Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

But when Gina came and got me, her face was pale and her voice had been reduced to such a small thing I could barely hear it. Shae, she was saying, or trying to. Shae. Over and over, with effort and an unfocused look in her eyes. Shae.

I didn’t believe her while climbing the folding attic ladder; still didn’t while crossing the rough, creaking boards, hunched beneath the slope of the roof in the gloom and cobwebs and a smell like a century of dust. But after five or twenty minutes on my knees, I believed, all right, even if nothing made sense anymore.

There was light, a little, coming through a few small, triangular windows at the peaks. And there was air, slatted vents at either end allowing some circulation. And there was my sister’s body, on a cot between a battered steamer trunk and a stack of cardboard boxes, covered by a sheet that had been drawn down as far as her chest.

The sheet wasn’t dusty or discolored. It was clean, white, recently laundered. Eight years of washing her dead granddaughter’s sheets — my head had trouble grasping that, and my heart just wanted to stop.

Gradually it dawned on me: With Shae eight years dead, we shouldn’t have been able to recognize her. At best, she would’ve mummified in the dry heat, shriveled into a husk. At worst, all that was left would be scraps and bones, and the strawberry blonde silk of her hair. Instead, the most I could say was that she looked very, very thin, and when I touched her cheek, her skin was smooth and stiff but pliable, like freshly worked clay. I touched her cheek and almost expected her eyes to open.

She’d been nineteen then, was nineteen now. She’d spent the last eight years being nineteen. Nineteen and dead, only not decayed. She lay on a blanket and a bed of herbs. They were beneath her, alongside her. Sprigs and bundles had been stuffed inside the strips of another sheet that had been loosely wound around her like a shroud. The scent of them, a pungent and spicy smell of fields and trees, settled in my nose.

“Do you think Grandma did this?” Gina was behind me, pressing close. “Not this this, that’s obvious, but… killed her, I mean. Not on purpose, but by accident, and she just couldn’t face the rest of us.”

“Right now I don’t know what to think.”

I shoved some junk out of the way to let more light at her. Her skin was white as a china plate, and dull, without the luster of life. Her far cheek and jaw were traced with a few pale bluish lines like scratches that had never healed. Gently, as if it were still possible to hurt her, I turned her head from side to side, feeling her neck, the back of her skull. There were no obvious wounds, although while the skin of her neck was white as well, it was a more mottled white.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check the rest of her.”

Gina’s eyes popped. “Me? Why me? You’re the hard-ass prison guard.”

It was then I knew everything was real, because when tragedy is real, silly things cross your mind at the wrong times. Corrections officer, I wanted to tell her. We don’t like the G-word.

“She’s my sister. She’s still a teenager,” I said instead. “I shouldn’t be… she wouldn’t want me to.”

Gina moved in and I moved aside and turned my back, listening to the rustle of cotton sheets and the crackle of dried herbs. My gaze roved and I spotted mousetraps, one set, one sprung, and if there were two, there were probably others. Grandma had done this, too. Set traps to keep the field mice away from her.

“She’s, uh…” Gina’s voice was shaky. “Her back, her bottom, the backs of her legs, it’s all purple-black.”

“That’s where the blood pooled. That’s normal.” At least it didn’t seem like she’d bled to death. “It’s the only normal thing about this.”

“What am I looking for, Dylan?”

“Injuries, wounds… is it obvious how she was hurt?”

“There’s a pretty deep gash across her hipbone. And her legs are all scratched up. And her belly. There are these lines across it, like, I don’t know… rope burns, maybe?”

Everything in me tightened. “Was she assaulted? Her privates?”

“They… look okay to me.”

“All right. Cover her up decent again.”

I inspected Shae’s hands and fingertips. A few of her nails were ragged, with traces of dirt. Her toenails were mismatched, clean on one foot, the other with the same rims of dirt, as if she’d lost a shoe somewhere between life and death. Grandma had cleaned her up, that was plain to see, but hadn’t scraped too deeply with the tip of the nail file. Maybe it just came down to how well she could see.

I returned to Shae’s neck, the mottling there. Connect the dots and you could call it lines. If her skin weren’t so ashen, it might look worse, ringed with livid bruises.

“If I had to guess, I’d say she was strangled,” I told Gina. “And maybe not just her throat, but around the middle, too.” Someone treating her like a python treats prey, wrapping and squeezing until it can’t breathe.

We tucked her in again and covered her the rest of the way, to keep off the dust and let her return to her long, strange sleep.

“What do you want to do?” Gina said, and when I didn’t answer: “The kindest thing we could do is bury her ourselves. Let it be our secret. Nobody else has to know. What good would it do if they did?”

For the first minute or two, that sounded good. Until it didn’t. “You don’t think Grandma knew that too? It’s not that she couldn’t have. If she was strong enough to work the soil in her garden, and to get Shae up the ladder, then she was strong enough to dig a grave. And there’s not one time in the last eight years I heard her say anything that made me think her mind was off track. You?”

Gina shook her head. “No.”

“Then she was keeping Shae up here for a reason.”

We backed off toward the ladder, because another night, another day, wasn’t going to do Shae any harm.

And that’s when we found the envelope that Gina must have sent flying when she first drew back the sheet.

How you react to what I got to say depends on who’s done the finding, our Grandma Evvie had written. I have my hopes for who it is, and if it hasn’t gone that way I won’t insult the rest by spelling it out, but I think you know who you are.

First off, I know how this looks, but how things look and how things are don’t always match up.

Know this much to be true: It wasn’t any man or woman that took Shae’s life. The easiest thing would’ve been to turn her over and let folks think so and see her buried and maybe see some local boy brought up on charges because the sheriff decides he’s got to put it on somebody. I won’t let that happen. There’s plenty to pay for around here, and maybe the place would be better off even if some of them did get sent away for something they didn’t do, but I can’t help put a thing like that in motion without knowing whose head it would fall on.

If I was to tell you Shae was done in by what I always called the Woodwalker, some of you might believe me and most of you probably wouldn’t. Believing doesn’t make a thing any more or less true, it just points you toward what you have to do next.

If I was to tell you you could have Shae back again, would you believe it enough to try?

In the kitchen that evening, across the red oilcloth spread over the table, Gina and I argued. We argued for a long time. It comes naturally to brothers and sisters, but cousins can be pretty good at it too.