Elliot frowned. “Why what?” he asked.
She looked over at me, then back to him.“Why don’t you believe in sin?”
He shrugged. “It’s a construct invented by men who maintain power through control,” he replied. “I’m not interested in letting them have it.”
“Can we get back to the murder, please?” Hart interrupted, sounding irritated. “What, exactly, do you mean, that theyateyou?”
I turned away, feeling sick. I didn’t want to think about my fathereatingmy sister.
She just stared at him.
“I think it’s pretty fucking self-explanatory,” Elliot said, stepping behind me and putting his hands on my shoulders.
I swallowed, hard. “It will be evident on her bones,” I rasped out.
I felt Hart’s eyes on me. And Rachael’s.
“That means I need to exhume the body,” he said, and his voice was gentle.
I nodded. “Do what you need to.”
I don’t recommend ever attendingan exhumation. Especially not one for anyone you ever cared about. I hadn’t ever met my sister, so, for me, it was sort of like attending the exhumation of a stranger.
A stranger who was standing right there, impossibly, unnaturally still.
Ward had released my mother, who apparently hadn’t wanted to speak to me, since Ward had sent Lady R over to find out if I wanted him to make her stay to talk to me. I’d taken the possibly-childish route of figuring that if she didn’t want to talk to me, I didn’t want to talk to her, either.
Elliot had given me a look that either wanted to know what was wrong with me or possibly he meant to communicate complex sympathy—I wasn’t sure, and, either way, I felt kind of like shit about it. Even dead, my own mother didn’t want anything to do with me.
Maybe she was angry that we were digging up Rachael and that I’d been the one to sign the consent forms. Noah hadn’t wanted anything to do with any of this—he and Lulu had stayed in Richmond, and when I’d called him, he’d told me to do whatever I thought was right.
So I had.
I guess Momma disagreed.
I had no idea what Rachael thought, although I guess if she’d objected, then she might have done something other than stand there and stare.
I winced as the coffin, its plain boards rotting, cracked, although it—thank God—held together enough that Rachael’s body stayed within.
“Fuck,” Hart hissed as the crane moved very, very slowly to deposit the coffin in the back of a trailer. I couldn’t see over the plywood sides, but the sound of splitting wood and a few soft thumps suggested it hadn’t held together very well. Hart grimaced and turned away.
Behind me, Elliot let out a strange half-grumble, half-groan. The others at the site—Raj Parikh, a few other Feds I didn’t knowfrom Charlottesville, the guy operating the digger—made other unhappy noises.
I guess I wasn’t eating lunch today, either.
The only redeemingpart of the day was that I—unlike Raj and Hart—didn’t have to attend the autopsy. Instead, Elliot and I went back to the house, working on packing up the everything that Noah and Lulu had said they didn’t want… which was pretty much everything.
Honestly, my instinct had been to just toss everything. Burn it, bury it, throw it away. Elliot had very practically pointed out that it would be far better for the environment and the local economy if I at least donated things, but had also mentioned that this might be a way to help pay for either the car I now needed or my new knee. Insurancewasgoing to pay for a new car, but it was going to take a few months before that money would hit my account, and if we did some sort of sale or list stuff online, we might make at least some money.
Of course, nobody in their right mind was going to drive up here to buy it, but Humbolt had very nicely offered to let us use his driveway when Elliot just happened to mention the fact that we wanted to do a yard sale. Anything that someone didn’t buy, we could then donate.
I knew he was right, but I was still deeply resentful of the fact that I was going to have todoit. To sit in this house, to look at the things that had surrounded me as a child, reminding me of all the days I’d spent wishing I were anywhere but here.
That part, at least, hadn’t changed.
“The ME confirmedcanid dental marks on her bones,” Hart said, shifting awkwardly. He was standing just inside the doorway of our hotel room. I hobbled my way back to the bed after letting him in.
Elliot was out getting dinner for all of us—me, Elliot, and Hart—from the Chinese place, because I was craving sweet and sour shrimp, and they had cream cheese wontons without crab in them, which meant that Hart—who, as an elf, can’t digest any meat—could eat them, and Elliot knew he loved them.
