“That would do it for me,” I said.
He laughed. “Those cows didn’t have to wait on me for very many morning milkings, I’ll tell you what.” He turned serious, one big hand scrubbing at his beard. “Why do you come to ask about a thing like that?”
I gestured at the house. “You know how it is going through a place this way. Everything you turn over, there’s another memory crawling out from underneath it.”
Later, I kept going back to what I’d said when Gina and I had first walked in and looked at Grandma’s chair: that it seemed like she’d finished her book and set it aside and peacefully resolved it was a good day to die. It’s the kind of invention that gives you comfort, but maybe she really had. She kept up on us, her children and grandchildren, even though we were scattered far and wide. She knew I had a vacation coming up, knew that it overlapped with Gina’s.
And we were her favorites. Even Mrs. Tepovich knew that.
So I’m tempted to think Grandma trusted that, with the right timing, Gina and I would be first to go through the house. She couldn’t have wanted my mother to do it. Couldn’t have wanted my father to be the first up in the attic. Some things are too cruel, no matter how much love underlies them.
Maybe she’d thought we would be more likely to understand and accept. Because we were her favorites, and even though my mother had grown up here, and my aunts and uncles too, they were so much longer out of the woods than we, her grandchildren, were.
It broke the agreeable calm of Saturday afternoon, Gina and I in different parts of the house. I was in the pantry, looking through last season’s preserves and had discovered an ancient Mason jar full of coins when a warbling cry drifted down. I thought she’d come across a dead raccoon, a nest of dried-out squirrels… the kind of things that sometimes turn up in country attics.
But when Gina came and got me, her face was pale and her voice had been reduced to such a small thing I could barely hear it. Shae, she was saying, or trying to. Shae. Over and over, with effort and an unfocused look in her eyes. Shae.
I didn’t believe her while climbing the folding attic ladder; still didn’t while crossing the rough, creaking boards, hunched beneath the slope of the roof in the gloom and cobwebs and a smell like a century of dust. But after five or twenty minutes on my knees, I believed, all right, even if nothing made sense anymore.
There was light, a little, coming through a few small, triangular windows at the peaks. And there was air, slatted vents at either end allowing some circulation. And there was my sister’s body, on a cot between a battered steamer trunk and a stack of cardboard boxes, covered by a sheet that had been drawn down as far as her chest.
The sheet wasn’t dusty or discolored. It was clean, white, recently laundered. Eight years of washing her dead granddaughter’s sheets — my head had trouble grasping that, and my heart just wanted to stop.
Gradually it dawned on me: With Shae eight years dead, we shouldn’t have been able to recognize her. At best, she would’ve mummified in the dry heat, shriveled into a husk. At worst, all that was left would be scraps and bones, and the strawberry blonde silk of her hair. Instead, the most I could say was that she looked very, very thin, and when I touched her cheek, her skin was smooth and stiff but pliable, like freshly worked clay. I touched her cheek and almost expected her eyes to open.
She’d been nineteen then, was nineteen now. She’d spent the last eight years being nineteen. Nineteen and dead, only not decayed. She lay on a blanket and a bed of herbs. They were beneath her, alongside her. Sprigs and bundles had been stuffed inside the strips of another sheet that had been loosely wound around her like a shroud. The scent of them, a pungent and spicy smell of fields and trees, settled in my nose.
“Do you think Grandma did this?” Gina was behind me, pressing close. “Not this this, that’s obvious, but… killed her, I mean. Not on purpose, but by accident, and she just couldn’t face the rest of us.”
“Right now I don’t know what to think.”
I shoved some junk out of the way to let more light at her. Her skin was white as a china plate, and dull, without the luster of life. Her far cheek and jaw were traced with a few pale bluish lines like scratches that had never healed. Gently, as if it were still possible to hurt her, I turned her head from side to side, feeling her neck, the back of her skull. There were no obvious wounds, although while the skin of her neck was white as well, it was a more mottled white.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check the rest of her.”
Gina’s eyes popped. “Me? Why me? You’re the hard-ass prison guard.”
It was then I knew everything was real, because when tragedy is real, silly things cross your mind at the wrong times. Corrections officer, I wanted to tell her. We don’t like the G-word.
“She’s my sister. She’s still a teenager,” I said instead. “I shouldn’t be… she wouldn’t want me to.”
Gina moved in and I moved aside and turned my back, listening to the rustle of cotton sheets and the crackle of dried herbs. My gaze roved and I spotted mousetraps, one set, one sprung, and if there were two, there were probably others. Grandma had done this, too. Set traps to keep the field mice away from her.
“She’s, uh…” Gina’s voice was shaky. “Her back, her bottom, the backs of her legs, it’s all purple-black.”
“That’s where the blood pooled. That’s normal.” At least it didn’t seem like she’d bled to death. “It’s the only normal thing about this.”
“What am I looking for, Dylan?”
“Injuries, wounds… is it obvious how she was hurt?”
“There’s a pretty deep gash across her hipbone. And her legs are all scratched up. And her belly. There are these lines across it, like, I don’t know… rope burns, maybe?”
Everything in me tightened. “Was she assaulted? Her privates?”
“They… look okay to me.”
“All right. Cover her up decent again.”
I inspected Shae’s hands and fingertips. A few of her nails were ragged, with traces of dirt. Her toenails were mismatched, clean on one foot, the other with the same rims of dirt, as if she’d lost a shoe somewhere between life and death. Grandma had cleaned her up, that was plain to see, but hadn’t scraped too deeply with the tip of the nail file. Maybe it just came down to how well she could see.
I returned to Shae’s neck, the mottling there. Connect the dots and you could call it lines. If her skin weren’t so ashen, it might look worse, ringed with livid bruises.
“If I had to guess, I’d say she was strangled,” I told Gina. “And maybe not just her throat, but around the middle, too.” Someone treating her like a python treats prey, wrapping and squeezing until it can’t breathe.
We tucked her in again and covered her the rest of the way, to keep off the dust and let her return to her long, strange sleep.
“What do you want to do?” Gina said, and when I didn’t answer: “The kindest thing we could do is bury her ourselves. Let it be our secret. Nobody else has to know. What good would it do if they did?”
For the first minute or two, that sounded good. Until it didn’t. “You don’t think Grandma knew that too? It’s not that she couldn’t have. If she was strong enough to work the soil in her garden, and to get Shae up the ladder, then she was strong enough to dig a grave. And there’s not one time in the last eight years I heard her say anything that made me think her mind was off track. You?”