Shallow Graves (3 page)

HIS REAL NAME
was Duncan Palmer. He was forty-seven years old. He had been a bank teller in Minneapolis, but he had recently been fired from his job for losing his temper and making threatening comments to customers. He told his friends he was going to take a vacation to get his head together before he found another job.

He had been arrested two years ago as a suspect in the death of his ex-girlfriend's son. No charges were filed and he was released.

The boy had caught him with the sixteen-year-old babysitter while his mother was at work. The girl had run away, humiliated, and Duncan Palmer had panicked. He hit the kid repeatedly over the head with a baseball bat. The bat had been a birthday present
from Palmer a few months earlier; he had spent too much money on a good one, never mind that the boy was the worst player on his Little League team and the mother wasn't impressed.

The boy had died on the kitchen floor. Duncan Palmer wrapped the body in plastic and drove out of the city to dump it. A woman walking her dog found the boy the next day.

The cops suspected the man from the start, but the babysitter lied and Palmer lied. The mother lied and swore he would never hurt her son. Maybe she even believed it. The case went unsolved. They blamed it on a home invasion gone bad.

Not all of that was in the news, but there was enough in the memories for me to put the story together.

By the time I met him, Duncan Palmer was thinking about doing it again. The possibility was there in the back of his mind, wrapped up on those vines and thorns that tasted of ash, deep and thrumming like a distant drumbeat. He had gotten away with it before. It had been the most exciting day of his life.

He was the second man I killed.

Some days I feel bad about it. Most days I don't.

The kid was short, chubby, with dirt brown hair and brown eyes. He only wanted a snack. I can still smell the peanut butter.

DUNCAN PALMER HAD
driven us several miles along a county road north of I-80, through gently rolling fields surrounded by wire fences. It was a dark night, most of the sky covered with clouds. The pavement was uneven and rough, difficult to skate on, but I barely noticed. I kicked and kicked and my legs never grew tired. I was energized, my nerves sparking, my blood flowing, my heart beating so strong I could feel it in my ears and my fingertips.

I wound my way along the grid of country roads for miles. Trees loomed beside the road, dropped away as I passed them, and insects buzzed in the darkness. A few cars passed, headlights bright and white. Some slowed when they saw me, but none stopped. The
rich night air rushed over me, soft on my skin, cool through my hair. My mind was empty.

I crashed once, not entirely on purpose. I knew I was going too fast when I crested the hill, but I didn't slow down. I hit a pothole in the asphalt near the bottom, on the outside edge of a sharp turn. My skateboard went left and I went right. The momentum carried me straight into the trunk of a tree.

I lay on the ground for a few minutes, dazed and hurting.

I moved my head, neck, arms, hands. I probed at the abrasions on my face. If there were hairline fractures in my ribs or cracks in my skull, they would heal themselves. If there was blood collecting in my brain, it would drain away. The scratches on my chin and cheek bled sluggishly for a minute or two, then stopped. I would have fading yellow bruises and new scars by morning.

The worst of the pain passed. I sat up, took my notebook out of my backpack. It was too dark for me to read what was already written on the page, but I didn't need to. I knew the list by heart. I had started writing it shortly after I woke up. A record of experimental trial and error: all the ways I could not die.

I added one more line:

8. Skated face-first into tree.

As failed deaths went, that one was pretty embarrassing, but in the spirit of scientific inquiry I couldn't leave it out. I sat cross-legged beside the road until the sting in my skin faded, then I found my skateboard and I kept going.

The clouds gathered and parted through the night. It rained a
few times and my hair and clothes grew damp, but it always passed. I stopped once at an empty intersection, not because I needed a breath and not because I cared that I was lost. I only wanted to taste the cool damp air and listen to the quiet. There was enough of a clear patch overhead for me to recognize the broad
W
of Cassiopeia, but I couldn't see much else. As I watched, the clouds drifted over her.

It figured that now that I was here, in the dark in the middle of nowhere, no cities to speak of for hundreds of miles, it was too cloudy to see anything.

But I didn't have to leave.

The thought drifted into my mind, curious and bright, like a fish behind the curved glass of an aquarium.

I didn't have to keep moving. If I wanted, I could lie down in one of these fields. It wouldn't matter if it rained because I couldn't get sick. I didn't have to worry about the cold. I didn't have to eat. I didn't have to sleep, or find a safe place, or do anything at all. I could lie beneath a shade tree and use my backpack as a pillow and wait through the day, watch the clouds clear, watch the sunset, watch the stars come out again. I could do that for as many nights as I cared to count. I could never see anybody again.

No murderers. No memories.

Eventually the hollow cold that wasn't hunger would fill me again, but I could wait it out. Maybe my heart would slow, my blood would grow sluggish in my veins, my lungs would spasm and shudder when I tried to breathe, and maybe I wouldn't mind so much,
out here with nothing around but grass and stars, with no people dragging their guilt and grief and anger behind them like oily dark banners.

I had left home after I woke up because it was impossible for me to stay. There was a Breezy-shaped hole in the life I had once occupied. The girl I had been was gone. I didn't know what I was anymore.

