I went inside. The moon was high and full, whitewashing the crumbling tombstones and the crypts. The stones were engraved with all the old names. The first Gentrys and Grangers and Macks all had honor places here, but there’d been no room for fresh graves for a good century now. Only the five families with crypts could rest here when their time came. I paused by the gate, straining to hear rustling or whispered, breathy voices. Nothing.
I wished I’d thought to bring my own cell phone. I could have called Lavender, told her she was busted. If nothing else, I could have texted her over and over and followed the wind-chime sound of her phone. Now all I heard was an owl calling, mysterious and inquisitive.
I checked the hollow between the first two crypts, but it was empty. I crossed to the other side, fast as I could, to check between the Darian and Fincher crypts, though a rock-strewn path between them made it a bad choice. Lastly, I hurried to the Birch family crypt, the largest building, at the very back and center of the graveyard. It was faced with granite, our name across the top in tall, stern letters. The iron door was locked, and stone angels guarded it on either side. I went behind it and found nothing but the other gate. It opened onto the park, behind the gazebo. I peered out between the rails, and the park was empty, too. The town’s shops and restaurants were all closed at this time of night.
Hugh and Lav weren’t here. They were getting farther away from me with every passing minute. Had the make-out spot changed?
I spun slowly, listening, racking my brain for an idea of where to go next. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of movement, all the way across the cemetery, just outside the larger wrought-iron gate. By the time I turned to look, it was gone, leaving me with the impression that a person, or the shadow of a person, had crossed past it in a swirl.
I wasn’t scared, not here in my hometown. I didn’t think of ghosts either, though I was surrounded by the dead. No, strangely, the word that came into my head was “Batman.”
But that was crazy. Birchville was hardly Gotham, and Batman was a fiction. As for my Batman, what possible business did he have here? Our relationship, as far as he knew, consisted of a drunken hookup at a con, some texts, and a datelike night of Words with Friends. If he were here, then he actually had descended way down deep into creepy stalker territory. He didn’t seem like the type.
I couldn’t shake the feeling, though. The shape I’d seen pass by the gate was tall and dark and definitely male. With ears. Little pointy ears, sticking up from the top of his head.
It had to have been the moonlight playing shadow tricks on my eyes. It must have been Hugh, or a dog, or nothing. I started back toward the other gate to see.
Just then, from the opposite direction, I heard a breathy little shriek, high-pitched and full of laughter. I barely caught it, but it was Lavender. She sounded far away, off the square entirely, the sound carrying on the clear summer air.
Whatever dog or imaginary Batman I had seen would have to wait. I let myself out and ran through the park, going toward Pine Street as fast as I could, near silent in Wattie’s rubbery shoes. Pine ended in a T intersection at Oak Street, and I paused there, out of breath, listening for kid sounds. I thought I heard something to my left. Surely they were not heading toward the highway?
These were residential streets, and there was no traffic at this hour. The houses off the square were smaller and boxier. This neighborhood was mostly tidy brick ranch homes that had been added to Birchville in the forties.
I heard nothing, so I said a quick prayer and sped left, running over to Cypress Street. At the next corner, I stopped, hands on knees, head down, trying to get my breath back and listening. Still nothing. Either they were being quiet or I’d picked wrong and was moving away from them. Where could kids go to get a little horizontal in this neighborhood?
There was no place for that sort of nonsense here. If they went down to Loblolly, they’d be one block off the highway, by a gas station. Had they come out for Snickers bars and Slurpees? I shook my head. Hugh would know that that place closed at midnight.
Everything else, for blocks, was only houses. Who lived here?
That was the right question. In a flash I knew exactly where the kids were heading. I knew what was in the bag, too, and I’d been worried about all the wrong things.
I took off again at a fast trot. The kids would be on Crepe Myrtle, but I didn’t want to go all the way around the block. I looked for a backyard with no fence and no doghouse and then cut across.
I pushed through a stand of azaleas, and then I was in Martina Mack’s backyard. It wasn’t fully fenced, but she had a dog run off the back door, and there was a stake with a chain here, too.
I heard Lavender say something, then Hugh’s shushing noise, then stifled giggles. I hoped they wouldn’t wake Martina’s dogs up. She had three or four of them, medium-size browns and brindles with square heads and small eyes. Together they could bark the dead awake.
As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw them. No Jeffrey. I had half hoped he’d gone through Hugh’s room to use the same ladder, but it was only the two of them. I paused, surveying the yard. I’d been a scant few minutes behind them the whole way, but they’d made a lot of progress.
Hugh looked to me like a professional. As I watched, he released a roll of Charmin, holding the end. It sailed up in a perfect arc, streaming a long white tail as it unfurled, soaring straight over a branch of the tall loblolly pine in the center of Martina Mack’s front yard. That whole tree was already well swathed, a crisscross pattern running through the branches, bright white and blazing in the moonlight. The fat gardenia bush beside the mailbox had been swaddled, its white blooms mostly covered so that it looked like a single outsize toilet-paper rose.
The grocery bag lay open on the balding grass, and they’d already deployed at least half the rolls in the giant pack of TP.
“Perfect!” Lavender whisper-talked, admiring Hugh’s toss.
Lav was clearly new to rolling. She threw hers too hard, and the toilet paper broke, the roll thudding and bouncing away across the grass. She bounded after it, lithe as a fawn, her limbs going so suddenly graceful in her leap that it made my heart swell.
They were giddy with pleasure at their own boldness, rolling the house in response to Martina Mack’s horrific baiting of Birchie at the church. As revenge plots went, it was both too mild—given the chance to hurl Martina Mack into the Sarlacc to be digested for a thousand years, I would have been sorely tempted—but also too much. It was wrong to roll the yards of little old ladies, even vicious ones. Especially Martina, who was house-proud. Her tidy nana house had country heart cutouts on the shutters, and she kept her flower beds as beautiful as Birchie’s.