Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Same night, hours later
Diane, Christine, and Rosa grabbed the dead man by his ankles and pulled.
His entire body came out in one frozen, blanket-wrapped burrito—still folded in half.
The corpse’s weight pushed Diane backward and she fell right on her butt on the ground.
Rosa and Christine got better grips and managed to keep the dead man from hitting the ground too.
Diane scrambled to her feet and grabbed hold once more.
“Apparently our stiff’s gone stiff,” Christine said, deadpan, straining with the man’s weight.
Rosa just stared at her for an elongated second. “Not funny, Christine.”
They walked, carrying the body, as bent as it was. “The guy was thin, but tall,” Rosa said, kind of grunting the words. “Has some weight to him.”
“Yeah, dead weight,” Christine quipped.
“Please don’t joke.” Bonnie had come to join them. She’d come back to life, Diane thought. That was good. She had the frying pan in her hand, still wrapped in plastic, but set it on the ground and found a place to grab on.
The load became lighter. They lowered him to the ground right alongside the open grave, still bent in half like a contortionist. The blue canopy that had been pitched over the grave in case of rain, looked like it would blow down in a strong wind.
“Okay,” Bonnie said. “We’d better not bury the blanket with the body. It could be connected to Diane’s car through microscopic fibers or something. Same for that bag on the frying pan.”
She really had come back to herself, hadn’t she? When Diane crooked an eyebrow at her, she said, “What? My son’s a cop and I watch a lot of Forensic Files.”
“You’re right,” Diane said. “We can’t leave the blanket.”
“Well, the dead guy is bent around the blanket, Diane,” Christine said, ladling extra sarcasm onto the words.
“Yeah, about that,” Diane began.
“Madre de Dios, we have to straighten him, don’t we?” Rosa pushed her hands through her dark brown and silver curls.
“But the dead guy is wrapped around the blanket and stiff, Diane.” Christine’s sarcasm had turned to something else as she repeated her earlier line with revisions.
“He can’t be all lumped up like that in the bottom of the grave,” Diane said in a perfectly reasonable tone. “If we bury him like that, the bottom will either be lumpy or noticeably shallower. It has to appear undisturbed until they lower the vault and casket.”
She kept a watchful eye on Bonnie, who’d winced a little at the word casket.
She wore a puffy, plum-colored coat and hugged herself against the chill of an April 1st night in central New York.
It was barely forty degrees and the breeze kept kicking up, riffling her gray-and-blond bangs and making it feel like twenty outside.
She’d seemed shocky at first but was definitely coming back to herself now.
She had been coming back to herself for a while now.
Good for her.
Diane got back to the task at hand. “Stand on his ankles, Rosa.”
Rosa closed her eyes slowly. “I can’t believe you just said that.” Then she opened them again and stepped onto Mr. Terrence’s blanket-wrapped ankles. “Bonnie, come hold me up.”
Bonnie moved behind her and braced her hands against Rosa’s back to help her balance.
“Christine, you’re on this end with me,” Diane said. “Grab his other shoulder.”
Christine did not move. She was staring at the bundled lump as if she hadn’t even heard.
“Hey, Christine!” Rosa clapped her hands under her friend’s chin.
Christine blinked and looked up.
“You okay?” Rosa asked, her tone softer.
Christine’s face had been uncharacteristically blank for a moment. But she resumed her trademark smirk and said, “Comme ci, comme ca,” balancing her hands the way the kids did when they said, “six, seven.” “It’s not every night I bury a body, after all.”
She moved behind the body, beside Diane. Diane clasped her shoulder and squeezed. “We’ve got this.”
Christine’s black booties came to just above the ankles and had spiky three-inch heels that sank into the ground with every step.
“I’d’ve worn different shoes if I’d known what I was getting into.
” She plucked the heels out of the earth, then crouched low, leaned over, and gripped a dead, stiff, blanket-wrapped shoulder.
“Ready, set, pull!” Diane said.
The body unfolded, and there were snapping sounds like rubber bands breaking as they pulled him all the way into a sitting position, where they ran out of leverage. He was perfectly upright like a vampire at sundown.
“My God, what was that noise?” Christine asked.
“I think it’s called breaking rigor,” Bonnie said.
