Chapter 27
twenty-seven
Greta stared at the casket and tried to make her mind accept the size of it.
Small.
Too small.
Not a coffin for a person.
A box for what the searchers had been able to bring out of the mud. Oak grain. Dark stain. Brass handles polished bright under the gray morning.
She stared at it and the open grave beneath it, and couldn’t wrap her mind around the wrongness of laying Alice to rest in pieces.
The officiant’s voice carried across the flat wind-scoured plot at the edge of town, where Solace’s dead had been going to rest since 1880.
The rain had softened the ground. Greta’s black flats sank a little every time she shifted her weight. She’d bought them three years ago for a wedding she never attended. Now mud worked its way around the soles while her sister’s casket waited above a hole in the earth.
The Valor Ridge family had arranged themselves in a loose semicircle around the grave.
Walker stood with his hat in both hands, his shoulders square, Johanna beside him with a hand resting on his back, Logan beside her.
Jonah held his own hat against his chest. Nessie was pressed into Jax’s side, pale-faced, and Jax had one arm around her and the other around Oliver.
Naomi stood with her jaw set and her eyes red-rimmed, her coat buttoned all the way to her throat. Ghost hovered beside her, as usual.
Maggie and Anson stood close behind them.
Lila was pale and hollowed out beside Boone.
River was in an actual button-down shirt that looked like it had been ironed, and his hair was combed and gelled back instead of the usual riot of curls.
X stood beside Mariah, sneaking worried looks at her while she ignored him.
The town had also shown up in force. Cody and Jodi Simms stood shoulder to shoulder, both in dark Carhartts, Jodi’s hand tucked into the crook of Cody’s elbow.
Margery Pendry had brought her good cane, the one with the silver handle, and she leaned on it without looking like she needed it.
Ruthie Campbell stood beside her, eyes already wet, dabbing at them with a frilly handkerchief.
And Dallie-Ann.
Greta hadn’t expected her. The hairstylist hovered at Ruthie’s elbow in a black dress that looked borrowed, her hands twisting together at her waist. She wouldn’t look up. She kept her chin tucked toward her chest like she was bracing for something.
Greta’s throat closed.
Dallie-Ann had been so certain. Standing in the Summit Outfitters showroom with one hand pressed flat against her chest as she looked at Alice’s flyer.
That’s her. She goes by Alyson now. She’s got a baby.
Her voice had cracked on the word baby. Greta had driven to Glenhaven the next morning with Bear in the passenger seat and Atlas and King in the back, and she’d let herself believe, for forty-eight hours, that her sister was alive and braiding a child’s hair somewhere behind a fundamentalist fence.
It hadn’t been Alice. It had never been Alice, because Alice had been buried in the mud this whole time.
Greta met the woman’s gaze, and Dallie-Ann’s face crumpled. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, and Greta could read it as clearly as if she’d spoken—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I thought it was her.
Greta nodded once. It was the closest thing to absolution she could give without breaking down where she stood. You tried. You were the only one who tried.
Ruthie put an arm around Dallie-Ann’s shoulders and pulled her in close.
Even Hatch was here, which was weird because she didn’t really know him, and he certainly hadn’t known Alice. But he stood off to the side of the Valor Ridge group with his hat in his hands.
Well, maybe it wasn’t that weird.
Valor Ridge was a family. And families showed up for each other.
Or at least they were supposed to.
But Mason “Hatch” Hatcher was here, and Dallie-Ann was here, and her dad wasn’t.
She’d called him three days ago. Sat at the kitchen table with Naomi’s hand in hers and Johanna across from her and pressed the contact she hadn’t dialed in over a year.
“Greta?”
“Yeah.”
She’d closed her eyes. “Dad, they found her.”
A long silence. Then: “Found who?”
Who else? She’d wanted to scream at him. Who else would she be calling about?
“Alice,” she’d said. “They found Alice. Yesterday. On private land outside Solace. The flood uncovered her.”
The silence had stretched. Then her father had said, “Okay.”
That was it. Just okay.
She’d hung up. Dropped the phone on the table like it had burned her. Bear had crossed the kitchen in three strides and pulled her up out of the chair.
“I hate him,” she had whispered against his hard chest.
“I know,” Bear had said.
