EXHUME
Nolan
“THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE DEAL closes. Three fucking weeks.”
Harper gives a single nod. “Three fucking weeks.”
“And how many bodies?” I ask, even though I heard Harper perfectly well the first time she told me. My hard stare drills into the side of her face, but she doesn’t look away from the silty floodplain stretched before us, dark water flowing just beyond the reach of her headlamp.
She swallows. Clears her throat. “Sixteen.”
“Sixteen fucking bodies. That’s almost a body per night, and it assumes we’ll have perfect conditions and zero mistakes.”
“Yes,” she says, her eyes glinting in the dim light as they roll. “Thank you for mansplaining math. Don’t know what I would have done without that groundbreaking contribution.”
I huff an irritated sigh. “I’m not trying to mansplain math to you.”
“How about you mansplain to me your surely elaborate plan of how you’re going to get Sam to leave instead? That would actually be useful.”
Right. That too. I’d already started keeping tabs on his whereabouts this morning so I could work out any behavioral patterns that I might be able to upend or exploit. So far, I haven’t come up with many grand solutions except for maybe sabotaging his equipment and his vehicle. “I’m working on that,” I grumble.
Harper huffs. “I’m sure. Well, you’d better work faster, Ballmeat,” she says, thrusting the handle of a shovel into my chest with precision, even though she doesn’t turn or even look my way. “We have a Sleuthseeker to
drive out of town and exactly zero-point-seven-six bodies per day to exhume in the glorious three weeks we’ll be spending together, so we’d better get cracking.”
She marches away toward the shallow slope that drops onto the swath of silt by the river where vegetation is sparse and landmarks are few.
I could kill her. Bash her over the head with the shovel in my hands and take my chances that she wasn’t bluffing about my book. Disappear into the wilderness. Resign myself to never seeing my family again, further breaking the already shattered remains of their hearts. At least they would know I served justice to those who deserved it.
My grip on the handle loosens just a little as I watch Harper lay her duffel bag on the ground, setting her shovel next to it. She has her back to me, a pool of light tracking over the dirt as she surveys the space around her, as though she’s projecting her thoughts onto the ground. She’s scared, but not of me, and not for herself. She’s worried about the old man. So worried she’s willing to risk her life to wrangle me into her control. And I want to know why.
Though I hate the idea very much, I can understand why she might send her car off a cliff and fake her own death after a deadly hit-and-run. I get why she’d hide in a strange little town for four years. Self-preservation. But I don’t understand why she’d risk everything for an elderly man who might have killed his own daughter. How could someone with no qualms about leaving me and my brother for dead be so loyal to him that she puts herself in harm’s way?
There’s something about Harper that pulls questions from the dark recesses of my thoughts, and they’re not the same ones I came to Cape Carnage to ask her.
Harper bends down and unzips the bag to rummage through the contents.
The fantasy that I’ve been living for these last four years is only a few feet away. I’ve dreamt so many times about choking the confession free from her lips. I take a few steps closer. In only a handful of heartbeats, I could have her under my control. But instead, I lower the shovel, take a deep breath, and walk calmly toward her, making enough sound so as not to startle her.
I will get the answers I came for, I promise myself. I am here to deliver the consequences of the choices she made, ones that neither of us can escape. But I want to know all her secrets before I do.
“So,” I say as I draw to a halt next to her. “Where do we start?”
I squint against the light of her headlamp as she eyes me, her attention flicking to the shovel in my hand before returning to my face. I’m making her feel unsafe. I should probably be relishing the discomfort my presence is giving her. But I don’t.
I push the shovel into the dirt next to me and make a point to take a step away from it and fold my arms, and as though she’s giving me something in return, she turns off her headlamp, switching on a camping lantern instead.
“I figure we can start at the edge over there and work our way from left to right,” she says as she nods past me toward a cluster of granite boulders in the distance. She pulls a tape measure from the bag and tosses it at my feet before rising with a spray bottle in one hand, the lantern illuminating her from below in a way that would make most people look like shit. But not Harper. She’s hauntingly beautiful, ethereal in the bluish glow of the lantern and the moonlight. Even more so when she starts spraying a mist above the crown of her head, the droplets shimmering as they fall over her
hair.
“What is that?”
“Bugfucker.”
