8
The ground was hard. Not that Harry should have been surprised: he’d lived in Penobscot County for long enough to have no illusions about winter. On the other hand, he’d never had to dig a grave, not in any season, and this was like breaking rocks.
Morland left him to his own devices at the start. The chief sat in his car, the driver’s door open but the heat on full blast, and smoked a series of cigarettes, carefully stubbing each one out in the ashtray. After a while, though, it became clear that Harry would be hacking at the ground until summer if he was forced to make the grave alone, and so Morland opened the trunk of his car and removed a pickax from it. From where he was standing, Harry caught a glimpse of something wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, but he didn’t look for long. He figured he’d have seen more than enough of it by the time this night was over.
Morland broke the ground with the pickax, and Harry cleared the earth away with the shovel. They worked without speaking. They didn’t have energy to spare. Despite the cold, Harry felt sweat soaking into his shirt. He removed his coat and was about to hang it on the low branch of a tree when Morland told him to put it in the car instead. Harry assumed it was because the car would keep his coat warm, until Morland made it clear that Harry’s health and well-being were the last things on his mind.
‘With luck, she’ll stay down here and never be found,’ said Morland, ‘but you never know. Prepare for the worst and you won’t be disappointed. I’ve seen crime scene investigators put a man behind bars for the rest of his life on the basis of a thread left on a branch. We take no chances.’
Morland wasn’t concerned about leaving tracks on the ground. It was too hard for that. Neither was he worried about being seen. Nobody lived nearby, and anyone who might be passing would, in all likelihood, be a citizen of Prosperous, and would know better than to go sticking a nose into Chief Morland’s affairs if he or she was foolish enough to come and investigate in the first place. Anyway, by now news of what had happened to the girl would have been communicated to those who needed to know. The roads around Prosperous would be quiet tonight.
They continued to dig. When they got to three feet, they were both too exhausted to go further. The chief was a big, strong man, but Harry Dixon was no wilting flower either: if anything he’d grown fitter over the previous year, now that he was required to be more active on his construction sites than he had been in decades. It was one of the few good things to come out of the financial mess in which he found himself. He had spent so long supervising, and ordering, and taking care of paperwork, that he had almost forgotten the pleasure of actual building, and the satisfaction that came with it – that, and the blisters.
Morland went to the car and took a Thermos of coffee from the back seat. He poured a cup for Harry, and drank his own directly from the neck. Together they watched the moon.
‘Back there, you were kidding about the wolf, right?’ said Morland.
Harry was wondering if he might have been mistaken. At one time, there had been wolves all over Maine – grays and easterns and reds – and the state had enacted wolf bounties until 1903. As far as he could recall, the last known wolf killing in the state was back in 1996. He remembered reading about it in the newspapers. The guy had killed it thinking it was a large coyote, but the animal weighed over eighty pounds, twice the size of the average coyote, and had the markings of a wolf, or wolf hybrid. There had been nothing since then, as far as he was aware: sightings and rumors, maybe, but no proof.
‘It was a big animal, and it had a doglike head, that’s all I can say for sure.’
Morland went to light another cigarette, but found that the pack was empty. He crushed it and put it carefully into his pocket.
‘I’ll ask around,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be a wolf, but if there’s a coyote in the woods we’d best let folks know, tell them to keep a watch on their dogs. You done?’
Harry finished the last of the coffee and handed the cup back to the chief. He screwed it back on and tossed the Thermos to the floor of his car.
‘Come on, then,’ said Morland. ‘Time to put her in the ground.’
The trunk light shone on the plastic, and the girl inside it. She was lying on her back, and her eyes were closed. That was a mercy at least. The exit wound in her chest was massive, but there was less blood than Harry might have expected. The chief seemed to follow the direction of his thoughts.
‘She bled out on the snow of Ben Pearson’s yard,’ he said. ‘We had to shovel it up and spread some more around to hide what we’d done. Take her legs. I’ll lift from the head.’
