Black-Eyed Susans (20 page)

“OK, where?”
Bill’s tone indicates he may be losing some faith in my treasure hunt. Once again,
I regret involving him.

I point to the left side of the yard, at the
very back. The weeds are a wild and shaggy carpet, but you can still make out the small
hill that Mr. Bell used to call the Grassy Knoll. Lydia had inherited that need to
nickname things.

Bill follows behind me, dragging his left
shoe, trying to scrape off dog poop as he goes. I stop abruptly, lean over, and begin to
yank at weeds.

“What the hell are you doing?”
He glances back to the house. My weeding efforts have revealed a small metal door
planted sideways into the rise of the tiny hill.

The rusty padlock that holds it closed would
probably fall apart with a swift kick. I’m tempted.

“It’s an old storm cellar from
the ’30s when the house was built. I don’t recall Lydia’s family ever
using it. Mrs. Bell thought they were better off in the bathtub during tornado warnings
than hanging out with poisonous spiders and beetles in a black hole.”

“Where were the flowers?”

“Planted across the top. There’s
always been a layer of dirt above the concrete. Used to be grass.”

“You didn’t bring a
shovel,” Bill says, almost to himself. He’s trying to fit the pieces
together, and I’m holding back the big one. “You think he buried something
for you … in the storm cellar?”

An image of Charlie flashes into my mind,
crammed on a bus with shrieking volleyball girls, headed to Waco.

I’m missing her game for this.

“Yes.” I place two fingers on my
wrist and feel my racing pulse, because Lydia always did. “Last night, I dreamed
that Lydia is down there. That the flowers marked her grave.”

“Do you ever have
nightmares?”

The doctor’s demeanor today, all stiff
and formal, suggests he has renewed purpose. I imagine him stabbing at a random page in
his Book of Tricks right before I arrived. It is probably thick as a loaf of bread, with
crackled yellow pages, a worn red velvet cover, and thousands of useless magic
spells.

“Let me think,” I say.
I’ve added this cheerful line to my arsenal of
sure
and
sounds
good,
part of my campaign to get off this couch as soon as possible.

I
could
tell him that last
night’s dream wasn’t exactly a nightmare, as my nightmares go, and that his
daughter, Rebecca, was the guest star. I was camped out in the grave with the Susans,
per usual. Rebecca peered down at us, pale and pretty, in one of my mother’s
flowered church dresses. She fell to her knees and extended a hand. Her hair, wound in
these goofy old-fashioned ringlets, tickled my cheek. Her fingers, when they reached me,
were white-hot. I woke up, my arm on fire, choking for air.

I could tell him, but I won’t. It
seems unkind to bring it up, and I am working on being kinder.

“I dream a lot about the grave.”
This is the first time I’ve
admitted this. It also happens to be
true. “The dream is always exactly the same until the end.”

“Are you in the grave? Or hovering
above it?”

“For most of the dream, I’m
lying in it, waiting.”

“Until someone rescues you?”

“No one ever rescues us.”

“What do you hear?”

A truck engine. Thunder. Bones crackling like firewood. Someone cursing.

“It depends on the ending,” I
say.

“If you don’t mind, tell me
about the different endings.”

“It is pouring rain, and we drown in
muddy water. Or snow falls until it covers our faces like a baby blanket, and we
can’t see.”
Or breathe.
I swig out of the glass of water his
secretary always leaves for me. It tastes a little like the lake smells.

“And to be clear …
we
means … Merry and … the bones.”

“It means the Susans.”

“Are there … other endings
besides those?”

“A farmer doesn’t see us and
shovels dirt into the hole with his tractor plow. Someone lights a match and drops it
inside. A huge black bear decides the hole is the perfect place to hibernate and lies
down on top of us. That’s one of the nicer endings. All of us just go to sleep. He
snores. Anyway, you get the idea.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, sometimes he comes back and
finishes the job. Buries us for real.”
With bags and bags of manure.

“He … meaning the
killer?”

I don’t answer, because once again, it
seems obvious.

“Do you ever see a face?” he
asks.

