Page 104 of Take Your Breath Away

“This is the spot,” Matt said. “Right around here. Go stand by the rock.”

I did as I was told, turning around and propping myself up on it. I still had the shovel in my hands. Matt stood about thirty feet away, looking at the ground, then at the rock, then back at the ground, one finger up in the air, as though testing to see which way the wind was blowing. He was six years in the past, trying to remember where, exactly, he’d done it.

He ran one work boot back and forth across the ground, brushing leaves and other debris out of the way.

“Was thinking there might still be a depression or something from the hole,” he said, “but I’m not seeing it. But I’m pretty sure it was right here. About ten paces from the rock, right in line with that birch tree over there.”

He made an X in the leaves with his foot. “Start there,” he said, then backed away to be out of range, should I decide to take a swing at him with the shovel.

I stepped forward, rested the tip of the blade on the ground, got my right foot on top, and pushed down. I turned over one small pile of dirt.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked. “Why Brie? Who are you? How did you know Brie?”

I’d spent the last ten minutes or so wracking my brain, trying to remember where I might have met this man before. Nothing about him was familiar. Nothing jumped out at me. But that didn’t mean Brie couldn’t have known him. Had there been something in Brie’s past, something she’d never told me about, that might have prompted someone—this man—to hunt her down and kill her? Did she have dark secrets she’d kept from me, just as I’d kept some from Jayne?

“Never met her before,” he said. “Didn’t know her.”

When he said that, I wondered whether Matt was some crazy serial killer, picking his victims at random. Maybe he’d seen Brie at the mall, on the street somewhere, and there was something about her, the way she looked, that triggered something in this guy. And he’d decided: She’s next.

“So you just saw her and thought, I’m going to kill her,” I said as I drove the shovel into the ground again. I was starting to make a pile of dirt to the right of the hole.

“You think I’m a psycho?” Matt asked. “That what you’re calling me?”

“I’m looking for a reason.” I continued to dig.

“It’s called working for a living,” he said.

“You were … hired?” I stopped shoveling, shook my head. “Someone paid you to kill my wife?”

Matt made a fist and raised a thumb. “Way to go, Sherlock.”

The enormity—the reality—of what was actually happening here didn’t quite hit me until that moment.

I was digging up my wife’s grave.

“You buried her here,” I said.

“I buried somebody here,” he said. “Question is, is she still there? If she’s not, that’s a problem. And if it’s not who it was supposed to be, that’s a problem, too.”

This was all starting to feel like a dream, or, more accurately, a nightmare. This could not be happening. I was not here. I was not digging this hole.

“Thought she was dead when I put her in, and even if she wasn’t, the dirt should have smothered her.” Matt seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. “Can’t imagine her digging her way out. Be like some kind of Stephen King movie.” He focused on me. “You one of the ones that spotted her?”

The recent sightings of Brie. He’d clearly been informed.

“No,” I said. “But I heard from others who did.”

Matt’s head drifted slowly from side to side. “Makes no fucking sense.”

What do you know? Something we could agree on.

I had to try and keep my head clear. Inside, I was shaking, and if I hadn’t been holding that shovel, my hands would have been trembling, too. My stomach was rising up into my throat, and it was taking everything I had not to double over and vomit.

“Who hired you to kill my wife?”

Matt shook his head.

But I persisted. “What’d she do? Why would anyone want her dead?”