“Forensic Files again?” Christine arched a brow.
“Lauren the Mortician,” Bonnie replied. “She’s on YouTube. Brilliant, cute, funny, and smart as a whip.”
Diane moved around to the front of Mr. Terrence, so she could push instead of pull.
“Hurry it up, girls,” Rosa said. “If anyone so much as looks in this direction—”
“I know, I know!” Diane could see as well as any of them that there was a blanket-wrapped body sitting upright, next to an open grave, silhouetted by the night sky.
“And your new car’s color isn’t exactly blending in,” Christine said. “What is that, electric blue?”
“Vapor Blue,” Diane replied. “But only because they didn’t offer it in Graveyard Camo.”
Chrissy raised her brows in acknowledgment of the comeback as she put her hands against the front left shoulder. “If it wasn’t a capital crime, I’d take a picture. You don’t see this kind of thing every day.”
Diane said, “Push!”
They pushed. The shoulders went down, only snapping and crackling half the way, because Rosa fell off the legs and they sprang upward from the ground and stayed there, defying gravity.
Swearing in Spanish, Rosa dropped to her knees, put one hand on each leg, and pushed them down again, growling with the effort. Again the guy’s body made those awful breaking sounds.
Bonnie stood behind Rosa and pressed her hands to her ears.
“Good, good,” Diane said when he finally laid flat. She untucked the blanket and spread it open.
Everyone went quiet and stood there staring down at the dead man in the black satin mini-robe.
His junk was exposed and flaccid. His skin looked pale gray in the darkness, almost the same shade as Tommy Johnson’s tombstone.
His crushed head was so misshapen it didn’t look real, and there was a lot of gooey stuff that wasn’t blood on the side that had hit the mantel.
“Nothing about this is good,” Christine said, for once out of sarcasm. She crouched and took hold of the blanket’s edge.
Diane met her eyes and nodded and they both rose, lifting the comforter. Mr. Terrence rolled right into the grave, neat as you please.
Bonnie let the frying pan fall from its plastic bag to land on top of him.
Diane took a Hefty bag from the pocket of her long brown coat. She’d swiped it from Mr. Terrence’s house. She bundled the blanket and the bag that had held the frying pan into it. Then she tied a knot and put it into the cargo bed of her brand-new ride.
“What will you do with that?” Bonnie whispered.
“Burn it,” Diane said. “Harry built us that fire pit in the back yard last summer. Brought home the concrete from the company before the new owners took over. Anyway, as soon as he leaves the house, I’ll take care of it.
” She pushed the button to close the hatch, and brushing her hands together, walked past the grave and her friends to the dirt pile a few yards away.
She took one of the shovels, scooped it full, and carried it back to pour dirt onto Mr. Terrence’s face, because that was the most disturbing part of him to look at.
Then she handed her shovel to Rosa. Rosa took it, and headed to the dirt pile, limping a little bit.
Bonnie gave a determined nod and marched with Rosa to the mound, where she took hold of the second shovel. They both returned to the hole and dumped their dirt.
Bonnie offered her shovel to Christine, who said, “Um, no. Not in these boots.”
“I got it, Bonnie,” Diane said, taking her shovel.
Rosa held onto hers, and the three of them made several more trips back and forth, taking turns, and avoiding the four poles that held the canopy over the grave.
When he was thoroughly covered, Rosa jumped down into the grave with the shovel and smoothed the bottom.
Diane gave her a hand up. Then the four of them stood looking down into the hole underneath the blue tarp. “My footprints show, where I was standing,” Rosa said.
Bonnie took a shovel and went for a little more dirt. She brought it back, and then shook it over the footprints until they were filled in. “Just like shaking sugar on top of a cookie,” she said.
“Well, you sound better,” Diane said.
“It’s done. I hope.” It was quiet for another moment. Then Bonnie said, “Now what?”
“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” Christine said, “but I plan to go home, take a hot shower and a valium, and get some sleep.”
Diane nodded. “Just don’t forget, we have to be back in time for the morning service.”
“Jesus, Diane, it’s already two a.m.”
“The service isn’t until ten,” Diane said.
Rosa elbowed Christine and added, “So adjust your dosage accordingly.”