Graveyard Games (7 page)

“
No?”

He glanced down at the headstone and then
lifted his gaze off into the distance. “I think…honestly, I think
he came back because this town loved him.”

Dusty smiled, blinking back tears. “I did,
too.”

“
Yeah, so did I.” Chris’
voice broke when he said it and she looked up at him
sharply.

She had forgotten about him almost, but
Shane startled her when he stuck two fingers in his mouth and
whistled.

Chris glanced over his shoulder. "Gotta go."
Shane motioned to him. "Take care of yourself, Dusty."

He headed down the hill, not looking back at
her. Like a trained puppy dog, she thought as he climbed carefully
over the chest-high spiked fence.

She watched them get into the Mustang. Shane
stepped hard on the gas, dust flying from underneath his tires as
he skidded down the path running next to the fence and up onto
Hubbard, heading toward town. He never was one to use a front
entrance, she thought.

He's lying—or he's covering up for
someone.

She knelt in front of the
headstone, putting the yellow rose down. She traced his name, the
dates.
Dominick William Chandler. May God
Have Mercy Upon His Soul.
Dusty frowned.
That was another of Julia's touches.

God have mercy, she thought, looking up, her
eyes falling on the space Shane had vacated.

May God have mercy
upon
his
soul.

Chapter Four

The door was closed.

She had to pass it every day, and it was
beginning to bother her. In spite of what was going on back in
Chicago, it bothered her so much she almost wished she were back in
her apartment, even if her roommate’s cat liked to curl around her
head like a hat at night. She didn’t know which was worse, the
investigation hanging over her head, or the closed door she now had
to pass every day.

A month, that’s what she told her father and
stepmother—and Jack. She told him, too, making the call in Nick’s
Jeep, calling from her cell on the outskirts of town, where she
actually could get more than just a few bars on her phone. After
that, she’d called her roommate, Kathy, who had agreed to ship her
some of her clothes and personal things. She was taking a month
off. A mourning vacation. None of them had been happy about it,
including her. She didn’t want to stay here, with memories of Nick
around every corner, but she couldn’t go either. Not yet.

And still, 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 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 when they
were kids 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 his
shade up, his 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 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 was out of focus, as if the world
were 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 it would
resist, but it swung open wide—no squeaky hinges, no cobwebs.

She couldn’t breathe. Her
heart, quivering 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 there were something heavy sitting on her
chest. She felt like she was falling, or the floor was dropping
away.

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

“
It’s okay,” she called,
her voice surprising her, how steady it was. “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—Angelina Jolie from Tomb Raider, 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 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. He looked as if someone had tried to piece him back
together like a gruesome puzzle, but hadn’t been quite successful.
Flesh hung loosely from his scalp, flapping wetly as he smiled at
her. His eyes
—what
eyes?—
were gaping holes in his head where
blood trailed like tears down his face, running through those
places where hunks of flesh were just gone missing.

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, tracing rivulets from
his
—holes—
eyes,
that loose piece of flesh flopping against his head with a wet
sound and she couldn’t help it, she screamed and
screamed…

"Dusty! Wake up! Dusty!"

The real world slipped slowly back and her
father was shaking her. She was 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.

"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, her 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 words, comfort words,
Band-Aid words. They were false words.

"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 him standing there, grinning,
sightless, his 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.

* * * *

It was becoming an obsession.

The still closeness she felt when she
entered the cemetery was calming, but it was more than that. It
became a steady bit of normal. She longed for order, a sense of
reality, but she couldn’t even bring herself to call Jack and ask
how the investigation was going. That represented responsibility.
Getting back into the swing of things, as her father said.
Forgetting Nick was what it came down to, and above everything, she
refused to do that.

They seemed to be managing
quite well, her parents. Life goes on and all that.
Julia cooked dinner and did her crosswords and
laughed at the jokes on
Everybody Loves
Raymond
re-runs. Her father went to work,
took out the garbage, read the paper, watched football on
Sundays.

They had reestablished a routine.

But there was a space they
couldn’t ignore, no matter how hard they tried. An empty space at
the dinner table, an empty space in the living room when they were
watching
Lost
or
The Tudors.
Dusty didn’t want to go back to the way things were, not
without Nick.

So, here was her order, her routine. In the
cemetery, she could talk to Nick. She wasn’t crazy enough to think
he heard her, but somehow it made her feel better. She wasn’t
forgetting him, like everyone else seemed to have done. It was
keeping him alive, and that was the most important thing.

"Hi, Mr. Evans!" Dusty yelled, although she
was only standing five feet away from him.

"Well, hi." He waved as he walked toward her
car. "You were out early this morning."

"It's prettiest here in the morning." She
fished for the keys in her purse and, when she found them, zipped
up her jacket. It was starting to get colder.

"What was that?" He tapped his right
ear.

"I said," Dusty raised her voice. "The
morning is so pretty here!"

"So true! I love this place." He ran a hand
through his white hair. "I spent my life here. I suppose I'll be
spending death here, too."

"Oh, God, here we go," Dusty said with a
sigh, looking out across the cemetery. Evans had been the caretaker
since she could remember, and because there weren’t many people to
talk to out here, once he got going, he never wanted to stop.

"What was that, Dusty?" He tapped the
hearing aid in his shirt pocket. "I have to get new batteries for
this thing."

"I've gotta go!" Dusty was practically
yelling. "I've got to pick up something at Cougar's!"

"All right, I'll see you tomorrow then." He
turned away and limped toward the main office.

He's getting old, she thought, and it was a
sad thought. He had to hire kids around town to help with the place
now. He did love the place—and he really probably was going to be
buried here.

"Bye," she called, getting into the car. She
didn’t think he heard her.

* * * *

For Dusty, if there was one place in
Larkspur filled with memories of Nick, it was Cougar's General
Store. The force of the memories 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.