Come on, doesn’t he think I would
have said if I saw his face?
Still, I think about his question. Rebecca’s
is the only face I’ve ever seen in this recurring event. She was lovely in her
first appearance last night. Big, innocent eyes, dark corkscrew curls, skin like ivory
silk.

She looked very much like
Lillian Gish, probably because Lydia and I had just rented
Birth of a
Nation.

Lydia says that Lillian Gish loved to play
tortured characters,
as a rebellious counter to her devastating beauty.
Lydia
knows this because her dad has a huge crush on this actress, even though Lillian Gish is
quite dead. She said her dad especially likes the finale of
Way Down East,
where Lillian floats unconscious on an ice floe toward a seething waterfall, while her
long hair dangles in the water like a snake. Right after she told me, Lydia said she
shouldn’t have. That it might provoke more nightmares while I was
in this
state.

It ticked me off. She hardly ever says
things like that. It makes me worry. Am I looking in more of a state than usual?
Isn’t she noticing I’m more cheerful? Aren’t I getting better?

Either way, it probably isn’t
relevant
to tell the doctor about his daughter showing up in my dream as a
silent movie queen, wearing my mother’s clothes
.
It was certainly weird
and random, like just about everything else.

“No,” I say. “I
don’t see his face.”

Once again, I’m in the shadows.
Watching.

My body is tucked under the eaves, pressed
against the cold, dirty siding, hopefully out of camera range for the television van
camped by the curb out front.

I’m trying to steady my nerves by
picturing Lydia’s yard the way it used to be: green, neat, and shady with two
giant clay pots of red and white impatiens on each of the front corners of the flat
concrete porch. Always red and white, like the Christmas lights that Mr. Bell strung
along the front roofline that every single year ended ten bulbs short on one side. It
was tradition for my father to comment on it whenever we drove by.

Lucy and Ethel used to live back here. Mr.
Bell’s hunting dogs. When he wasn’t around to call them off, their excited
claws left little white streaks on my calves. The old boat was usually up on blocks in
the back corner, perpetually waiting for July 4th. Lydia and I used to throw off the
tarp when Mr. Bell wasn’t home so we could do our homework and work on our leg
tans at the same time.

But there’s a circus assembling here
today. And I’m responsible for it. My gut cramps. Bill and Jo are staking their
reputations on me.

It took three days for Bill to retrieve the
judge’s permission to dig at Lydia’s house and another twenty-four hours to
set the time for
2
P.M.
, which is exactly fourteen
minutes from now. The district attorney was surprisingly cooperative, probably because
the police are getting killed in the media. A local newspaper editorial criticized the
county for “an embarrassing lack of Texas frontier justice in not identifying the
bones of the Black-Eyed Susans and returning them to their families.”

It wasn’t a particularly well-written
or researched opinion, just fiery, something Southern journalists are good at pulling
out of the air on a slow day. But it had worked a little magic on Judge Harold Waters,
who still reads newspapers and has presided over the Black-Eyed Susan case from the
beginning. He scribbled his signature and handed it down from his perch on top of his
favorite cutting horse, Sal.

I barely remember Waters during the trial,
just that Al Vega was worried he was too wishy-washy on the death penalty. A few years
ago, I saw the judge on CNN giving an eyewitness account of a UFO hovering over
Stephenville “like a twenty-four-hour Super Walmart in the sky.”

“Could have been a worse draw,”
Bill had told me.

And so here we are, because of my dream
about Lydia, and a judge who believes in flying saucers.

Two uniformed cops are squaring off the back
yard with yellow crime tape. Jo is standing on top of the Grassy Knoll with the same
female detective who attended the meeting with Hannah’s family. A SMU geology
professor is rolling by with a high-tech ground-penetrating radar device on wheels that
will never in a million years fit through the door to the cellar. It barely fit through
the gate. His grim face says he’s figured this out.

Jo has told me that GPR is still more
theoretical than practical when searching for old bones underground, but she and Bill
decided it couldn’t hurt to add to the melodrama. The DA agreed. He’ll make
hay out of it either way.

