Graveminder

Chapter 53

“BECKY.” CISSY STILL HAD HER HAND INSIDE HER HANDBAG, BUT SHE lifted her gaze to Rebekkah. “What a lovely surprise. Did you come to tell me that you’ve decided to give me my inheritance? Leave the house and everything else to the rightful heirs?”

“No.” Rebekkah stepped closer. “How could you do this? Your own daughter, your mother ... You killed them.”

Cissy pulled a black semiautomatic pistol out of her handbag. “Do you think you’ll come back different? I’ve wondered what would happen if a Graveminder became one of the Hungry Dead.”

For a moment, Rebekkah paused. She’d hoped that there was some explanation, some truth, to lessen the ugliness of the things that Cissy had done. “Why?”

“The Graveminder is supposed to be a Barrow woman . You are not.” Cissy leveled the gun at her. “You’re not a part of my family, yet here you are, the next Graveminder.”

“You’re going to kill me because I’m not Jimmy’s biological daughter?” Rebekkah gaped at her. “Would you have killed Ella?”

“Ella took care of that herself.” Cissy’s arm didn’t waver. “It should’ve been me. She decided I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t handle the dead. Look at them.”

“You didn’t handle them. You used them.”

Cissy snorted. “They aren’t people now. What difference does it make?”

Rebekkah knew she wasn’t fast enough to outrun a bullet. She didn’t know how to pick the next Graveminder. All she knew for certain was that Cissy shouldn’t be it.

Is thinking it enough?

Rebekkah could imagine only one person she’d pick: Amity Blue. She whispered the name in case it had to be spoken. “Amity Blue. Amity Blue is the next Graveminder should I die here.”

“What are you muttering?” Cissy took a step forward.

Amity Blue. I want Amity Blue to take this task.

“Becky? I asked you a question.” Cissy aimed her gun at Rebekkah’s leg.

“You won’t ever be the Graveminder,” Rebekkah vowed.

Cissy pulled the trigger.

There was no telltale sound as it happened, and it wasn’t that Rebekkah saw the shot, even processed that it had happened. She simply crumpled. Her leg felt like it had been skewered by a hot poker. She put her hand on her thigh in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding. Blood slipped out around her fingers.

“I tried to talk to Mama, but”—Cissy crouched down beside Rebekkah—“all she could see was you. Rebekkah. Precious Rebekkah . After you and your mother ran away, I thought Mama would pick me or one of my girls ... but do you know what she said?”

Rebekkah put her other hand on her leg, too, pinching the skin together. The pain of doing so made her vision blur. She swallowed twice before she could speak. “What?”

“That even if you died, she wouldn’t lay the burden on my girls.” Cissy stood up. She extended the hand with her gun in it again. The barrel brushed over Rebekkah’s cheek. “I guess it was okay to burden you. Maybe she didn’t love you after all, Becky.”

Rebekkah reached up to grab the gun, but Cissy yanked it away.

“I’m not a murderer, Becky,” she said. “I killed once, but now I just have them kill each other. I don’t intend to go before my maker with those sorts of sins on my soul.”

“Still on your soul,” Rebekkah muttered, vaguely aware that Cissy was watching her. She struggled to get her shirt off. Every movement hurt, far worse than the shot that had grazed her in the land of the dead. Shot twice in two days. As she swallowed against the bitter taste in her mouth, she realized that she’d bitten her lip enough that the bitterness she was tasting was her own blood. None to spare. Blinking against the pain, she tied her shirt around her leg. It was a crude solution, but maybe it would stanch the blood.

“No. ‘The sins of the dead rest on the Graveminder, for if she had done her duty, the dead would not be free to do harm.’ I read the journals a long time ago, but when she died, I took them. Since you don’t have Mama’s journals, I wanted to let you know that part. These deaths? Every injury since Mama died, they are yours to carry. How fitting that you will go to your end with those stains.”

Rebekkah looked up. Even in the haze of her pain, the tug in her chest told her that someone, that the Hungry Dead, stood nearby.

At the doorway, Daisha stood. She looked at the two women, but Rebekkah couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t want to call out, to alert Cissy. She glanced again at Daisha’s expressionless face. Is she attracted to blood? Will she kill me as she killed Maylene?

Daisha vanished.

Cissy jerked to her feet and half pulled, half dragged Rebekkah toward the house. “I didn’t intend to feed them yet, but plans change. Soon as you’re dead, Liz will be the next Graveminder. She’s the only one left. Teresa will become clearheaded and strong.”

Cissy opened the door and shoved Rebekkah into the house.

