16

Sarah doesn’t scream, because she’s not a screamer. Her hands go over her mouth as she backs out of the doorway, skittering away from the second corpse she’s seen this week. Fourth, if you count animals.

“What’s wrong?” Reid asks, but she can only shake her head. She can barely make her eyes blink. They’re stubbornly refusing to close, as if something terrible is waiting to happen in that tiny sliver of darkness.

Reid hurries to the door and stands there, stunned.

“When did you see him last?” he asks, and she wonders if he watches a lot of CSI and listens to murder podcasts, because he should be freaking out a lot more than he is, not asking sensible questions like a hardened detective.

“Last night,” she says, breathless and creaky. “After you brought me dinner. I was going to try to get some work done. He yelled and threw one of my mugs at me. I’m surprised no one else heard it.” She points to where the shards still sit in the gravel.

Reid shakes his head and puts his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close in a gesture that’s less prospective suitor and more emotional support dog. “We need to go tell Gail. Do you want me to take you to your cottage, or my cabin, or do you want to come with me? Or maybe go wait with Kim? I know you’re pretty shaken. God, who wouldn’t be?”

She’s trembling, and even turned away, she can’t stop seeing Bernie lying there, like when too-bright light leaves an imprint on her eyelids. She can’t help imagining the unbearably heavy silence that followed the click when his last cassette tape ended.

“I’ll go with you,” she says. “Just…maybe close the door.”

She wonders if this happened last night, if the studio door has been open all this time. Bernie looks like he’s been there awhile, his skin a pasty gray, almost purple where it touches the floor. She’s eternally grateful that some hungry forest creature didn’t come in here and maul him—maul the body. She doesn’t like—didn’t like—Bernie, but no one deserves…that.

Reid leads her up the road toward December House. They pass the glass studio, where Kim is blasting Taylor Swift. Sarah likes Kim, but she hopes they’re not spotted as they walk by; she doesn’t want to have to explain the situation multiple times, and she’s fairly certain Kim would be morbidly, garishly fascinated in a way that currently repulses her. The pop music fades, the air taken over with slow, steady scales played on a violin. It almost sounds like Lucas is…unsure and a little wobbly? Is he drunk, or has he gone so long without playing that he’s rusty? When he introduced himself on the first night, he confidently named multiple instruments as his specialty, and that’s a ridiculous thing to lie about. It’s not like Gail would let him stick around if he came here under false pretenses. Sarah hopes he’s okay, because something sounds off.

They finally reach December House, and Reid opens the door, holding it as Sarah passes within. It feels blessedly safe and normal. If crystals and water bottles and cloth maxipads are for sale alongside granola bars and Cheetos, things can’t be too dire.

Gail, as usual, is nowhere to be found. Reid rings the bell, one solid ding, then hits it a few times for good measure.

No one comes.

He hits the bell again—again and again and again.

“Hello?” he calls. “We have an emergency!”

Finally there is noise beyond the door, but when it opens, they’re faced with Sleepy Gandalf, or whatever Gail’s husband’s name is. He blinks at them like a half-dead owl.

“George, there’s been an accident,” Reid says. “Bernie is dead.”

Such simple words for such a complex state of affairs.

George blinks a few more times as if hoping reality will change like a TV switching stations, but when Reid doesn’t follow that up with a cheery Ha, ha, good prank! the old man sighs heavily.

“She’s out with the people digging up the coffin,” George finally says. “Good timing, I guess, if there’s another body.”

This may be the darkest thing Sarah has ever heard another human mutter, and she can’t tell if George is joking or just so dry and practical that he hasn’t stopped to consider what a borderline sociopathic thing this is to say.

“Come on.”

He tromps out the door in his pajama pants and Crocs and oversized green sweater, and Sarah and Reid share a look of befuddlement and follow him. Once they’re behind the house and up the ridge, Sarah can see the ruckus over by the area where she first started digging. She expected a hearse, but instead there’s a work van, plain white. The back doors are open, and three figures hover around.

“Body’s so old the coroner didn’t want it,” George says, answering the question Sarah would like to ask if she wasn’t in shock. “Local historians came to check it out. Heard the guy call it a neat find.”

