Better left buried, p.3
Better Left Buried, page 3
And that is how I know Veronica Anselm knows how to lie, and does it well.
No one has ever accused me of looking like my mom—or even, really, my dad. Mom is tall and lean and muscular, hard in every place where I am soft.
I, on the other hand, am short and curvy and almost always out of breath. Plus, I have red hair to Mom’s dark brown.
“Thank you.” Mom puts a hand on my shoulder, drawing me gently back. “Veronica, do you need anything tonight? I’d like to get my daughter to bed, but then I am…I am at your disposal.”
“Of course, of course.” Veronica steps back and pushes a button on a sensor on the wall. It looks like climate control, but one of the fancier, newer models, the kind that monitors every aspect of temperature and lighting. The mansion looks old on the outside, stately and grand, but inside everything is sleek, modern, updated to prove how much money they’ve got. “I can never figure out how to do this from my phone, no matter how many times dear Gussy shows me.”
Mom hmms politely in response.
Veronica’s hand trembles, just a little, as she sets the temperature. “Well, then.” She clears her throat, a mask settling back over her face, emotion controlled. “How would you like to stay in your mom’s old room tonight? We’ve kept it just the way you liked, Katy. Even the old Avril Lavigne posters.”
I’m not quite sure who that is, but I can’t imagine Mom as a kid, period, let alone a kid in this house who left posters on the wall in her bedroom. I open my mouth, but shut it again, remembering Mom’s panicked request to say nothing to anyone, to wait until we are gone before I ask my questions.
“Oh, we couldn’t possibly intrude at a time like this,” Mom says smoothly. “And this is Gus? He belongs to—”
“Blake,” Veronica answers, while at the same time the boy—Gus, apparently—says: “Curtis.”
Katy’s head swivels back and forth between them, taking in something I don’t quite understand. But I know enough to know she looks scared.
“Well, Curtis’s son, of course,” Veronica says after a pause. “Of course. But my son has decided not to be a part of our lives. Oh. Oh, we’ll have to tell him. He was always closer to his father than Blake was. But yes, Katy darling, Blake has been raising our sweet Gus.”
Gus, to his credit, does not give her the sort of eye roll I would give someone for Veronica’s tone, but he catches my eye, just for a moment.
I almost open my mouth to ask more about this past tension, because Katy usually would be nosing around for things like motive and sources of conflict, and she’s not, and that’s unsettling. But she has been off-kilter and quiet and strange—and the mention of Curtis’s name made her look like she wanted to run.
“Anyway,” Veronica says, wiping at one last tear with one delicate hand. “This is all very horrible, but we must get some rest. Cliff has assured me that he’s handling everything. You’ll stay here tonight.”
She waves us farther into the mansion, leading us up a wide spiral staircase, her footsteps slow and measured. “Katy, darling,” she murmurs. “Why did you come? How did you know to come back?”
Katy pauses at the top of the stairs, quiet for a long moment. “You don’t know, V?”
For a moment, she’s there, the mom I knew before we entered Haeter Lake. She looks like the woman I always knew her to be, formidable and smart, teasing secrets out of people who want desperately to keep them buried.
“He didn’t tell you?” I blurt at Veronica.
For a moment, the expression on her calm, almost expressionless face darkens.
But then it clears, storm clouds flitting away and replaced by perfect stillness.
“Tell me what, sweetheart?”
“Pierce texted me,” Katy says. “But no matter. Let’s get to bed. What an awful night for you, Veronica. I’m so very, very sorry for your loss.”
Veronica acknowledges her with a dip of her head, silver hair remaining perfectly in place as she does. She leads us down the hallway on the second story, past an ornately decorated bathroom to a small bedroom that looks out of place with the rest of the house.
“Just as you left it,” Veronica tells Mom meditatively. “As if you’d never gone away. Lucy, you’ll stay here.”
Just as you left it? Who was Mom to these people?
Mom barely looks at me, so there won’t be any answer there.
