Chapter 13 #2
The garage door rumbles open moments later, and I hear Yefrem’s car pulling inside.
The sound is familiar, but from this point onward, will I associate it with the sound of preparation for body disposal?
Everything familiar has become sinister, like looking at the world through a funhouse mirror where normal activities hide criminal purposes.
Yefrem returns through the kitchen, bringing with him a draft of night air that carries the scent of approaching rain.
The weather forecast had mentioned possible storms later in the week.
I’d planned to use the time to apply for jobs and maybe tweak my listing to get more guests.
Instead, I’ll be hoping the rain washes away any evidence we might leave behind.
“Ready?”
The question is reasonable and practical. Am I ready to carry a dead federal agent to a car so we can drive him somewhere and bury him? Is anyone ever ready for that?
“No.”
He gives me a sympathetic look. “Neither was I, the first time.”
I arch a brow. “When was the first time?”
“When I was fifteen.”
Fifteen. The casual way he says it, like mentioning when he learned to drive or got his first job, is what really stuns me.
I was fifteen once too, worried about algebra tests and whether Josh Morrison would ask me to the spring dance.
Yefrem was fifteen and apparently learning how to dispose of bodies.
We lift the bundle together, and the weight settles on my shoulders, making me grunt. It’s not just the actual weight, though that’s considerable, but the metaphorical weight of what we’re doing and what I’m becoming. Every step toward the garage is a step farther away from the person I used to be.
“Careful on the steps.” Yefrem’s warning comes just as my foot catches on the threshold leading to the garage. I stumble, nearly dropping my end of the bundle, and he adjusts quickly to keep it secure.
The near-fall sends a jolt of panic through me. What if we’d dropped him? What if the tape had come loose and Lang’s body had spilled out onto my garage floor? The image is so vivid and horrible I almost lose my grip again.
His car is a dark sedan, nondescript in the way that expensive cars sometimes are when they’re trying not to draw attention. German engineering hiding in plain sight. The trunk is already open, a black maw waiting to swallow the evidence of what happened in my kitchen.
Loading the bundle takes more effort than I expected.
Lang’s body wants to fold wrong, the rug makes everything slippery, and my hands keep losing their grip.
We have to try three different angles before we find one that works, and by the time we get him settled, I’m sweating despite the cool night air.
“It looks so much easier on TV,” I say in a disconnected voice.
He gives me a concerned look before he arranges the bundle carefully to fit properly, making sure nothing protrudes or seems obviously body-shaped.
From a distance, it might look like we’re moving a rolled carpet or some furniture.
The mundane camouflage of extraordinary circumstances used to hide the disposal of a body.
It seems like something I might read in one of Lee Child’s books.
No, more like a mystery than a thriller. Or maybe?—
“Celia, are you with me?” His voice is tender.
It gets my attention, and I nod slowly, though my brain feels wrapped in cotton. “Present,” I say with a hollow giggle that deepens his look of worry.
The trunk closes with a solid thunk that sounds like finality, like the period at the end of a sentence I never wanted to write.
“Do you have a shovel?”
The question shouldn’t surprise me—of course we need a shovel—but it does. Another step in this process I’m not prepared for, another tool in an inventory I never wanted to compile. I like to make lists, but I never expected to make a Body Disposal List. “In the garden shed.”
He sounds firm but exasperated when he speaks. “Get it and anything else we might need. Gloves and a tarp if you have one.” When I stare at him, he says almost harshly, “Get your shit together and get it done, Celia. You can fall apart later.”
For some reason, his demented version of a peptalk works, snapping me back to the present.
I rush to retrieve the gardening supplies from my shed, moving on autopilot through the familiar space.
My gardening gloves, still stained with soil from planting bulbs last fall, are covered in flowers, and I almost giggle again imagining Aleks…
no, Yefrem…donning them to bury a body. I find the shovel I bought at Home Depot, excited about my first real garden, and there’s a plastic tarp left over from painting the guest room ceiling.
All of it will now be repurposed for something I never could have imagined. The irony feels deliberate, like the universe has a twisted sense of humor.
When I return to the garage with my arms full of supplies, Yefrem is standing by the car, checking his phone.
The light from the screen illuminates his face, throwing sharp shadows that make him look dangerous in a way candlelight hadn’t.
This is what he really looks like, I realize.
Not the charming guest who shared wine with me during a power outage, but the man who kills federal agents and knows exactly how to clean up afterward.
It crosses my mind that maybe he’s both, but before I can give in to the odd compulsion to ask who he really is, he interrupts.
“We need to go. Now.”
I blink and nod. “Where?”
“I know a place. Somewhere quiet.”
Somewhere quiet. A euphemism for somewhere no one will find Marcus Lang’s body.
