horse she’d made in school and left for the knackerman last spring. She picked it up, barely believing it. But when she turned it over, there were her initials, scratched into the clay:MF.

These were gifts people had left him. Hundreds, thousands of objects and notes and treasures left for him over the years.

A leather saddlebag hung off the end of one of the shelves. She reached into it, pulled out a glass jar half-full of dark red paint and an old wooden-handled paintbrush.

Mini felt eyes on her and looked up, let out a little squeak like a mouse about to be eaten, swooped down on by a hawk.