Twenty-nine-year-old Hetty Bramble pushed her choppy black hair out of her face then looked down at her scarred hands. Her short blunt fingernails were as broken and brittle as she felt inside. Some said she still had the goth look she’d sported as a teenager, but she didn’t care. She was not interested in pleasing anyone but herself, much less in attracting a man.
She walked through the nursery she now owned with pride, sniffing the plants and rose bushes and knowing that soon the azaleas would bloom.
After the way she’d been raised, taken in by her uncle Earl when her parents died, then being forced to help him build the pine boxes for the indigents, pull weeds and clear spots for the graves, who would have thought she’d enjoy digging in the dirt, spreading fertilizer over the ground and tending to the flowers in the graveyard?
Uncle Earl had seen her as his work horse, and never let her forget that he’d given her a home instead of sending her to foster care. He hadn’t been so selfless though. He’d wanted herparents’ money, what little there was. And she’d never seen a dime of it.
Sometimes she wondered if she would have been better off in the foster system. But she did have her cousin Ida to lean on so that made it bearable.
As morbid as the graveyard was, it was all she’d ever known. It had been home to her, an amusement park for her and Ida as children. They’d played hide-and-seek behind the gravestones, and sometimes pretended the graveyard was the jail. They’d chase each other and any other kid who wanted to play, pretending to be the graveyard police, then make an arrest and throw the kid in a grave until they paid to get out. Of course, to lure the kids into playing, first they’d had to make up a story about what fun they’d have and not let on the exact nature or rules of the game.
At night they played ghosts in the graveyard. Sometimes the mischief got in them, and they robbed flowers and left them on people’s doors to freak them out or played spooky music and sounds when visitors came just to scare them away.
Half of the Bramble people, including drunk Uncle Billy Bob and their mean as a snake cousin Luther, were buried there. Her mama and daddy and granny were spending eternity in a section called the Garden of Peace although there was nothing peaceful about the cemetery.
A sarcastic laugh escaped her as she walked out to her pick-up truck. Only time her mother had ever had any peace was the day they put her in the ground.
Although the sound of shovels hitting rock echoed in her ears constantly, she took comfort in gardening and tending the graves herself. Some folks thought she was daft because she talked to the dead and sang them old gospel hymns her mama used to sing to her at night.
With all the haunting memories between those rows of headstones and vases of plastic flowers, she tried to atone for her sins, for the dark things she and Ida had done, and make the ground look cheerful for the families who visited.
She lifted the bin of fertilizer to store in the back of her pick-up and started to carry it outside, but the rain stopped her. Fertilizer smelled like death anyway, but when wet it knocked her head off.
A gray Lincoln pulled up beneath the awning and nosy Nell Nickerson waved to her as she got out, tugging her raincoat around her meticulously groomed outfit. That woman had hired hands do her bidding and had never touched dirt with those hands much less a scrub brush.
“Hetty, good Lord, did you hear the news?” Nell’s eyes looked like giant saucers about to fly out of her head.
Hetty wrangled in her irritation and when Nell’s wandering eyes fell to Hetty’s arms, she yanked her long sleeves down to cover old bruises.
She didn’t want to play guess what with this gossip monger, but Nell wouldn’t quit until she spilled whatever seed of a rumor had her body preening with excitement. “No, what now?” Probably one of the bunco ladies’ teenagers wore a whore dress to prom. Or some boy knocked up a girl or got busted for weed or meth. Meth labs were popping up in every corner of the mountains like weeds in a flower garden.
Sheriff Wallace didn’t seem too keen on shutting the labs down and turned a blind eye. Hetty always wondered if he had a stake in them himself.
“I heard they found a body up yonder at Green Gardens Cemetery,” Nell chirped. “Might be that girl Ruth.”
Hetty went bone still, her breath trapped in her chest.
A body found at the graveyard where all the bad things happened? Where her uncle had worked? Where she spent her days now?
Was Nell goading her or was that a fact?
Was it Ruth Higgins, the girl Uncle Earl was accused of killing?
NINE
Atlanta, Georgia
A cold chill washed over Tilly Higgins as the reporter’s words echoed in her head.
An unidentified body has been found here in Brambletown this evening. Police are at the scene and will reveal more information as it becomes available.
Her breathing quickened as she started the engine of her trusted Red Escape, left Atlanta and headed into the mountains. She’d run away from Brambletown years ago to escape the stigma and suspicion surrounding her family.
After her sister, Ruth, disappeared, both her brother and father had been treated like suspects.
Although most people believed Earl Bramble had killed Ruth.
Everyone in town had their version of an Earl Bramble story, all sordid and ugly.
