Graveminder

“Do you ever regret it?” She didn’t look up as she asked the question. Her hand rested on her son’s chest. Jimmy hadn’t coped well with the loss of his family. Unlike his parents, he was made of softer stuff. Maylene and James were strong-willed. They had to be in order to raise a family and make a life.

“No, not what we do.”

Maylene lifted her gaze from her son. “You regret what we didn’t do?”

“Mae … you know that’s not a conversation that’s going to help either one of us.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “We were who we were when we got called. You were already spoken for. I found Annie. I loved her. Still do.”

“Sometimes I wonder … if I hadn’t tried to build a life so different from what we could’ve had—”

“Don’t. You and James had a good life; Annie and I did, too.” He didn’t pull Maylene closer. After several decades as her partner, he knew to wait until she was ready to be comforted.

“My husband’s dead, my granddaughter’s dead, now my son.” The tears slipped over the lines in her face. “My Cissy and both my blood-grand-daughters are angry at the world. Beks isn’t Jimmy’s daughter by blood, but she’s family now. She’s mine. She’s all I’ve got left.”

“And me. I’m with you till the end,” he reminded her as he had so many times before.

Maylene turned away from her son’s body and let William fold her into his embrace. “I can’t have her hate me, Liam. I can’t. She can’t know yet. She wasn’t even born here.”

“Mae, we’re getting too old to keep this up. The kids are more than old enough—”

“No.” She pushed away. “I’ve got one daughter who hates me, two granddaughters who can’t handle being this, and Beks. She’s only lived in Claysville a few years. I’m going to let her go for now. Byron wants to stay away from here, live a little. You know he does. Let them both have some time away.”

And William did what he’d always done when Maylene needed anything: he agreed. “A few more years.”

Now he was standing in the same spot—only this time they had no more choices. Byron needed to know; Rebekkah needed to know. In the years since Jimmy’s death, William had suggested it often enough, but Maylene had refused every time.

“No more choices, Mae.” He looked down at her lifeless body. “I wish I could protect them longer. I wish I could’ve protected you.”

That was the crux of it, though: he hadn’t. After half a lifetime of being by her side, they’d both gotten complacent. She’d handled so much that he’d almost forgotten what could happen.

Almost.

Every month the chance was there, and until he introduced his son to Mr. D, the town was unprotected. He loathed what Byron and Rebekkah were being asked to handle, but it was past time.

“They’re strong enough.” William brushed his fingers over Maylene’s cheek. “And she’ll forgive you, Mae, just as we forgave those before us.”

5

WHEN BYRON PULLED INTO MAYLENE’S DRIVE AND SHUT OFF THE ENGINE, he wasn’t surprised to see Chris leaning against his patrol car. He’d seen the sheriff in traffic an hour earlier and wondered at the time if he was going to get a ticket or just a lecture.

“Your mama would have your ass the way you were driving.” Chris had his arms folded over his chest. “You know that.”

Byron pulled off his helmet. “She would at that.”

“You trying to get arrested?” Chris scowled.

“No.” Byron got off the bike.

“Killed?”

“No, not that either. Just needed to relax. You ought to understand that,” Byron said lightly. “I watched you crash enough times in high school.”

“Well, I got some sense … and kids to look after now. You got a pass on a ticket today, but don’t think my looking the other way will be a regular thing.” Chris shook his head and then pushed off his car. “Guess you want to go inside again?”

The simplicity of it made Byron pause. The law was relative in Claysville. Chris and the town council were the first and last step for all legal matters—and sometimes for social ones, too. If they had been anywhere else Byron had lived, he wouldn’t have been able to just walk into a dead woman’s house; if they had been in a proper city, he couldn’t expect the police to open a door for his curiosity. Here, if Chris said he could go in, that was as good as having a warrant.

Byron shrugged off his jacket and laid it over the seat. “Tell me you collected evidence that makes some sort of sense of this.”

Chris had gone up Maylene’s walk, but he paused and looked back at Byron with challenge clear in his posture—shoulders back, chin up, and lips curved in a smile that was not genuinely friendly. “Why are you being difficult? There’s nothing to this, Byron.” Chris waited until Byron caught up with him and then he said, “Maylene’s gone, and whatever happened, it’s happened and done. She died, the door was open, and something bit on her.”

“You can’t think that. I saw her. We can look for fingerprints or … something.” Byron wasn’t a detective, didn’t know what clues he’d even look for—or if he’d recognize them if he saw any. “Let me call up some people I met. One of the women I knew in Atlanta was just finishing up a program in forensics. Maybe she could come here and—”

“Why?”

“Why?” Byron stopped midstep. “To find out who killed Maylene.”

Chris gave him the same sort of inscrutable look that William always did. It was galling to see it on the face of a man he’d once partied with. “They’re probably long gone. No sense chasing up the road after some vagrant. Maylene’s dead and gone. It won’t help anything to go asking questions. Not you or Bek.”

Byron paused. He hadn’t said it, but that was part of it: he wanted to have something to say when he faced Rebekkah. At least he’d had that when his mother died, an explanation, an answer of some sort. It hadn’t made the loss any less, but it helped.

I can’t protect her from this. I can’t fix it … I can’t deal with her blaming me again either.

“Just open the door.” Byron motioned at the key in Chris’ hand.

Chris shoved the key in the lock and pushed the door open. “Go on, then.”

For the second time in twenty-four hours, Byron crossed the threshold he hadn’t crossed in almost a decade. One of the last times he’d been in there was when Ella and Rebekkah had tried to sneak him in the upstairs window. The girls had shushed him and giggled; they had all tumbled together into an untidy pile, too high to do much more than that.

“She’s going to need a friend more than anything. I know you’ve had your … whatever it is, but you need to be there for her.” Chris stood just inside the door. The kitchen was now immaculate. No dishes waited in the drying rack. No blood remained on the floor.

“They cleaned already.” Byron wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but the simple fact of the situation was that any clue he might possibly have found had been wiped away with the bleach he could still smell.

“’Course they did.” Chris shook his head. “Can’t have Rebekkah coming back to Maylene’s blood on the wall. Would you want that?”

“No, but”—Byron swept his hand around—“how are we going to find who did this if everything’s all bleached and vacuumed and whatever else they did? Maylene was killed.”

“Maybe you ought to take your concerns to the council.” Chris didn’t follow him any farther into the house. “If it makes you feel better to look around, go ahead. Just pull the door behind you when you’re done.”

Byron took a calming breath, but didn’t reply.

“I’ll see you at the service tomorrow … with Rebekkah?” In that one short phrase, Chris asked all of the questions that he wasn’t verbalizing: did you reach her and is she coming and will you help her?

“Yes,” Byron confirmed.

“Good.” The sheriff turned and left Byron alone.

Because there is no crime scene to preserve. No sense of law or privacy or any damn thing that makes sense.

Byron walked through the house. If he knew what was normal for Maylene’s house these days, it would be easier to see what was amiss. Or if they hadn’t already cleaned. The kitchen had always seemed uncommonly large, but in an old farmhouse, that wasn’t too peculiar. The pantry, on the other hand, was enough to make him wonder if every single person in Claysville was hiding some sort of eccentricity. Years ago, the girls had been adamant that they weren’t ever to open the door to it, and at the time, he hadn’t cared. Now he stood speechless. The room itself was the size of some of the kitchens he’d had outside of Claysville. Shelves ran from floor to ceiling, and as he looked he realized that there were runners in the floor so as to slide any of the front shelves forward and to the side. Behind these were another set of equally stocked shelves. Maylene had enough food to cook for the whole town.