Buried Secrets (New Adult Dark Suspense Romance) (7 page)

“I don’t understand why,” she whispered, swallowing as she let her finger trail down over his Adam’s apple, feeling him swallow. “But I think Nick wanted us to kiss and make up.”

“Do you want to?” He turned more fully toward her, the question in his eyes.

“Kiss?” Her finger traced the V of his t-shirt, his jacket still undone.

“Yes.”

His lips were slightly parted, wet. So were hers. They were so close she’d lost focus and longed to close her eyes. Her body thrummed, so very alive, and the irony didn’t escape her because they were surrounded by death. Everything else faded away, lost its shape, until all she could focus on was Shane’s presence, the heat of his body, the way his hands moved down the curve of her shoulders to grip her upper arms.

“I don’t know why,” she confessed, finally letting her eyes close in anticipation, feeling him drawing her closer by micro increments. “But yes. Yes. Yes.”

She whispered the last three words, her lips almost touching his. His breath was warm, fruity and sweet, fingers tightening their grip on her arms. Then Shane groaned softly and Dusty’s eyes flew open when he pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length.

“Maybe you don’t.” He took a shaky breath. “But I know why.”

“Enlighten me,” she snapped, unable to suppress her sarcasm.

“You want to forget,” he said, still keeping her at bay, shaking his head sadly as he glanced at Nick’s headstone. “Not that I blame you.”

“Got it.” She jerked her shoulders out of his grip, sliding back on the grass to give them more space. “No more kissing.”

“Dusty, come on.” He nudged her knee with his moccasin. “As much as I’d like to, I just don’t think it’s such a good idea right now.”

She snorted, reaching into her pocket to check the time on her iPhone. She couldn’t make a phone call out here if she wanted to, there was no reception. She got zero bars. “Are you going to tell me I’m too vulnerable and you don’t want to take advantage of me?”

“No, princess.” He had his knees up, elbows cocked over them. “
I’m
too vulnerable and I don’t want
you
to take advantage of
me.”

Her head snapped up and when she saw the grin on his face she couldn’t help laughing.

“Hey, did you hear about the kid that got killed?” she asked, pocketing her iPhone again.

“Yeah.” Shane’s face hardened, eyes narrowing as he looked out across the cemetery. “What do you think I’m doing out here?”

“Looking for bodies?” she guessed.

He shook his head. “Looking for tracks.”

“And setting traps.”

“Whatever works.” He glanced over at the giant snapping jaws behind them. “I want that thing dead.”

“What thing?”

“Whatever it is.” He zipped his jacket back up.

“Not a bobcat? Or a cougar?”

Shane shrugged, standing, pulling his hat back over his head.

“Where’s your car?” she asked, shading her eyes again to look up at him. “Do you need a lift?”

“Parked it up the road. Out of sight,” he replied, nodding toward the trap. “And no thanks. I’ve got to set this baby.”

“Where’s your bait?”

He grinned, slinging his bow over his shoulder. “I haven’t killed it yet.”

“Ew.” She made a face, thinking about the poor opossum or raccoon waddling around the woods who would soon be skinned for bait. Dusty hugged herself, glancing around the cemetery, the breeze blowing strands of her hair that had escaped her braid away from her face. “Do you really think it’s unsafe to be here? In the graveyard?”

“Not during the day.” Shane reached into his pocket, pulling on a pair of gloves. Then he frowned down at her, forehead creasing in concern. “But promise me you won’t come out here at night.”

“Cross my heart.” She did and he smiled sadly at the gesture—it was something they did when they were kids.

“Good.” He grabbed the chain on the bear trap, lifting its weight easily. Shane was tall and lanky, but his shoulders were wide and seemed to be able to carry the weight of the whole world.

“You’re going?”

“Stay.” He reached a hand out, the one not holding the trap, tilting her chin up so she had to look into his eyes. They were dark with seriousness. “But I want you to leave before dusk. Promise me?”

“It’s only nine in the morning.” She rolled her eyes.

“Promise me,” he insisted sternly. “Today or any other day.
Never after dusk.”

“Okay,” she agreed, his urgent tone and the sharp, wary look in his eyes actually giving her goose bumps. If she didn’t know better, she could have sworn he almost looked… afraid.

“See ya, princess.” He leaned forward, pressing his lips to the part on the top of her head.

Then he headed toward the back of the cemetery and she watched his retreating form with mixed emotions. If someone had asked her the day she graduated what she would be doing in the fall, she never could have imagined sitting on her brother’s grave kissing—or almost kissing—Shane Curtis. She didn’t know what was more shocking—Nick’s death or her sudden, inexplicable attraction to a guy she had spent most of her adolescence actively hating.

