Quiet as the Grave

Gavin looked up from his game. “What’s that? Is he busting up boxes or something?”

“I don’t know.” Mike listened a minute. Then he narrowed his eyes. That noise sounded disturbingly rhythmic. Disturbingly familiar.

He turned to Gavin. “Wait for me in my office, okay?”

Gavin’s brows tightened, and he started to move back toward Mike. “Why? Is it something bad? Is it a burglar?”

Mike smiled and shook his head. Gavin had never been fearful before Justine’s disappearance. Once, when he was only five, he’d caught a large, hairy spider under a glass and sat guard over it until morning because he didn’t want to bother Mike and Justine, who were sleeping.

Now the slightest noise in broad daylight had him as tense as a guy wire.

“No, it’s nothing. It’s just Rutledge, being a dork. I’ll take care of it.”

“Okay.” Gavin headed into Mike’s office, the little dinging and chiming sounds of his video game already audible.

Mike headed back to the receiving area, where the thumping noises had just reached a crescendo and died away. He rapped roughly on the door, though he felt like busting in and letting the damn fool get caught with his pants down.

This wasn’t the first time he’d heard those thumping noses. Not the first time Rutledge Coffee had used Mike’s business as a by-the-hour motel room.

It was beginning to piss him off.

Worst of all, Mike knew that the thumpee wasn’t Rutledge’s girlfriend, Debra Pawley. Debra was handling an open house at Justine’s mansion this afternoon. Ledge must have found some other poor fool to join him in a little afternoon delight.

Mike’s knock had brought thirty seconds of scurrying and scrabbling noises. When they stopped, he opened the door. Sure enough, there between the cabinets that held pens and pencils and spare paper was Rutledge.

He grinned at Mike, though he was flushed and disheveled. He sucked in his belly, which had just a hint of beer bloat, while he put the finishing touches on his belt buckle.

Standing behind him was a curvy redhead who looked familiar. Mike noticed the smell of melted cheese, and then he remembered. Bonnie, the girl who delivered their pizzas when they had to work late.

“Hi, Bonnie,” he said.

“Hi, Mr. Frome,” she responded shyly. She swiped at her hair, which was decorated with tiny Styrofoam packing peanuts. They must have been using the mail table. “I’m sorry… I mean I brought Mr. Coffee a pizza and—”

Rutledge gave her a look. “And you were just leaving.” He shook his own hair with his fingers. “Right?”

“Right.” Bonnie slipped by Mike carefully, as if it would be rude to touch him. “Goodbye, Mr. Frome.”

When she was gone, Mike turned to Rutledge. “You stupid son of a bitch.”

Rutledge had decided to brazen it out. “Why? She’s got great tits, and we got the pizza for free.” He held up a slice and bit into it. “Want some?”

“No. My kid’s out there, Ledge. What I want is for you to stop treating my business like a brothel.”

Rutledge chewed a minute before responding. “A brothel?” He grimaced. “You sound like my Victorian uncle. You know, I think you may be hungrier than you think. What’s it been, two years? You’re starving, my friend, and you just don’t know it.”

For a minute Mike wanted to punch him. What the hell did he know about the two years Mike had just been through? What did Rutledge Lebron Coffee III, who had spent his life taking, whether from the pizza girls or from his parents, know about real loss? He thought that because he’d run through his inheritance and had to work for a living, he had really suffered.

And on top of that he was idiot enough to cheat on Debra. Sure, they’d both done crap like this in high school, but they were grown men now, supposedly. And Debra just might be the best thing that had ever happened to a jerk like Rutledge.

“Get out,” Mike said. “Go home and don’t come back until you’re ready to work for your paycheck, not sit around eating pizza and screwing the delivery girl.”

Rutledge frowned. “Come on, Mike. You know I was kidding. I—”

But just then Mike’s cell phone rang. He tugged it out of his pocket roughly and answered without looking at the caller ID.

“Yes,” he said tightly. “What is it?”

“Mike? It’s Debra.”

Debra? She sounded stuffy and wet, as if she’d been crying. Had she somehow found out about Rutledge and the pizza girl already? Mike tightened his grip on the phone.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I—” She began to cry in earnest. “Oh, Mike—”

“Honey, calm down. What’s wrong?”

“I found her,” she said. “In the garden, in the larkspurs. I saw something and—” She couldn’t go on. She was crying so hard she was hiccuping.

Saw something? That wasn’t much to go on, but Mike’s blood was already running cold. He knew he still held the phone, because he could hear Debra crying, but he couldn’t feel his fingers. Rutledge had gone very quiet, too, and was watching him carefully.

“What? Debra, try to tell me. What did you see?”

“B-bones,” she spluttered out. “A hand. A human hand.”

“Oh, my God,” he said in a stranger’s voice. He felt dizzy. It was as if he’d been holding his breath for two years, waiting for this call.

For a minute, he saw the slim white bones against the black mud, in the blue shadows of the larkspurs.

But then a more terrible image took over his mind’s eye. He saw Gavin, sitting innocently in his office, playing video games, never guessing that the blue spring sky had exploded and was already falling around them.

“Mike? Did you hear me? It’s— It’s—”

“I know who it is,” he said. And then, in his head, he heard the cruelest words in the English language.

It’s my son’s dead mother.

CHAPTER THREE

JUSTINE’S MANSION WAS every bit as overblown and pretentious as Suzie remembered from her visits here four years ago. Suzie stood in the center of the great room and shook her head. All this sprawling marble, frou-frou Louis-something furniture and cherubs grinning down from celestial ceilings.

Ridiculous. Marie Antoinette might have been comfortable here, but Suzie darn sure wasn’t.

But Mayor Millner had asked her to come. And considering that his daughter’s dead body had been found buried in the yard just two weeks ago, she hadn’t been able to say no.

She picked up a millefleur glass bowl, which was the only truly pretty thing in the room, lots of red and blue and yellow and green coils of glass captured inside it like a field of wildflowers. It must have been a wedding present. Justine would never have picked out anything so sweet.

Deep in the recesses of the house, a thump sounded. Then a whispering shuffle, as if someone dragged something heavy over the marble.