Briar Ridge Mobile Homes
Kat was sick and tired of living in this divey trailer park. Mama said it wasn’t bad when she and her daddy first moved in, that there was a pretty view of rolling hills from the ridge. She found that hard to believe. All you could see now were briar patches for miles and miles. She’d learned the hard way that snakes and rodents roamed though the weeds. A rattler almost bit her once and it scared her so bad her knees knocked every time she stepped close to the bushes.
When she was little, she’d seen monsters hiding in the thicket at night.
She despised her mother’s shenanigans, too. She was always embarrassing her. Yelling at her one minute then the next wanting to live vicariously through her because her own teenage years sucked.
Kat knew the history. The gossip. All the kids around her had grown up with it. The horror of the coal mountain fire and the toxins. The people fleeing town to be safe. The fight between Hetty and her mama and that girl that went missing.
Her cheeks burned at the thought.
But no, her parents had stayed for some reason as if they were so accustomed to misery they’d forgotten how to live. Were they just plain stupid?
Sometimes she worried she’d been exposed to toxins and as she got old, she’d have some weird disease where she’d start having seizures or go crazy or have boils on her body like some of the rumors claimed.
She shivered at the thought, slammed the trailer door shut and shoved at the mountain of magazines her mama had piled by their old vinyl couch, knocking them to the floor.
“Kat, you better get yourself under control,” her mama yelled. “And take off those damn red Converses before your daddy sees them. He says they make you look trashy.”
Kat huffed, ran into her room and closed the door to pout. If it was up to her daddy, she’d wear a tent so none of the boys could see that she was finally starting to grow boobs.
She looked down at the little mounds with pride. She’d been waiting a long time for them to pop out and had almost given up hope. Her mama had big knockers, as Daddy called them, but poor Hetty was flat as a pancake.
Mad at her mama and afraid she’d devise some plan to keep Kat from going to the winter dance where she hoped Seth Simmons might finally notice her, she went to her closet and dug out her mother’s old computer. She’d found it hidden in the cedar chest where her mama kept the quilts her grandma had made.
Mama wouldn’t have hidden it if something juicy wasn’t inside. Maybe something about Ruth Higgins. Or… some dirt Kat could get on her mama to use as leverage the next time her mama tried to ground her. Proof that once upon a time Ida Bramble had been as scandalous as the gossip claimed, not a nagging hag as her daddy called her.
Even fifteen years later, the fight between her mama and Hetty and Ruth Higgins was infamous. Shame dug at Kat’s insides. Good grief, a photo of it was even included in the yearbook that year. There was also a memorial to that bitch Ruth, according to her mama, who’d bullied her and Hetty and thought she was better than them cause her daddy was mayor and they had a nice house.
Kat crawled to the corner on her beanbag chair, opened the computer and realized she needed a password.
She thumped her fingers on her temple in thought then decided to try the obvious, her mama’s birthday. It worked, so she dove in, searched the files and realized her mama had once kept a shadow journal. She was shocked her mama had enough smarts to do so.
Or maybe like in Kat’s own English class, it was a requirement.
Curious, she clicked on the link, saw a picture of Green Gardens Cemetery and the titleThe Graveyard Girls. Her pulse jumped as she began to read the first entry.
If her mama knew what happened to Ruth or Kat’s granddaddy, maybe she’d written about it in here.
TWENTY-FIVE
Daisy’s Diner
Ellie stopped at a table of ladies having lunch and asked their thoughts on the Brambles.
“Earl never had much sense,” one woman said. “Flunked out of school in the ninth grade. That’s why he dug graves.”
“He was a stutterer, too,” an ancient-looking woman muttered.
A thin gray-haired lady chirped, “One time someone accused him of burying their sister in the same pine box as her mama.”
A woman they called Nell tsked. “I heard he made that girl Hetty sleep in one of the pine boxes.”
Ellie shuddered at the very thought. She’d been claustrophobic as a child and during one case, the killer she was chasing locked her in a coffin. She still suffered nightmares from the experience.
A middle-aged plump woman added, “Right after Earl disappeared, my husband, Roy, said he saw Earl sneaking into the junkyard after dark. The next day an old pick-up truck was missing and so was the cash he kept in the cash box.”
“Did the police ever find the truck?” Ellie asked.