I climb into the passenger seat, and the leather is soft and expensive under my legs.
The car smells like leather and something else—aftershave, maybe, or gun oil.
These scents belong to Yefrem’s real world, not the fake identity he’d worn in my house.
He backs out of the garage into the night, and I catch a glimpse of my house in the side mirror.
It looks normal from the outside. The usual peaceful and suburban facade where I’ve been so happy.
There’s no indication that a federal agent died in the kitchen an hour ago, that the woman who lives there just helped wrap his body in a rug, and I’m about to help bury that corpse.
My neighborhood is dark and silent, with no streetlights to illuminate what we’re driving past. The houses around us are full of people sleeping peacefully, unaware that a federal agent’s corpse just rolled by their windows in the trunk of a sedan.
Mrs. Patterson, who bakes me cookies at Christmas, is still asleep, likely with Sariah tucked in safely beside her.
The Hendersons, who always wave when they’re walking their dog, would never guess I’d be involved in such an activity.
My neighbors are normal people living normal lives, oblivious to the fact I’ve has crossed a line into territory they can’t imagine.
We drive in silence through streets I’ve traveled hundreds of times, but everything looks different now.
It’s all foreign and threatening, like I’m seeing it through the eyes of someone who helps hide bodies and lies to federal agents.
The familiar landmarks of my daily routine all seem to belong to someone else’s life now.
“Are you okay?”
The question surprises me. Am I okay? I’m sitting in a car with a corpse in the trunk, driving to bury evidence of a murder I helped cover up. I’m as far from okay as it’s possible to be. “I don’t know.”
His mouth curls into a grim smile for a second. “That’s honest.”
“Is honesty still an option? After this?”
Yefrem glances at me, and in the dim light from the dashboard I see something like sympathy in his expression. “It’s the only option, at least between us.”
“Between us.” I test the phrase, evaluating the way it implies some kind of partnership or a bond forged by shared criminality. “What are we now?”
“Survivors.”
We’re Survivors. People who do what they have to do to make it through the night and wake up free the next morning. It’s reasonable but feels incomplete. “How much further?”
“Ten minutes.”
Ten minutes to the place where we’ll bury Marcus Lang. Ten minutes to complete my transformation from innocent civilian to criminal accomplice, to seal my fate alongside Yefrem’s.
The road narrows as we leave the residential area behind, winding through patches of forest that seem to swallow the headlight beams. I’ve driven this way before during the day—it leads to some hiking trails and a small lake—but at night, it feels ominous and endless. “How do you know where to go?”
“Le…my associate identified a location for me.”
I nod. “Associate, huh? I had associates before being fired, but I never asked any of them for advice on where to bury a body.” A giggle threatens to escape again, but there’s no amusement behind it.
He touches my knee for just a moment. I should flinch away, but I don’t. “Just a little longer to keep it together.”
I nod and inhale before exhaling sharply. “Have you done this before? Buried someone, I mean.”
“Yes.”
My eyes widen, but I’m not really shocked. “Here?”
“No. Different places.”
Different places. Multiple bodies in multiple locations, on multiple nights like this one.
Perhaps I’m not his first unwilling accomplice, but the latest in what might be a long line of people who got pulled into his world and had to choose between cooperation and prison. “What happened to the others?”
“What others?”
“The people who helped you before.”
Yefrem is quiet for so long I think he won’t answer. Finally, he says, “There were no others. Not like this.”
“What makes this different?”
Another pause. “You.”
The single word carries gravitas I’m not sure I want to understand.
Me. What makes this different is me, specifically, not just anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But I don’t know what that means, don’t know if it’s better or worse than being interchangeable, and my thoughts are too scattered to really focus on anything right now.
We turn off the main road onto a dirt track that my car would never handle. The sedan’s suspension absorbs the worst of the bumps, but I feel every pothole and rock through the seat. Trees close in on both sides, branches scraping against the windows like fingers trying to hold us back.
“Almost there.”
The trees open up into a small clearing, and Yefrem pulls the car off the track into a space that his GPS indicates.
He turns off the engine, and the silence is absolute.
There is no traffic, no neighbors, and no civilization for miles in any direction.
Just us and the night and a federal agent’s body waiting to be buried.
“This is it.”
I stare out at the clearing then at the man beside me, who’s about to teach me how to dig a grave.
A month ago, I was worried about job interviews and guest room ratings.
Now I’m about to become the kind of person who knows how deep to dig to hide a body, how to choose the right spot, and how to cover the evidence so it stays hidden.
What’s about to happen settles over me like a physical presence.
After tonight, there’s no going back. No pretending this didn’t happen, and no returning to the woman I was before Yefrem knocked on my door and changed everything.
All I can do now is dig and pray this ends with both of us still breathing.