“Why?” Rebekkah repeated. “You killed your daughter.”

“Teresa understood. She’ll be my warrior in this world, and Liz will be able to take me to the other.” Cissy’s smile was that of a zealot, of a woman whose beliefs were everything to her, and that sort of true believer was a terrifying thing. “The others weren’t thinking. All these years, they worked for him— servants to Mr D ... I read all about it when I was younger. I spent hours reading all those journals. We serve him, yet what do we get?”

Between the pain in her leg and her own doubts, Rebekkah had no answer to this question, but Cissy wasn’t looking for one.

She continued. “All that power. Two worlds , Becky. Yet here we are trapped in a few miles of land. He has an entire world. Woman after woman is his servant. Barrow women. We’ve died because of his choices. No more. I’m not some dead man’s servant.”

“You aren’t the Graveminder.” Rebekkah forced the words out around the pain. She leaned against the wall and tried to stare at her aunt, but her eyes had lost their focus. The desire to close them warred with the fear that if she did so, she’d never be able to open them back up.

Behind them, Daisha reappeared and said, “Hello, Miz Barrow.”

Cissy turned. “What are you doing here?”

Daisha sniffed. “I found the Graveminder. That’s what I was supposed to do. I remember that ... and now I have her.”

“I don’t want you in my house.” Cissy didn’t back away, but her posture was tense as she tried to surreptitiously look around the kitchen. “How did you get in?”

“There’s no barrier around your house now. You pulled her over it.” Daisha’s voice was very matter-of-fact.

Rebekkah blinked. She wasn’t sure whether her gun-waving aunt or the dead girl who’d murdered Maylene was the bigger threat. Given the choice, though, she’d put her faith in the dead. She took a step toward Daisha and stumbled. Her eyes drifted shut. “You ...” she started.

In less time than it took Rebekkah to force herself to open her eyes, Daisha stepped forward and lifted Rebekkah in her arms. She held her aloft like she was a small child. “Is she for me?”

“I was going to give her to the others, but”—Cissy backed away—“you can have her. You seem alert. That’s the consequence of eating. I’d rather they aren’t alert yet.”

The door to the garage opened then, and Byron stepped over the salt separating the house from the garage. He left the door open. The dead were no longer contained by salt circles. They stood waiting on the other side of the line of salt at the threshold. Byron was bloodied, but still standing.

Cissy’s eyes widened. “What have you done?”

Byron didn’t spare her a glance. He stepped up to Daisha. “Are you sure?”

“Take her out of here.” Daisha handed Rebekkah to him. As soon as she released Rebekkah, she grabbed Cissy. The movements were so quick as to seem virtually simultaneous.

Byron walked into the living room and set Rebekkah on the sofa. He lifted a clear plastic container that looked like it should be filled with rice or cereal. Then he poured its contents on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room.

“Daisha!” Rebekkah struggled to her feet.

Byron walked over and stopped her. “No. She’s staying a bit longer.”

“You can’t. She helped me.” Rebekkah squirmed to get up.

“This is her choice. In a moment, I’ll let her out. Trust me.”

When she nodded, he stepped over the salt line and back into the kitchen. “We can do this another way,” he said.

“This is the price of my help, Undertaker,” Daisha said.

As Rebekkah watched, Daisha nodded toward the salt that kept the rest of the dead from entering the kitchen and directed, “Remove it.”

“Montgomery! You can’t listen to her.” Cissy sounded terrified, but her present fear could do nothing to undo the horrible things she’d done.

“Byron?” Rebekkah called. He glanced at her, and she said softly, “Please do as Daisha asks.”

For a moment, he hesitated. Then, without looking away from her, he scraped his foot over the line, removing the salt barrier, and letting four more Hungry Dead into the kitchen.

As he did so, Daisha shoved Cissy at the dead and put herself between them and Byron. “Go.”

He didn’t waste any time; he ran into the living room. He bent down to pick Rebekkah up off the couch, but she put out a hand to stop him and then glanced back into the kitchen.

“Not yet. I need to”—she made herself look at him—“bear witness.”

“You don’t.” He tore his gaze from her eyes to the wound in her leg. “You were shot . Let me get you to the truck and then—”

“Not yet,” she repeated. She looked past him to the kitchen, where the dead were consuming a pleading and screaming Cissy. “ This is where I need to be.”

If they were going to sentence someone to die, she’d not hide from that death. The sight of it, the shrieks as Cissy was pulled from one dead hand to another, wouldn’t be anything she’d soon forget, but she watched nonetheless.

This was justice: the dead deserved recompense.