So Valor Ridge was here. The townspeople were here. Even Evander was here, standing at the edge of the trees.
But her dad couldn’t be bothered to leave his trailer in Arizona. And who the hell knew where her mom was.
The officiant kept talking. Something about eternal rest. Greta couldn’t hold on to the words. They moved past her like wind across the granite up on the ridge, and she thought about the flyer in her desk drawer.
It had been on the corkboard beside her desk for fifteen years.
Alice at sixteen, smiling in the sunshine, platinum-blond hair wild around her face, the leather jacket visible at the edge of the frame.
MISSING in block letters across the top.
Greta had pinned it up the week Alice didn’t come home and had never taken it down.
She’d walked past it every morning. She’d seen it every time she went to her desk.
When she woke up the morning after the bones were found, she took it down.
But she hadn’t been able to throw it out.
She’d folded it once. Then again. She’d crossed to her desk, opened the top drawer, and set it inside.
Stared at it. Folded paper, faded ink, the last piece of hope she’d been carrying for fifteen years.
And she’d closed the drawer.
The officiant finished. His voice trailed off, and he closed the small leather book he’d been reading from and looked at Greta.
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the folded sheet of notebook paper. She’d written it at two in the morning on Bear’s kitchen floor with Atlas asleep across her feet and Bear and Logan asleep upstairs and the house so quiet even the hum of the refrigerator sounded too loud.
She unfolded it. The paper crackled in the silence.
She didn’t look at the faces watching her. She looked at the casket and read.
“Alice was sixteen when she left. She had this laugh that came from her whole body. You could feel it in the air when she did it, like something had just gotten lighter.” She took a breath and exhaled slowly before continuing.
“I’ve been talking to her for fifteen years, like she was still alive, right beside me.
In the car. On the trail. In the dark when I couldn’t sleep.
I’ve been telling her about my day and asking her what she thinks and imagining what she’d say back, and I—”
Her voice cracked. She stopped and crumpled the paper. She couldn’t see the words anymore.
“I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, but I’m going to keep talking to her like she can hear me.” She walked to the casket. “Because I miss you, Alice. I’ll always miss you.”
The funeral director had shown her how the small hinged lid at the head worked—a simple latch, a piano hinge on the inside—and she crouched and opened it now. The interior was cream-colored satin, smooth and cold to the touch.
She unclasped the thin gold chain with two interlocking hearts from her wrist. It was a cheap drugstore friendship bracelet, but it was the most valuable thing she owned. Alice had given it to her for their last birthday together when their parents forgot.
She had been wearing it for fifteen years.
Until this morning.
She set it inside the casket. The chain pooled against the satin in a loose coil.
She closed the lid. The latch clicked. She straightened and stepped back.
Bear’s hand found the small of her back.
The funeral director moved forward and gestured to the two men standing by the straps.
They took hold and began to lower the casket.
The mechanism made a soft grinding sound, metal on metal, and the straps played out in controlled increments.
The casket descended in small jerks, inch by inch, until it reached the bottom of the grave with a soft thud.
Greta felt that sound in the pit of her stomach.
The straps were pulled free. One of the men picked up a shovel from where it leaned against the pile of earth beside the grave. He scooped a load of dirt and held it a moment, looking at the officiant, and the officiant nodded.
As the dirt hit the casket, a small hand found hers. She looked down at Oliver. A little boy who had already seen too much sorrow and fear in his short life. Someone else who never knew her sister, here solely because he knew and loved her.
She squeezed his hand.
He looked up with a small, gap-toothed smile and squeezed back.
“I’m so sorry,” Nessie said as she hurried to gather her son. “He insisted he had to come and I turned my back for one second—”
“It’s okay.” She smiled down at his dark head. “Thank you for coming, Oliver.”
“I’m sorry about your sister,” he said with so much sincerity, her throat slammed closed. She couldn’t respond, so she just nodded and patted his shoulder before Nessie led him back to Jax.
As dirt landed on the casket, the crowd began to fracture until it was just her, Bear, and the workers left.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t stand here watching that hole fill. She turned to him. “I need to go up.”
He looked at her. Then past her at the tree line above the cemetery, where a forest service trail cut up the ridge in a steep diagonal, visible as a pale scar through the pines. He looked back at her face.
“Okay.”