I went west because it was as good a direction as any, and because I thought I might like to reach the Pacific Ocean before I made another decision. But I didn't have a plan. For the first time in my life I didn't have any idea what I could or should do next. I didn't have anywhere to be. Nobody was waiting for me. Nobody was expecting to see me ever again.

Grass rustled nearby and I started, spun so quickly I nearly lost my balance. It was only the wind pushing leaves against each other. I let out a loud breath, shook my head, and turned again.

There was something in the intersection.

It was pale and translucent and drifting a foot above the asphalt. It had the basic shape of a human body: limbs, torso, smudge of a head. The legs ended in shredded rags, the arms in spidery threads.

I thought: Mom and Dad would be so disappointed.

They had always told us there was no such thing as ghosts. No ghosts or spirits, no heaven or hell, no afterlife. When my youngest sister, Sunny, asked what happened to us when we died, our middle sister, Meadow, had scoffed and said, “You rot and worms eat your brain, stupid.” Mom and Dad had hushed her, told her not to frighten Sunny, and they had explained that all that remained were
the memories our loved ones carried with them and the impact of the things we had accomplished. Nothing in their view of the world allowed for the possibility of ghosts in empty intersections, shadows clinging to murderers, or the half-dead thing I had become.

“Hi,” I said.

The ghost had no face. It drifted in the breeze, like a tattered flag on a pole, but it gave no sign that it had heard me. It didn't come closer. It didn't move away. It didn't do anything. I walked around it in a slow circle; it didn't turn.

I reached out to touch it. It felt like nothing at all, not even a cool puff of air. It had dark smears where its eyes ought to be.

I stopped bothering the ghost and headed west along the road again. When I looked back, it was still there, a pale drift above the road, tiny in the dark prairie night.

THE NIGHT I DIED
was warm and clear. I remember joking with Melanie when we slammed the doors of her mom's car, the minivan with the stick-figure family displayed on the back window. Two parents, two kids, two dogs. I remember laughing as we dodged sprinklers on somebody's lawn and slipped on the grass. Everything was laughter and light and fun. There was nothing before us but our last summer of high school stretching long and open.

Later she would recoil, and my face would sting where she slapped me, and I would leave the party alone.

Later still I would grow cold and stiff in a backyard grave, but I don't remember that.

On the day I came back to life, hundreds of birds within a two-mile radius dropped dead with no warning and a freak storm covered the city with frost.

I don't remember much of the year in between.

I don't remember the police, the searches, the interviews. I don't remember the headlines: EVANSTON TEEN MISSING. I don't remember the articles: “Breezy Lin, 17, was reported missing by parents David Lin and Erin Donahue after she failed to return home from a party on Saturday night.” I don't remember the interviews, the speculation, the online comments, the inevitable school assembly. I don't remember my parents giving press conferences, my sisters beside them. Sunny cried and Meadow scowled while Mom and Dad held my picture and pleaded, but I don't remember it. I don't remember that picture appearing every night on the local news: last year's school photo, taken when my hair was longer and I was wearing an electric blue shirt I had since given to Meadow. I don't remember the posters stapled up around town. I don't remember the police dogs barking and tugging through the neighborhood.

They had no chance of finding me. I don't smell like myself anymore. I'm too degraded.

I don't remember any of it. I read about it afterward.

You don't sleep when you're dead, but you can dream. During that year I lay buried in my grave, I dreamed about darkness and space and silence. During that year, I was alone.

I always wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. Not in the casual, halfhearted way all kids want to be astronauts when they go through their drawing-pictures-of-Saturn phase, but truly,
earnestly. I was going to be a member of the first manned mission to Mars.

I decided when I was seven, and when I was eleven I worked it all out: the classes I would take in high school and what I would study in college, how long it would take me to get my PhD in astrophysics or planetary geology or engineering, the research projects I would do, the grants and internships I would get, all of it with the space program in mind. I seriously considered joining the air force but decided a career in scientific research was a better option. I had a long-term plan and a carefully annotated schedule in my desk drawer. I convinced my teachers to let me create independent math courses so I would already know calculus by the time I enrolled at MIT. I signed up for swimming lessons so I could ace NASA's swimming requirement. I wrote practice answers to imaginary interview questions. I asked my parents if I could go on a parabolic flight for vacation rather than our usual summer at the cottage on Lake Michigan. I had files and calendars and an entire shelf full of astronaut biographies. I had a map of Mars on my bedroom wall, another of the moon, and a space shuttle poster signed by Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. I had a T-shirt with a drawing of the cosmonaut dog Laika and would tell anybody who asked all about how she had died a horrible death alone and in pain above the earth.

Melanie said it was creepy that I knew that and I probably shouldn't talk about it if I wanted to keep my friends. I thought twice about wearing my Laika T-shirt after that, but I didn't stop. I just wore it when Melanie wasn't around.

A future in space was the only thing I had ever wanted.

My parents encouraged me. They were proud of my dreams and my determination. They told me I could do it, and I believed them.