“Her,” Sarah murmurs. “She’s not an it.”

“Her,” George repeats with the tired carelessness of a man who has to placate people often and no longer takes it personally.

Over by the hole, a man in his fifties and a girl in her late teens or early twenties are lifting the coffin out of the ground with ropes. There’s a big pile of dirt where they’ve uncovered it completely, and Sarah is eager to see what it looks like when revealed in its entirety.

It’s just an old wooden box, she realizes as they get closer, nothing decorative or special about it. No carvings, no woodburning, no polish, nothing to indicate that anyone ever cared about the poor soul within. The top is back on, at least, not nailed down but placed loosely. Gail stands nearby, frowning. Sarah wonders if it’s because she’s worried about the property’s reputation or because it’s just one of many annoyances throughout her day, if she would offer the same frown to an empty box of cereal or a sock left outside the hamper. Thus far, she seems annoyed most of the time.

And then she spots Sarah and Reid.

“Oh, no,” she barks, flapping her hands. “Shoo, you two. This is not the sort of thing that requires nosy nellies.”

“There’s an emergency,” George wheezes.

“Oh?” Gail narrows her eyes at the three of them like they’re naughty children.

“It’s Bernie,” Reid says. “We found him in the studio.”

“So?” Gail asks.

“He’s dead.” Sarah’s voice is tiny, but as she’s the one who found him, it feels like she’s the one who should say it out loud.

Gail rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. “Probably just drunk, the old skunk. Or stayed up too late working. He always does that. Pushes himself too hard and then crashes.”

“So you guys are friends,” Sarah says before she can stop herself.

Gail gives her a sharp look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He was yelling at me last night, and he said you two went way back, and that he didn’t have to share the studio with me because…” She trails off, wags her head. “It doesn’t matter. He’s not drunk or sleeping. He’s dead. In the pottery studio.”

“Very dead,” Reid says, backing her up.

The older guy and the young woman heave the coffin into the back of their work van and slide it all the way in. The man dusts his hands off and joins them, the young woman trailing behind him. This guy looks like a cross between a mountain man and a scholar, wearing a vest with a pocket square over a plaid shirt with a knife on his belt and sturdy, well-worn boots, all in shades of brown and what Sarah suspects is butternut. The young woman is wearing a college sweatshirt and holey jeans, her hair up in a loose bun and her white Keds stained the red of Georgia clay.

“I take it the more recent decedent isn’t an antique?” the man asks with a southern accent.

“He’s sixty-eight,” George answers. “Well, was.”

Gail looks lost, her eyes focused on something far away and darting around like she’s doing math in her head and it isn’t matching up.

“Was the cause of death obvious?” the man asks.

“No blood, no marks,” Reid says. “A heart attack or aneurysm, maybe?”

The man shakes his head. “Well, let’s go see him and make sure there’s nothing we can do. And perhaps, George, you might go phone the sheriff?”

George sighs like this is a big ask and lumbers back toward the house at the speed of an ancient basset hound. Gail doesn’t make a move, so the man—the historian—looks up at the hotel and squeaks like a little kid gazing at a Christmas catalog full of things he’ll never have.

“You sure I can’t just go take a quick peek?” he asks Gail. “No cameras. Just poke my head in the lobby?”

That certainly gets her attention. “Absolutely not. The floor’s all rotted away. So let’s not lose track of what’s important, just now,” she responds, her mouth in a hard line.

The historian shrugs good-naturedly and leads the way back to the studios at a sprightly pace, like he’s academically delighted by the possibility of more death. The girl follows him, and then Gail wakes up and hurries to join them. Sarah pauses by the van doors, looking down at the plain wood top of the coffin. From this side, the bloody scratch marks aren’t visible. She hopes the historian will do honor to this woman, to her suffering. She hopes he will treat her tenderly, touch her bones with delicacy, show her the kindness she deserves after all these years.

“So that’s the corpse you found, huh?” Reid asks.

“Yes,” Sarah says softly.

“What did it look like—the body?”

