“Leia! Mind how you use the name of our Lord,” said my grandmother. Who had kept a dead body in her attic for God only knew how long.
“How much grease goes in the skillet?” Wattie asked, insistent, pulling Birchie’s attention.
“A goodly scoop. Use the spoon I keep right by the coffee can,” Birchie said, back on track.
I touched Wattie’s shoulder as a thank-you and then went upstairs. I had to explain to Rachel how it was I’d brought her only child to a house that had a body hidden in the eaves. An old, old body, I would need to emphasize. Just bones, really. When did a person stop being a body and become a piece of history? Perhaps when there was no one left alive who loved them. How long was that in a town that had a memory as long as Birchville’s?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t want to know.
I closed my bedroom door behind me, braced myself, and dialed my stepsister.
8
Kittens was an understatement. Rachel was having Bengal tigers, and she fired a barrage of questions at me in a high, tight voice. I didn’t have answers, but it hardly mattered. She interrupted every other second, railing and gobsmacked at the injustice; she’d evacked her kid from a marital war zone only to land her bang in the middle of a crime scene.
When I could get a word in edgewise, I asked, “Are you going to tell Jake?”
A small silence.
“Have you talked to Jake at all?”
“No. I guess I have to, if you’re going to be finding corpses stashed right above his daughter’s bedroom,” Rachel snapped. As if I habitually dug up human remains all willy-nilly and now I needed Rachel to bring me in hand before I turned up Jimmy Hoffa in the zinnias. The fact that Rachel might call Lavender’s dad was the only silver lining I could find here. I was not a Jake fan by any stretch of the imagination, but he was the only father Lavender had.
“So what now?” I asked.
“Lavender’s coming home, is what now,” Rachel said, in a tone that brooked no argument.
“Okay,” I said. “You want me to call Delta?”
“I’ll handle it,” Rachel said, and finally let me off the phone.
I took a fast shower, and I was barely out when my phone started ringing again. It was Mom, calling compliments of Rachel, wanting to know what the hell was going on at Birchie’s. Of course my parents needed to know what was going on, but I’d wanted to be the one to tell them. Gently. With a lot of context. I hadn’t felt so tattled on since Rachel and I were six and she ratted me out for accidentally flushing Mom’s emerald-chip earring down the toilet. And after I’d kept my mouth shut about Jake!
I stood dripping, wrapped in a towel, for a good ten minutes, assuring my mother that there was no reason for me to come right home with Lavender. I gave her my Yankee-soldier-bones theory and told her that anyway, with Birchie sick, I was pretty much the adult in charge here.
“Maybe so,” Mom told me, fretful. “But you’re still my baby. That never changes.”
That made me put my free hand over my pregnant belly, wondering what the hell I had signed up for. As soon as I could get off the phone, I threw some blush and lip gloss at my face, hoping it would land in a way that made me look less fraught. I tried to get dressed, but my very fattest emergency jeans chose today to be insufficient to hold Digby. Perfect. I threw them in the corner.
As I turned away, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Even at my fittest, I wasn’t what you might call willowy. I was built thick, with stubby muscle legs and hardly any boobs to speak of. But these days my body was looking different. I’d gained a cup size, and my hips had rounded out along with my belly. I was heavier than I’d ever been, but I liked my body in the mirror. I looked lush and very, very female. Maybe even sexy. I stared at myself for a good ten seconds before I realized what I was doing.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked my reflection, then went to dig through my small store of packed clothes.
I knew the answer. My judgey preggo book said this was common in the second trimester. It was sex hormones, showing up all uninvited to the crazy hormone party already raging in my legitimately panicked brain. I put on a long Indian-print skirt, an outsize T-shirt that I sometimes slept in, and a lightweight baggy cardigan. When I checked the mirror again, I looked fat and maybe homeless, but not pregnant. Good enough.
By the time I got downstairs, the yard was innocent of bones, boxes, neighbors, and policemen. Frank was sitting in the breakfast nook, eating a cold cinnamon bun and waiting to give me an update.
“Did you talk to her?” I asked with no preamble.
He gave me a brief nod, but his face was grave. “I tried. Birchie was frazzled, and she didn’t make a lot of sense. Wattie says she got up too early. Her routine is off. They’re both lying down now. Be patient, okay?”
“Well, at least you kept that moron from filling up the yard with crime-scene tape,” I said, grateful. The last time that yellow tape had so much as seen the light of day was when Movie Town put the tanning beds in the back room. Their little stash of rentable porn moved to a corner with an 18+ sign posted until a high-school boy got caught walking out with a copy of Good Will Humping stuffed down his pants. Cody—of course Cody—had then roped the corner off in glaring yellow, both to indicate a major crime and to try to keep teenagers out of the section. “Did Chief Dalton ask you a lot of questions?”
“Not much, once I agreed to let him take the bones off to be analyzed. He’s being as careful as I am. This is Miss Birchie’s house, after all. He knows where most of his salary comes from.”
“That’s excellent,” I said, suddenly starving. I sat down across from him and chose a roll from the tray myself. I took a huge bite and asked around it, “Can’t we tell them we came across the chest by accident? That we were pulling things of sentimental value down for Birchie and found it buried deep? Maybe Birchie saw the bones and panicked. Maybe she was even driving the chest down to the police station?” That was the polite title for an office about the size of a good walk-in closet tucked into the square by Brother’s Café.
“You mean flat-out lie,” Frank said, regarding me gravely.
“Yes. Hell yes,” I said, vehement but still very, very quiet. The house was full of teenagers holed up someplace whispering about their own concerns and exhausted little old ladies having naps. My Birchie was ninety years old and grievously ill. Whatever she knew or witnessed or was party to, I forgave her. If she even needed forgiving, which I wholeheartedly doubted.
“Morality aside, that story won’t wash,” Frank said. “The trunk was locked shut when they tried to run off with it. Martina Mack saw you break that lock out in the yard, and she was trumpeting the fact so loudly I suspect they know it over in Georgia.”