Page 105 of Take Your Breath Away

He continued to shake his head. “Dig.”

I tossed a few more shovelfuls of dirt before pausing to ask, “How far?”

“You should hit something about a foot down.”

“You’re scared she somehow dug her way out,” I said.

Matt bristled at the word. “I’m not fucking scared.”

“Could have fooled me,” I said. “You’re scared she won’t be here. Who told you about the sightings?”

Another head shake.

I tried to recall all the people who had seen the woman who was, or was not, Brie. There was Max, and maybe the people who lived in the new house next to him. There was Albert and Isabel, and her husband Norman. And, finally, Elizabeth.

I forced the shovel down into the dirt, but with less force than I could have. It wasn’t that I was trying to buy time, although that was part of it. I was afraid of what I might hit, and how hard I might hit it. Like driving the shovel blade into what might be left of Brie would somehow do her greater injury.

“Gotta take a piss,” Matt said.

Would this be my chance? Was Matt going to disappear behind a tree long enough to empty his bladder?

Evidently not. He transferred the gun to his left hand, evidently more skilled at pulling down his zipper and digging out his dick with his right. The stream landed about four feet from where I had been digging, his piss soaking into what might be the foot of my wife’s grave.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him more than I’d ever wanted anything in my entire life.

Matt shook, then zipped back up. “Did I ask you to stop?”

“So let’s say we find her remains,” I said. “We’re done? You could have come out here alone and dug her up.”

“I need you to tell me if it’s her.”

I almost laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

“Maybe there’ll be something,” Matt said, still training his gun on me. “Like, maybe she had a filling in one of her teeth. Something like that you’d recognize. She was your wife. Who’d know better than you?”

I had created a hole a foot and a half wide, two feet long, and more than a foot deep. I hadn’t encountered anything but dirt. I took a step back so that Matt could give the hole a cursory inspection.

“Hmm,” he said.

Now my mind was considering the unimaginable: that Brie really had been buried alive, and somehow escaped. But if that was really what had happened, why had she gone into hiding for six years and suddenly reappeared Saturday?

“Hmm,” he said again.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe you got the wrong spot.”

Matt rubbed his chin. He looked to the rock, back to where I’d dug, then back to the rock again.

He pointed at the ground about two feet over from where I’d been digging.

“Try there,” he said.

Forty-Four

Yellow police tape surrounded the property at the end of Rosemont Street. Two Milford police cars, parked up by the corner, blocked access to the street. Out front of the house were two more police cars, one unmarked.

Inside the house, wearing paper booties, her hands gloved, Detective Marissa Hardy surveyed the scene.

A woman, mid-thirties, sprawled out on the kitchen floor on her back, her eyes open and staring vacantly at the ceiling, her head haloed by a pool of blood that appeared to have stopped spreading. There were no signs of a fight. No upturned chairs, no broken plates or glasses, although Hardy did notice that the edge of the counter, above where the woman’s body lay, had been chipped.