Rick Mofina - Perfect Grave

“Banged it on the bench? How the heck did that happen?”

“That’s how it happened. So drop it,” Jack sucked air through his teeth while gnawing on a chicken wing.

That night after Brady got into bed, Rhonda softly pressed him for more details.

“Brady, what really happened?”

“Mom, I was clumsy.”

“You’re not clumsy. Tell me what happened.”

“Dad said that I-Mom. I’m clumsy. I dropped a tool on Dad’s foot. Okay?”

Her blood bubbled.

“Did he hit you?”

Brady turned to the wall.

Rhonda marched from Brady’s room. Jack was on his sixth, or seventh, beer and still gnawing on chicken wings when she lit into him.

“Did you hit him?”

Jack glared at her while still chewing, his jaw muscles tightening.

“He dropped a drill on my foot. I hardly touched him.”

“You bastard!”

“Don’t make this a big deal, Rhonda,” Jack gnawed on his chicken bone. “I’m warning you.”

“You stupid coward.”

Jack ground into the chicken, sprang to his feet, swung at her head, missed, shifted his weight to swing again, and suddenly his eyes widened and he clawed at his throat.

He was choking.

Rhonda thudded his back, wrapped her arms around him, put her hands together and tried to press into his upper chest. Jack fell to his knees, collapsing on their living room floor, gasped for several minutes, then stopped breathing.

Right there.

With Brady watching.

Rhonda tried mouth-to-mouth and CPR while Brady called 911.

There was nothing they could’ve done, the doctors said later.

A chicken bone had become wedged in his throat.

Rhonda was suddenly a young widowed mother, trapped in a maelstrom of horrible emotions that lasted for months. So when the doctor had asked if Brady had ever had a head injury, she couldn’t tell him the whole truth because she believed it had been all her fault.

She feared that the doctor would call social services and- they could take Brady.

There had been a point in her life when she truly believed Jack was her salvation. But it was so long ago it seemed like a distant, dying star. Little by little as each day passed, Jack had become a hard man to love. In fact, all the love she’d ever had for him evaporated the day she buried him.

Brady was the only good thing to come out of her marriage.

The only good thing in her life.

And now, after all she’d been through, God has somehow seen fit to take Brady away from her. And now, as she tried to fight back tears, the line in her hand clicked and this woman at the insurance company was going to put her on hold-

“No! Damn it! Don’t put me on hold again you, stupid, stupid-!”

Rhonda slammed the phone down, drove her face into her hands in time to muffle her scream.

Helpless. She was utterly helpless.

Rhonda sat in her kitchen letting her anger ebb until she heard a noise.

What was that?

She stopped breathing to listen.

I t sounded as if something had fallen over in the garage.

Rhonda waited and listened.

Nothing.

Strange.

Was she so stressed that her mind was playing tricks on her? Maybe it was the echo of her own sob.

No. She definitely heard something.

It came from the garage. Maybe it was Brady and his friends? She glanced at the clock. It was a bit early for him to be home from school just yet. Besides, he didn’t like going in the garage much.

Neither did she.

It was like a mausoleum. That’s where Jack spent a lot of time. A lot of his stuff was still out there. Stuff she had trouble selling, or giving away. She’d better go check because, if she didn’t, it would trouble her tonight.

She took the key from the peg.

It was a two-car garage connected to the house with a breezeway. Rhonda hardly used it. This is silly. She was probably hearing things, she told herself, sliding the key in the side door.

Dust motes swirled in the columns of late-afternoon sunlight shooting through the side window. Standing in the doorway, with her hand on the handle, Rhonda looked around.

Three broken lawn mowers that he used to cannibalize for parts lined one wall. Two ladders were suspended on hooks on the opposite wall. Extra sheets of drywall and scrap pieces of plywood stood in one corner. The tall refrigerator was in another corner. Brady’s wading pool, his old tricycle, and baby things cluttered one area. Old baby toys and broken lawn furniture. The barbeque.

Reminders of happier days.

It was odd.

She could feel a presence.

Jack’s workbench was still cluttered with old tools. Junk, really. And such a mess. She should just toss everything. Next to the bench stood the row of his old mismatched file cabinets where he kept God knows what. Landscaper stuff. Not the important papers. Those all went to the accountant and lawyers.

Nothing seemed out of place.

Maybe the neighbor’s cat got in through a vent? Or a squirrel? Hopefully not a mouse.

No. It was nothing.

Rhonda tightened her hold on the door handle and prepared to leave. As she took a last look around, something caught her eye. The way the light reflected on the file cabinet. The middle drawer of the second cabinet was open.

Now that’s strange.

They’re all supposed to be locked. There’s nothing important in there but she distinctly remembered locking them all. She looked at the stuff in the drawer. Just useless files on lawns and maintenance. But how could that drawer be open?

How could that be?

Maybe she’d forgotten?

Maybe she’d been out here looking through Jack’s papers and had forgotten? She stood there thinking until she heard Brady’s voice, faint, from the house.

“Hi, Mom, I’m home.”

“I’m coming!” she called back.

This was silly.

She snapped the file drawer closed, then left, pulling the garage door closed behind her without seeing the stranger standing in the darkened corner next to the refrigerator.

He was holding a large knife.

And he was skilled at using it.

I t was relentless.

Something familiar gnawed at Chuck DePew, something he felt could break this case wide open.

But what was it?

At the Washington State Patrol’s Crime Lab in Seattle, DePew studied an enlarged photograph on his oversized computer monitor. He’d seen this before. But when? He thrust his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and ground his teeth; a lifelong habit signaling his Zen-like style of problem solving.

The image looked like a TV weather map, a confusion of isobaric contours, troughs, and radiating temperature patterns.

DePew then typed several commands. As the new data loaded, he took stock of his worktable with the evidence collected in and around the scene where Sister Anne Braxton was murdered.

The key item was a cast of a partial shoe impression taken from the alley behind her apartment, near the blackberry bush where the killer had tossed the knife. The cast was collected by Kay Cataldo’s crew with the Seattle Police CSI unit. They’d done a nice job, producing a little work of art in dental stone that offered a three-dimensional copy of the partial.

A right shoe impression was the first thing DePew thought when Kay first showed it to him earlier. “Any chance you could help us out here, Chuck?” Kay’s SPD unit was smaller than the WSP team and constantly overwhelmed. But then again, so was DePew.

“There’s not much to go on here,” he said.

“I’ll give you my Sonics tickets if you guys can do anything with this and the lift of the partials we took from her apartment.”

“Are they good?”

“The impressions?”