Chapter 32 Sebastian #2
A long moment of silence. She broke it with, “I was outside smoking. Saw lights at the gates. I heard Simone. She was screaming.” Gwen’s voice broke.
Another moment of silence passed before she continued.
“He was beating the living shit out of her. I told him to leave. He wouldn’t.
He got in my face, and he was screaming, and then I was screaming, and he pushed me, and I pushed him, and then his hands were around my throat.
” Her voice cracked, and I swore I felt her tense, even though the only part of our bodies that touched were my shoulder and her knee.
“I had a knife in my pocket, so I used it.”
Damn it. This would’ve been so much easier if she had hunted him down. “I figured it was something like that.”
“Whoever you killed,” she said, almost inaudible over the rumble of the tractor, “was it like that? Self-defense?”
I dipped the bucket into the hole again, now at least three feet deep. As I came back up, I said flatly, plainly, “No. It wasn’t.”
“Lovely,” she said under her breath. “Just lovely.”
I dumped the soil onto the pile of dirt beside the pine tree with the S. With a hammer in my heart, I turned the engine off. Holding the rollbar for support, I hopped down. Shovel in hand, I gestured to the hole. “Mind shining me a light?”
She kept her distance, far enough from the shovel’s length. As if I would use it against her. Like I would slash it across her throat or slam it over her head.
That visual had me swallowing bile.
Climbing into the hole didn’t. I’d moved a body before. No one was around now, so I didn’t have anything to be afraid of. The only thing about this that made me sick was knowing she thought I could do this to her.
Each dip of my shovel into the soil was as patient and careful as my incisions in a surgery or the stroke of my paintbrush. The bigger mess I made, the more difficult it would be to move the body.
When I hit something soft and meaty, I tossed the shovel into the snow, crouched into the hole, and wrapped my gloved fingers around the slippery tarp.
Grunting, I grasped hold of it, wiggled my feet to the sides of the body, and yanked. I yanked, and yanked, and yanked until the top half of the blue tarp laid atop the dirt beneath the tree with the S.
There was no intense smell. No bugs flying about. I was grateful for that.
Panting, I waved over my shoulder for Gwen to join me. “Come here.”
“I’m good.” She shone her light on the blue-tarped figure. “Just put the body in the bucket, and—”
“If you want to know who I killed, take a look.” I gestured into the grave, hoping she would turn the light this way. Also hoping she wouldn’t. “Not much left of him now, but here he is.”
I couldn’t make out her face in the glow of her flashlight. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. It would confirm perhaps my greatest fear.
That I had become my father.
No, worse than him.
He beat his wife, beat his kids, drank himself into oblivion each night, but he’d never killed anyone. Certainly not in cold blood.
I had.
And I’d gotten away with it.
The only sound was that of Gwen’s feet sliding through the snow. She stood to my right, light aimed into the grave at my feet.
Another body lay there, wrapped in now muddied white linen. All that was exposed was his face. His dusty blond hair, his hollowed-in, nearly mummified cheekbones, and the deep caverns beneath his eyelids where bugs had feasted for a decade.
Everything from the nose to the throat was gone.
“Wait, I’m—” Confusion mixed with disgust riddled each word. “You put David in the same grave?”
“I did.”
Seemed logical to keep them close. Why taint this land in two places? Better if both pieces of shit laid together for all eternity.
“Where are…” She gagged. “Where are his lips? Who is he?”
“In the atmosphere, technically?” Scratching my head, I leaned against the wall of dirt behind me.
“I burned his jaw. Every tooth. His hands, too. Did the same thing to David.” I nodded to the figure wrapped in the blue tarp.
“Those are the two easiest things to trace. Dental records and fingerprints. If there would’ve been any real investigation into this guy’s disappearance, they would’ve figured out that it was me pretty quickly.
But I still tried to check all my boxes. ”
A long stretch of silence. Gwen flicked the flashlight onto me, and for a moment, it was like I was in an interrogation room. But I wasn’t shaking.
“Jason Dickens.” The first time I had spoken his name in years, and holy shit, it felt good.
Like taking a piss on a road trip. Not a sightly thing, not a fun thing, but god damn, the relief.
“He was my best friend. For a while, anyway. In hindsight, I don’t think he was ever really a friend.
I was a pawn to him. He played with me, shifted me around a little, but it was always to get to the queen. Sarah.”
I still couldn’t make out Gwen’s face, but the flashlight had trembled when she looked into the grave. It was steady now. “Sarah? Your sister?”
Nodding, I planted my gloved fingers on the lip of the hole and hoisted myself onto the edge. “Gwen, meet my brother-in-law.”
“What the hell is this, Sebastian?” she snapped. “Are you trying to make a point? Or are you just trying to show me that you’re a psychopath?”
“Yeah, I am. Trying to make a point, I mean.” I tore off my glove and rubbed my eyes.
“He killed her. Sarah was the only friend I ever really had, and Jason killed her. He orphaned my niece. And he would’ve gotten away with it, and I couldn’t let that happen.
I couldn’t live with myself if, some way, somehow, he got custody of Lizzie.
So I killed him. And my only regret is that I didn’t do it the moment I realized he was hurting my sister. ”
Another long stretch of silence.
“This is Lizzie’s dad,” Gwen whispered.
“Yes,” I said. “This is Lizzie’s dad.”