It was difficult to get her out of the trunk. She hadn’t been a well-built girl, which was why the decision had been made to feed her up first, but now Harry knew for the first time what was meant by ‘dead weight’. The heavy-duty plastic was slippery, and Morland struggled to get a grip. Once she was out of the car he had to drop her on the ground, put his foot under her to raise her upper body, and then wrap his arms around her chest to carry her, holding her to him like a sleeping lover. They stood to the right of the grave, and on the count of three they tossed her in. She landed awkwardly in a semi-seated position.
‘You’d best get down there and straighten her,’ Morland told Harry. ‘If the hole was deeper I’d be inclined to let it go, but it’s shallow as it is. We don’t want the ground to sink and have her head peeping up like a gopher’s.’
Harry didn’t want to get in the grave, but it didn’t seem as though he had much choice. He eased himself down, then squatted to grip the ends of the plastic. As he did so, he looked at the girl. Her head was slightly lower than his, so that she seemed to be staring up at him. Her eyes were open. He must have been mistaken when he first saw her lying in the trunk. Perhaps it had been the reflection of the internal light, or his own tiredness, but he could have sworn …
‘What’s the problem?’ said Morland.
‘Her eyes,’ said Harry. ‘Do you recall if her eyes were open or closed?’
‘What does it matter? She’s dead. Whether we cover her up with her eyes wide open or squeezed shut is going to make no difference to her or to us.’
He was right, thought Harry. He shouldn’t even have been able to see her eyes so clearly through the plastic, but it was as though there was a light shining inside her head, illuminating the blue of her irises. She looked more alive now than she had in the basement.
He shook the thought from his head, and pulled sharply on the plastic. The girl was dragged fat. He didn’t want to see her face again, so he turned away from it. He’d tried. She’d been given a better chance than any of the others, of that he was certain. It wasn’t his fault that Ben Pearson had put an end to her hopes.
Suddenly all of the strength was gone from his body. He couldn’t haul himself from the grave. He could barely raise his arms. He looked up at Morland. The chief had the pickax in his hands.
‘Help me up,’ said Harry, but the chief didn’t move.
‘Please,’ said Harry. His voice cracked a little, and he despised himself for his weakness. His mother was right: he was half a man. If he’d been gifted with real courage, he’d have put the girl in his car, driven her to the state police in Bangor, and confessed all to them, or at least dropped her off in the center of the city where she’d be safe. Standing in the grave, he imagined a scenario in which the girl agreed to keep quiet about what had occurred, but it fell apart as soon as he saw himself returning to Prosperous to explain her absence. No, he’d done the best that he could for her. Anything more would have damned the town. Then again, it was already as close to damnation as made no difference.
He closed his eyes, and waited for the impact of the pickax on his head, but it never came. Instead, Morland grabbed Harry’s right hand, leaned back, and their combined strength got him out of the grave.
Harry sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.
‘For a second, I thought you were going to leave me down there,’ he said.
‘That would be too easy,’ said Morland. ‘Besides, we’re not done yet.’
And Harry knew that he was not referring to the filling in of the grave alone.
The girl was gone, covered by the earth. The ground had clearly been dug up, but Morland knew that whatever remained of the winter snows to come would take care of that. When the thaw came in earnest, the ground would turn to mire. As it dried, all traces of their activity would be erased. He just hoped that they’d buried the girl deep enough.
‘Shit,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ said Harry.
‘We probably should have taken her out of the plastic. Might have helped her to rot quicker.’
‘You want to dig her up again?’
‘No, I do not. Come on, time to go.’
He wrapped the blade of the shovel and the head of the pickax in plastic bags, to keep the dirt off the trunk of his car. Tomorrow he’d clean it inside and out, just to be sure.
Harry had not moved from his place beside the grave.
‘I have a question,’ he said.
Morland waited for him to continue.
‘Isn’t there a chance that she might be enough?’ said Harry.
Morland might have called the look on Harry’s face hopeful, if the use of the word ‘hope’ were not an obscenity under such circumstances.
‘No,’ said Morland.
‘She’s dead. We killed her. We’ve given her to the earth. Why not? Why can’t she be enough?’
Chief Morland closed the trunk before he replied.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘she was dead when she went into the ground.’