TOLLIVER didn’t seem to be able to move from his side of the open grave, and we both shone our flashlights down at the body.
“At least I didn’t fall in,” I managed to say, and my voice sounded hoarse and strange to my own ears.
“He stopped you,” Tolliver said.
“You saw him? Clearly?”
“Just his silhouette,” he said, and even Tolliver’s voice was strained and breathless. “A small man. With a beard.”
This was the first time such a thing had happened to us. It was like being an accountant for five years, and then suddenly being presented with a set of alien numerals that had to be balanced in five minutes.
Tolliver stumbled around the grave to kneel beside me, put both his arms around me, and we held each other fiercely. We were shivering, shivering intensely—not from the cold, but from the nearness of the unknown. I made a little noise that was horribly like a whimper. Tolliver said, “Don’t be scared,” and I turned my head a little to tell him I wasn’t any more scared than he was; which was to say, quite a lot. He kissed me, and I was glad for his warmth.
I said, “This is a thin place.”
“What’s that?”
“A place where the other world is very close to this world, separated only by a thin membrane.”
“You’ve been reading Stephen King again.”
“It felt strange from the moment we got here tonight.”
“Did you feel anything different when we were here the first time? Yesterday?”
“The old ones always feel a little different from the new ones. Maybe I saw the dead more clearly, with more detail.” I held him tighter. Now that I’d gotten over my startled reaction to the ghost, I had plenty of other fears to cope with. We had a situation on our hands. “What will we do about the body, Tolliver? We shouldn’t call the police, right? We’re already under enough suspicion.”
My feelings about the law were, at best, ambiguous. I couldn’t blame the Texarkana PD for not knowing what was going on in our household when I was a teenager. After all, we’d struggled so hard to conceal it. I hardly blamed them for not finding Cameron; I, of all people, knew how hard it could be to find a dead person. But now that I was grown, the thing I valued most was the ability to shape my life as I wanted. The law could take that away from me in a New York minute.
“No one knows we came here,” Tolliver said, as if thinking out loud. “No one’s come out here since we got here. I bet we could leave and not get caught. But someone’s got to get this body out of the grave. We can’t just leave him.”
I was beginning to feel calmer. “Who is it?” I asked, and my voice was steadier. After all, bodies were my area of expertise. I was not at all worried about being this close to a corpse. I was worried about the police suspecting I’d made him a corpse.
“I’m not sure.” Tolliver sounded a little surprised, as if he should have known who was in the hole from the brief glimpse we’d had.
“Let’s look again,” I said practically. I was feeling a little more like myself.
We pulled apart then, and deployed our flashlights.
If my heart could sink any lower, it did. Since the body was on its stomach, I couldn’t identify its face, but the clothes were familiar.
“Crap. It’s Dr. Nunley,” I said. “He’s still wearing the clothes he had on when he grabbed me at the hotel.” I pressed the button on my watch, and the dial illuminated. It looked as though I had a fairy perched on my wrist. “It’s been three hours since that happened. Just three hours. The lobby staff had to talk to Dr. Nunley to get him to leave, and they’ll remember it. This couldn’t be worse.”
“Not for him, anyway,” my brother said, his voice dry. But he had a slight smile on his face. I could just see the edge of his mouth in the cast-back light. I felt like punching him in the arm, but I wasn’t sure I had enough muscle control to manage it. “And it’s not so good for us, you’re right,” Tolliver admitted.
“Have we left footprints? Has it rained since we got here yesterday?”
“No, but the dirt here around the grave has been turned over, and I’m sure we’ve left traces somewhere. On the other hand, so many people have come through the cemetery since you found Tabitha…and we’re both wearing the same shoes we wore out here yesterday.”
“But there wasn’t this loose dirt then. I don’t know how we would explain coming out here tonight. Oh, I’m so sorry I got you into this.”
“Bullshit,” he said briskly. “We were doing what we do. You wanted to see if you could get some other bit of information from the grave. Well, we found out more than we wanted to know, huh? But it’s not your fault.” He hesitated. “Do you want to try to talk to him, the—the ghost? And what about getting a reading from the body?”
