Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

She fingered the plastic wrapper around the neck of the bottle. With the edge of her nail, she tried to cut it away, but her hands felt thick. She put the cap in her mouth and scraped the wrapper with her teeth. A little piece of it tore. She tugged at the flap and finally pulled it free, unwinding it like a ribbon. That small success felt like a huge victory.

Valerie squinted to line up the arrows on the cap in the darkness. She tried to pry off the cap with her thumb, but her skin was damp, and her fingers slipped on the ridged plastic. Finally, attacking it with both thumbs, she popped the cap off the bottle, and it flipped like a coin into the air. She punched through the foil seal, and the bottle squirmed in her numb fingers. A dozen tablets spilled on to the ground around her legs. She didn't care about losing them. They weren't enough to make a difference.

She put out her left palm. Her arm trembled. The bottle shook as she overturned it, tumbling a pyramid of white pills into her hand. She balanced the open bottle in her lap and stared at the tablets. It wasn't hard. Put them in your mouth. Grab a handful of fresh snow. Do it over and over until the bottle was empty.

But she couldn't. She wanted to, and she couldn't.

'Oh, Callie, I'm sorry,' she said.

She was angry with herself for hesitating. Her baby needed her. Her daughter was alone. All it would take to rescue her was one small, meaningless step; all she needed was to do the right thing, and they would be together. Even so, she couldn't bring herself to die like this. Giving up felt like a selfish and faithless act for which she would never be forgiven. It was as if she could hear a lonely voice talking to her grave and shaming her: How could you give up on me?

Valerie listened to the voice and spread her fingers wide. The aspirins fell and bounced and made dimples in the snow. The wetness began to dissolve them into paste. She got up, limping as the blood made its way back into her legs. She wandered until she was nearly in the water. Ice crept from the shore like a foggy window. She put one foot down in the water, cracking the ice with the heel of her boot, and then again, making jagged holes in the surface. She turned the bottle upside down and let the tablets cascade through the ice and disappear into the river. Finally, when it was empty, she flicked the bottle end over end beyond the ice. It floated for a while, and then, as water leached through the neck, it turned over and sank.

She knew she should feel like a failure, but she felt a rush of adrenaline instead. A new sensation washed over her, coming from nowhere, making her feel restless. Somewhere, somehow, something had changed, like a shifting in the earth under her feet. She felt drawn away from here. When she touched her face, she found warm tears streaming down her cold face again. Pouring. A waterfall. A deluge. It didn't matter why. She only knew she had to go. Go now. Go fast.

Valerie walked, and then she stumbled, and then she ran. She clawed her way up the slope away from the river. Her breath hammered in her chest. She couldn't go fast enough to satisfy the impatient urge that had taken hold of her brain. She heard them again, louder and closer as she neared the street: people calling for her, shouting her name.

She burst from the low brush near the parking lot where police had surrounded her car. Red and blue lights lit up the street like fireworks. She saw Denise. She saw Serena. Everyone looked everywhere in the empty town, except at her. She was invisible. She stayed where she was, catching her breath, unable to move or to shout, 'I'm here.'

Then Serena turned. Their eyes locked on each other, thirty yards apart. Valerie watched Serena's face erupt into a smile and heard her yelling excitedly, the same words over and over. The wind drowned her voice, but it didn't matter, because she already knew what Serena was saying. She knew the impulse that had drawn her away from the river and back to her life.

She knew who had saved her. She knew.

'We have her,' Serena repeated, running toward her. 'We have her, we have her, we have her.'

Valerie crumbled to her knees and wept for joy.

Kasey still had the key.

The key that Regan had given her. The key that had let her inside the Glenn house. She had used it once, and she would use it again tonight, and then she and Callie would drive west and disappear. They would lose themselves in the small towns of the desert, where they would both be safe.

She still had the gun, too. Maggie's gun. It was shoved in the waist of her jeans, and she felt the hard metal when she breathed.

She had avoided Highway 2 and used the twisting back roads on the drive from Duluth. She had stopped only once at a roadside convenience store, where she'd broken into the dark shop and cleaned up and bandaged her wounds. The bleeding had quit for now, but she was exhausted and weak.

Her mind and body were both fraying. But she couldn't give up.

Nieman's car was parked in the trees on the shoulder of County Road 76, out of view from the highway. From there, she had plunged into the woods and hiked half a mile to her hiding place fifty yards from the Glenn house, on the shore of Pokegama Lake. She hunkered down near the water and studied the activity around the house.

Police officers patrolled the backyard, and she knew they were hunting for her. She didn't care. Her goal was the side door leading into the garage, where the yard was unlit. No one would see her breaking from the woods, and she only needed a few seconds to get inside. Then she could wait for the right moment to move deeper into the house.

With the snow silencing her footsteps, she zigzagged to the edge of the forest bordering the rear lawn of the mansion. Despite her care, she flushed a rabbit that shot noisily from the brush and made tracks across the open snow. She froze, sheltered behind the bushy arms of a spruce. A policewoman near the corner of the house spied the rabbit and scanned the forest where it had emerged. She studied the darkness, staring right at Kasey. Her hand rested on the butt of her gun.

The policewoman wandered closer and stopped twenty feet away. Kasey tensed. In her head, her breathing sounded loud. The cold made her shiver, and the branches swayed where her body touched them. Water dripped from her red hair. Behind the policewoman, she could see the dark recess of the doorway leading inside the garage. It was only a few steps away across a trail of flagstones.

The policewoman lost interest in the rabbit. She dug in her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, then blew her nose loudly and unleashed a hacking cough. She took a last look at the woods before turning on her heel and disappearing around the front of the house.

Kasey waited to make sure the cop didn't return. The strip of ground between the woods and the garage was dark and empty. The lake wind had blown the snow into drifts by the side of the house, leaving most of the stonework clear. Taking a breath, she bolted from the trees and across the flagstones and ducked inside the doorway. When she looked back, she saw that she had left two footprints near the edge of the forest. They were barely visible, but if she looked closely, she could see them in the snow near where the policewoman had stood. Two boot marks four feet apart.

She couldn't worry about them now.

Kasey slid the key from her pocket. It was warm in her hand. With a cautious glance in both directions, she pushed the key into the dead-bolt on the side door and turned. The key didn't budge. She jiggled it and tried again, twisting furiously, but the key didn't fit. She yanked it out and squeezed it in her fist and shut her eyes. In frustration, she threw her shoulder against the door, but it was locked and solid.