“Show some respect,” she says with an unexpected burst of indignation.

“Is it disrespectful to ask?”

Sarah isn’t sure how to put her feelings into words; her brain is still roiling with thoughts of Bernie. Bernie last night, shouting. Bernie throwing the mug at her and flicking her off. Bernie now, all the wrong color, too still, his T-shirt straining over his belly, purple tingeing the backs of his ears.

Did this girl look like that when she died? Did her skin go white, mottled purple where she was trapped in this coffin, lavender shoulder blades like fairy wings, the nape of her neck the mauve of a rose? Did this girl die with her eyes open, staring stubbornly up at the sky she couldn’t see, or did she close her eyes and dream of the sun?

Reid is looking at Sarah like she’s acting very strange, and maybe she is, but this is a hill she will die on.

It is a hill the girl died in.

“She died a violent death.”

Because being buried alive is a very specific kind of violence.

“How do you know?” he asks.

“Let’s catch up.” When she starts walking toward the swiftly disappearing historian, Reid has to follow or seem like a creep.

They make a strange group, striding across the mountain. The historian—Louis, as he introduces himself during the walk; his daughter Ann, who attends the local college; Gail in her lime-green sweater and multilayered paper beads; and behind them all Reid sticking close by Sarah’s side as if worried she’s going to faint. Louis stops when the studios and cabins are in view.

“Wait, where’s the body again?” he asks.

“Pottery studio,” Reid supplies.

Gail takes the lead, and soon they all crowd around the closed door. Somewhere in the back of Sarah’s mind, she’s hoping that it was all a prank to make her look stupid, that Bernie is going to pop upright and laugh at her, call her a hysterical bimbo, tell everyone the story about how he fooled a tender little stupid snowflake crazy girl.

But that doesn’t happen because when Gail opens the door, Bernie is still very dead.

“Oh, my God,” Gail moans. “I thought—but—maybe he’s—”

The historian, kneeling by Bernie’s side, grasping the man’s wrist, shakes his head.

“Looks like a heart attack,” Ann says. Louis moves away, and she darts around the body with a businesslike precision, checking Bernie’s eyes and opening his mouth and lifting his arm to inspect it from every angle.

“She’s a nursing student,” Louis explains, pride clear in his voice.

“Yeah, so notice the sallow skin, the lividity, the slack jaw,” Ann says.

Sarah feels bad for thinking of her as “the girl” at first, because she is clearly a woman, but it’s odd how the mind divides women into these two staunch categories. Even at twenty-six she still sees herself as a girl and wonders if she will ever feel like a woman. She sees the woman in the coffin as a girl, too. Maybe it’s the long hair or the white gown, but there was something so innocent and youthful about her.

“No wounds, no signs of a struggle. Did he have any preexisting conditions?” Ann looks from person to person, but no one seems to know.

“He drank too much,” Gail finally says, almost guiltily. “Didn’t eat right, didn’t drink enough water, didn’t get exercise, lived on coffee, smoked cigars and a lot of weed, barely slept.”

Sarah notes the familiarity, the sadness. Gail knew Bernie, more than she knows anyone else here. A tiny fire of rage blooms in Sarah’s chest as she wonders if perhaps he wasn’t chosen for this residency because of his art but because of his relationship with Gail, which means that if things had been fair, she would’ve had the studio all to herself to begin with.

If things had been fair, she wouldn’t have been terrorized by this man.

She wouldn’t have had to stand there in the door to what should have been her studio, staring at her first dead body.

Well, her first fresh one.

George appears in the doorway, raises caterpillar-like white eyebrows at the sight within. “Sheriff’s on the way,” he says, then, a beat later, with the same matter-of-fact tone, “Well, that’s it for Bernie, then.”

Great, Sarah thinks. George knew him, too.

“Wait, what’s this?”

The young woman who’s been examining Bernie has his whitish-gray fist in both of hers, uncurling his stiff fingers. She pulls something out of his grip and holds it pinched between two fingers.

It’s small, dark, metal.

It’s familiar.

It’s the nail Sarah put in her apron pocket.

The nail from the dead girl’s coffin.