Shallow Graves (17 page)

IN THE MORNING
I was reading the news from Cheyenne when Jake shuffled into the living room. Zeke was asleep on the couch; he hadn't stirred when I came in as the sky started to turn pink. Jake picked up the blanket from the floor and dropped it over Zeke, tucked it over his shoulder.

“You could have made him take the floor,” he said. He yawned and ran his hand through his hair.

I shrugged. “It's fine.”

Jake sat down and glanced at the computer. “What's that?”

I turned it so he could see the article I was reading. They had found Brian Kerr. I explained, “He's the one who takes the
monsters . . . wherever they take them. To try to change them.”

I said
wherever
, but I was thinking
whoever
.

There was the figure of a woman lurking at the edge of all my thoughts, the Mother to whom Mr. Willow was bringing his tributes. Ingrid had said it might be a creature, a monster, but in my mind she was tall and grim and featureless, a terrible silent shape with arms opened in a gathering embrace. I hadn't told anybody what I knew about her yet. Not Rain, not Ingrid, and I wasn't going to tell Jake either. She was the linchpin at the center of Mr. Willow's world. I was keeping her to myself.

I kept telling myself it was because I wanted more information. It felt so clean and rational to think of it that way. Information. Facts, data. I couldn't trust secondary evidence. I had been telling myself that all night. A responsible researcher would go to the source.

The article about Brian Kerr didn't have much information: The paramedics and state police had been called to the house after Kerr's wife found him unconscious on the premises. Nothing about the room full of belongings. Nothing about the blood. There was a picture of him perched on a wooden fence and smiling, majestic mountains in the background. He looked normal, nonthreatening, but the sight of his face put a knot in my stomach. I scratched my fingernails softly against my jeans and imagined a phantom pain, the splinter-sharp agony of scrabbling helplessly along a long stone tunnel.

There were too many of Brian Kerr's memories trapped in my head.

So I turned the conversation to something that had bothered me since the night before, when I finally realized how Rain had been manipulating my thoughts in the red room.

I asked, “Does Rain have kids?”

Jake hesitated, which was all the answer I needed.

“She does,” I said. “Doesn't she?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Zeke told me that you helped her with a family emergency. And she did her nightmare thing on you, made you think something bad would happen if you told anybody. That was about her kids, wasn't it?”

“Is that true?” Zeke pushed the blanket down and sat up; his voice was rough with sleep. “Jake?”

“That's not what happened,” Jake said.

“A boy and a girl. Maybe seven or eight years old?”

Jake shook his head. “I have no idea how you know that. I know she didn't tell you. She doesn't want anybody to know.”

Maybe not, but she had wanted to find out, without asking, if I had seen them. That's why she had made up that other woman and put her into my mind. It might have worked too—I might have been overcome with sympathy, eager to share that I had seen the kids at the church—if only I hadn't been so wrapped in myself, so convinced that being this thing that I was, this inhuman monster, meant being so unique and isolated that the idea of mothers and children and families all in it together hadn't even occurred to me.

“She didn't tell me. But she does, right?”

“Yeah. I don't know how old they are. They're not human. Rain's
a lot older than she looks.”

“What are you talking about? Since when does Rain have kids?” Zeke asked.

“It's not—”

“That's what that was about?” Zeke said. “When you went with her that day?”

“Yeah, but it's not—”

“You know what she is. And you still—”

“Zeke.” The angrier Zeke got, the more tired Jake looked. “It didn't happen like that. The kids needed help.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” Zeke asked.

Jake glanced at me before answering. I couldn't read that look at all, but I had a feeling they would be having a very different conversation if I wasn't in the room.

“They were staying with their grandfather, their human grandfather. He didn't know what they are.”

“Why would she leave them with a
human
?” Zeke asked, disgusted.

“I don't know. She didn't tell me, okay? All she said was that her kids had called her and she needed to go pick them up right away. By the time we got there . . .” Jake rubbed his hand over his face. “The kids were defending themselves.”

“What did—”

“I'm not going to tell you what he did.” Jake voice was sharp.

Zeke shut his mouth.

“It doesn't matter. It was technically suicide, but it was messy enough that the cops would ask questions. So we cleaned it up and
got them out of there. That's all. I don't know where she took them after that. She said she was going to find somebody else to look after them, but I don't know who.”

