Chapter 10
I slipped out into the darkness like a shadow.
I bypassed the front stairs, which creaked under weight, and took the narrow back staircase that led down into the laundry room.
The concrete floor of the basement was cold beneath my boots. I walked through the darkness, navigating by memory, until I reached the heavy bilco doors that opened directly out into the rear garden.
I lifted the rusted iron crossbar.
I pushed the metal doors up into the roaring night.
The gale hit me instantly, drenching my face in freezing rain. The smell of saturated mud and wet hemlock filled my nostrils.
I climbed up the stone steps, eased the cellar doors shut behind me, and slipped into the blackness of the trees.
***
The hike through the outer woods was a trial of mud and tangled brush.
Blackwood Ravine lay two miles north of the Vance property line, cutting a deep scar through the state forest preserve. There were no marked trails here; the county had abandoned the old reservoir decades ago when the concrete dam cracked, leaving behind a wasteland of drowned timber, collapsed sluice gates, and sheer mudstone cliffs.
I didn't turn on the flashlight.
I didn't need to. I had walked this path countless times in my nightmares, and twice on the night I buried her.
My boots sank ankle-deep into the sucking clay with every step. Wet hemlock branches whipped across my face, tearing at the hood of my slicker. The sound of the wind tearing through the pine canopy above was deafening—a continuous roar that masked the sound of my labored breathing and the squelch of my boots.
After forty minutes of climbing, the ground suddenly dropped away beneath my feet.
The Ravine.
I stood at the lip of the ridge, looking down into the darkness.
Seventy feet below, the swollen waters of the drainage creek rushed violently past the fractured concrete ruins of the old reservoir pump house.
I switched on the tactical flashlight, keeping the red beam pointed strictly at the ground three feet in front of my toes.
The narrow path that wound down the western embankment was completely washed out. Where the trail used to run, a slick slide of red clay and shale tumbled straight down into the gully.
I gripped the strap of my duffel bag, braced myself against the trunk of a stunted birch, and slid down the embankment.
The descent was rough. Mud surged over my boots, scraping against my knees, but I dug my heels into the silt, sliding in a controlled fall until my boots slammed against the cracked concrete apron of the reservoir foundation.
I was at the bottom.
The air down here was thick with the smell of stagnant water, decaying pine needles, and wet slate.
Towering over the western edge of the ruins was the landmark: the fallen western cedar.
It was a colossal, ancient tree that had fallen decades ago, its massive trunk resting across the collapsed stone foundation like a fallen pillar, its tangled root system exposed like a web of petrified serpents.
It was there.
Beneath those roots. Under the three slabs of gray foundation slate.
My pulse hammered against my ears like a drum.
I scrambled across the slick, broken concrete, uncaring of the mud coating my slicker, and dropped to my knees in front of the cedar root ball.
The earth here had been disturbed.
The thick carpet of pine needles that had covered the hollow for ten years had been scraped aside. The red clay was raw, exposed, and heavily gouged, turned into a slurry of thick muck by the pouring rain.
Someone had been digging.
A sharp jolt of fury and terror tore through my chest, swallowed whole by the howling wind.
I unzipped the duffel bag and pulled out the steel entrenching spade.
I didn't care about noise anymore. I didn't care about stealth. All that mattered was the box. All that mattered was confirming that the secret of my life remained locked beneath the earth.
I drove the steel spade into the rain-drenched loam with desperate force.
*Thunk.*
The blade sank into the muck. I leveraged the handle, hurling a heavy clump of wet clay over my shoulder.
*Thunk.*
Rain streamed down my face, stinging my eyes, plastering wet strands of hair across my forehead. I dug with furious momentum, my breath tearing from my lungs in ragged gasps, my shoulders aching with exertion.
Six inches. A foot. Eighteen inches.
The clay was heavy, dense with iron and stone, resisting every thrust of the blade.
"She's dead," I muttered through clenched teeth, rain pouring down my cheeks. "You're dead, Daisy. You never came back."
I thrust the spade down with all the weight of my body.
*CLANG.*
The sharp, hollow reverberation traveled straight up the steel shaft into my wrists.
Not a rock.
Not a root.
It was the unmistakable sound of steel striking aged wood.
The lid of the pine chest.
My heart surged into my throat with a dizzying wave of monstrous relief.
It was still here.
The box hadn't washed away. The flood hadn't taken it.
I dropped the spade into the mud and fell forward onto my hands and knees, burying my arms into the waterlogged hole.
I tore away the thick clumps of clay with my gloved hands, uncaring of the sharp slate fragments scraping against the rubber, digging until my fingers found the edge of the chest's iron latch.
The wood was rotted, spongy, yielding beneath my grip.
I grabbed the broken corner of the pine lid and pulled upward with all my strength.
The rotted timber gave way with a wet snap.
I pulled the tactical flashlight from my pocket, turned the red beam down into the dark cavity beneath the cedar roots, and cleared the muck away to look down into the void.
There, resting in the silt and stagnant water, nestled among the decayed shreds of a mustard-colored corduroy jacket, lay the bleached, undisturbed curve of a skeleton.
The remains were here.
She had never left.
A breathless, triumphant sound escaped my lips.
"I knew it," I whispered, reaching into my slicker pocket to pull out the rusted hummingbird locket, ready to drop it back into the darkness where it belonged. "I knew you were dead. You're nothing. You're just bones in the—"
A sharp click echoed through the trees.
The darkness of the clearing was instantly obliterated.
A blinding, roaring wall of pure white light exploded through the pine trees behind me, vaporizing the shadows of the ravine.
Two high-beam halogen headlights, mounted high on the push-bar of an engine idling twenty feet away on the old access spur, pinned me against the cedar roots with searing brilliance.
I froze over the open grave, my hands caked in ten-year-old mud, the silver locket clutched in my trembling fingers, staring blindly into the glaring wall of light as a siren let out a single, deafening wail.
