The Midnight Estate #5
“There was a ghost,” he announced, then he promptly burst into tears. “Mama, the ghost was in my room.”
“Oh, my goodness!” Christine exclaimed, scooping her son up into her arms. She pressed him close against her and whispered,
“Ernie, it was just a dream. Just a nightmare. You’re okay.”
“It was a rough night,” Marie said, and truer words had never been spoken.
“You look terrible, sweetheart,” Christine said gently. “Put that soup out to defrost and go rest. Is Silas still asleep?”
“He got up, tried to have a cup of tea and went straight back to bed,” Marie lied. “But yes, I’ll do the same. Thank you,
and . . .” Her voice went rough, and she tried to clear it, but failed miserably. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry,
Ernie.”
“It’s not your fault,” Christine scolded her, and Marie forced a wobbly smile. If only she knew. Ernie had no interest in
apologies anyway. He was muttering to himself, cuddling into his mother’s neck, already begging her to take him home.
Once Christine was gone, Marie took the soup into the kitchen and sat it on the counter. She pulled a pair of Silas’s boots
over her sock-clad feet and walked to the back door.
Marie had to brace herself with every new step. She had once been so enamored with this backyard and had found it to be such
a magical place of peace and natural beauty. Now she knew she would never see it the same way again—in a single night it had
become a place of darkness and secrets and shame.
Every new step seemed harder than the last but she kept going until she reached the wrought iron fence at the edge of the
historic cemetery. And here was Silas, covered in mud and sweat, digging like a madman, out of view of the front of the house
where his wife had just been.
Neither Marie nor Silas were entirely comfortable with the plan to bury Rupert in the backyard cemetery, and over the many
hours of the long, sleepless night, they had debated and desperately tried to brainstorm an alternative. Any alternative.
In the end, there seemed to be no better option.
It wouldn’t be rocky soil. It would never be disturbed.
It wasn’t too far for them to move the body.
And no one would see Silas digging, not in that corner behind the tall concrete fence.
It was secluded from the front yard and the road, and even from the farms around them.
They had agreed that they would dig to about four feet, hoping that the original occupant had been buried at the standard
six feet. They didn’t discuss what they would do if they struck a historic coffin at a shallower-than-expected depth. Marie
thought that possibility was so horrific she refused to seriously entertain it.
But after four hours of work, Silas had already established a hole roughly the right shape and place and close to half of
the required depth. He wiped a hand over his forehead, pushing sweat away but replacing it instantly with a further smear
of mud.
“Ernie gone?”
“He is. Christine told me I look terrible.”
“You do look exhausted.”
“So do you. Do you need anything?”
“No. But thank you.”
“I thought you might want something to eat . . .”
“I couldn’t,” he whispered, and he seemed to turn green at the very thought. “No, but thank you.”
They had already considered the minor details.
To cover their tracks, they would bury everything with the body—Rupert’s wallet, his passport, even Maeve’s passport because Marie had an Australian driver’s license now and that would suffice for identification.
The passport had the photo of Maeve on it, and if anyone ever found it, questions would be asked.
She wanted to bury her wedding ring but Silas insisted she keep it, at least for now.
She would need to wear it for a long while yet—for the duration of her pregnancy, maybe for years after the baby was born.
Marie would fetch the wheelbarrow from the garden shed, and Silas would use this to maneuver the body from the parlour into
the cemetery. Once it was all over and Rupert was in that grave, they had agreed that they would stand together and say a
prayer for him. She already felt sick at the thought, but this seemed to matter so much to Silas. He was a decent man, one
who respected other people, even people undeserving of that respect.
“I’ll go back inside then,” she said.
Silas nodded and looked back to the earth around him.
Marie still didn’t feel guilty about what had happened to Rupert, but she was starting to feel very guilty indeed at what
she had done to Silas. Just three short months ago they were total strangers, and now he was up to his neck in her mess.
“Silas, I really am so very sorry that I dragged you into this.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he told her, but he was adjusting the leather gloves he wore, preparing to dig again.
“Never apologize for doing what you had to do to survive.”
