Page 4 of We Already Dug the Grave

“What?” Something stirred softly inside me like wind whistling beneath a closed door or the gentle rustle of wings. A whisper in my mind coaxing me to look, look, look.

I bit my bottom lip. How long had it been since the last time the echo of my gift wafted over me? Three months? Six? Always triggered by a reminder of her. Cruel, if you asked me, considering it hadn’t been trustworthy for at least a decade.

Still. Moss Grove?

I forced a smile and shook my head, as if clearing cobwebs. “Sorry, I mean, where did you say?”

“Moss Grove,” he repeated. “It’s a smaller town up in north Alabama, near Georgia. Mostly big houses and cow pastures. They say the governor has some property up there.” Billy tapped his fingers against the table. “Pretty country, not the kind of place you’d ever expect to find a body. But that’s where she was. Some kids playing in a creek stumbled across her arm sticking out of a shallow grave.” He shook his head and kept talking as the heat drained from my face. “Makes you wonder how she got there.”

My hands were suddenly sweaty, and I clenched the coffeepot’s handle to keep from dropping it to the floor.

Billy’s dark eyes narrowed. “You okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I’m fine. I…” I shook my head. “I’m, um. Yeah. I’m fine.”

I wondered what he’d say if I told him the truth, that I knew Moss Grove well. Very well, in fact.

How I’d never visited but was certain I could navigate its upscale homes and rolling green fields with my eyes closed. How years ago I’d spent countless hours searching Google Earth and scrolling through aerial views of each county road because I knew someone who lived there.

Someone who pretended I didn’t exist. But it didn’t matter, because regardless of how far apart we strayed, an invisible tether always snapped us back together. This was proof, wasn’t it?

Proof that when it came to Robbins women, where bloodlines begat secrets and intuition tangled like a vine through my family tree, it didn’t matter how far we scattered, we never escaped each other.

Not me and my sister.

And now, out of nowhere, her town, Moss Grove, announced itself. And further, the missing girl’s body had been found by a creek.

A memory elbowed its way into my mind’s eye…another creek. This one with a rocky bank with tall trees stretching overhead. Girls playing mermaids and making potions with water and sand and leaves…

No.

The two aren’t connected.

Yes, there’d been another creek. Another body. But in the South, creeks were common as fingerprints on a dirty window. It was a coincidence.

Everything means something, if you know how to look. I could hear Aunt Ruth’s voice in my head again. It was a truth I’d cut my teeth on. But the problem was, I didn’t know how to look anymore.

Or rather, the family gift refused to let me. It teased and taunted and begged, but whenever I tried to open that place within me, once trained and practiced and welcoming, it no longer spoke like it should. Except to whisper one thing. One cruel thing. Again and again whenever I dared peek, channeling into it my tea leaves. That is, if the internal door deigned to open for me at all.

So I ignored its teasing call, except when desperation hit hardest. On those nights, when I dared peer into my fortune, I always regretted it.

It had taken a lot, but I’d made peace with the fact that I wasn’t that girl anymore—the one who channeled the simmering Sight into a teacup, using tasseomancy to divine meaning. I wasn’t her, and I could never be her again.

Now, I was only a waitress living in a nothing town scraping by as best I could.

But Moss Grove?

It felt sharp and intentional—a slap across the face, which had once been fate’s preferred method of getting my attention.

Out of habit, I reached into my pocket and caressed the shard of bone tucked there, the one physical thing from my past I’d carried with me. My own morbid worry stone. As I ran my fingers along its smooth edge and sharp tip, it both soothed and shamed me.

Moss Grove, a creek, a body—It was only a coincidence. There was no deeper meaning. No reason to spiral and connect dots that weren’t there. The ugly truth was, people were killed all the time. Didn’t I know that better than anyone?

“They didn’t find the boy?” I asked, when I realized Billy was staring, waiting on me to say something. Prove I wasn’t about to pass out on the restaurant floor.

“Not yet.” Billy shrugged. “Some think he might be responsible.”

There. That was probably it. If true crime podcasts taught us anything, it was that it’s always the boyfriend.