Two little kids with the power to manipulate thoughts, separated from their mother, protecting themselves, and your friendly neighborhood ghoul on call to help clean up the crime scene. I was selfishly glad Jake didn't share any details, but I understood now why he had been so angry at Rain for getting Zeke to help her.

“You should have told me,” Zeke said.

“I thought—” Jake sighed. “You're right. I should have.”

“I need to talk to Rain,” I said. “Can you call her?”

“Why?”

“Wherever she took them, it wasn't as safe as she thought. I think she went looking for Mr. Willow's people because they have her kids,” I said. “She kind of told me when we were stuck in that room, but I didn't realize she was talking about herself.”

“You know where they are?” Jake asked.

“I know where they were a few days ago.”

Zeke pulled the blanket up to his chin and slumped into the couch. “She's at Ingrid's. I'm not calling.”

Jake went to get his phone.

I didn't tell them that it might be too late for Rain's children. I wasn't planning on telling her either. Not until she told me what I wanted to know first.

RAIN REFUSED TO
come to Jake and Zeke's house. She listened to my proposed trade—information about her children for information about Willow—and accepted with a reasonable minimum of cursing and threats of bodily harm.

“Meet me downtown,” she said. “Pearl Street, in front of the bookstore. Be there in about an hour. There's someone you have to meet.”

“Who is it?”

“The guy who put me in touch with our Wyoming friend,” she said. “I told you about him, remember? He's one of the lucky survivors. Speaking of which, you see the Cheyenne news this morning? How does it feel to be famous?”

I said, “I'll be there,” and hung up.

She hadn't said to come alone, and I didn't know how to find Pearl Street anyway. It only took a little bit of wheedling to convince Zeke to come with me. Jake left for work after making Zeke swear about a dozen times, a dozen different ways, not to do anything stupid and definitely not to go anywhere with Rain or any of her friends or any monster-hunting humans we might come across. Zeke rolled his eyes, but he promised.

It was midmorning on a warm, sunny Saturday, the sky cloudless and deep blue, and Pearl Street was crowded with people: couples walking with cups of coffee in hand, kids playing, buskers plucking songs on their guitars. After the strangeness of the past several days, everything felt off, artificial, as though the entire city had been lowered around us like a movie set during the night.

Rain was leaning against a storefront when we arrived, hands tucked into the pockets of her black hoodie. “You know Ritter?” she asked Zeke. “Climber guy, lives in his van, not too fond of showers?”

“Human?”

“Yeah, but he's harmless. Totally chill. He works at a bagel shop.”

“That's a stellar character reference,” I said.

“Considering the people you've been hanging out with, you have no room to judge. How'd you like their ugly little roommate?”

“Oh, Steve? We're cool. We understand each other.”

If I was expecting Rain to be different—some external evidence of fear or relief, a glimmer of maternal instinct, or even guilt for putting her children in danger again—I was disappointed. She
looked and acted exactly as she had the day before. We might have been making plans to go see a movie rather than discussing the fate of her missing children.

Rain's friend was sitting on a low wall in front of a bookstore and café. He lifted a hand in greeting when he spotted her, started to smile, grimaced instead.

“What did you bring him for?” he said.

Zeke stared right back and didn't say anything.

Rain leaned over to kiss the man's cheek. “Not my idea. Don't worry, I won't let him bite. Ritter, this is Breezy. Breezy, Ritter. She's the one I told you about.”

“You're the one that put Brian Kerr in the hospital,” Ritter said.

He was closer to thirty than twenty, with dirty-blond hair pulled back in a limp ponytail and a scraggly beard coaxed into twin loose twists. He was wearing ratty jeans and flip-flops and a red T-shirt that said I SKI
♥
LAND in block letters. He held a ukulele in his hands and the case was open on the ground in front of him, a few dollar bills and change scattered over the velvet lining. He had never killed anybody.

“I guess so,” I said warily. “How did you hear about that already?”

“News travels,” Ritter said. “I'm not the only one around here who's had a problem with those assholes. Trust me, I'm not going to judge you for it. That man has done some serious shit. If you messed him up, I want to buy you a drink.” He squinted in the sun. “Or I would, if you weren't like twelve.”

“My age is kind of a divide-by-zero number at this point. How do you know them?”

