Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“Go on.”

Her voice came from somewhere outside what he was seeing. He could never tell if he’d actually witnessed this part, or he’d built it up over the years in his imagination, his mind, his nightmares. In front of him lay his father, straining to breathe. Enough of his clothing had burned off that the underlying skin of his chest, already laid raw with the heat, rippled, then split open to the muscle with the effort. The man arched forward and reached toward him, the whites of his eyes bulging out of his carbon face, imploring him for help.

“Go on,” he heard her say again.

“… I started to scream, broke free, and ran. They found me hiding in the basement of this house. I’ve been trying to erase that sound, that smell, those eyes ever since. Tonight just…” He couldn’t talk anymore. The tears he’d fought back while working on Nell met no resistance this time, and a sob, raw and loud as an animal’s bellow, broke free from deep within his chest.

Her arms were around him in a flash.

“No one helped,” he gasped when he got his breath. “They just stood around and watched him die.” He tried to wipe his eyes and stifle his crying, but she kept telling him that it was okay, and her cool fingers stroked the side of his face. She cradled his head so closely that her hair fell around him in a sheltering bower, and the soothing sound of her heartbeat filled his ears.

He looked up and gently cupped his palm over her cheek. She turned her head slightly, brought her lips to his fingertips, and softly kissed them, keeping her eyes locked on his, not allowing him to evade the truth of these seconds. They remained huddled side by side, cocooned in each other’s embrace, straddling a distance far greater than the reach of their arms.

He lay back and drew her on top of him, and kissed her, and was kissed by her, a fearless gentle kiss.

A mile down the road a red car stood parked under a grove of poplar trees, its windows well frosted by the breathing of the three men who waited inside.

A fourth carrying night goggles walked up to the passenger side and got in the front seat. The driver finished talking on his cellular and snapped it shut. “No phone calls, neither on the land line nor his cellular. They may have figured out we’re listening,” he said to the newcomer.

“It doesn’t matter. Roper loaded up the Jeep with shovels. Looks like they’re going digging.”

“He’s coming now?” the man behind him asked, sounding surprised.

“All I can tell you is he’s ready to break ground. That means we need to get there and wait for him to show up.”

The other man in the backseat muttered, “Well, god damn. I didn’t think he’d take the bait to that extent.”

The driver started the motor and turned the defroster on full blast. “I guess this time we played him just about perfectly.”

Saturday, November 24, 2:30 A.M.

Hampton Junction

The beam from Lucy’s headlamp sliced through snowflakes big as polka dots as she followed the road in through the woods. Barely a foot had accumulated on the ground, but the stickiness of it made the trek hard going and transformed the branches overhead into a giant corridor of curved white ribs. It was her first time on the grounds, but Mark had pointed out the entrance several times.

She had awakened about an hour ago, languidly stretched, and left Mark sleeping in their bed – she paused. Their bed. She liked the sound of that, and savored the memory of his naked body against hers.

Her feelings for Mark confused her. She’d had lovers before. It had been a way to keep sane at the front of a war zone, losing herself in the embrace of a man she liked and respected, with no illusions about the future. Before that, in medical school, she’d had little time for sweethearts, though sex with the right friend on occasion had been comforting during that ordeal as well. Yet with every man she’d shared her bed, she always knew how ephemeral their affair would be even as they first began to make love.

She’d hadn’t felt that with Mark. Nor did his evident experience as a lover remind her of the other women he’d had. Rather the way he gave himself to her so wantonly let her respond in kind and made their lovemaking all the more special, as if it erased all the times before.

She even liked the edginess she felt in him as he wavered between wanting to bolt from Hampton Junction or staying to practice in his father’s footsteps. It excited her, because as he stood torn by those two extremes, he still exuded the aura of a man with a spine of steel in him, and a moral compass that would point true north no matter what.

And when he was ready, they would talk more about his father’s death. She’d already decided not to raise the possibility Cam Roper had been murdered until Mark could bring it up himself.

But she had also sensed something else. Afterward, as she lay in his arms, she felt a wariness in him that saddened her, a watchfulness as part of him sealed itself off. He still didn’t entirely trust her.

Back in his kitchen she’d made herself a thermos of tea, then, having dressed warmly, grabbed one of the headlamps along with a few other items, switched all the garden tools Mark had selected from his Jeep to her station wagon, and fishtailed out his driveway onto the road.

And here she trudged, having decided to prove herself to him once and for all.

Her frosty breath rose straight up, weaving among the tumbling flakes in the windless night, and the squeaky crunch of her boots on the frozen snow carried in the frosty air. The sound was audible for a long way, which meant she would just as easily hear anyone sneaking around the woods. It reminded her of similar nights in Bosnia, when her medical team had to go out on emergencies, and they knew for sure men with guns were everywhere. Now that had been scary. This felt like a walk in the park. The last thing Braden would expect was for anyone to show up at this hour.

She walked into the clearing and saw the hulking, gray building looming at its center as if waiting for her. It looked exactly the way Mark had described. At least she didn’t have to go inside.

She picked her way through the shrub growth until she reached where it bordered spindly stalks of dormant grass. The perimeter of the lawn he’d talked about, she figured. Walking a few dozen yards farther in, she proceeded to tramp down a twelve-foot square. She then selected a half-moon garden edger from the tools she’d carried with her and sliced the area into six-foot lengths of sod. As she’d expected this time of year, the ground hadn’t frozen yet. Using the blade to pry up the end of one piece, she gave herself a handhold and pulled. It took some additional cutting and slicing, along with a lot of heavy tugging, but she ripped it out more or less intact. Rolling it up and laying it aside, she got to work on the rest. Within half an hour she’d lifted two dozen rolls of turf, exposing moist black earth underneath. Luckily the flakes dissolved on contact with the wet surface.

She fished a rolled-up newspaper from an inside pocket of her jacket and spread it out where she’d first be working, anchoring the corners with clumps of sod. Using the shovel she turned over a strip of soil, then took a garden variety trowel, got down on her knees, and sifted through the dirt, picking up a small trowelful at time, then feeling through it with her fingers over the paper. She figured she wouldn’t have to dig too deep, a couple of feet at most. But it was slow going, and the sweat she’d worked up earlier congealed to her skin, making her all the colder.

She didn’t count on finding anything right away. That would be pressing the laws of chance. But if there were anywhere near 180 tiny corpses buried here, odds were she’d eventually come across at least one set of bones. Not that she needed to find even that these days. In Bosnia they’d been able to detect traces of human DNA in soil samples. And if she wasn’t successful this time, she and Mark could do a little each night, covering up their work with snow so Braden need never know.