She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,130

apartment in Brentwood was Keener’s. The store had been there since 1939—Harold Keener would not only recognize me but might pick up the phone and call Matteo when I purchased something as odd as a shovel.

I parked on Cramer off Brownsville, about three blocks from my apartment, and walked the rest of the way. Parking near my building wasn’t an option. Honda Preludes were a fairly common car, but a black one parked in front of my building would probably get recognized as mine. I left the shovel in the trunk.

Construction on Krendal’s Diner was nearing completion and a sign hung in the window—Carmozzi’s Pizza, coming soon!

I walked past and tried not to look through the newly whitewashed windows for fear of what might look back.

Nearly three months had gone by since the last time I stepped into my apartment building. The place felt foreign to me. The halls seemed narrower and musty, in need of paint. I climbed the steps and slipped into my apartment unnoticed. Even Ms. Leech’s door remained closed. No grocery list on the door, not on Sundays.

My apartment was dark. Every surface, thick with dust.

I crossed the room, past the stack of posters still on the table, past Gerdy’s dress still on the floor, and reached for the thick blinds over the window, then thought better of it.

If someone were to look up. Someone who knows me…

I settled into Auntie Jo’s chair near the window and waited for night to come. My right knee bounced nervously, and the ghosts of my past howled all around, cackling at my ear, anxious for what came next.

At a little after one in the morning, I parked on Nobles Lane, probably within ten feet of the place I left my bike as a kid on the day of the Great Chase.

If I closed my eyes, I could still hear the sound of those four SUVs racing up behind me, with Dunk and Willy chattering from the radio.

When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but a dark, deserted road, edged by woods. Nobles Lane had no street lamps, no traffic, and the few homes sat far back from the road.

A light drizzle had started up a little after midnight and remained steady since. When I pulled off the pavement, the Honda’s tires dipped slightly in the muddy earth, and I cursed myself for not thinking about the possibility of leaving tracks behind. I should have brought a jacket, too. The temperature dropped into the forties and was still sinking. As grave-robbing went, I wasn’t very good.

At this hour, every sound seemed amplified, from the groan of my trunk to my footfalls as I ran through the woods toward the cemetery, with the shovel in hand. I came out of the trees about a hundred feet west of our bench, and I couldn’t help but think of the painting in Stella’s room.

Shadows clung to the sides of the mausoleums, wrapping the stone structures in the blanket of night, cradling them in the rain. I knew I was alone, yet I felt eyes on me. I half-expected someone in a white coat to slip out of the woods, to step out into my path, maybe more than one someone, all with thoughts of that box. In the time I spent in this cemetery growing up, I had yet to see a caretaker or any form of security. Someone locked the front gate promptly at nine each night and opened it again in the morning, but even that person eluded me through the years. I imagined anyone working in a cemetery, in the solitude of it, would eventually become a silent part of that cemetery, able to move through the grounds one with the wraiths and gloom, nothing more than a whisper among the gravestones.

As I came over the hill on the south end of the cemetery, my parents’ graves came into view, Auntie Jo now beside them under the sweeping arms of the large red maple tree, their gravestones glistening in the rain.

Could I really do this?

Oh, how I wished for a drink. I would have probably drank pure grain alcohol at that point, if I had it on hand. A beer, cough syrup, whiskey, anything. My skin tingled with the craving, the mouth of every pore open wide. I had nothing, though, and I pressed on anyway.

When I finally reached the graves, as I stood over my father’s resting place, I turned slowly and searched the cemetery grounds for signs