I snort a laugh. Her lips don’t even twitch as she mists a cloud of spray around her head. A mosquito lands on my neck long enough to pierce my skin and I slap it. “Seriously?”
She shrugs. “Maya likes to get creative with her names. But she has a PhD in chemistry from MIT, for fucksakes. Everything she makes is fucking incredible. This is the good shit.” Harper mists her arms, her eyes never leaving mine, as though she’s ready to turn the nozzle on me if I so much as twitch in a way she doesn’t like. I’m pretty sure she would flay the skin right off my face with her fingernails if she could, judging by the merciless glare she pins on me. It’s murderously adorable.
No, it’s fucking not. What the actual fuck?
I shake my head, maybe hoping to clear my wayward thoughts, maybe hoping some of the cloud of citronella-scented droplets might drift closer to
cover my skin in the light breeze.
“I’d like some,” I say.
Harper’s eyes narrow to thin slits of malice. “Where’s yours?”
“At the inn.”
“You’re telling me you do Search and Rescue for a living, and you come to a nighttime body removal party at a body of water without bug spray?”
I swat at another mosquito, but two more land on my body in the time it takes to kill just one. “First of all, you’re playing fast and loose with the word ‘party.’ Second, when you said, ‘Pick me up at ten o’clock and help me with something for Arthur,’ you left out the part about digging up dead bodies by a fucking river. So. Can I have some?”
A snide little smirk flickers across her lips. “Not so good with manners, are you? Maybe if you’d said ‘please’ in the first place, I would have given
your book back when you asked for it.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“You’re right. And I’m not feeling so inclined to give this to you either,” she says as she sprays down the front of her body, her eyes still locked to mine. Blood roars in my ears. I don’t know if it’s rage, or the enticing boldness of her challenge, or the way the mist coats the exposed skin of her chest to shimmer on her collarbones. Maybe it’s all three that set me aflame.
My jaw presses tight as I take a step closer. “I could take it.”
She’s mere inches away, staring up at me with total defiance, her full lips set in a determined line. “And I could spray you in the face. That worked so well for you the last time.”
I inch closer. She still doesn’t shrink from me. Instead, she slides the spray behind her back in a way that almost dares me to take it. To reach around and fold her in an embrace and pull it from her hands. No matter how hard I try not to, I imagine the feel of her against me. Her warmth. The rise and fall of her chest against mine. The cadence of her heartbeat.
Her hard stare bores right into me, digging through every layer until it feels like she’s embedded herself into my heart, piercing me from the inside out. “Please, Harper,” I finally say, not missing the way her gaze finally
drops to my lips and lingers there when I let her name slowly roll from my tongue, “can I have the bug spray?”
Her words come out a little breathless when she says, “Will you complain less if I give it to you?”
“I’m sure I’ll find something else to complain about, don’t worry.”
One hand slowly comes from behind her back to lift the bottle into my peripheral view. “I can’t wait to find out what joys you’ll bring next.”
Our fingers graze as I take the bottle from her. An electric hum sizzles in my skin even after that momentary touch has passed. And I wonder if she felt it too. If she did, she gives nothing away. As soon as she releases the bottle, she’s bending to grab the lantern and tape measure with one hand, the shovel with the other. “Follow me,” is all she says.
I pick up the duffel and my shovel, covering myself in the Bugfucker mist as Harper leads the way toward the boulders that sit on the rise at the end of the plain. When we arrive there, she sets her shovel and lantern down, then passes me the end of the tape, keeping the wheel in her hand.
“Do you have a map?” I ask.
She slices me with a glare. “I am the map. Six meters from the middle of the biggest rock. There should be a little line,” she says, running her finger over the surface of the boulder. “It’s here.”
I lean close to where her fingers rest, and sure enough, there’s a small notch in the stone made by a human hand. When I straighten, we both turn to evaluate the floodplain. “But how do you know you’re going straight? It could be there,” I say, pointing to a spot on the ground close to the shore, “or there.” I shift in an arc and point again. “Or it could be somewhere in between. Unless you have a second point to anchor from, it could be anywhere around there.”
Harper’s focus tracks across the wide, slow-moving river, locking onto another set of boulders on the opposite shore. Her shoulders fall a fraction, enough for me to notice. “There is another anchor point. The rock closest to the water.”