I want to grab her stiff shoulder and drag her back out into the misty midnight air.
Who are they to you? I want to scream at her. Who are they to me?
Home has been a gap in my chest my whole life, an absence, an ache. Home was me following Mom on her cases, traveling more than we stayed any one place, asking questions about where she was from and never getting any answers.
Home was something I had invented in my head.
“I’ll just say goodnight to—” Mom begins.
“And you’ll have the room down the hall,” Veronica says crisply. “Goodnight, Lucy, dear. I’m so sorry to meet you under such awful circumstances. Sleep well.” She shuts the door between Mom and me before I can say anything.
I look around the room. This room, unlike the rest of the mansion, seems as if it has not been updated in years.
I never expected home to look like this.
There is no hint of dust, but otherwise the room looks untouched—the only carpet of any kind I have seen in the house, an old dark-green rug beneath the narrow bed. The nightstand has chipped white paint, and the dresser beside it is covered in mock-trial trophies. Veronica was right about the posters, too—Avril Lavigne, a singer apparently, has her place on the wall beside Shakira and Britney Spears. The Britney poster is signed.
Cross-country, track, and debate trophies line one of the shelves.
Of course Mom was her own kind of champion in school.
In school. Because this town is where she went to school.
It’s too much for one day, the trip up here, the dead body, the creepy preserved bedroom, the news that my mom is from here.
I set my bag gingerly down on the bed, but before I have the chance to process anything, or to look around further, there is a creak and a groan and the wall behind my bed fucking opens.
Katy steps through, ducking her head, and moves so fast she nearly knocks me over as she catches my scream with her hand placed firmly over my mouth.
“Shh,” she says sharply.
There is the mom I know, a badass who has no time for drama. Especially mine.
“I’m sorry to scare you,” she whispers, removing her hand from my mouth.
“There’s a secret passageway?” I stare up at her, and then back at the—well, not the wall. The door, I suppose. “You can walk around in the fucking walls?”
“Be quiet,” Katy hisses. “I’m not in here, and you didn’t see me. Veronica doesn’t know all the passages. Definitely doesn’t know about this one. They were old servant corridors a hundred years ago. Pierce had them sealed off because he—he was proud of how progressive he was, letting the servants use the main entrances and hallways. Said these were all a safety hazard anyway. But I found them.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I whisper. “Katy, what’s going on?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” she says firmly. “I’m being watched. I will be watched as long as I am here. Baby, I don’t know what happened, but I need you to know that you can’t trust these people. Don’t tell them anything about yourself or about me or about your dad. Don’t tell them about Pierce, or what he texted me, or what you saw at the park. Don’t tell them anything.”
I shiver, and Katy pulls me close.
“Katy,” I whisper. “Are we in danger here?”
Katy hesitates.
In the stillness, I can hear the creak of the old house settling. Despite all the updates, the bones of this house are old. Old money, old secrets.
“Who’s Curtis?”
Katy stiffens. Says nothing.
“Did he—” I stop, my voice snapping as if a thread has been cut, as if the house itself sucked the breath out of me.
“He’s Veronica and Pierce’s son,” Katy answers finally. “He’s not in Haeter Lake—or he shouldn’t be—and he’s not your problem. If he is in Haeter Lake, he’s someone to stay away from. Do you understand?”
I don’t understand anything, but there doesn’t seem much point in saying so.
“Katy,” I say when she doesn’t press me on it. “Can we leave tomorrow?”
“Baby, I’m sorry,” she says. “Because I found the body, I—I have to stay in town for a few days. Just until everything is squared away.”
I spring back from her. “Are you—are you a suspect?”
“I won’t be,” Katy answers. “Once they clear up time of death and we have my alibi from the gas station cameras outside of Knoxville, I’ll be just fine. It’s just a precaution. Cliff and Veronica both know I had nothing to do with it. And they know I’m too smart to let this get pinned on me.”
I drop onto the bed. “Katy, holy shit. Who were these people to you?”
