Chapter 31 After
After
I’ve decided what to do before the door shuts behind me, but it’s hours before I can put my plan into motion. Barry paces constantly, a whine at the back of his throat. He can tell something is wrong.
I prepare, and I wait until nightfall. At nearly midnight, still with no word from Len, I throw my gear in the back of my car and whistle for Barry.
I’m about to get in when headlights swamp me. A car has pulled onto the street, and my stomach tenses as it slows in front of my house. Parks.
My shoulders sag with relief when Dev gets out. He’s wearing the same mud--streaked jacket he wore last night, a decidedly un--rugged sweater underneath. He puts his hands in his pockets as I approach, looking slightly sheepish.
“Sorry to show up unannounced,” he says.
“Why are you here, Dev?” I ask.
“Thing is.” He scratches the end of his nose and looks off to the side. “I haven’t known you that long. But I’ve got this gut feeling that you are absolutely planning on escalating the stupid.”
“Really.” I quirk an eyebrow at him. “And what do you think I’m going to do?”
“At a guess? You’re going back out there,” Dev says. “And you’re not going to stop until you find something that Wagner and the police can’t deny. Which means pretty much one thing, doesn’t it?”
“What does it mean, Dev?” I ask softly, wanting him to say it.
“You’re going to try to find a body,” he says. “Barry alerted in that clearing. There’s something there, and we both know it.”
“So you came out here to stop me?” I ask.
“Actually, I came to offer my help,” he says. “Because with two of us, it’ll go twice as fast. Which means half the time for you to potentially get caught and sent to jail, which would definitely impact my third--date plans.”
“Oh.” I blink at him. “Seriously?”
“Brought a shovel and everything,” he says, gesturing at his trunk. He smiles, though it’s strained. “Let’s go be criminals.”
We pick a different entry point this time, just in case someone’s looking out for us. The hike takes us in from the northeast, which means that at least we’re not crossing the Hills’ property. Though I suppose soon enough it’ll all be theirs.
“You know, this is almost romantic,” Dev quips as we walk. “The moonlight, the stroll through the woods, the overpowering sense of dread.”
“I think your idea of romance might need recalibration.”
“I remind you I was recently traumatized on that front.” He dips his head. “Sorry. Bad jokes are the only coping mechanism I’ve developed that doesn’t cause long--term health issues, so I’ve leaned into it.”
“I don’t mind.” Except part of me does, I realize.
Part of me knows, against all logic, that I’m meant to do this on my own.
I’m drawing near to something, a place that has been calling to me and me alone.
The place between the trees where all the lost are waiting—-but that’s a dream.
There is no magic to this hum in the air; it’s only my anticipation.
There will be no miracles to uncover tonight. Only bones, and only if we’re lucky.
Barry finds the scent again then. He strains against the lead, but tonight I give him less ground. I need him close. I’ve already raised Andrew Hill’s suspicions. He might be out here, and I didn’t like the way he looked at Barry.
Some men are only happy when they know they could hurt you, if they wanted to. They tell themselves, tell you, that they never would. But they want the option. And if you think you’re safe, there’s nothing they love more than stripping away that safety.
I know we’ve reached the spot before Barry’s haunches hit the ground. He alerts softly, as if he knows we’re trying for secrecy, and I praise him in a low tone, ruffling his ears.
“Let’s hope it’s not too deep,” Dev says. It. We talk about the hole, the grave, the body, but we’re both thinking one thing.
Let’s hope she’s not too deep.
I leash Barry to a nearby tree, and the two of us begin to dig.
It’s hard work. At least the frost has loosened its grip. In winter, the frozen ground would be impossible to unlock without pickaxes or heavy machinery. As it is, the dirt is packed with rocks and pebbles, and our shovels are loud as they strike again and again.
We work a few feet apart from each other, just far enough that we don’t get in each other’s way. We dig a foot down and then widen out before going deeper. I haven’t done this kind of body recovery—-the remains we find are out in the open. People dead of exposure or natural causes, mostly.
