Page 91 of Stay Buried

“We got the mark the next morning. Later on, I heard there was a mark on your mother’s door too.” He looked at her.

“They found her car four days later. Parked at a bridge two hours south of here. The police say she jumped, but I never believed it.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I really am.”

“I’m sorry too,” Ashley said, meaning it. She was crying now. “Please,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “If it’s not too much, can you tell me about that day? About the fire?”

He looked stricken. “Anna wasn’t supposed to be there at the town hall. She was going to stay at home. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you get the mark. Stay home and wait…” His voice trailed off.

“But she went in anyway?”

He nodded. “Maybe to look for whatever that last piece of proof was.” He took another long sip from the bottle.

“Who started the fire?”

Willy looked down at the bottle in his hands. “It was the knackerman.”

“I heard…” Ashley went on, trying not to go too far, but longing to hear whatever details he might share. “I heard that you went into the burning building. That you tried to save her.”

He gripped the bottle tightly, staring at his hands with their dirty nails. “I tried. I saw her there in the flames. I tried to get to her—” His voice dissolved into a sob.

“It’s awful,” Ashley said, putting a hand on his arm and squeezing, “what happens to the ones who leave us. But what’s more awful is that we have to find a way to go on living.”

“Sometimes I see her, my wife,” Willy told her. “Sometimes she tells me things.”

“Sometimes I see my mother too,” she admitted, deciding to leave out the gruesome details. “She gives me messages. Or tries to, I think.”

“Maybe they don’t ever really leave us,” he said. “Not all the way.”

And for the first time, she felt it: the truth. That maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t crazy. That they hadn’t been grief-induced hallucinations. Maybe her mother had actually found a way back, a passage between the world of the dead and the world of the living, had returned to warn Ashley, to try to explain what had happened, what danger she might be in. And maybe Sad Willy wasn’t just the town drunk imagining he was visited by his dead wife: maybe she actually came back and talked to him.

Sad Willy capped the bottle, stashed it back inside his sleeping bag, then stood up. “I’ve gotta go,” he said. “There’s something I’ve gotta do.”

“Thank you,” Ashley said. “For talking to me.”

He gave her a hand as she stepped out of the cellar hole.

“You be safe now,” he said. “Can you find your way back to the bridge?”

“Yeah, I’ll just follow the path.”

He began limping off in the opposite direction they’d come from.

“Willy?” she called after him. “One more thing.”

“Yeah?” He stopped, looked back at her.

“Do you know who the knackerman is?”

He smiled at her. “We’re all the knackerman,” he said, then turned and walked away.

THIRTY-SIXMINI

October 18, 2016

Mini walked through the woods, wondering if she’d been wrong to share so much with Ashley. To tell her about the white horse, to show her the watch. It made her feel strange to think she was carrying the watch that once belonged to Dr. Endicott but had been given as a gift to some person named Frankie she’d never even heard of. But why did the knackerman have Frankie’s watch? The questions lined up like a row of dominoes in her head, running into each other, knocking each other down, not giving her any answers.

She thought about Sad Willy losing his wife in the fire in the town hall and what it must have been like to be trapped in there, surrounded by flames, smoke so thick you couldn’t see, probably couldn’t even find your way out if you tried.