Their father kept insisting that he was all right, even though the medical boot that covered his foot said otherwise. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said. “The doctor said it was just a sprain, and I should be okay in a week.”
“That’s not what being okay means, Dad!” Emma exclaimed, on the verge of tears. She’d been clinging to their dad’s shoulder ever since she and Zane arrived at the hospital a few minutes ago. “You could have been killed! The doc said it’s not just a sprain, it’s a grade two sprain!”
“Which means it’s a little more serious than a twisted ankle but not as bad as needing surgery,” their father said, chuckling. “And it was my mistake to order the statue moved without testing it first—”
“What?” Zane interrupted.
His father tried to wriggle his toes and then winced. “Remember the friend who I asked to survey the rest of the grounds for me? He was confused—there were no anomalies that would compromise its structure, so he didn’t quite understand how the soil could have given way without warning. Fortunately, he had some thermal imaging tools on hand so he could take a look underneath the ground. It’s always been believed that Stilgarth housed a cemetery as well as a manor, and he wanted to ensure that we wouldn’t be disturbing anyone’s rest if more excavation was needed. Well, he found a strange heat signature directly underneath the Gravemother monument, but he couldn’t make heads or tails as to what it was.”
“So you had the statue moved to find out?”
“You got it. Unfortunately, the monument was heavier than either of us expected it to be—and far more fragile than it looked. As we were lifting it up with some pulleys, part of the sculpture broke off without warning.” His father looked ruefully down at his injured foot. “And I inadvertently helped cushion its fall.”
“You shouldn’t be moving the monument in the first place!” Emma protested vehemently. “You would have made her angry!”
Their father and Zane stared at her. “I didn’t know you were such a believer of the Gravemother’s curse,” his father finally said, more amused than anything else.
“I believe she’s real,” Emma announced, folding her arms. “And I think she’s trying to find something, but no one’s helping if you all keep breaking down the walls and moving things around!”
She’s trying to find you, Zane thought, stricken.
“You do have a point.” Their father sighed. “No more moving anything else. And I wasn’t lying when the doctor said I’d be out of here in four days or so. But I’m not all that keen on having you two stay alone in the apartment until then—”
There was a tap on the door. Garrett stood beside it, smiling bashfully. “If you don’t mind,” he said. “I just called my parents, and they said they’d love for Zane and Emma to stay with us until you’re back on your feet.”
“Will you?” Zane’s father asked, brightening. “I was going to pull in a favor from a friend of mine to stay over, but if it’s not too much trouble . . .”
“My folks are used to Zane by now,” Garrett assured him cheerfully. “And they’d love to meet Emma. Hope you feel better, Mr. K. My mom said to give you our number so that you can hash it out with them if you want.”
“You didn’t have to, but thanks,” Zane muttered to Garrett while his father chatted with Garrett’s parents. “For Emma’s sake.”
“Hey, I’m not just doing it from the goodness of my heart,” Garrett said, looking embarrassed. “I figured we ought to stick together. Since we’re, uh . . .”
“Friends?” Zane supplied. “It’s not a hard word to say.”
“What’s hard to say?” Emma asked curiously, drawing nearer.
“Nothing,” Zane said hastily, just as Garrett said, “You wanna go and see how we prepare bodies for burial while you’re staying over, Emma?”
“I remember,” Zane’s sister said, wide-eyed. “Your family owns the funeral parlor. If it’s not too much trouble to show me—”
“You actually want to?” Zane asked incredulously. “Miss Emma ‘I Don’t Want to Be the Owner of a Haunted House’ Kincaid?”
Emma grinned. “I took your advice. I’m making a ton of friends at school. Stilgarth is all they’ve been asking me about, and I was thinking that maybe I should know more about it, so I can answer them better. Dead bodies aren’t exactly ghosts, but . . .” She hesitated. “I want to know about the Gravemother, too,” she said. “I think maybe I can help her.”
“I’m glad that you’re finally getting out of the house, but I’m not sure ghosts and trying to help the Gravemother are the best ways to friendship.”