“Hey, Nick, look at me,” she whispered, tracing the D in his name on the headstone. “I’m mending fences. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

She glanced up to see if anyone was around to see her talking to a grave, but there was no one. Shane had disappeared over the crest of the next hill. The only witness was a fat chipmunk sitting on the edge of a tall headstone, his cheeks stuffed. He stopped to look at her, chattering angrily for a moment before turning and scampering behind a nearby mausoleum.

Her finger followed the line below, stopping at
life eternal.

“Julia thinks you’re in heaven,” she told him. “I don’t know where you are, but I sure wish you were here.”

She felt a little crazy, talking to Nick like this, but it felt good too. Cathartic. She’d been longing to talk to him for days.

“If you’re up there…” Dusty turned her face up to the clear blue September sky. “Or… anywhere… could you send me a sign? Because I miss you so much, Nicky, and I just wish I could talk to you about this. You drop this whole me and Shane Curtis thing like a bomb on my head and then go and get yourself killed… what the hell?”

She sniffed, feeling tears stinging her eyes, letting them fall without wiping them away. What difference did it make? There was no one there to see them.

“I just want to know what you think I should do, because this thing with Shane, it’s got me…”

She didn’t even know how to finish that sentence. Confused? Crazy? Stupid? She didn’t really know if there was anything there at all. Shane hadn’t seemed surprised by Nick saying they probably would have ended up together if he hadn’t been around, but he hadn’t confirmed the idea either. She didn’t have any clue how he really felt. In the end, she didn’t even know how
she
really felt.

Her stupid brother had planted a seed in her head and now it was growing like a weed.

“What should I do?” she asked, tears falling onto the gray marble of his headstone. “Just… tell me what I should do.”

She was asking about Shane, but also about her life, her future, everything. It all felt directionless now without him. She was drifting like a boat in the middle of the ocean with no rudder or sail. Dusty sighed, standing up and wiping off the seat of her pants before retrieving her purse where she’d left it on the ground. As she turned toward the front of the cemetery to walk back, she glimpsed it out of the corner of her eye.

At first she thought she must be dreaming.

She froze, staring in disbelief at the bald eagle sitting on top of the chest-high wrought-iron fence surrounding the cemetery. It sat between two spires, head turned to the side, one eye fixed on her. There was no mistaking that hooked, yellow beak, the smooth white feathered head and brown body. Perched that way, it looked like it was wearing a soft, brown fur coat. The spiked spires on the fence were a foot tall and the eagle was twice that size. It was the biggest bird she’d ever seen in the wild. It made the crow she’d seen earlier look diminutive in comparison.

“Nick.” She whispered her brother’s name, knowing of course it wasn’t him, not really. But the goose bumps on her arms and the way the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up told another story. Was this really the sign she’d asked for?

Then the eagle spread its wings, making her gasp out loud at their enormous span, and it took off, flapping gracefully as it gained height. She shaded her eyes, watching it gain altitude, realizing it was heading toward her. Its shadow reached her first, blocking out the sun, and then it was soaring overhead. It circled, calling once, twice, a high sound, and then soared on, skating the updrafts.

Smiling through her tears, Dusty wondered if Shane heard the eagle’s call, however far away he’d walked into the woods. The cemetery was backed up to hundreds of acres of state forest. He could have been a quarter mile in already. But she had a feeling the eagle had been sent not just for her, but for Shane as well.

She hoped he’d seen it too.

✝
Chapter Seve
n
✝

The door was closed.

She had to pass it every day.

It bothered her.

The door stayed shut, a poster of Murphy's Law thumb-tacked to it
.
“It's okay to be a pessimist once in a while, Nick,” she remembered saying when she gave the poster to him.

She passed it on her way to breakfast. She passed it coming down the hall late at night, when she was tired enough she thought she might be able to get some sleep. She passed it, wet and shivering and wrapped in a towel, after taking a shower. She had passed it at least twice a day, every day, for the past two weeks... but she still didn’t have the nerve to look inside.

Julia hadn’t mentioned cleaning it out or going through his things again. She had changed his sheets and made his bed and Dusty had watched all of that with mixed feelings of horror and awe. Then the door had been shut again.

It scared her.

Not so much the fact that the room was there and she had to go by it, or that all of his things were still in it, or that there were clean sheets waiting for him. Those things bothered her, but it was more than just that.

It was the door—the closed door.

One of Julia's favorite gripes had been that Nick never shut his door when he was changing. Dusty had always been able to go by on her way to her room and see him sitting on his bed, doing his homework, reading, munching on pretzels and drinking Mountain Dew. Sometimes he would call her in, sometimes he was gone—but the door was always left wide open.

