Page 121 of We Already Dug the Grave

“Your daddy started getting rough with y’all. Especially you, Milly. Let him hit me, but I couldn’t abide him putting his hands on you girls. I was going to get us away from him. We were going to be free. I planned it all out. I was going to use foxglove.

When I was young, I’d overheard Aunt Hattie tell one of her clients about it.” As she spoke, she looked at the wall across from us, covered in Hattie-May’s drawings. Pencil sketches of belladonna, daffodils, oleander, wolfsbane, and lily of the valley overlapped in a paper patchwork quilt. There was rosary pea and of course the mourning willow with its weeping branches and gnarled roots. A darker incarnation of the tree behind the greenhouse, which wasn’t scary at all.

Mama continued. “I worked for months, growing the pretty flowers from seeds in our back flowerbeds.” She smiled. “I do not have Aunt Hattie’s green thumb, but I tended to it and it thrived. Like nature herself wanted me to succeed. Then when it was ready, I followed instructions I found online, blending it to a pulp.”

“We were going to poison Burt, originally,” I said.

“Poison’s how most women do it.” Mama’s gaze drifted from Hattie-May’s artwork into the past. “Can you believe I hung all my hopes on a teenage memory? But that’s what desperation will do to you. Foxglove can trigger a heart attack, and I convinced myself with your daddy’s drinking and smoking and carrying on, no one would suspect a thing, that I was like Aunt Hattie getting rid of pests. I’m not ashamed to say I was excited when I stirred it into his coffee. I remember thinking, ‘This is it. Today I’ll get my life back. Today I’ll save my girls.’ I don’t know if you remember, but I made y’all a special breakfast. It was going to be the first day of the rest of our lives.”

My breathing hitched. The pancakes were blueberry and shaped like hearts.

My chair squeaked as I shifted my weight and stole a look at my sister, who watched Mama reverently.

“But…I don’t know how he knew, or even if he really did. Your daddy didn’t drink his coffee that morning. Three cups a day with breakfast the entire time we’d been married, and that morning he didn’t drink a drop. He loaded you girls up for school, and I was so scared that I could barely breathe. Milly, I think you could sense something was wrong because you tried your darndest to stay home, but I couldn’t let you.” She shook her head. “When he kissed me goodbye there was pure hate in his eyes.”

She paused, taking a deep breath, and I remembered that feeling: the coldness. The metal in my palm. The explosion. Death foretold before I was old enough to understand.

“Once he was gone, I took his revolver from where he kept it locked in our nightstand. He dropped you at school then came right back, eager to waste no time. So, when he opened the door, I pulled the pistol from my dress pocket and shot him.”

Chapter 48

Now

The sky was dusky and the mosquitoes were out in full force by the time we left that evening.

While Mama took one of Hattie-May’s pain tinctures and lay down to rest, Frances and I checked the house over and scrubbed away all traces of the two of us, then we got in the car and drove away.

At the end of the driveway, I slammed on the brakes and hopped out. My sister didn’t follow as I jogged to the fence post. The bones hung in the pink evening light, and I pulled one free from the twine. And then another. And then the rest.

For a moment, I considered bringing them with us, a replacement for the one that had traveled in my pocket for the past decade. In the end, I threw Ruth’s wards into the woods that ran along the roadside.

Frances was confident her in-laws would bury any impending news story concerning Burt’s death, but I wasn’t so sure. He was an Anderson shot dead, missing half his skull. That was news.

When reporters showed up to the property, having bones hanging on the fence would only fuel the media frenzy. I hated to think of what would be said about my aunts’ house. The bones would make it worse. Hattie-May and Ruth didn’t deserve that.

Frances watched from the car window. When I slid back into the driver’s seat, she said, “Guess the wards were useless in the end.”

“Guess so,” I said, though when I considered my sliver of bone I’d used to stab Burt, itself a stolen ward, I wasn’t so sure.

We drove in silence, and were at the last stop sign on the edge of town when four cop cars whizzed by, sirens blaring. I stole a glance at my sister, who stared at me, her expression unreadable.

Two hours later, on the interstate, I got up the resolve to ask my sister about something that bothered me. I’d worked it all out in my head, and almost everything made sense except for one thing.

Burt had manipulated us, had shown up and boasted this whole story to get us to turn on each other. It hadn’t worked. Except he’d taken one secret with him to the grave.

“Do you think he was telling the truth?” I asked. “About Casey, I mean. Do you think he truly never moved his body?”

Frances bit her bottom lip. “To be honest, I don’t think he did. Burt was cruel, but he had his limits. He took the helmet, but no way he’d have transported a decaying corpse.”

“I looked everywhere for Casey.” I tapped my fingers against the steering wheel. “He wasn’t there. None of him.”

“You must’ve been in the wrong place. Or maybe scavengers got him. I was in the car with Burt when we left that morning. Yeah, his nails were dirty, but I feel like there’d have been a smell or something if he’d, I don’t know, put Casey in the trunk.”

I nodded but said nothing, only stared out the windshield. I hated the flippant way she talked about Casey. I’d spent half my life feeling bad for abandoning him in the forest, but this—not knowing where he was—was worse.

“Oh, hey.” Frances grabbed my arm and pointed at a sign. “That place has good bathrooms, and I have to pee.”

I gave my signal and exited.