“It worked for me,” Garrett said easily.
Zane rolled his eyes gamely, but his stomach twisted. As worrying as Emma’s newfound interest in the Gravemother was, he felt better knowing they’d all be together for now. “We’re gonna go home and pack what we need, and let’s see if you’re just as eager when you finally see your first dead body, Emmy.”
• • •
To his surprise, Emma enjoyed herself. She didn’t shrink away from the window when she saw the forlorn form of Mrs. Danville stretched out on the metal table. The old woman was already dressed in what looked to be her Sunday best, with a pearl choker around her neck and heeled shoes on her feet. Her hair was carefully made up—Just the way she always wore it, Mr. Sevilla had said—and Garrett’s mother was carefully applying the rest of the makeup on the dead lady’s cheeks, giving her a softer blush.
“It’s like she’s sleeping,” Emma said, her fingers pressed against the glass separating them from the mortician and her client.
“Thank you, my dear,” Mrs. Sevilla said from inside the room. “That’s one of the best compliments you can give someone like me.”
Mr. Sevilla then made his specialty for dinner: finely chopped seasoned pork that he called sisig, served in a sizzling pan. It was a staple meal popular in the Philippines, he said, where his parents lived before moving to Solitude. “And that’s how I met Mrs. Sevilla,” he said, chuckling and placing a bowl of hot steaming rice beside it. “An uncle of mine passed away shortly after we arrived here, and I offered to handle all the funeral arrangements. After talking with the director, a guy whose family went back for generations in Solitude, I accidentally wandered into the embalming room and saw his daughter behind the glass, hard at work with one of her customers. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I must have looked quite the fool, staring at her until she finally lifted her head and told me, rather sassily, that if I wanted to look at something, the viewing room was across the hall.”
“Dad said he met Mom when he was working on a construction project in Seattle,” Emma said. “She was buying some hot dogs from a vendor across the street. He looked up, saw her, and walked right into a metal post.”
The Sevillas laughed. “Your father doesn’t strike me as the type to lose his head easily,” Garrett’s father remarked.
“He’s not. And Mom was a nurse, so when she saw him get hurt, she rushed over, and he told her it would make him feel a lot better if he could have her number.” Emma sighed. “She died in a car accident five years ago. We still miss her a lot.”
“That’s when Dad started moving us around for his job,” Zane interjected. “I guess he couldn’t stand staying long in any one place without her.”
Mrs. Sevilla made sympathetic noises. “But do you think he could be convinced to settle down here in Solitude, whether or not he chooses to sell Stilgarth to the town?”
“I don’t know,” Zane confessed. “But I don’t mind staying here for good,” and felt a little startled at how much he meant that. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Garrett glance at him, smile a little, and then look away.
After dinner, Emma did her homework while Zane and Garrett looked over their budget for the math project and quibbled over the expenses. “This doesn’t look too shabby,” Garrett finally conceded, going through the numbers one more time. “At this rate, we’ll make a profit within the first three months and then actually start expanding if it holds. Mrs. Robertson’s gotta give us an A for this.”
Zane laughed. “Yeah, and I bet in twenty years Sevilla Funeral Parlor will be the most profitable place in Solitude if this is just practice for you.”
“I just like figuring out the planning. What about you? Gonna go build properties like your dad does?”
Zane winced. “Not really. I don’t really know what I want to do yet. I like history, I guess, which is why I enjoyed reading Mr. Moss’s journal, even if two-thirds of it just talked about cows.”
“Cow poop,” Garrett corrected.
“I’ll figure it out when I’m older. It’s not like I even know if we’re gonna be here long.”
Garrett’s face fell slightly. “Didn’t you say you wanted to stay here?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what Dad wants to do with the place yet. He said we were all gonna decide, but he’s still gonna have the final say. Emma didn’t want to be here at first, but I think she’s taking a shine to the town, too.” Zane turned toward his sister and realized she’d finished her homework and drifted over to the couch, where she lay fast asleep. He sighed. “I’m gonna go take her back to—”
Emma began to twist and turn, distressed noises coming out of her mouth.