In the middle of the night, if she would get up to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom, she would hear him breathing. Sometimes, if the moon was full—and Nick left the shade up, curtains open and, whenever possible, the window gaping—she could see him curled up, the covers mostly kicked off.

It was unsettling to see the door shut. It was unnatural. Julia had shut the door and had somehow managed to shut Nick out of their lives without having to deal with it, and Dusty didn’t have the nerve to open it back up. She passed it, feeling guilty, knowing it just wasn’t right for it to be closed. It stung. Nick's door stayed open. Always open.

Dusty put her hand on the doorknob.

Her palms were sweating, trembling. She stared for the longest time at Murphy’s Law.
Anything that can go wrong, will
. Oh, that was the truth. Everything had gone wrong, and it was getting more and more wrong every day. It had never occurred to her things could go wrong, as wrong as
this
, and never get any better.

Everything shifted out of focus, as if the world was tilting. Her hand felt disconnected from her body as it turned the doorknob, and…

What are you doing? Oh my God, you aren’t really going in there, you aren’t really

…pushed it open.

It was easy. Somehow she thought there would be resistance, but the door swung open wide—no squeaky hinges, no cobwebs.

She couldn’t breathe. Her heart, hammering near the back of her throat, was getting in the way. She leaned against the door frame, wide-eyed and frozen, rejecting the possibility, even as her brother,
her dead brother
, smiled at her from his bed.

She found her voice.

Then she began to scream.

“Dusty?”

Julia. It was Julia calling up from downstairs. Dusty took her hand away from her mouth and for a moment she felt everything slipping sideways. She could barely get air into her lungs, as if something heavy sat on her chest. She felt the floor dropping away. She was falling.

And then it was okay again. She leaned against the door frame, staring into the Kodak paper-eyes of Nick and Shane—just a picture!—lying on the bed.

“It’s okay.” The steadiness of her own voice surprised her. “It was… nothing.”

She moved into the room.

His bed, his dresser, his CD collection—everything was still there, as if waiting for him to return to it.

His models—the ’68 Corvette she’d helped him do one rainy afternoon, the Blue Angel planes—sat collecting dust on his shelves. His walls—an Avengers poster, a Detroit Red Wings pennant, a bright red Porsche Carrera GT. A well-loved and often used skateboard that hadn’t seen pavement in years stuck out from his closet. His skis stood propped against a chair in one corner, just waiting to be waxed so they could hit the slopes.

He was everywhere. He filled all the available space, nearly tangible. His presence followed her as she moved about the room, just looking, not daring to touch. There was a half-eaten bag of Doritos sitting on his dresser, neatly clothes-pinned shut. Waiting. She realized with a sinking feeling that Julia would never be able to yell at him again for having food in his room.

Ultraomnipresent.
Wasn’t that the word Nick loved, from that e.e. cummings poem? “If I was a superhero,” he’d said, ‘that’s what my powers would be.” Somehow she could feel him that way now. He was here that way…somehow…because he was…

“Hey there, Dusty.”

The voice, the finger poking her shoulder, was unmistakable, even as she whirled around. The life felt sucked right out of her body, her heart forgetting how to beat. She knew it was. She knew, because Nick was…was…

Here.

She screamed, looking into his face, looking
into his face.
Her brother was a gruesome puzzle someone tried to piece back together but hadn’t been quite successful. Flesh hung loosely from his scalp, flapping wetly as he cocked his head and smiled at her. His smile was too wide, because his lips were gone, exposing the pink flesh of his gums. His eyes—
what eyes?
—gaped, just holes in his head. Blood trailed like tears down his cheeks, running in rivulets through the rough terrain—what was left of his face.

She screamed.

She screamed and screamed
and screamed.

“Dusty.”
The voice, rough and gritty, made her shudder. That wasn’t Nick’s voice. It couldn’t be.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her, looking for all the world like he was grinning, but he wasn’t, there was just no skin left over his teeth, and the blood, so dark it was black, traced inky tears from his
—
holes
—eyes, that loose piece of flesh drooping against his head, moving whenever he did with a wet flopping-fish sound.

She couldn’t help it. She screamed
and screamed…

“Dusty! Wake up! Dusty!”

The real world slipped slowly back as her father shook her dizzy.

“Are you okay?” He peered into her face. He had his fuzzy blue robe on and she saw his outline in the faint light from the hall, haloing him, like some angel had appeared to save her.

“Dead,” she whispered thickly. “His eyes, there was...was...”