The clouds had cleared across the course of that day. The sun was setting in the west, burning still and so hot, even with
the foliage above him, Silas felt a tinge of sunburn on his nose. But that was the least of his worries by then.
The leather gloves had protected him for a while, but he had just been digging for too long, and eventually blisters had formed all over his hands.
His back ached and no matter how he stood now, he couldn’t find a position where he was comfortable.
His eyes burned with dust and mud and exhaustion, and tears he wanted so badly to shed, but he had the sense that Marie needed him to be strong and so he flatly refused to allow himself to cry.
She stood beside him, back ramrod straight, hands stiff beside her thighs. Marie held her chin high, but there was panic in
her eyes as she looked down at the fresh dirt in front of her. This grave was simply adorned—no concrete poured over the top,
or even a border of concrete as some of the others had. The simple granite headstone held little weight to it and was a lie
now, or at least, it wasn’t the whole truth. Rupert would never have a marker to signify his final resting place. It was Silas
and Marie’s firm intention that no one would ever know what had happened. They had agreed that this was a secret they would
carry alone together until their final breaths.
Silas’s biggest worry for the next few months was the gardeners. He’d been employing some young men to come once a week to
tend the place. The risk of the gardeners noticing the disturbed soil was too great—Silas was going to have to tell them not to come for a while, not until the mounded dirt had settled flat and grass had grown back across the grave. He had not yet
figured out what excuse he would give for the pause in their schedule, but if Silas knew one thing about himself it was that
he would be able to make up some story on the fly. The ability to spin a tale was his biggest—perhaps only—gift.
“You buried his wallet and passport too, didn’t you?
And Maeve’s?” Marie asked him. She was pale as a ghost and shivering violently and Silas had the sense that she was barely holding herself together.
He did not want to lie to her, but over the course of the day he’d come to realize that burying Rupert’s passport and wallet with his body was a terrible idea.
If someone did discover the body at some point in the future, they’d have no way to identify it anyway—unless there were identity papers
buried right there with it.
And, God help him, he could not bring himself to bury the last things he had left of his sister, the last photograph he had
with her and his mother. He just couldn’t.
“Sure,” Silas said, because he didn’t want to panic her, and he hadn’t made an alternative plan for those items yet. He’d
have to figure it out later, when he could string two thoughts together in his mind. For now, they had to finish what they
had started and lay this man to rest. “I’ll pray, if it’s all the same to you,” he said, very suddenly aware that he was not
going to be able to withhold tears much longer. His voice was rough, with dust and dirt and exhaustion but also, the sheer
trauma of the eighteen hours that had passed.
“Please.”
“Dear Lord,” Silas said quietly. “We commit Rupert to your eternal wisdom and compassion.” The reality of what they’d done—of
what he had helped to hide—hit him all of a sudden. His aching knees went weak, and he could barely manage a whisper as he finished
the prayer. “We pray you will grant Rupert grace and peace. We pray you will grant us grace and peace. Amen.”
With that, Marie turned away from the cemetery. She opened the wrought iron gate and then ran down the path towards the house,
her sobs echoing all through the garden. But Silas sank on his knees into the muddy, messy dirt, and he cried right there
in place, right beside the very worst thing he had ever done in his life.
A few days after the incident with Rupert, a handyman arrived at the mansion. Much to Marie’s alarm Silas led him straight into the backyard. She hovered in the kitchen, peering out the window as the men talked at the bottom of the garden.
Marie had not been out the back door since they buried Rupert. She had taken to hanging the laundry around the house because
she couldn’t bring herself to use the clothes line in the backyard. She knew it was irrational, maybe even foolish. She kept
telling herself that if she just went out there a few times, confronted the backyard, reassured herself that it represented
no further harm to her, she’d be fine.
But she would get to the back door and bile would rise in her throat and her hands would shake. Marie thought she was coping
reasonably well after everything that had happened, but apparently that was only the case if she didn’t go near the mansion’s
back door, or turned out the light in her room, or if she wasn’t startled—because earlier that morning, a door had slammed
in the wind, and several hours later she still felt as though she’d been plugged into some electrical current, her whole body
humming with anxiety.