Chapter 2 Noah
Noah
I’d fallen asleep.
That must be it.
I had been so exhausted that I’d fallen asleep on the cot in the caretaker’s shed and this was some sort of lucid nightmare. Or I was experiencing a mental health episode.
Or it was . . . something else.
I glanced around, my spine tingling. I wasn’t a superstitious man, especially since, in all my years working this land, I’d never once encountered a ghost—and if there weren’t any ghosts in one of the oldest graveyards in Louisiana, there probably weren’t any anywhere.
But if something was going to convince me I was wrong, it was standing on top of a fresh grave listening to the muffled screams of the woman I’d just put in it.
I was half terrified that her shadowy, transparent figure was about to float toward me out of the darkness, or worse, that her hands would punch out of the ground, but I saw nothing.
The only other explanation I could think of was that it was a prank.
That Beau Broadturn had put a speaker in his wife’s coffin.
But as much of an asshole as Beau was, I couldn’t think of a single instance of him playing a practical joke on someone, and I didn’t see him starting now.
“Help Meeee!” came a scream from right beneath my feet.
“I’m here!” I yelled, because if Emma was somehow alive and trapped down there, then she should know she wasn’t alone. “Emma, is that you?”
“Yes!”
Holy shit.
“Where am I?” she yelled.
I cringed. Nope. Not shouting Six feet under the ground in a coffin! back at her, because she already sounded like she was in a blind panic.
“You’re stuck!” I yelled back. “But I’m gonna get you out!”
“Who are you?”
“Noah Evans! I need you to try and stay calm, okay?” I had no idea how much air she had left down there, but it couldn’t have been much. Typically, there was only enough for a few hours. The fact that she was still alive was a goddamn miracle.
Especially considering the fact that she died two days ago.
“Noah Evans the gravedigger?!” she shrieked.
Oh, so she remembered me.
“Is This a Coffin? Oh My God, Let Me Out!”
The sound of banging echoed from below, followed by more screams.
Good going, Noah. Really great job making everything worse like you always do, I chided myself.
I called her name several times before she finally stopped screaming. “I have to go get the excavator! If I try to dig you out by hand, it’ll take forever!”
“Don’t leave me!”
“Only for a second, and then I’ll be right back!”
The sound of sobbing hit my ears, breaking my heart.
“Emma, I promise, I am going to get you out of there, you just have to try and calm down. Please, darlin’,” I said, the endearment falling from my lips without thought. This part of the country, it was a common term.
“Okay, but . . . please hurry,” she said.
I sprinted back the way I came, cursing my clunky work boots, wishing I had sneakers on instead.
The excavator was tucked away in the garage for the night, and it would take a while to drive it all the way back, but trying to dig Emma free without it would take four hours, minimum, and I didn’t know if she had enough air left for that.
A few minutes later, I turned the key in the machine and rumbled out into the night, cutting right through the graves instead of taking the road, knowing my dad was going to cuss me out because it would leave tracks and maybe concave some of the newer burial sites.
There was no help for it. Plus, I was sure once Dad understood the circumstances, he’d forgive me.
After what felt like an entire lifetime, I parked the machine a few feet from Emma’s grave, cut the engine, and hopped out.
“I’m back!” I told her, and heard her relieved sob. “I’m going to start digging as carefully as I can, but I need you to scream real loud if the coffin cracks or buckles.”
“Oh, god,” she groaned, sounding petrified.
“I’m good with the bucket, Emma. I won’t hurt you.”
“You promise?” she called.
“I promise.”
Please, universe, don’t make a liar out of me now, I prayed, hopping back into the excavator and turning it on. I was good at it, the best in my family, putting hours in each month, but this would be the ultimate test of my skill.
I swung the arm out over Emma’s grave and took a steadying breath.
My whole body shook with a mix of fear and adrenaline, and one wrong jerk of my fingers might end in disaster.
Willing myself to take my own advice and calm the hell down, I carefully tilted the bucket, and, slower than I’d ever gone in my life, dug out the first load of soil, my ears strained for the sound of a scream over the rumbling engine.
I didn’t hear one, but I cut it just to be safe.
“You still okay?” I called.
“I wouldn’t say I’m okay, but the lid is holding!”