My arms and back are starting to hurt before we get much farther down, and the ground is getting harder--packed. The only comfort I have is that if we’re digging up a grave, someone else had to do this labor before us, and I doubt they were any more eager to go a full six feet deep.
Dev pauses, bracing himself on his shovel. He wipes sweat from his forehead. We’ve propped the flashlights nearby, leaving us strangely illuminated. I can see only the sliver of his cheek, but exhaustion radiates off him.
“We might not find anything,” he says.
“I know.”
“What are you going to do if we don’t? We can’t keep coming out here,” he says.
“Len’s got his contacts.” Not that I put much faith in that.
“You don’t let go of things, do you?” he asks.
I bend to dig, not answering him. He doesn’t know about the list I keep in the back of my head.
It’s not long. Nearly all of our searches produce some kind of result, even if the ending isn’t a happy one.
But there are those few still waiting to be found, and I have never forgotten them. I have never stopped looking.
“These girls,” I say, punctuating my words with the shovel striking dirt. “They look like my friend. The one who went missing.”
“Janie.”
“She wanted to be named January,” I say.
“She told me that was her name when we first met, and I called her that for ages before her dad overheard me and laughed at her. He said, ‘She’s just Janie. Just plain Janie.’ She laughed at me, too.
I thought for the longest time that she did it to fool me, and that she was making fun of me.
But she wanted to be someone else. Someone with a name like -January—-a romantic name. ”
The look on her face when I turned to her with confusion and betrayal in my eyes—-for a split second, that had been sadness. It twisted so quickly into contempt I hadn’t even realized it until long after she was gone.
“She asked me to call her January one more time after that. I thought she was teasing me again.” I throw aside another shovelful of dirt. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“You don’t need a reason,” he says.
“There are so many things I wanted to tell her. There are so many things I wanted to understand. And the one chance I had, I didn’t even . . .”
I stop. There’s a light in the distance. A flashlight, bobbing. I hiss through my teeth. “Damn it.”
“We should go,” Dev says urgently.
We can’t. Not yet. I can’t turn away again.
Oddity. Oddity, wake up.
It’s like she’s right behind me. I can hear her voice still.
Hear the click of her fingernails against the glass.
If only I’d turned around. She would have stayed.
We would have talked. And maybe we would have fought again, and I would still be here with more than a decade between us, but she wouldn’t have gone to meet whatever fate was waiting for her.
Why did you come back?
After so many years, why that night?
The flashlight is drawing closer. Barry’s ears prick, and he growls faintly. “Shh,” I tell him.
I turn back and keep digging, my movements frantic. Dev hesitates, then follows suit. We toss shallow shovelfuls of earth aside, barely denting the bottom of the hole. We’re little more than two feet down.
“Audrey,” Dev says warningly. It’s time to go. Past time. But I can’t stop. My shovel bites the dirt again and again and then—-
Something pale shows at the bottom of the hole.
“Audrey, we need to go,” Dev says, and grabs for my arm.
I drop to my knees, clawing away the hard dirt with both hands. The light bobs between the trees. Only yards away. It’s too late to run now anyway.
A shape emerges. The curve of a brow, cracked by my shovel. Two empty orbits.
“Oh god,” Dev breathes. Delicately I brush the dirt from that curving brow. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I think, the pad of my finger against the crack I caused.
There’s a figure at the edge of the clearing. The source of the approaching light: Emily Hill. She walks toward us slowly, drawing up to the edge of our excavation. She looks down, the beam of her flashlight pinned to the skull.
No one speaks. Barry stands silently at attention, at the limit of his leash. Slowly Emily crouches down, only inches from where I kneel.
“Who is this?” I ask her.
She looks at me, lips parted. I can’t tell if she’s about to answer, or merely confused at being asked.
A siren wails in the distance. She stands, stepping back from the hole. “Andrew called them. You should go,” she says.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say.
“Okay,” she says simply. She turns and walks away. I look at Dev, stunned, but he only shakes his head.
Together we wait for the police to arrive, kept company by a lost girl’s bones.