“Family,” she says. “Kind of. But it doesn’t matter now. The less I tell you, the less you ask, the safer everybody will be. Okay? I’ve got to get back to my room now because Veronica will check any minute. The bedroom door bolts, okay? Make sure you bolt it tonight. And keep this under your pillow.” She pulls a small knife from her pocket and presses it into the palm of my hand.
And then she turns and ducks out into the narrow secret corridor, the wall sliding back into place.
I stare down at the blade in my hand.
I’m in my mom’s childhood bedroom, in a mansion full of people who may love her or may hate her or something more confusing than either of those things.
And my mom is a suspect for murder.
When I stumble blearily out of my narrow, cramped bedroom the next morning, everything has been meticulously cleaned, even the stack of dishes that always seem to linger in our small sink. My shoes, so packed with mud the night before, are immaculate.
I text Mom, because this scares me. This fucking scares me. The way Mom looked at me last night when I got home, the mud on her own shoes, the sound of the hose trickling in the backyard. What I saw at the amusement park. And that girl, the one with the sundress and the eardrum-shattering scream, who looked me dead in the eye and saw me at the place where Pierce Anselm died.
Your shift almost done?
The bubbles pop up immediately as Mom types, and it takes a long time, because Mom is the slowest damn texter on the planet.
Coming home.
The shoes are clean. They’re so clean. Too clean.
So I put them on, adjust my knife so it’s hidden against my ankle, and pace outside in the dusty gravel as I wait for Mom.
She pulls up a few minutes later in the old red Honda Civic that she’s had for as long as I can remember. She’s wearing her scrubs, and there’s a speck of blood on one of the sleeves, but she gets out and wraps her arms around me tightly.
“Mom?” I whisper against her shoulder.
“It’s gonna be okay,” she says sharply. “I promise, baby, it’s gonna be okay.”
I don’t have time to ask what she means, or what’s going on, or about her shift and the reason she was called in, the body, Pierce Anselm’s body, because the sound of sirens cuts the still morning air.
Mom nearly jumps back from me, and then her face hardens. That look in her eyes goes still and calm, the way she was when they told her that Dad was dead, that they couldn’t bring him back. Still and calm because Mom knows how to handle the worst shit. She always has.
“Mom.” My voice cracks on the word. “Mom, what’s going on? Why is Cliff here?”
“Don’t tell them anything,” Mom says softly, and then she’s pushing something into my hands.
It’s her phone, the Friends phone case and cracked screen, and I shove it into my pocket, staring up at her. “Mom?”
“Promise me. No matter what happens. No. Matter. What.” She cups my face gently with one hand as the sheriff’s car pulls up in front of our trailer.
But then it’s too late for any more questions, because Cliff gets out of his car.
I’ve known Cliff my whole life. He was the one who picked me up when I was drunk that first time, spray-painting shit on the Anselms’ gate, and later that weekend, smashing the windows of the bank because they had fucked us just like the Anselms had. I know he remembers it every time he looks at me, remembers that I’m the delinquent. That I’m the loud kid, the kid from this side of town who will never amount to more than the drinking and the spray paint and the uncaged anger.
Today, though, today he looks sad. Almost regretful.
“Morning, Langley,” he says. “Audrey.”
My mom nods stiffly at him.
“What do you want?” I take a step forward, my fingers drifting toward my knife.
Mom’s hand digs into my shoulder, pulling me back. “Audrey.”
My name is a warning.
Cliff shoves his hands into his pockets, his eyes looking past us both for a minute. “Langley,” he says finally. “Langley, you gotta know why I’m here.”
“I don’t,” I snap. “And I’d fucking like to. The sirens, Clifford? All the lights? What do you think happened out here?”
“Still not Clifford,” he corrects me wearily. “Langley, we gotta just ask you some questions, okay? It’s gonna be easier if you come, yeah? It’s gonna be easier on all of us.”
Definitely easier on Cliff, but Mom’s face has gone bone white, so I don’t say that.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Ask questions about what?”