“I’m gonna keep working, then,” I told Emma, and got back to it, lifting another load, pausing to check on her, repeating that sequence again and again, until I’d moved as much of the turf as I safely could. Everything else, I’d need to do by hand.
I jumped out and ran to my shovel. “Knock on the wood by your head, as hard as you can!”
Emma knocked. I climbed down into the opposite side of the grave, by her feet, and started digging faster than I ever had in my life, grateful the soil wasn’t too compacted. Beneath me, I could hear her breathing, loud, ragged, like she was hyperventilating.
“Emma, you gotta calm down,” I told her.
“You calm down!” she yelled back, and I was relieved to hear some of her fiery personality peek through the panic. It was like the old Emma. The one I grew up with. Not the Stepford wife she’d turned into after marrying Beau.
“Don’t be rude or I’ll leave you where you are,” I threatened.
An audible gasp. “Noah!”
“Oh, come on, now. You gotta hear me up here sweating my ass off trying to get you out.”
“All I hear is your big feet stomping around. If you crush me, I swear to god, I will haunt you.”
I shook my head, chuckling in relief, the sound borderline hysterical, because what the fuck? How was she alive? There must have been an autopsy. Embalming. Some sort of process that should have led to someone discovering the fact that she wasn’t actually dead.
“How did I get here?” she called, echoing my thoughts.
“I can answer all your questions when you get out,” I told her. “Just focus on staying as calm as you can while I work.”
“Can you . . . talk to me?” she asked, voice cracking. “It’s too quiet in here, and I’m so scared.”
I started digging faster. “Of course I can. It’s nighttime up here, middle of February. I only have half a foot of soil to go, and then you’ll be out, and I’ll call nine-one-one.”
“No!” she screamed.
“You need to get looked at.”
“No, Noah! Promise me.”
“I can’t do that. You’ve been through a lot.”
I didn’t say more, didn’t know how much she remembered.
Yeah, she’d “died” two days ago, but before that, she’d been in a coma for another three.
Apparently, she’d tripped going down their stairs, and Beau didn’t find her until he got home from work.
She’d sustained a head wound and slipped into a coma.
When it was discovered she was brain dead, Beau decided to pull the plug, against her family’s wishes.
And now here she was, alive and screaming, traumatizing me in a way that was absolutely going to require therapy.
“Is the sheriff still Beau’s brother?” she called.
“Yes.”
“Then no. We can’t call nine-one-one, because then Beau will find out I’m alive and try to finish me off.”
I froze, my shovel stabbed into the dirt, a frisson of unease slipping down my spine. Nothing about the past week had sat right with me, and I’d had my suspicions about Beau, but did Emma just imply he’d tried to kill her?
I blew out a breath and chucked the shovel load of dirt over my shoulder. “Okay. We won’t call nine-one-one.”
“Thank you,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Please, keep talking.”
“It’s nice out tonight. Warm.” For the next twenty minutes, I spoke to her, making the most inane small talk of my life, saying way more than I usually did.
Every so often, I paused to check in, to make sure she was still breathing, my heart stuttering to a stop if her response wasn’t immediate.
The entire time, in the back of my mind, I was cursing out Beau. If he’d really tried to kill her . . .
My shovel pinged off something hard.
“Oh, thank god,” Emma sobbed.
I quickly cleared the rest of the soil. “Close your mouth and cover your face,” I told her. “I’m going to open the lid, and dirt will fall in.”
“Okay!”
“Ready?”
“Ready!”
I threw the top open, still half convinced this was some kind of fever dream, but there she was, as stunning as ever, her curves clad in a white sundress, blond hair fanned across the pillow, dirt caving in all around her, still very much alive.
She pulled her hands away and tried to scramble up, but slipped on the silk liner. I grabbed her without thinking, hauling her close, and she threw her arms around my neck.
“Thank you,” she sobbed into my shoulder, her body racked with shudders.
I was shaking a fair amount myself. “Christ, are you okay?”
“No,” she cried.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone?”
“No, please. No one.”
“Not even your family?”
She shook her head against my chest. “I just . . . I need time to think. Is there somewhere you can take me where I’ll be safe?”
“I mean, my cabin, but it’s—”
“Yes. Please. Can we go there now?”