Sister Row
We pry the last board like a stubborn rib, the wood graining my gloves, the nails crying small metal screams. Everyone holds breath like it will help. It doesn’t. The hole is not a coffin; it’s a mouth that forgot how to close. No lining. No box. Just a scraped rectangle with my name started in splinters on the underside of the top plank and damp soil staring back.
“Empty,” the coroner says.
Wayne shifts his weight. “That’s a relief,” he offers, the floodlights painting his smile.
“For who?” I ask.
He tells the deputies to widen the grid and keep the press at the road. He says “preliminary” like it’s a spell.
I slide the scratched board into an evidence sleeve. The gouges are fresh, flanked by specks no bigger than flea ghosts. Skin. Leah’s partial. My brother in the splinters, recent enough to smear.
“Days,” I say.
The coroner nods, reading the clay. “Three, maybe five.”
He was here. Or the ghost of him was. The pit pulls at my vision until the world narrows to a square that could swallow a woman who thinks she’s made of stone.
“Close it,” Wayne says.
“Leave it,” I say. “He meant me to see it.”
“Or someone meant you to think that.” He looks at me too long. “Go get food.”
I walk away from the light because the truth hates company. The orchard is colder between rows, the kind of cold that keeps secrets. On the east wall the Temple’s stones rise prim as a ledger. A brass gate sits in the middle like a promise. It wears a red thread around the key stem, a square knot.
The plaque says GARDENS OF REMISSION. The hardware says ownership.
I ring the bell and a man in a gray coat appears with the quiet of people who practice it. Thin, careful, a soft collar that says he irons what you can’t see.
“Detective,” he says. “Brother Alden.”
“Open the gate,” I say.
He studies my face like a map. “We have families resting.”
“You have rows resting on county dirt and bodies in my crime scene.”
He glances at the thread on the key, then slides the lock. The hinges don’t dare squeal. Inside, the grass is tender. Stones shine like teeth that floss.
“We don’t do burials at night,” he says.
“Someone does,” I say.
“Charity placements,” he says.
“How many placements this month?”
He smiles with mercy pasted on. “Records are available by request.”
“I’m requesting.”
He leads me into an office that smells like lemon oil and withheld answers. A ledger waits with the obedience of a dog that doesn’t like you. He writes names the way some men say prayers—quick, practiced, hoping no one asks for translation.
“Donor programs kept the doors open when crops failed,” he says. “We all feed the ground, Detective.”
“With what?”
“What it can use.”
I note the key on his ring. Brass teeth, red thread. I note the knot. Square, firm. The same square biting my apple stem. The same square the wind bell wore.
“How do you tie it?” I ask.
He blinks. “Standard.”
I tie one with the loose end of the ledger ribbon, my hands remembering my brother’s fingers explaining rabbit over hole, down, and through. Alden’s mouth thins. “We use the same,” he says.
“Who taught you?”
“The man before me,” he says. “And the one before him.”
Back at the tape, Leah calls. The lab confirms the first skull: a girl from the year my brother vanished, a name I remember from a stapled flyer on the feed store corkboard. The board splinter stays at “sibling match likely.” Likely eats more than it feeds.
Wayne posts two cars at the orchard and plants himself in the manager’s office like a scarecrow that smiles. He loves conference calls, loves to be the calm. I hate rooms that try to sell me trust, so I step back into weather.
Dusk leans in. Alden phones again, voice still even, heat tucked underneath. “Someone disturbed the east rows,” he says. “We heard… movement.”
“I’m en route,” I say.
Night does favorite things to orchards. It makes geometry into faith. The floodlights don’t reach the wall. Alden meets me at the gate with his careful hands empty. He’s alone. That worries me more than company would.
“Where?” I ask.
He leads along the inside of the wall. The grass knuckles up in places like tense muscle. We stop at a stake that reads MERCY. Beneath it, the soil sags with the suggestion of an animal burrow, small and mean. Alden kneels and puts his ear to the earth like a character who doesn’t make it to the end of the chapter.
“Listen,” he says.
At first it’s insects rehearsing. Then a rhythm, faint, like a spoon tapping glass two rooms away.
“Pipes?” I ask.
“Bone,” he says, and even he hears how that sounds.
I pull on gloves. The spade takes the top layer like skin. The smell is not rot. It is the sweetness of apples stored just a day too long. Six inches down the dirt goes slick, as if a hand had smoothed it and smoothed it again. I find wood. Not boards. A door. Small. Handmade. The latch is a loop of baling twine knotted square.
He leaves the same signature everywhere: apples, keys, doors. What kind of man believes a knot is a name?
I slide the loop free and lift. The door comes on a sigh. Cold air climbs out, alive with the smell of wet iron and old prayer.
“Back up,” I say.
Alden obeys. The hole is tight, a crawlspace curved like a throat. My flashlight makes a tunnel of dust. The tapping stops. Then it starts again, three quick, two slow, one long. Morse I don’t know, or a child’s idea of it.
“Stay or go?” Alden asks, and the question is bigger than the hole.
“Go,” I say, and drop to my belly.
I take the first two feet, then three, shoulder blades scraping, breath loud, earth pressing a hand between my shoulder blades. The tunnel elbows right, then down. There’s air from somewhere, a draft that tastes like limestone and old apples. My light paints a circle ahead, a pale oval. Cloth? Face? I inch forward until my arm can reach.
Fingers. Warm.
They close around mine with a speed that hurts. I don’t say his name because names are promises, and promises are the one thing the ground can’t keep.
“Cass,” a voice says in the tunnel that shouldn’t hold voices, small and close and unbelieving. He says it again like he only got the one word and he wants to spend it right.
Behind me, wood creaks. Above me, soil dusts my neck. The hand tightens.
“We have to move,” I say, and then the light goes out, clean as a blown candle. Dirt sifts into my collar, cold, gritty, tasting like pennies and apple skins and time and rain.
The tunnel breathes in. The door above us shuts. Someone fits the square knot on the outside, neat as a signature, and pulls.