Root Line
The board moves under my palm like breath from the wrong direction. Not wind—pressure, patient and deliberate. The seam in the soil sighs as if the ground has lungs.
“Don’t,” I whisper, to the earth or to myself.
I call it in. Floodlights arrive and pour a hard halo over Row D. Wayne steps into it with a mug and a pastor’s calm, the coroner beside him, two deputies pretending the shovels on their shoulders are props.
“We wait for daylight,” Wayne says.
“We wait for a warrant,” the coroner adds.
I hold up the top board. Scratches: the start of my name. “We wait for nothing.”
His jaw goes tight. “You want cameras before we have chain of custody? Tape it and go home.”
I stay. The orchard makes little sounds—leaf speech, beetle nail, a fox stitching the dark. The seam breathes but doesn’t lift again.
The coroner returns with a cart. “Let’s do it.”
We peel turf. Boards underneath, crooked nails hammered in haste. The smell is cider-sweet and old-book dry. When the last plank comes free, the hole inhales. Lamplight floods a rectangle of darker dark. No coffin, no lining—just a bed kept for a specific weight and splinters on the underside of the lid where the scratching tried again.
“Fresh,” the coroner says. “Days.”
“For what?” Wayne asks.
“For whoever fits the lid,” I answer.
He radios a perimeter. When the deputies drift to the wrong places, he says, “Cass. Sleep.”
“Rumor,” I say, and drink the coffee he leaves. It tastes like habit. I watch floodlights bleed into dawn and think about my brother’s handwriting, the A that always came out angry.
By morning, the press hovers like crows. Wayne feeds them reassurance. The orchard manager hands me a map and names varieties like saints. I mark red dots where the dead surface; he flinches.
We pull a second body before noon. Female, twenties. Upright, knees bent as if the earth made room. A leaf-shaped earring clings to a hair thread. Roots knit her ribs like careful hands.
“Years apart,” the coroner reads from the soil. “Whoever did this has patience.”
“A calendar,” I say.
A deputy brings coffee and a scrap torn from a hayride brochure: a lab name for the first skull. Missing twenty years. Not my brother. Relief drops me; shame follows.
Wayne waits until microphones are out of earshot. “Keep that internal.”
“She had a mother.”
“She has a grave,” he says, edge showing. “If you want a war with half the county, say her name on camera. If you want to keep digging, use the inside voice.”
“What do you know about the Orchard Man?”
“Story parents told to keep kids out of places with snakes,” he says. “People prefer a villain to weather.”
“I heard it before I left. Felt like a leash.”
“And you cut it.” He nods at the open hole with my half-name. “Looks like it found you again.”
We walk the rows. He says the orchard changed owners four times in thirty years, the east wall leased to the Temple. He says what men say before we find ink that doesn’t wash out. I say little. The ground is listening.
At dusk I go to my father’s house without knocking. The kitchen smells like onions and old coats. The table is a ledger—jar of screws, fishing license, a prescription he isn’t taking.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says, same as the night my brother didn’t come home.
“Did you ever work the orchard?”
“Everyone worked the orchard. Pick, mend fence, unload fertilizer. Paid in cash and pie.”
“Who hired you?”
“Depends on the year. Rooks before Halverns. Temple leased the east wall. New owners keep old habits.”
“What were the habits?”
“You dig a hole,” he says. “You plant a tree. You feed it.”
“What do you feed it?”
“What it eats.”
On the porch, a plastic wind bell taps once in a still night. The string is tied with a square knot that wasn’t there before—the kind my brother showed off.
My phone rings. Unknown local number. “Detective Ryder? Leah from the lab. The trace from the board splinters—the skin cells—we have a partial. Family match to you.”
“My father,” I say.
“Closer,” she says. “Sibling.”
The night thins. The wind bell taps twice like a finger on glass.
“You sure?”
“We’ll confirm in the morning,” she says. “But the odds are bad.”
In the driveway a shape waits just outside the porch light: the patience of someone who doesn’t mind being seen. I step forward, then stop because the thing on the top step moves. It rolls. An apple—red as a cut—bumps my boot. The stem is tied with baling twine. My full name is scratched into the skin.
I pick it up. The letters are shallow but decisive, written by someone who practiced on boards. Cold leaks from the apple into my palm. I turn to the shape at the drive’s edge. “You forgot to knock.”
It shifts. Light catches a ring on a finger, bright as a bead of mercury. I know that ring, or want to. A boy wore it with a shoelace untied. The day this town decided not to dig.
“Stay where you are,” I say, quiet as a trigger. I take the step fast. The shape retreats an equal step, measured, almost polite. The wind bell taps a third time. I cut the twine from the apple and keep the string, proof that knots can still be tied by the living.
“Cass.” Wayne’s voice, not from the drive but the street behind me. No siren. He ghosted in. “We need you back at the orchard. There’s been… another.” He doesn’t finish, which tells me what it is: fresh earth, warm boards, a schedule accelerating.
I don’t look away from the shape. “How close?”
“Close enough to step wrong,” he says.
The shape withdraws down the driveway, easy as a person delivering a message. Gravel ticks under quiet feet. By the gate there’s only fog folding over fog.
I pocket the twine and set the apple on the rail, where morning will see it and learn nothing. The night holds its breath, a held second where every clock forgets to tick.
“On my way,” I tell Wayne, and hang up. The square knot in the twine is neat as a signature. I loop it round my finger and pull it tight until pain writes a line in my skin.
Back at the orchard the floodlights make noon from a wrong sun. Deputies stack where the row turns. The coroner waits with her cart. Wayne points with his chin. I follow it to a shallow hump, boards still wet, nails shining like fish.
On the top plank, scratched through the sap, is a date. Tonight’s. Beneath it, one word, spelled with a hand that doesn’t wobble.
SISTER.
“Don’t touch it,” Wayne says, but my palm is already on the wood, feeling breath gather under it for the rise. Somewhere beyond the rows a fox barks once, as if counting with us, and the wind carries back a whisper that sounds like my name.