Ritter gave me a wry smile. “I used to be one of them.”

He didn't say
one of them
like he was talking about a group of kids he used to know, like he would say he used to be in a band or on a team, or even the shamefaced way he might say, “I used to be a Young Republican.” He said it like it was something he had lost, something mournful from long ago.

“You mean you were . . .” I didn't know how to ask. “Different?”

“They don't go after normal kids,” Ritter said. “I used to be able to see ghosts.”

“Are you sure they were ghosts?” Zeke asked.

Ritter twitched his shoulders. “Yeah, I'm sure. I used to call them my ‘glowy people.' My stepmom thought I was making things up to screw with her.”

“When did you start seeing them?” Zeke said.

“Uh, I don't remember,” Ritter said, frowning. “I could always see them. I was never scared of them or anything. They don't do anything, right? They just float around. There was one on the street outside our house. I was like eight before I realized nobody else could see it.”

“But you could always see them?” Zeke said. “Even when you were a baby?”

“What does it matter?” Rain asked.

Ritter brushed his fingers over the strings of the ukulele. He was looking more uncomfortable with every question. “I think so. I don't exactly remember, you know? Why?”

“Something happened when you were born,” Zeke said.

Ritter's fingers fell still on the instrument. “How do you know that?”

“Your mother died.”

“Jesus, could you be more tactless?” Rain kicked at Zeke's feet. He stepped out of reach.

“Nah, he's right,” Ritter said. “It's fine. How did you know?”

“Humans can't see ghosts without a reason. That takes magic, and magic means somebody died.”

Ritter snapped his fingers and pointed at Zeke. “See, that, that's what I didn't know before. I know it now, sure, but they never told me that. Pastor Willow and all his people. He never told me there was an explanation. He never told us shit.”

“How did you meet them?” I asked.

“I got in trouble when I was a kid. Got caught, you know.” Ritter held his fingers to his lips to mime smoking a joint. “My dad and stepmom decided I should start going to this youth group thing, at this church our neighbors went to. This place over on Baseline. I don't know if it's still there. This was, I dunno, ten years ago. I thought it would be talking about Jesus and playing basketball and going camping and whatever, and if I got my grades up, they'd forget about it and stop making me go. It was mostly fine, too, a little woo-woo and everything. No prayers or shit. I doubt any of them ever even read the Bible. They had this house where we could hang out without any adults. That made it fun. But there was this one guy, this older kid, he was really intense about it.” Ritter plucked at the ukulele strings again, a quick progression. The notes vibrated brightly and faded. “Intense about everything, like he didn't want any of us having fun.”

“Brian Kerr,” I said.

Ritter nodded. “It was only the second or third time I went when he told me he knew I was different. I didn't plan to tell anybody. I was a dumb shit, but I wasn't stupid enough to announce to a bunch of Jesus freaks I saw dead people. But they were saying, like, everybody experiences things they can't explain, the world's full of mysteries, maybe you know about them, blah blah blah, and I thought, maybe they'd understand? And one day Brian came up to me and said, ‘We can make it go away.' I told him I didn't know what the hell of he was talking about, so he got one of the younger girls to talk to me. She was always saying things like, ‘It doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just means you have something bad attached to you, you have a darkness inside you,' other crap like that.”

Violet's lines hadn't changed much since then.

Ritter went on, “I didn't listen at first because, whatever, my ghosts didn't hurt anybody. But she was really convincing. I started to think, oh shit, she's right, this isn't normal, there is something seriously wrong with me. So I said okay. They could fix me.”

“What did they do?” I asked.

“They took it away,” Ritter said.

“How?”

Ritter looked at me for a long, long moment. “I don't remember.”

In Brian Kerr's memories, there were towering pine trees, the scent of the forest, a yawning dark hole in the side of a mountain, and fear. His fear. He had been dragging other people to their deaths, but he was as scared of what waited in that darkness as they were. No matter how many times he walked away alive, he was still afraid.

“But it worked?” I said. “Whatever they did, it worked?”

Ritter glanced down, tapped the wooden body of the ukulele, shrugged and laughed a little, humorless and tired. “Yeah. I guess. I miss them, you know? The ghosts. They never hurt me. I kind of liked them. That one outside our house, I couldn't tell who it was, but I used to pretend it was a kid like me who died riding his bike or something, and I'd talk to him like he could hear. I wouldn't mind seeing them again.”

