Maisie waited in the living room in the same chair she sat in every morning at this time. After injuring Stuart’s arm the night before, she wondered if he would still ride by, or if the injury was substantial enough to keep him from his daily ride. Over the last twenty-four hours, she’d talked to him more than she had in several months. Finally it seemed they were getting somewhere with each other. She liked it.
Keeping to his early morning ritual, Stuart’s garage door opened at precisely six forty a.m. He rode onto the street toward her house, but this time when he passed by, he looked straight through the window where she was sitting. He nodded and winked at her. Although it wasn’t fully light outside yet, she could still see the gesture. Partially horrified she’d been caught, she jerked back, almost falling off her chair in the process.
How long has he known I’ve been watching?
Days? Months? Years?
Her face became inflamed, feeling like a hot tamale in the devil’s oven, a sensation she wasn’t used to having.
Stuart whizzed around the corner and out of sight, and Maisie sprung into action, returning to the Marshalls’ backyard, and to the shovel she’d left by the fire pit the night before. She wasn’t sure she’d find anything this time either. The fire pit had been empty, and the police had already searched the perimeter. Even so, it was worth one last look.
Once in the yard, Maisie cupped a hand over her brow, searching for anything that seemed out of place, recently dug up, or disturbed. At the very back of the Marshalls’ yard, in the far corner, was a grave Mildred Howard had dug for her dog Caesar when he passed away a few years earlier. Over time, weeds had shot up around it, covering the soil, but the grave marker, a white wood cross Mildred had painted herself, had always stood up straight as a prominent reminder of the dog’s passing. Today, not only was the cross noticeably askew, it was tilted to the right, at an angle of about two o’clock.
Maisie grinned, muttered to herself, “You little devil, you. How very clever. Now then, let’s see what you’re hiding.”
Not wanting to disturb the dog’s remains, Maisie focused her efforts on the cross itself, carefully digging up the soil around it until she was about two feet deep, just pliable enough to pull the cross out of the ground. She set it beside her and bent to her knees, peering into the hole she created at what appeared to be the edge of an oversized, Ziploc-type bag. The question now became a matter of what she’d find inside the bag when she pulled it out—the remains of Mildred’s precious dog or something else. With the dog only having been laid to rest a few years before, and plastic surviving a decade or longer before it decomposed in soil, the probability of the bag holding the dog’s remains was high.
Still, she’d come too far not to find out now.
Feeling a wave of guilt, she paused a moment to give Mildred’s dog the respect he deserved. “I’m sorry, Caesar. You understand the predicament I’m in, don’t you? I’ll put you right back when I’m done and never bother you again. I promise.”
She reached a hand down the hole until she felt the tip of the plastic bag. She gripped it in her hand and pulled upward. The bag separated from the dirt easily, and Maisie’s hand wrapped around the object inside it—an object that felt cold and hard, nothing like brittle fragments of withered, old bones. She brushed the dirt off the baggie, unsealed the bag, and peeked inside.
Lane Marshall did have something to hide.
But why had he gone to such great lengths to hide it?