Tolliver’s suggestion was as bracing as that brisk slap detectives give hysterical women in old movies. “Yes,” I said. “Sure.” Of course, I should have thought of that. I had to calm myself first, and center myself. Not too easy, since I was already buzzing like crazy just from being so close to a fresh body.
The closest I could get to Clyde Nunley’s corpse without climbing down into the grave—which might have destroyed or damaged evidence—was to hang over the edge with my hand extended to him. I lay down on the ground and wriggled forward. Tolliver held on to my legs. The hole wasn’t so deep, and I managed to touch the shirt on Dr. Nunley’s back.
His death was so recent it was like a continuous droning in my head, almost drowning my reason, and I had to wait for that to subside before I got a sense of his passing. “Hit on the head,” I mumbled, caught up in the sheer astonishment he’d felt. “On the back of the head. So surprised.” The shock of it was still lingering around him. He absolutely had not expected the attack.
“Here?”
“Yes,” I said, straining to extract the pictures of the end of his life. He was so fresh, so recently translated into this lump of flesh that could neither act nor reason. I saw the darkness around him, the tombstones, everything like it was now: the cold, the rough ground, the upturned earth. “Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurts! My head!” And the hole coming at me, couldn’t throw out my hands to take the fall, grayness…blackness.
I was close to that blackness myself when Tolliver hauled me up and braced me against him.
“Here, open your mouth,” he said, and then he repeated it. “Open!”
I parted my lips, and he pushed a piece of peppermint into my mouth.
“Come on, you have to have some sugar,” he said, and his voice was sharp and commanding.
He was right. We’d found that out, by trial and error. I made myself suck on the candy, and in a few minutes I felt better. Next came a butterscotch.
“It’s never been this bad,” I said, my voice weak. “I guess it’s because he’s so new.” I was worried I couldn’t make it across the cemetery back to our car without a lot of help from Tolliver.
“He’s absolutely gone, right? That…who stopped you—wasn’t him? I did think I saw a beard.”
Every now and then, we’d found a soul attached to a body. That was rare, and until this night I had thought that would be the eeriest thing we could find. Now we knew there was more.
“Clyde Nunley’s soul’s gone,” I said, not willing to commit myself further than that. “And we should be, too.” I gathered myself to make the attempt.
“Yeah,” Tolliver said. “We got to get out of here.”
I paused, halfway to my feet. “But we’ll be leaving him by himself.”
“He’s been by himself for a hundred years,” Tolliver said, not pretending he didn’t understand. “He’ll have to be by himself for a while longer. For all we know, maybe he’s got company.”
“Does this qualify as the strangest conversation we’ve ever had?”
“I think so.”
“I couldn’t have anyone else but you here, no one else would understand,” I said. “I’m so glad you saw him, too.”
“And that’s never happened before, right? You’ve never mentioned anything like that.”
“Never. I’ve known when souls were still attached to the body, and I’ve wondered if those would be ghosts if they didn’t detach. I’ve always wondered if I would see a ghost sometime. I’ve always been a little disappointed that I haven’t, in a way. Oh my God, Tolliver. He saved me from falling right into that grave on top of the corpse. The first time I see a ghost, and he saved me.”
“Were you scared?”
“Not that he would hurt me. But I was afraid because it was spooky and I didn’t know what to do for him. I don’t know why he can’t or won’t go on, I don’t know how he experiences time, I don’t know his purpose. And now all his people are gone, I guess. No one could visit him or…” I shut up, afraid of sounding maudlin.
They all want to be found, you know. That’s all they want. Not vengeance, or forgiveness. They want to be found. At least, that’s what I’d always thought.
But Josiah Poundstone—I was sure he was the ghost—had been firmly located since the moment of his death. Someone had erected the “Beloved Brother” headstone. And someone had murdered him, if that was part of his awareness. When I’d stood on his grave in the daylight, I’d felt only the faintest flutter from him, so overwhelmed had I been with the thrumming from the most recent corpse. I’d assumed Josiah Poundstone was gone for good.
Apparently, I’d been wrong.