He was quiet after that. All around us was the lazy commotion of a crowded street on a Saturday morning, but nobody gave us a second look. I felt the tendril tug of a killer, somebody besides Zeke, but I couldn't pick out who it was before the sensation was gone.

“That girl you met,” I said. “That was Violet?”

“Yeah. Redhead. Sweet little kid, but creepy too.”

“I need to talk to her.”

“No way,” Ritter said, shaking his head. “Bad idea. All that stuff about being cursed and releasing your soul from evil and all that bullshit, she believes it. She believes everything that bastard tells her.”

Maybe she had ten years ago, but I wasn't sure it was true anymore. Violet had let me go, or tried to. Even Lyle, who I could barely think about without shuddering, had apologized as he snapped my bones and tore my skin. Something was broken at the center of Mr. Willow's congregation. His foot soldiers were not as loyal as he believed them to be.

“I want to talk to her anyway. You know how to get in touch
with them, don't you? Who did you call for Rain?”

“This kid Danny. Danny Mendoza. He's all right. They told him they couldn't help him, but they kept him around anyway. Working for them, you know, doing whatever.”

Truck Stop Danny, the trying-too-hard Goth who could see a girl across a parking lot and know she was a monster and send her right into Mr. Willow's hands. No wonder they kept him around.

Zeke asked, “Why would he do that?”

Ritter shrugged. “He's not into their shit, man, but it's not like he has anywhere else to go.”

“You have to call him again,” I said.

Ritter was already shaking his head. “No. Not a chance. I am done with those people.”

“You did it before.”

“Because I thought—” He stopped, looked at Rain, frowned in confusion. “You said you needed— What did you need?”

“It doesn't matter,” Rain said. “You don't care. You didn't care before, and you don't care now. You know it's none of your business.”

Ritter was holding the neck of the ukulele so tight I thought it would snap. “But I—”

“It's only a favor,” Rain said. All of her easy friendliness was gone. She was looking right at Ritter, and her eyes were like embers. “A little favor. I'll owe you one. No big deal. Just call the guy.”

Zeke glanced at me, but I didn't need the warning. I knew what she was doing.

“I don't think,” Ritter began, but he was reaching into his pocket for his phone. “What am I supposed to say to him?”

Rain looked at me, and I said quietly, “Violet's the one I need to talk to.”

“Find out how Breezy can talk to that Violet girl. That's all.”

Ritter looked at the phone like he wasn't sure what to do with it. “That's all? I don't want to go back. I don't—I can't—”

“You don't have to go back. They'll never know you were involved.”

His face was pale except for two flushed smudges on his cheeks. He made the call.

Rain leaned close to listen to the conversation, and she murmured in Ritter's ear to guide his replies. It might have been intimate, almost romantic, if only he didn't look so scared. He spoke for a minute or two, then looked up and held the phone out to me.

“He wants to talk to you.”

I accepted the phone. “Yeah?”

“You're an idiot.” Truck Stop Danny. He sounded younger over the phone. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“What do you care what I'm doing? I should be dead now, thanks to you.”

“I didn't think you'd actually be stupid enough to go to them.”

“Then why did you even try?”

“Because it's a hundred bucks for me for every stupid one,” he said. “And I need to eat. Not my fault you fell for that shelter-from-the-storm bullshit.”

“But I learned so many interesting things from the experience.”

“You know they're looking for you. You and the nightmare. They know she's hanging around Boulder a lot.”

“They're here?” My skin crawled. I couldn't stop myself from looking up and down the street, as though I might spot Mr. Willow lurking right there among the shoppers and students.

“Just the crazy chick right now,” Danny said. “The pastor and his attack dog are dealing with the cops in Wyoming.”

“Violet's here? Where is she?”

Danny didn't answer right away.

“You know where she is,” I said. “Tell me.”

“You should get out of there,” Danny said. “Leave town. Forget about them.”

“I will. After I talk to Violet.”

“You didn't get enough of her already?”

“Why don't you want to tell me? You didn't have any trouble sending me to her before.”

Danny sighed loudly. “You know what? You're right. You're not my problem. I am done with this shit.”

“Good for you. Tell me how to find Violet.”