“Okay … well … that’s helpful, I guess. Except for the fact that it’s on the other side of the river.”
“Yeah.” There’s a long, silent pause. I would have expected her to march right up to the riverbank and dive in with the tape measure and probably a knife between her teeth. But she offers nothing. She just gnaws at her lip before lifting a shoulder as though she can hide her concerns beneath a nonplussed gesture. “I think it will be fine if we just measure from this rock,” she says as she motions for me to hold the end of the tape against the notch in the boulder. “As long as I go straight-ish—”
I let out an audible sigh and stop her with a touch to her arm that makes her jolt. “You said yourself, we don’t have much time. We’d better save ourselves the trouble of digging all over the place. Do you have another tape measure in here?” I squat down to start rummaging through the contents of the bag, glancing up to catch Harper shaking her head. She might not have more than one measuring tape, but she does have a brand- new, sixty-meter-long nylon cord rolled up in the bag, and I’m hoping that might do the trick. “What’s the distance on your map from the boulder
across the river to the first body?”
“Forty-four meters.”
“Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do.” We measure out the length of cord to forty-four meters, tying a knot at that marker. Then we measure out six meters on the tape, locking the position on the wheel. When everything is ready to go, we head to the shore with the lantern and rope. There’s only one more thing to do.
I take a deep breath and reach behind my head to pull off my shirt.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Harper whisper-hisses, her eyes darting around us as though someone might be lurking.
I chuckle, unfastening my belt buckle next. “Going for a swim.”
I’m sure she’s blushing. I can almost hear the blood rushing to her cheeks. Though she tries to look away, it’s as though she can’t help herself.
Her eyes keep returning, settling on my abs, or my pecs, or my shoulders, or on my hands as I take my time with the button at the top of my jeans.
Basically anywhere there’s exposed skin or the possibility of more.
What the fuck. I am not flirting with the woman I might kill.
Will kill. I will kill her.
Later.
“So I guess I get it now,” I say.
“Get what?”
“Why you’ve been hiding out for so long in Cape Carnage specifically.”
I toe off my shoes and unzip my jeans. Harper’s eyes fuse to mine and her head tilts, and I swear I can feel the absence of her gaze on my skin, a chill that has more to do with her than the cooling night air.
“And why is that, oh wise one?”
“At first I thought you only liked it because it’s … quirky.” I tug my jeans over my hips, and though I expected she’d look down, she doesn’t. A twinge of disappointment stings in my throat when I swallow. “But if you’re spending all your spare time looking out for La Plume and doing his murderous dirty work in exchange for room and board, that makes more sense.”
If I had been flirting with her, which I wasn’t, my words would have killed my chances stone dead. The look she gives me is more than lethal.
It’s incendiary. “I can’t believe you are the person trying to take me out. A man who couldn’t be more ass-backwards if he tried. Congratulations on getting literally none of your assumptions about me or anyone else right.”
Her eyes are knives of malice, but I think I see a flicker of hurt in their depths before she tosses the end of the rope to my feet. “Don’t drown. It would be such a tragedy to lose your brilliant mind from this fucked-up world.”
With a sneer, she turns her headlamp on in my face long enough to blind me and then pivots away, heading back toward the boulder. Though I can’t see her clearly with the halo of the bright light burning in my eyes, I doubt she even gives me a backward glance. If she feels the weight of my gaze on her shoulders, she doesn’t let on.
The halo slowly dissipates from my eyes, leaving only the pale blue of the lantern and the darkness of the forest on the opposite shore.
I tie the rope to my ankle and wade into the water that bites at my skin with bitter jaws.
The soft sand gives way beneath my toes as I move away from the shore and I’m enveloped by the current, slow enough to be easy to fight, fast enough to push me a little off my target. The fragrance of fresh water mixes
with the citronella oil still clinging to my body. I push my way into the darkness, keeping that silver rock in sight. I should be thinking about how the hell I’m going to get my book back or how to strategize my way out of this exhumation plan. But I’m not. I’m thinking about Harper. I’m remembering that flash of hurt I just saw in her eyes. It didn’t feel the way I thought it would knowing it came from me.
I close my eyes and dip my head beneath the surface, trying to force that image from my mind. But it’s stuck there. Unwilling to let go.
