Graveyard Games

FIDO
publishing

Graveyard Games
© 2010 by Sheri Leigh

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This is a work of fiction. Names,
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author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.

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Cover art © 2010 Michael
Mantas

Edited by Michael Mantas

First published by Excessica
Publishing

Second Edition – February,
2010

A Smashwords Edition

Warning: the unauthorized
reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.
Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without
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Part One:

Suspicion

Chapter One

Dusty stood, hands clenched, nails making
little red crescents in her palms as she listened to the Reverend's
perfect monotone. He read Psalm 23—Julia's favorite and Julia's
choice. Chewing her lower lip, Dusty looked down the sloping hill,
past slanting headstones, and saw the procession of cars lined up
on the asphalt drive. Shane's black Mustang was among them.

Bastard.

She tasted blood, coppery and bitter.

Her father's hand found hers, coaxing her
fingers open, squeezing. Dusty didn’t look at him. Her palm stung
where the small half-moons absorbed the sweat from his hand. Julia,
her stepmother, wept at his right into a monogrammed
handkerchief.

From this angle, Dusty could see beyond the
fake green of the astro-turf and into the open darkness beneath her
brother's casket. She had skipped sad and had gone straight to
anger in the infamous Kubler-Ross stage of grief, but the sight of
the infinite darkness beneath her twin’s coffin made her knees feel
weak. For the first time, a wave of real sorrow hit and stopped her
as if she’d run full-tilt into a brick wall.

Oh Nick, this can’t be
happening,
she thought, staring into the
darkness beneath the satin-lined box where his body now rested. He
was going to be lowered into that yawning hole when everyone was
gone. John Evans, who only worked at the cemetery part time from
the spring to the fall, and drove the twenty-five minutes to the
Wal-Mart in West Lake in the off-season to greet shoppers, would
get a local kid to help him, one on each side, and they’d use the
straps to lower the box into the ground. Then Evans would rev up
the backhoe and fill up the empty space with dirt.

Who fills the empty space
up here?
She wondered, fighting a wave of
nausea and tears.
The empty space in my
life? In my heart?

Dusty leaned against her
father, his big shoulder a safe place to rest her dizzy head, and
she ignored his concerned look when he glanced down and slipped an
arm around her waist for support. She fixed her gaze on the
darkness, forcing herself to look there, knowing it only existed
for the sole purpose of swallowing what was left of her brother’s
body.
He’s not in there,
she reminded herself, trying on a reassuring
smile as her father’s hand squeezed her hip and pulled her
closer.

Yes he is,
a deeper voice whispered in her head.
What’s left of him.

She shivered then, in spite of the warmth of
the sun, her gaze moving up the casket again, back toward the
light, where an enormous blanket of red roses cascaded over the
sides. Those had been Julia’s idea, too. Dusty had suggested
yellow—Nick’s favorite color—but the idea had been shot down in
horror. Too cheerful for the occasion, dear. Definitely not
proper.

Proper?

That was Julia for you.

She gave up after that on suggesting
anything for the service. She let Julia make her little plans, get
her way, as usual. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.
Dusty unpacked her suitcase in the room where she’d spent her
childhood, feeling her life moving back in time as she did. There
was nothing to remind her of the world she’d just left behind in
Chicago. Even her gun and badge, the two things she hadn’t been
without since she’d started as a rookie on the force, had been
stripped from her two days before she got on a plane to fly back to
Detroit for her brother’s funeral.

She had expected her father at the gate, but
it was Julia who’d picked her up from the airport to make the long
drive up north to their little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
She was glad, because if it had been her father, she probably would
have tearfully blurted out the circumstances surrounding her
suspension like she had, as a little girl, told him about the mean
boys at school. She would have told him everything, even as ashamed
as she was about her own part in it.

But with Julia, she was safe. Her stepmother
talked while Dusty watched the strip malls give way to fields and
farm land. She watched her past returning, as if on an infinite
conveyer, and remembered how much both she and Nick had talked
about getting away from small town life. They had both made it out,
and yet here they were again, like nothing had ever changed.

Except Nick is dead.

Stop it, she told herself, biting the inside
of her cheek, concentrating on the pain.

Who says you can’t go home again? Even if it
is in pieces…

Stop it, stop, just stop! The taste of blood
filled her mouth.

Even when she’d been away, living a
decidedly urban life in a land of concrete and steel, this little
town had been home. She and Nick had talked about it occasionally,
how growing up rural had made them different somehow in the midst
of born city-folk, as her father always called them.