The professor is the acknowledged local
expert in the complicated task of reading GPR imagery. Still, the ground is not a womb,
and Jo tells me he will not be able to discern a skeletal face.
He’ll be searching for evidence of soil disturbances that would suggest someone
dug a grave once upon a time. He might be able to make out a human shape, but it’s
doubtful. He’s mostly part of the show.

The yard is now buzzing with conversations,
an impromptu lawn party that’s starting to gel. Bill is schmoozing the pretty
assistant district attorney assigned to witness this latest crazy turn of events. Her
real face is buried under a Southern coat of makeup. I’m calculating the distance
between them. Two feet, now one.

Mr. and Mrs. Gibson are propped up in lawn
chairs in their Sunday best Dallas Cowboys T-shirts, smoking like fiends, the only two
people who appear to be enjoying themselves. One of them has mowed the weeds for the
occasion.

The professor is suddenly making a beeline
for them. He shakes their hands. From his wild gesticulating, I’ve deduced that
the professor wants to run his device over both the front and back yards. The Gibsons
are vigorously nodding yes.

Are they imagining movie rights? Is that what prompted Mrs. Gibson to wash her hair
and stick on flip-flops and fresh toe Band-Aids? Is she hoping to add a plaque under
her No Soliciting sign that declares this house a historical landmark, like Lizzie
Borden’s?

The gate clanks behind me, and the back yard
suddenly snaps to attention. Four more people are striding in. Two cops in jeans,
hoisting shovels and a metal detector. Two women in CSI protective gear with an unlit
lantern and a large camera. Their arrival signals that my tortured wait is almost
over.

Across the yard, one of the uniformed cops
is already cutting through the lock on the storm cellar. He yanks on the door and it
gives way easily. He leaps back and slaps a hand over his nose and mouth, as does every
person within ten feet of the door. Even Jo, who told me that on the site of the 9/11
tragedy, she smelled things she will never forget.

Now everything is going too fast. One of the
crime scene investigators is busily handing out masks. One of the cops in jeans
disappears into the hole like an agile snake. The shovel and lantern
are handed down to him. Next, a CSI disappears. The space must be tiny, because everyone
else remains aboveground. Eager. Chattering into the hole.

Mr. Bell would never let us open that door.
It’s nasty down there, girls.

Empty plastic evidence bags are dropped into
the cellar. In fifteen minutes, two of the bags return to the surface, bulging. They are
set alongside the back fence.

The CSI pokes her head out from the hole and
she beckons for the cop with the metal detector.
In case there is jewelry?
I
could tell them that Lydia always wore her grandmother’s thin gold wedding band
with the pinprick red ruby. I wonder for the hundredth time in four days why the cops
couldn’t find any of the Bell family in a search of public records. It’s as
if they sailed off the face of the earth.

Jo is offering her hand to the CSI, covered
with muck and filth, climbing up through the door. The cop with the metal detector
descends to take her place. The Gibsons are munching potato chips and passing a plastic
tub of ranch dip back and forth. The geologist is methodically rolling his device over
the grounds like a wheelbarrow, pausing every now and then to read his screen.

A circus.

Another evidence bag is handed up from the
hole. And another and another. All of them are set along the back fence line with the
others. In the end, eight black bags, like the bodies of lumpy spiders, their legs
ripped off. Finally, both cops emerge, black from the knees down, tearing off latex
gloves. The group huddles for a short conversation.

Jo turns and searches the yard until her
eyes land on me. She walks toward me, her face twisted with concern, the longest twenty
yards of my life.

How could I have left Lydia down there for so long? Why did I not figure this out
sooner?

Jo’s hand is heavy on my shoulder.
“We didn’t find anything,
Tessa. We’re going to go a
little deeper, but they’ve already dug three feet and struck clay and limestone.
It would have taken the killer forever to dig through it. Seems very unlikely that he
did.”

“What … is in the
bags?”

“Someone used the place as a root
cellar. It was trashed with broken jars and rotting fruits and vegetables. And a couple
of now-dead moles that burrowed in somehow for a last supper. There was plenty of
moisture to keep it rancid. Cracks in the concrete.”