A shiver racks my body as I climb onto the narrow bank. I tilt my neck from side to side, the negative pressure popping between vertebrae. I stretch and flex my arm against the pain in my elbow. My knee throbs from running too far to get to Harper the other day. Scar tissue and broken pieces that never perfectly healed. When I look back across the water, she’s watching, her headlamp off, just the gentle lantern light pooling at her feet.
I wonder what she thinks about the marks she saw in my skin when I undressed. If she imagines the suffering it took to endure them or the grief that lies deep beneath their warped edges.
It’s too dark and distant for us to see each other clearly. But neither of us moves, not for a moment that seems to stretch as long as the river that snakes between us.
It’s Harper who breaks away first. Harper who bends to pick up the other end of the rope that’s still tethered to my ankle. “Are you ready?” she calls to me. And I still haven’t moved.
I finally lower to one knee to untie the cord and then bring it to the rock where a notch is carved into its surface. Harper pulls it taut and lines it up with the other tape. When she’s found the point where the two measurements coincide, she spears the shovel into the silt. No words pass across the water. She starts digging. And I start swimming.
By the time I make it back to shore, she’s already made good progress in the soft soil. I watch her fluid, metronomic movement as I get dressed, still soaking wet. She stabs her shovel into the earth and shifts it next to the pit she’s creating. She’s strong. Graceful. She doesn’t break her cadence, not even when I pick up a shovel and join her. We don’t talk. I don’t think she really looks at me, at least not the way I do, sneaking the occasional glance
like a thief. It’s not until she strikes a foreign texture with the point of her
shovel that her eyes meet mine.
“Guess your plan worked,” she whispers.
I nod. “One down.”
“Fifteen to go.”
With a single, grim look shared between us, we dig up the body, nothing left of it but bones in a decaying polypropylene sack with a faded black stamp that says RYE in large black letters. When the hole is filled back in and our tools are packed up, we stand for a moment and survey the floodplain and all the work we still have left to do. And she’s probably thinking the same thing as I am when we turn and start heading back toward the road. I know I should not be looking forward to it, but some traitorous little voice in my brain claims otherwise. It’s the anticipation of the hunt— that’s all it is. I’m gathering evidence and learning the habits of my prey.
Tonight was just setting the stage for what I can learn about Harper that will take her down. It was nothing more than an indulgence in my curiosity.
“Thanks,” Harper says, breaking the silence that I didn’t even notice in
the riot of my own thoughts.
“Sure.”
“What’s wrong?”
I blink at her. “What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong?’”
Though she lifts a shoulder, I don’t miss the way her brow furrows as she assesses my face, as though she’s hunting for clues. “You’ve looked miserable all evening, but now you’re … extra miserable. I didn’t think that would be possible, and yet, here we are.”
“Maybe I’m just thinking about how fucked up this situation is.”
“Didn’t really take you as the type to be put off by a little body relocation, given your scrapbooking hobby. But yeah,” she says, pausing to run her fingers along her jaw as she surveys the road ahead. I want to remind her that she’s been handling a body sack and that human decay juices have definitely passed through those fibers. But I don’t. “I guess it’s a little messed up.”
“A bit. And now I’m helping a woman I want to kill to cover up murders committed by another serial killer. This is the most incestuous murder party
I’ve ever heard of.”
“You have no idea,” Harper mutters as she tosses the sack of bones over her shoulder and walks away.
“Wait … what? What do you mean by that?” I jog a couple of steps after her before she tosses me a quizzical look in return. Inexplicably, my blood feels a hundred degrees too hot in my veins. “Do you and Arthur have some kind of … situationship … thing?”
“The fuck? No. Oh my God. Do you get anything right ever? Arthur has the hots for Irene.” She scoffs, and though she turns away before I can see it, I swear I hear her eyes roll. “Forget about it, Ballmeat guy.”
Harper walks out onto the shallow gravel pull-off where I’m parked. I follow her, but when she reaches my rental vehicle, she just keeps going, heading for a path that slices into the woods on the other side of the road.
“Where are you going? I’m your ride,” I say, walking to the middle of
the unlit road.
“I’m good. See you tomorrow.”
Without another word, she disappears. And just like the first time we
met, she leaves me alone.
In the dark.
