Page 129 of Stay Buried

It couldn’t be true. It was awful, too awful to think of.

Willy turned away from her. “She was supposed to be at home. She told me she’d stay home.”

Mini’s legs felt like spaghetti. She dropped to her knees beside the open grave.

“I tried to save her. But I was wearing the costume, and she ran from me. I called to her, but she ran right into the fire.”

Mini made a little gasping sound as all the air left her. She felt lightheaded, empty, like a deflated balloon.

“I’m sorry,” Willy whimpered, shoulders shaking, crying now.

Then he let out an angry, knackerman roar, drove the shovel down hard again, and stopped, looking down.

He’d hit something.

He scraped away dirt with the shovel, then bent over, brushing at it with his gloved hands. There was nothing down there, Mini knew. The knackerman’s remains were in the church.

So what had Willy found?

Willy jumped back, scrabbled and pulled himself out of the grave.

Mini aimed the beam of her flashlight down into the hole and saw what Willy had uncovered.

She let out a high-pitched, frantic scream, dropping the flashlight.

“Shh, Mini,” he said, wrapping his arms in the heavy leather coat around her, rocking her. “Close your eyes,” he told her. “Don’t look.”

FIFTY-NINEASHLEY

October 18, 2016

Pops had his rifle pointing at Malcolm, who held his hands up, blood from the gash on his hand trickling down his arm. Josephine came up to the shrine, and made a disgusted sound when she saw the damage. “And to think, I had such high hopes for you, Malcolm. You could have fulfilled your destiny. Justlookat what you’ve done. This holy placedefiled!” She shot angry glares at Pops and Jack too. Ash thought they looked sheepish, and wondered at the power Josephine wielded.

“Destiny?” Malcolm said.

“You felt it, didn’t you? When you first came? Knew you were tied to this place. That you had a special role here. The visions you had of your ancestral home, the ones you told me about, they led you here for a reason. You could have hadeverything.”

People were filtering into the church now, gathering around, taking seats in pews, answering the call of the bell. Some came in talking loudly with their neighbors about how he’d marked every house. Some came in with heads bowed low, whispering, frightened of what might happen next.

“But now look,” Josephine said to Malcolm, shaking her head in disgust. “How dare you? Destroying these sacred relics! And with his blood in your veins!” She gestured to the painting of the knackerman. Malcolm and Ashley turned to look at it. They locked eyes as the realization hit them both.

“It makes sense,” Ash said to him. “Right before Mom came here, she did a DNA test that showed Thomas Endicott wasn’t Gram’s father.”

“Your grandmother wanted no part of it,” Josephine said bitterly. “She found out her true heritage and ran away like a coward, cut off all her ties to Boone’s Ferry. Refused to take her rightful place as a leader here in town. Shameful.”

More people were trickling in, including a lanky man in a blaze-orange knit cap who rushed toward Josephine, shouting, “Miss Banks! You’ve gotta help us! What are we going to do? Half the town’s been marked!”

Pops lowered his gun, put a hand on the man’s back, and said, “Come on, Neil, let’s go sit down. We’ll get it sorted.”

“Why are the strangers here?” demanded a man from the front pew.

Josephine’s eyes darted from Ashley and Malcolm to the growing crowd of townspeople.

“These two belong to him!” she cried out. “They’ve been marked. We’ll give them to him.”

“Dozens have been marked,” called a woman from the middle of the church. “Why? What does it mean?”

“Is he coming for us? Is he here?” said someone else.