“Emmy?” He raced over to her, tried to shake her awake.
“Save them,” Emma sobbed. “Save them, please. Save—”
She stopped, let out a soft whimper, and fell back to sleep again, her breathing returning to normal.
A hand fell on Zane’s shoulder, reassuring. “She’s all right, just had a bad dream,” Zane said with a sigh. “I’m willing to bet it was the Gravemother again, though.”
“Zane,” Garrett said tersely.
“I know, we’ll need to be on our guard. I don’t know how we can help her stop dreaming about the ghost, but there has to be a way.”
“Zane.”
Garrett’s hand was still on his shoulder. Zane reached over and gave it a pat, then stopped. “Are you all right, Garrett? You’re as cold as ice—”
He froze. Garrett was still at the table where they’d been working on their project, staring at him. There was at least twenty feet between them, which meant the hand on his shoulder wasn’t—it wasn’t—
“Zane,” Garrett said again, voice low and terrified.
There was a clicking noise that sounded far too close. The fingers on his shoulder tightened painfully.
Swallowing, Zane looked up.
The Gravemother hovered over him.
This close, Zane could see more of her features: shriveled skin stretched taut over her face, stark staring eyes that were red around the irises, broken upper teeth and a black tongue. Without her lower jaw, he could see more of her neck, the flesh of which looked to have rotted away until there was nothing remaining there but patches of skin and a lot of bone.
Do not move my children, the Gravemother said.
Zane shoved the hand off him frantically. At the same time, he grabbed Emma, who startled awake, and dragged her off the couch as fast as he could. Garrett lunged forward, snatching an umbrella from a nearby stand, and swung it hard at the Gravemother. It went through her, and she was gone just as quickly as she’d appeared.
“Zane?” Emma asked, clutching tightly at his shirt. “What are you doing?”
Heart still pounding like a train engine inside his chest, Zane looked around, but the ghostly presence was no longer there.
“Zane?” Garrett was at his side, similarly breathless, and this time the hand on his shoulder was his. “I thought she was gonna—I’m glad that you’re—”
“We have to go,” Zane blurted out. “Can you ask your folks to look after Emma for a while?”
“What? Go where? Why—”
“The missing children.” Zane swallowed, but the lump in his throat refused to go away. “I think I know where they are.”
• • •
Garrett’s parents were confused, but when their son promised them it wouldn’t take long, both agreed to keep Emma company. “This better be worth it,” Garrett growled, biking hard to keep pace with Zane. “What makes you think you know where her kids are? People have been trying to figure that out for years.”
“Because the Gravemother told me herself.” Zane turned toward the road leading to Stilgarth Manor, ignoring Garrett’s undignified squawk when he realized where they were both headed. “I know why she tried to stop Dad from moving the monument.”
“We’re not supposed to be here.”
“We’ll risk it. It’s too important to leave for tomorrow.”
Zane’s father and the rest of the workers had left the Stilgarth statue where they had found it, though a huge chunk missing on the upper right of the sculpture showed Zane how the accident had occurred. The missing piece was on the ground, where his father had been injured.
Zane crouched down beside the fallen marble and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then he stepped toward the new hole in the statue, fishing out the flashlight he’d borrowed from the Sevillas.
“What are you doing?” Garrett asked.
Zane took a deep breath. The monument was abstract enough that there were enough ridges and protrusions for him to plant his feet against, so he could scale up it like he was climbing part of a rock wall.
He balanced himself carefully, steeled himself, and then shone his light directly into the hole.
A pair of eyes looked back at him from within.
For a moment, he nearly lost his grip. His arms flailed wildly, but Garrett latched on to his knees, keeping him steady. “What’s wrong?” the other boy asked, sounding panicked. “What do you see?”
Zane gritted his teeth and forced himself to look inside again, shifting his flashlight around. The face was gone; instead, there was—
“Zane?” Garrett prompted when Zane didn’t speak for a few seconds.
“I found the missing children,” Zane choked out. “There’s—I think there’s bones in here.”