Patricia Briggs: Home Improvement: Undead Edition

I went back to the yard. Sam was scouting around, examining the space with his nose. His floppy ears were hanging forward. I’d read that this pushed the scent up to a bloodhound’s nose. Amazing. I personally thought he was very cute as a bloodhound, but that got into kind of queasy territory, so it was a thought I had to banish.

“He’s working hard,” Quiana remarked. She’d perched on the edge of one of the yard chairs, her hands tucked between her bare knees. Her thick dark hair was twisted and secured on top of her head with a clip or two, because it was too hot for long hair. My own was piled up in much the same way.

“You two have been friends a long time,” she said, when I didn’t respond to her last comment.

“Yes,” I said. “A few years, now.”

“You have a lot of friends.”

“I have a lot of friendly acquaintances. It’s hard to have close friends, when you have a mental thing like mine.”

“Tell me about it.” Quiana shuddered delicately.

Frankly, I didn’t know if I wanted to be Quiana’s friend or not. There was something in her that put me off. I realized this was pretty damn ironic, since that was the way people often felt about me, but I didn’t think Quiana made me uneasy simply because she had an unusual ability. She made me anxious because for a few minutes the day before she hadn’t been alone in her skin. Someone else had been there with her.

I turned my eyes away from the girl. I didn’t want her wondering what I was thinking about. I watched Sam instead. He was sniffing the ground with the efficiency of a vacuum cleaner.

The lot was long and narrow, with the house leaving very little room on either side. On the north side of the house, there were maybe five feet between the air conditioner sticking out of the kitchen window and the fence that surrounded the yard from the front wall of the house to the rear property line. Naturally, it was in that narrow strip that Sam found a promising scent. He went over it anxiously, and then he raised his head and bayed.

I hoped all the neighbors really were at work. At least the fence blocked the view.

Sam’s doleful bloodhound face swung toward me, and he pawed at the ground at his feet. “Awwwrrrrhr,” he said.

I got the shovel from the tool shed. This was not going to be pretty. I was trickling with sweat after the first few shovelfuls, and I was maybe a little peeved that Quiana didn’t ask to take a turn digging. She looked down into the gradually increasing hole with an unnerving and unswerving fascination.

I looked at Sam, who was licking one of his paws. “You better go inside and change back,” I said. “Thanks, Sam.” He started ambling toward the steps and paused, stymied. I pitched a shovelful of dirt at Quiana’s feet. “Quiana,” I said sharply, “You need to open the back door for him.”

It was like I’d stuck a pin in her, she looked so startled. “Sure,” she said. “Sure, I’ll do it.”

I watched her go over to the door, and it seemed to me she stumbled a little, was a bit shaky on her feet. Her mind was blurry, foggy, with strong impressions coming from God knows where. After Sam was in the house, I resumed digging. The faster I went, the sooner we’d know if Sam had found an old turkey carcass or human remains.

After another five minutes I had to pause. Quiana had returned to her place at the edge of the hole. Her stance was rigid and her eyes were fixed on the upturned earth.

I heard a couple of slamming car doors. JB and Tara had returned. I felt a surprising amount of relief.

I was leaning on my shovel when they all came into the backyard—all the adults, that is. The twins were still sleeping. Sam had resumed his human form, and he was in his cutoff jeans again. His Hawaiian shirt looked cool with its loose drape around his torso. I envied him. My tank top felt wet and clingy.

JB and Tara were still wearing their workout clothes, so they were as sweaty as I was, but they both looked more relaxed.

“So, there something in there?” Tara asked, peering down at the hole I’d made.

“Sam thinks so,” I replied. “JB, you want to shovel for a while?”

“Sure, Sook,” he said amiably, and he grabbed the shovel. I sank to my haunches and watched him work.

Sam squatted by me. He never wavered in his expectant posture.

And with a terrible predictability, the shovel hit something that scraped instead of crunched. Without being told, JB started to scratch at the dirt with the shovel blade instead of sinking it in.

We didn’t need the monitor to hear the babies begin to wail.

Quiana tore herself away to go in to them. Tara seemed relieved to leave it to her.

JB uncovered a femur.

We regarded the bone in silence.

“Well, we got us a body,” Sam said. “Now we need to know who it belonged to.”

“How are we gonna explain what we were doing?” Tara asked.

“We could say you were going to plant some beans,” I said. “I know it’s late for beans, but a cop would believe that.” I left unspoken the fact that Andy would believe that if we said it was JB’s idea. “We can say we were digging the holes for the runner poles.”

“So they’ll come get the bones out, and then what? Will things get better in our house?” Tara’s eyes were bright with anger. “Will we stop being miserable? What about the babies? I think we have to find out who this guy was.”

“It’s not Isaiah Wechsler, and we know Albert lived, and we know Carter was sent away after the murder. So who could this be?” I looked around, hoping someone would look as though he had had a revelation, but everyone looked blank.

JB, shovel in hand, was standing by the crouching Sam. They were silently regarding the hole that was a grave. Sam was scowling.

“Tara, we can’t ignore this,” I said, as gently as I could. I was fighting a rising wave of irritation.

“I know that,” she snapped. “I never said we could, Sookie. But I got to figure out what’s best for me and my family.”

Quiana had been gone a handful of minutes by now. I could still hear the babies crying. Why hadn’t she found out what was wrong and fixed it?

The normally placid JB nudged Sam to make him move away from the grave. Sam’s jaw set in a way I knew meant he was barely holding on to his temper.

I didn’t trust any emotion I felt.

Tara was angry with me, which wasn’t normal. Sam and JB were glaring at each other. The anger in the air was affecting all of us. I made myself run into the house to find out why the babies were weeping. Tara should be doing this! I followed the sobs to their little room.

Quiana was sitting in the rocking chair crammed in beside the cribs, and she was crying, too.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Snap out of it.”

Her tear-stained face looked at me with resentment written all over it. “I have a right to grieve for what I’ve lost. Only my brother knows the real me,” she said bitterly.

Uh-oh.

“Quiana,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot calmer and a lot more nervous, “you don’t have a brother.”

“Of course I do.” But she looked confused.

“You’re being haunted,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. I didn’t want to say the word possessed , but it was definitely hovering in the air.

“Sure, that’s right, blame me because I’m the one who’s different,” she snarled in a complete emotional about-face.

I flinched, but I had to pass her to get to the babies, whose cries had redoubled. I decided to take a chance. “You want to go outside?” I said. Then I made a guess. “You can see your bones.” I watched her carefully, since I had no idea what she’d do next.

There was someone else behind Quiana’s face, someone both anguished and angry. All I could think about was getting her out of the room.