The Kill Devil Hills cemetery was a rolling green carpet in the center of the mostly sandy landscape. The grass was too green, almost cartoonish, and it made Bex feel uneasy.
“I can’t believe we’re going to a funeral of someone we know,” Trevor said, shifting in the driver’s seat of his Mustang. It was three days later, and Darla was still the center of every newscast, the front-page story of every paper.
Bex pulled her black skirt over her knees, smoothing it again like she had every five minutes on the car ride to the cemetery. It had taken her a while to decide what to wear that morning. She didn’t have a ton of clothes, and although death seemed to follow her like a dark shadow, she had never been to a funeral. There hadn’t been one for her mother, even after the Raleigh police declared her officially dead. There was no body, no note, nothing but seven years of absence, and according to the state, that was as good as dead.
There had been no money for a funeral for her grandmother, and truthfully, Bex wasn’t sure anyone would have come. If they had, it would have only been to stare at the casket of the woman who raised the child of an allegedly murderous animal, who cradled the daughter of the man who may have even killed her own.
Someone had held a memorial service for all the girls after what should have been her father’s trial but Bex didn’t know until later, not that her grandmother would have let her go. She had wanted to, out of morbid curiosity or to make amends or pay respects in some small way, but at the same time, being there would have been a betrayal of her father and would have turned the event into a media circus.
“Have you ever been to a funeral?” Trevor asked when he pushed the car into Park.
Bex shook her head, unwilling to trust her voice.
“Hey, there are Laney and Chelsea.” Trevor and Bex got out of the car and joined the girls on the sidewalk, then joined the slow procession of Kill Devil Hills’ inhabitants and high school students walking into the chapel. A red-nosed woman who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds was propped next to a man in a nice suit who clasped his hands and bobbed his head each time someone walked in. Bex guessed they were Darla’s parents, and a lump scraped the back of her throat.
The chapel was full. Bex recognized some of the younger attendees as students from school. She tried to look around surreptitiously, certain that everyone could read her mind and was already blaming her for bringing him—her father, Darla’s murderer—to Kill Devil Hills.
A handful of football players in dark suits filtered into the church, and then behind them a girl—a woman, maybe—stepped in carefully, her cocoa-brown eyes skittering from face to face. Her hands were clasped in front of her, the sleeves of her black suit jacket short enough to show thin, pale wrists. Her eyes met Bex’s, and Bex immediately looked away, feeling her cheeks flush. When she chanced a glance back, the girl had taken an aisle seat toward the back of the chapel. And she was focused right on Bex.
“Do you know who that lady is back there?” Bex whispered to Laney.
Laney made a show of looking over her shoulder, and Bex wanted to crawl into a hole. “Who? The blond in the suit jacket? She looks about our age, maybe a little older.”
Bex grabbed Laney’s sleeve and gave it a tiny shake. “Stop staring. Do you know her or not?”
“Negatory. Never seen her before in my life. If she’s related to Darla, I never met her.”
Bex should have been used to people singling her out and staring, but she was uneasy—and made more so when the heavy chapel doors were pushed shut. Bex couldn’t help but feel like it was the sealing of a mausoleum, doors slamming closed, locking them all inside. Trevor reached over and squeezed her hand, and she wanted to revel in the feeling. Her heart should have swooned, but she felt nothing but the heavy stone in her gut and that made her angry. Her father had stolen everything from her, had stolen her whole identity, and now she sat at a funeral, feeling nothing but pain.
My father is gone, she told herself, her teeth aching as she clenched them together. He didn’t do this.
She thought of the phone call, of the voice she could barely remember. Had it been deep or high? Was there really an accent, or had she just made that up?
Bex looked up when the music started to play but had to avert her eyes when the somber-looking men made their way up the aisle, all with red eyes and tearstained cheeks as they carried a slick, white coffin. The spray of flowers on top quivered and Bex lost her breath, tears pouring over her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she said, leaning over and whispering to Trevor. “I can’t… I just can’t do this.”