Page 52 of Forever Dark
The mattress sagged in the middle like it always did.
This time the room stayed quiet.
Selena stared into the dark and pictured Brenda in the choir loft.Head bowed.Hands arranged.Candles below.Words on the wall.Someone out of view that wanted the killing to mean more than death.A crime of passion would have been left in disarray.This had meaning to it.
Her eyes stayed open long after the motel had gone still and the sounds of Eric’s movie had finished.Selena’s mind swirled around the murder, and what the killer wanted to say about someone like Brenda.
Was Brenda being punished?
Or purified?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Night settled over Hawthorne Graveyard with a slow, patient weight.
Headstones rose from the earth at slanted angles, some cracked through the middle, some sunk so deep the names sat almost level with the weeds.Old iron fencing leaned around family plots in rusted bends.A dead oak stood near the far wall with one long branch stretched toward the hill beyond, as though it had spent a century reaching for the abandoned church above.
The church watched over everything.
Its tower cut into the sky, black against the low clouds, the cross at its peak only half visible in the dark.No light shone from within.No voice carried from it.The elements had stripped the paint, loosened the boards, and darkened the stone.The place had been deserted by men.That meant very little.Men abandoned holy places all the time.God never did.
The man stood before one of the older graves and lowered himself into a crouch.
Moss covered the front of the stone in a thick green film.A gloved hand moved over it in slow, careful strokes, peeling back the damp growth until the carving showed itself.The letters were shallow with age but still legible.A woman’s name.Beneath it, the date of death.1896.Buried with her infant child after dying in childbirth.
Survived by her son and her loving husband.
He read the words twice, then tilted his head.
“A terrible tragedy for your family,” he said.
Wind moved through the graveyard, stirring the weeds around his boots.
“But God must have willed it.At least you’re with Him now.”
His mouth tightened as he looked away from the stone.
“Unlike this trash.”
Several feet behind him, a woman strained against the bindings with what little strength she had left.Her arms had been pulled wide and tied to either end of the long horizontal grave marker that held her in place.Stone pressed against her back.Her coat had fallen open.Blood soaked the front of her blouse and ran in dark ribbons over her throat.More of it had gathered at the corner of her mouth, where each attempted cry collapsed into a wet gargle.
She tried again.
The sound barely carried.
He rose and turned fully toward her.
Moonlight caught the panic in her eyes.It had deepened during the last few minutes, passed from confusion into understanding, then crossed into the raw certainty that no one was coming and nothing she said mattered now.This moment always interested him.To see a person relinquish the delusion that life would just go on and on like an idle sunny day.
He stepped beside the stone and looked down at her.
“Shhh,” he whispered.“It’ll all be over soon.”
Her body jerked as she tried to pull free.The ropes bit deeper into her wrists.A broken plea formed at her lips, ruined by the blood.
“It’s too late for begging.”
A tremor ran through one of her legs.Her shoe scraped uselessly against the ground.Mud clung to the heel.He noticed small things at times like this.A chipped fingernail.A torn hem.Cheap perfume still clinging to a scarf.Details of the life that had brought them here, to this place, to this correction.