I imagined hundreds of times what it would be like to float above the earth, a clear marble of green and blue and white below me, the stars at my back, specks of light in the cold and the silence, and the vast, incomprehensible beauty of the universe. Every astronaut, every cosmonaut, all the women and men who have gone into space, they all say the same thing: they went up expecting to be awed by the moon and the sun and the stars, but what astonished them most was the earth. Michael Collins, the astronaut who orbited the moon in the Apollo 11 Command Module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left footprints on the surface, once said that what he thought when he looked down at the earth was, “My god, that little thing is so fragile out there.”

Being dead isn't like that.

Unfamiliar white stars pinpricked the darkness all around me, tiny and bright and impossibly distant. There was no earth, no moon, no sun. No strange planets wrapped in rings. No colorful nebulas or vast clouds of gas. Only stars.

No matter which way I turned, drifting and spinning helplessly in slow circles, nothing new ever came into view. My heart wasn't beating. I didn't breathe. I didn't think about anything.

The year passed, but I didn't feel it. All I felt was cold.

I didn't know I was waking up until it had already happened.

The birds started dying after midnight. The first people to notice were the early morning birders out before dawn, armed
with their notebooks and binoculars, wrapped in scarves and puffy down coats against the surprise cold. They saw their blue jays and orioles and herons all struck dead on their migration north. The bird-watchers called animal control, and animal control called an environmental consultant, and the consultant called a wildlife biologist, and before the morning was over dozens of little feathered bodies were packed away in plastic bags and coolers and carried off to be tested. All over the city people were checking their backyards and gutters and warning their kids not to touch the corpses. In homes and pet stores, parakeets and finches and parrots were dropping dead in their cages.

The frost melted away before noon, and the birds kept dying. On the news a scientist insisted the freak cold snap had nothing to do with it, never mind that it was the middle of June and Illinois was ready for summer.

The last birds died just before midnight, and I came back.

One moment I was in the darkness, surrounded by stars, and the next I was coughing and choking. I couldn't move. There was something crushing me from all sides. When I tried to open my eyes, I felt a sharp, stinging pain. I couldn't see. The stars were gone, and there was no light. I tried to breathe, my lungs heaving and burning, but my mouth and throat were packed with dirt.

I kicked and clawed, and slowly, slowly, the soil above me loosened. I wasn't buried very deep. Eighteen inches, no more, but I was so weak I couldn't break through to the surface. I was thrashing and squirming, trying to push the soil away, and that's when I felt the man's hands on my face and heard his excited whispers.

Somebody besides the birders and the scientists had noticed the dying birds. Somebody who recognized the signs and knew that no natural weather phenomenon was responsible.

I grabbed his wrists. A thick, nauseating darkness washed over me, more suffocating than the soil, oily and slick and sickening.

I thought:
killer.

I thought:
murderer
.

I only had to touch him and I knew what he was. I was holding his wrists, but it wasn't his flesh and bone I was feeling. It was the sick slippery guilt inside the meat shell.

I pulled without thinking, without hesitating, and he snapped. He was there one moment and gone the next. A lightning bolt of memories and blood and exhilaration exploded through me.

My heart shuddered, squeezed, began to beat again.

I hauled myself out of the grave. I fell onto my hands and knees, heaving and vomiting. I began to shiver. I was crying, tears streaking down my face, painful sobs shaking my body. I dug my fingers into my mouth to clear the dirt away, gagged and vomited again until my stomach ached and my throat burned.

I wiped a hand over my mouth and looked at the man lying on the ground. I checked his pulse because I thought I should, not because I didn't already know. His face was turned into the grass. He had a spot of thinning hair on the back of his head.

He had killed five people one winter night thirty years ago.

My ears rang with gunshots and screams. A woman's pleading voice. Only after several gasping minutes did the images soften, the smells fade, and I understood it was a memory.

I didn't feel weak anymore, but the nausea lingered. My blood was humming in my veins and my lips tingled. I spat on the grass; there was dirt in my teeth. My heart was thundering in my chest. I could feel the air filling my lungs, the muscles of my abdomen clenching, the nerves in my skin waking and pricking with pain. I could feel all of it. The awareness was overwhelming. In the darkness, surrounded by distant stars, there had been no time, but now I was counting the seconds with every breath and every heartbeat.

I breathed until my head stopped spinning. Every gulp of cold air was the best thing I had ever tasted. I lifted my head, waited to make sure I wasn't going to topple over, and stood.

I was in the backyard of a two-story house. There was no light through the back door or any of the windows. Somewhere nearby dogs were barking, angry and insistent. I realized I had been hearing them for some time.

I crossed the lawn, fumbled at the gate, pushed it open.

I kicked something soft and looked down: a little bird, still and brown and dead. I stared at it, waiting for a pang of revulsion, but I felt nothing. I brushed over its feathers with my bare toes. It was such a tiny thing, barely the size of my fist.

My eyes were gritty with dirt, scraping with every blink, but I recognized the neighborhood. I was only a couple of blocks from home.