This place had always been home, and she
remembered it with a vengeance as she stood in the middle of her
little upstairs room, her dead brother’s door open just down the
hall. She stood and felt Nick profoundly as she’d known him then,
the twin brother who teased and taunted but loved her, she knew,
above all others.

Well…almost all
others.
That dark voice came again, and
this time she didn’t stop it as her gaze darkened and scanned the
group gathered around the casket. Relatives and family friends
formed a circle, like druids dressed in black.

Nick’s friends, the people they’d graduated
high school with eight years ago (god, had it really been so
long?); his once high-school and sometimes-college girlfriend,
Suzanne; his still-best-friend, Shane—they all huddled together,
slightly separated from the family, almost breaking the circle.

Dusty tried to hang onto her anger. Without
it, an unbearable emptiness moved in, numbingly cold. Without the
heat of her rage, she felt husked out, a fat Halloween pumpkin with
a twisted visage, sitting helpless while the world finished the job
bit by bit, scraping out all the extras.

Do I look like
that?
Dusty stared at Suzanne, eyes
downcast, blonde hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.
Like an enormous hand plunged into me and pulled
out my insides?

Her gaze moved down the
line to Shane, flanked on either side by the same gang of guys he’d
hung around with since high school—Jake, Billy, Evan and Chris.
They’d been Nick's closest friends at one time, too, next to
Shane.
What about you?
That dark voice again. She tried to push it away.

She’d known them all
since—well, it seemed like forever.
Since
you
were eleven and Nick met Shane and you
became just his sister again
.

Damnit! She shoved the thought away with
brutal force.

Where are you, Nick? You're not in that box,
you can't be. Where are you really?

He couldn’t be gone. Even as she looked into
the darkness beneath his coffin, she denied it. He wasn’t in there.
The person she’d shared her sweatshirts with, her secrets with, the
womb with—he wasn’t in there.

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death..."

They were standing in the valleys of his
death, she thought bitterly. Valleys and green pastures littered
with graves and mausoleums—killed in the very cemetery he was being
buried in.

Across the coffin, Shane's gaze was on her,
but when she glanced at him, he looked away.

Bastard,
she thought again. Her heartbeat quickened and
the resentment and mistrust she’d always felt around him surfaced
and congealed, like an oil slick on a lake.

The sun blazed on his
blonde hair, turning it almost white, matching his pallor.
He looks guilty.
The way
his eyes fled from hers told her that much. He had the look of a
man whose entire world had collapsed and he was being buried alive
beneath the rubble.

Was he with you that night, Shane? Was
he?

Her gaze returned to her brother’s coffin
and she remembered talking to Nick for the very the last time.

* * * *

"It’s suspension with pay.” Dusty closed her
eyes even as she said it, resting the warmth of her cheek against
the bathroom door. It was private enough in here, and her roommate,
Kathy, didn’t know yet. She didn’t know if she was going to tell
her or not. “But please, don’t tell Dad. Not yet.”

“
They don’t honestly think
you’re really some high class escort…do they?” Nick’s voice was
muffled, and then she heard the sound of him crunching.

“
What are you eating?” she
asked, ignoring the cat’s paw sneaking under the door, looking to
play. It was Kathy’s cat, and it never failed to try to get into
the bathroom whenever the door was closed. “Anyway, the suspension
is pretty much standard procedure during any sort of investigation
like this.”

“
Doritos,” Nick mumbled,
still crunching. “But really, come on, how stupid would you have to
be, to
actually
be turning tricks after you busted that guy last year—what’s
his name, that deputy mayor guy?”

“
Marx. David
Marx.”

“
Yeah, him. I mean, you
blew the lid off that whole pot, Dusty!” Nick sounded so proud of
her she wanted to cry. “You even uncovered the kickbacks that dirty
cop was getting, the one who tried to cover it all up,
right?”

“
Right.” She closed her
eyes, remembering the headlines, her name in the papers. “I think
that’s actually the problem.”

“
What do you
mean?”

Dusty sighed, not wanting to tell him—but if
she couldn’t tell her brother, who could she tell? “Nick…there’s a
video.”

“
A…what?” He sounded like
he was choking on something.

“
Remember how I told you
about Stephen?” She hated even saying his name now. God, she’d been
so taken in. How could she have been so stupid, so naïve? Her
father used to tell the story about Nick coming home one day and
telling his twin sister, “My teacher says the word gullible isn’t
in the dictionary”—and Dusty had actually gone to check. Nick
always told her she was too honest to be a cop. Maybe he was
right.