Cliff sighs and looks down at me. “Pierce Anselm is dead,” he says. “Someone killed him.”
A choked sound escapes my mouth, something strange and feral. I look down, away from Cliff, because if I’m looking at him, he’ll see, and he’ll know. That I’m not sorry Pierce is dead. I’m not sorry at all.
“They called me in this morning,” Mom explains quietly. “The medical examiner—she ruled it a homicide, baby.”
“What does that mean? Mom, what does that mean?”
Mom laughs, but the sound isn’t humor. It’s a harsh, short thing that sounds painful. “It means they think I did it,” she says.
They would always have come looking for us first. Because we’re shit from the south side of Haeter Lake. Because we live in the trailer and we lost too much and we were too loud in our grief.
“Did you bring Veronica in?” I ask Cliff. “Show up at her house with all the fucking sirens? Drag her down to the station? Arrest her, too? Because if you’re looking for—”
“No one is being arrested,” Cliff interrupts me. “Just questioned. Audrey, you gonna be okay out here on your own? Langley, she can come, too, if you’d feel that’s safer. We—”
“She stays here.” Mom is looking past me, eyes hard as steel when she meets Cliff’s gaze. Her hand settles on my shoulder, the touch gentle but insistent. “Do you understand me, Cliff? She stays here, or I don’t go with you until you have an arrest warrant.”
He does understand, I can see it in the way his gaze flashes between us, and then he nods once and opens the back door for Mom.
She looks at me, emotion crackling in her eyes, and then she lets me go.
And the sheriff takes her away, still in her scrubs, with her too-clean shoes and that look in her eyes that says she knows it’s already too late for her.
I stand there for a long time, my thumb rubbing the bracelet Dad left me, staring down the narrow road long after the sheriff’s car is gone.
Mom told me not to say anything to the cops or the Anselms or anyone else. But she didn’t tell me not to find the girl at the park, the one who saw me. And if she saw me, she might have seen more. Maybe enough to clear my mom.
And maybe enough to add me to the suspect list, but that’s a problem for future Audrey.
A house like this one speaks at night.
Katy would say I’m being dramatic, but. Well. Someone in this family has to be.
But I spent the night tossing and turning, seeing the slumped body every time I close my eyes. And somehow more unsettling, my mom’s eyes, wide and scared in a way I’ve never seen.
I’m not usually much of a morning person, but by the time Katy knocks on my door, I’m more than ready to be up.
Katy is at the door early. Well, okay, so maybe 7:30 isn’t that early? But it’s early when you’ve been up all night in a creepy old house where your mom apparently lived but never once told you about.
Yeah, way too early when you take all of that into consideration.
I stumble out into the hallway, and Katy puts a finger to her lips.
“Let’s go,” she says. “Get your bag. You didn’t unpack, did you?”
“I didn’t lose my mind, Mother,” I tell her, stepping back into the room to grab my duffel and charger. “My bag is still packed. Because we’re not supposed to be staying, remember? I had spring break plans.”
A smile ghosts across her face. “Glad to see you’re your usual self this morning.” She grabs my duffel bag from me. “Phone, charger, all of that? My stuff is already in the car.”
I nod, hold them up with each hand. “Present and accounted for.”
“We’re going to the motel,” she says. “Move your ass. They’ll all be up any minute.”
“Why are we sneaking out of the rich people’s creepy house?” I whisper as I trail behind Katy. “Are they gonna kidnap us if they catch us? Are they in a cult? Are we in a cult now?”
“No one’s in a cult, Lucille.” Katy sounds exasperated.
Which is a definite improvement over scared out of her mind and emerging from my walls in the night.
Below, a door shuts gently, and Katy nearly jumps out of her skin.
So maybe not that improved after all.
“Must be Blake,” Katy says, as if I should have any idea who that is. “She’s the only one who gets up this early.” She grabs my arm and drags me around a corner into a bedroom that is furnished both elegantly and impersonally. “This way. Come on.”