“Okay.” He pulled her close, holding her. She shuddered against him, and when the world clicked back into place, the sobs came, the force of the tears tremendous.

“Okay, it's okay.” He stroked her hair and she clutched him, trembling, eyes closed tight. “It's only a dream. You're all right.”

Dusty recognized the words and they terrified her. She’d heard them all of her life and she knew their meaning all too well. They were a parent's gentle fib, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy. Band-Aid words. False.

“It's okay,” he told her, and she heard the tightness in his voice. “Everything's going to be all right.”

They were lies. Gentle, sugar-coated words of comfort—just facades to keep life in focus, maybe even to keep insanity away. They twined themselves through the heart and mind, numbing their way.

The image of Nick standing there, grinning, sightless, scalp flopping, made her shudder and she drew a shaky breath. The numbness wasn’t enough. She needed something more powerful.

It was never going to be okay again.

For Dusty, if there was one place in Larkspur filled with memories of Nick, it was Cougar's General Store. The force of her memory was still unbearably painful, but there just wasn’t anywhere else to get the essentials without driving all the way out of town. She hadn’t gone into Cougar's because she didn’t want to remember. She didn’t even like to look at the store front with its rotting wooden porch and windows so filled with handwritten specials it was impossible to see inside.

But she couldn’t avoid it forever. Cougar’s dog, Sarge, an elderly German Shepherd, thumped his tail as she approached and she bent to pat his head before she went in. Cougar's door had never had bells on it to let him know when someone entered.

“I ain’t deaf,” he would say. “What do I need bells for?”

The store smelled of coffee and the tobacco Will Cougar used to fill his pipe. It wasn’t a huge store, not like the Safeway in Millsberg, but he kept a good variety.

“Anything you want I got, and if I don't have it, you don't need it!” he was fond of saying, and when she was little, Dusty would have sworn it was the truth.

She went down the third aisle and picked up a box of Tampax. She used to be embarrassed to buy them, especially in Cougar's, but the awkward shyness passed after she was fifteen or so.

It had surprised and scared her to find her period had started. It had happened the morning after her dream and the sight of blood had made her sick. She’d even stayed in bed with cramps, something she didn’t often do—unless she was trying to get out of going to church. It had startled her, although she knew she was due. Somehow, she still hadn’t expected it. That—more than the rising and setting sun, her parents’ continuing lives, time ticking away on the grandfather clock in the living room—hit home.

There was life after Nick.

Dusty moved down the aisle toward the back wall where the magazine and book racks were. Cougar tried to keep up on his shipments. Her eyes scanned the titles, drawn to the word
Horror
written in red letters. Underneath were the latest. Cougar used to stock the horror section just for them. She and Nick would split the cost of books and share them when they were kids, and they never really stopped.

She was about to go up to the register when a name caught her eye. Stephen King in bold black letters, and below that, the title
Joyland
. A familiar thrill went through her and she thought,
I wonder if Nick know
s—?

She bit her tongue, closing her eyes. The bitter taste of blood filled her mouth, but it cut the thought off. Thankfully. Thoughts like that came out of nowhere and they hit like a cartoon anvil falling out of the sky. They flattened her. In order to function, she had to find a way to keep from getting splattered on the pavement every time she had a thought about Nick and what he might do in the future, things he would never do again. So she bit her tongue or pinched herself as a distraction.

Sometimes when it happened, she felt nauseous, like she did now. She spent one terrifying moment believing she was truly going to be sick. She was going to barf Julia’s special brown-sugar-and-pecan oatmeal up, right onto old Cougar's floor...

And then it passed and she was okay again.

She took the book off the shelf. She’d been so busy she hadn’t read much lately. That was before applying for colleges and graduation. Before she found out Nick was dead. Now she had nothing but time. She tucked the book under her arm, deciding to buy it. If it took her mind off of the horror—the real horror of her life—it was worth it. She started back up the aisle.

“I knew I had them, Mike.”

Dusty looked up at the sound of Will's voice. He came out of the back room, followed by Mike White, Sarah White’s father. She knew Sarah from school—they’d graduated together. They moved toward the front of the store up the last aisle, toward the register.

“It was just a question of finding them. I don't like keeping these up front. Don’t want any kids getting their hands on them.”

“Yep, true ’nuff,” Mike drawled. They were from somewhere down south, Dusty remembered. Sarah had come into third grade with the most laughable accent. Her nickname had become “y'all” because it was all that came out of her mouth, especially, “Y’all talk funny, not me!”

“I don’t sell much ammo outside of deer season,” Will told him. She heard the old cash register totaling things up. “Although, with what’s been happening around here lately, I should probably start advertising in the window.”