Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

He kept his hands in the pockets of his fleece jacket. His breath became a warm cloud in front of his face. He splashed through ice-glazed puddles in the indentations where tractors ploughed the spring soil, and the noise made by his boots was like glass breaking. Needles of frost made the brown grass brittle. His nose picked up the animal smell of cattle from the barn across the highway.

The field ended in a nest of trees. He slipped between the shaggy branches and tracked wet footprints across the driveway as he approached the house. It was a modest two-story farm home that showed signs of neglect. The wood siding needed fresh paint. On the sidewalk that led to the front door, two squares of concrete had buckled and cracked. Dead flowers wilted over the sides of clay pots on either side of the detached garage.

He studied the house carefully, but he knew she was gone now. Every window was black.

He made his way to the rear of the house. On the back wall, he saw three steel half-moons buried in the earth at intervals along the foundation. They were open and shallow, about two feet in depth, protecting windows that led to the basement. He stepped down inside one of the window wells and drove the toe of his boot into the glass. It shattered in shards that spilled inside to the floor below. He kicked several more times, knocking away the remaining fragments, then squatted down and squeezed his legs and torso through the tight hole. Letting go, he dropped to the concrete floor.

He slid a Maglite from his pocket and cast a narrow beam around the space. The air was cold and musty. He ducked to avoid pipes overhead and picked his way through the glass to the stairs that led to the main level of the house. The old steps squealed like mice. He took them slowly. At the door, he waited and listened, then pushed the door open and found himself in the unlit kitchen. Dirty plates were stacked in the sink. Half a pot of coffee grew cold on the counter. The butcher block table hadn't been wiped down, and he saw remnants of mashed carrots and banana strewn in front of a rickety high chair. He whiffed the air and smelled fried fish.

He moved from the dinette to the family room, which was crowded with garage sale furniture scattered over the small square of worn beige carpet. A brown tweed sofa faced the television. The coffee table in front of the sofa overflowed with magazines and dog-eared paperback books. He spotted three photo frames on top of the television, and he illuminated each of them with the beam of his flashlight. One photo showed an older couple on a desert highway; the other two showed a young man and woman. The man in the photos was burly, with blond hair and a mustache that overflowed his upper lip.

The woman had dazzling red hair.

Hello, Kasey.

He remembered her vividly as she'd looked in the field behind the dairy. Her body like a wet cat. Her eyes big and desperate. Her arms trembling and her hands looking small clapped around the big gun. He'd never dreamed she would fire. The wound in his shoulder still burned where her bullet had grazed him.

'You're a bad girl,' he said aloud. And bad girls need to be punished.

He scouted the ground level and then took the steps to the second floor. The first room in the hallway was an office with a computer desk and filing cabinets. A pale light glowed inside from a video loop repeated endlessly on the computer monitor. It was a screen saver of the Zapruder film showing the Kennedy assassination. As he watched, Kennedy took a fatal bullet in the head over and over.

Well, isn't that sick. Then he smiled at his own joke. Takes one to know one.

He rifled through the cabinets and desk drawers, pulling out months-old bank and credit card statements and cell phone bills. People never threw anything away. He flipped through a copy of the Duluth newspaper from the previous January and a February issue of Sports Illustrated. The swimsuit edition. He dug deeper, extracting file folders with tax information, which he paged through one by one. Toward the bottom of the desk drawer, he found a photograph of Kasey in a bathrobe holding her newborn son, his naked skin red and wrinkled. You look tired, darling.

But her eyes were the same. Blue. Fierce. He slipped the photograph in his pocket.

The next room was the bathroom. Kasey used bar soap that smelled like lavender. He spied threads of her red hair in the bathtub, which he picked up and twirled around his gloved finger. He imagined her stepping out of the porcelain tub, toweling her body dry, and studying her reflection. The tiny room would be humid and fragrant with her scent. When he opened her medicine cabinet, he found vitamin bottles containing fish oil and St John's Wort and prescriptions in her name for Xanax and Ambien.

Don't you sleep, Kasey? Poor baby.

He closed the cabinet and stared at his own face in Kasey's mirror. He kept his hair in a severe black crew cut. A gold earring hugged the lobe of his left ear. His right cheek was scarred and cratered from the acne he had suffered as a teenager. Looking at himself, he watched his dark, dead eyes come to life, like a doll turned on by a switch. He grinned and picked up an open tube of lipstick and scrawled a message for her on the glass. Two words to tell her who she was.

I want you to know I was here. I want you to know it's not over.

He found her bedroom at the end of the hall. The linens on the queen-sized bed were rumpled and unmade. Her closet door was ajar. He opened it and explored the contents, touching her blouses, running his fingers along the satin sleeves. On a hanger, he found a lace nightgown, which he removed and held at arm's length. It would fall barely past her thighs. The cups of the bra were sheer. He took the nightgown and draped it over the bed, as if she were lying there.

Looking down, he felt the familiar rage bubbling up like lava. For him, desire was rage. But it was different this time, because Kasey was different. She wasn't like all the others. He thought about waiting for her in the darkness and taking her now, but he willed himself to be patient. He wanted her to know. To feel him coming. To realize there was nothing she could do to keep him away.

As he turned for the doorway, he heard three muffled electronic beeps. He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted the small electronic receiver. The red light on the front of the black box was flashing.

He cursed silently.

Someone was at the school. Someone had tripped the sensors he had installed on the perimeter of the ruins. He couldn't have anyone discovering the burying place. Not now. Not yet.

Not before he was done with Kasey.

He ran into the hallway. By his mental calculations, he needed two minutes to sprint across the dark field to his van and another ten minutes to speed through the empty highways to Buckthorn.

He wondered: who's there? Who's going inside?

Was it the police?

He didn't have time to think. He hurried to the top of the stairs, and then he froze.

Headlights swept across the downstairs rooms. A key scraped in the front door lock. Someone was coming inside the house. He was trapped.

Kasey let herself inside and closed the door behind her. The house was dark and unusually cold. Through the front window, she watched the tail lights of Maggie's truck disappear toward the highway. She kicked off her boots and padded in her black athletic socks through the landmine of toys in the family room. She poured herself a cup of cold coffee in the kitchen, but when she tasted it, she poured it out in the sink.

'Bruce?' she called.

There was no answer. She was alone. She dug in her back pocket for her cell phone and dialed his number. The call went straight into voicemail.