Page 56 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Six

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T he rumor that Nina Faraday’s body had at last been found tore across social media for a few short days before the cops revealed the identity of the deceased: a fifty-five-year-old alcoholic from nearby Evanston who’d been reported missing by his family several years earlier after a Memorial Day barbecue.

But by then, doubts had fomented across the far corners of the internet.

Claims of another cover-up proliferated.

In a misguided attempt to quell the rumors, freshmen swimmers Henry Rawlings and Jamie Greene infiltrated the memorial service and snapped pictures of the grieving family to prove they really existed.

We agreed afterward that Henry and Jamie were idiots but not that they should burn in hell like the internet was saying.

Meanwhile, we set out to verify another rumor that the sheriff’s department was intending to reopen an investigation into Lydia Faraday’s death by exhuming her remains.

But first we had to find where she was.

The location of Lydia Faraday’s grave was the subject of local debate.

For months after her death, Lydia’s headstone had been vandalized by outraged locals who blamed her for Coach Steeler’s departure—her grave defaced with lewd graffiti, knocked down with heavy equipment, and at one point even stolen altogether.

The county had briefly assigned a deputy to patrol the grounds at night to chase off anyone who came with spray paint and a vendetta.

But ultimately Lydia Faraday’s grave was too expensive to maintain.

We knew that Lydia’s body had been relocated from the cemetery behind St. Paul’s Episcopal Church where some of the Faraday relatives were buried some short time after her burial; this formed the backbone of the many legends we’d heard as children about her wandering spirit.

Since then we’d heard lots of different stories about Lydia Faraday’s final resting place.

Some people said she’d been dumped in an unmarked grave behind the Granger Fire Department.

Others said her ashes were tilled into the earth beneath the football field overlooking the Aquatics Center, as final torment.

Some people said she’d been buried under the building itself and now wandered the chlorine-scented halls after dark, searching endlessly for Nina.

We’d heard that her bones were sunk in Byron Lake, where skeletal hands would reach out and clutch you if you swam too far past the buoys, and that she’d been buried under a false name in Shady Glen Serenity Park, the county’s largest cemetery.

This last story proved closest to the truth.

Brent Manning had an inside source that summer: freshman Adelaide Burnes, infamous for being both chronically morbid and a D cup.

Adelaide’s family ran a massively successful funeral home that dominated an entire block in downtown East Granger and served more than 80 percent of the mortuary needs of the greater Four Corners area—at least according to their billboards.

The point was, when it came to dead bodies, we trusted Adelaide. The girl knew what she was talking about.

It was a sweltering July night when Brent Manning went to the cemetery to find Lydia Faraday’s grave, to see whether there was proof of recent police activity.

It was a crazy and pointless errand, but a bunch of us decided to join him when he floated the idea on Discord.

We were itchy for something to do, somewhere to go, some excuse to get out of the house.

For days a thick haze had obscured our towns in a depressing pall of gray that refused to coalesce into badly needed rain.

The pressure worked on our eardrums, squeezed our skulls, and lit flames beneath our skin.

During the day, the temperature hovered in the nineties.

Our towels mildewed in minutes. We drew our shades against the sun like vampires.

Plus, we needed more material for our podcast.

We asked Brent if he could score any beer.

He could.

Shady Glen Serenity Park covered more than thirty acres.

It was intermittently lit and, as far as we knew, rarely patrolled.

More importantly, the eastern entrance was a short half-mile walk from Valleyview Road, where Alex Spinnaker lived.

His house served as a convenient cover and temporary base camp.

The rest of us followed the group’s progress via thumbnail pictures and messages that came through Discord.

Nate Stern had a new dirt bike and captured the trip through the woods—the rocky trail bucking the camera up and down, trees lurching into sudden view, thick clouds of gnats turned silvery by the touch of his headlights.

Olivia Howard flooded our Discord server with inconsequential details and observations, such as several pictures of what she claimed might be the remnants of an occult ceremony but looked to us like someone’s discarded chicken wings.

Skyler Matthews recorded dramatic voice memos where she described the moon as “the color of old bone” and the gates of the cemetery as “looming forebodingly, like iron fingers pointing to a bad omen.”

We were impressed and asked her what forebodingly meant.

We straddled realities as a group of us assembled at the eastern entrance of the cemetery, bridging the distance through photographs and video capture, comments and voice notes.

@mememeup: is @spinn_doctor wearing a moon suit? He looks like he’s glowing

@gustagusta: wait, hang on guys aren’t we missing @ktcakes888?

@ktcakes888: I’m literally standing behind you

@hannahbanana: wish I was there with you!! 3

@spinn_doctor: are we all here?

@highasakyle: where?

@spinn_doctor: by the east gate. Right across from the gun store

@highasakyle: I’m on my couch, bro

@badprincess: can someone ask @brentmann to change audio settings?

It was like that.

According to Adelaide, Lydia Faraday had not been buried under a fake name but simply under her initials.

She’d pointed Brent to an area containing the cheapest plots in the cemetery, where stubby hills cracked with rows of slab headstones reared over County Road 11 and overlooked a dribble of fast-food chains and auto supply stores bleeding out from downtown East Granger.

Those of us who were there—Spinnaker, Meeks, Topornycky, Kaitlyn and Ethan Courtland, Olivia Howard, and a handful of others—followed Brent through the gates and up the hill under a suffocating silence, clutching beers that warmed almost as soon as they were open.

The heat stuck to our skin like a plastic film that showed even through the videos we streamed back to the server.

The group split up on the hill, weaving among the headstones with camera flashlights burning like so many fireflies against the dark.

It was Sofia Young who found the grave, halfway up the hill, set a bit apart from the other headstones.

The whole server responded to her shout, which brought a tangle of messages to the general thread.

@badprincess: what was that? Did you guys hear that?

@brentmann: it’s Sofia. She found something

@hannahbanana: hear what??

@badprincess: Wait, where are you?

@hannahbanana: I’m at home!!!

@badprincess: I’m talking to @brentmann

@spinn_doctor: I don’t see you guys. Do you know how to do a duck call?

@highasakyle: did you find Lydia’s grave??

@skyediva: ummmm ... did anyone just hear that??? It sounded like a wolf??

@brentmann: I don’t speak duck

@gustagusta: hello? @goodnightsky? Did you find Lydia’s grave, or what?

@goodnightsky: It’s not Lydia Faraday. It’s some Vales

@hannahbanana: the Vales are there???

@goodnightsky: some of them are

@spinn_doctor: Bingo

@spinn_doctor: Jackpot

@highasakyle: which is it, Bingo or Jackpot?

@spinn_doctor: it’s Lydia Faraday

@goodnightsky: where???

@spinn_doctor: right behind you

@spinn_doctor: turn around

Our group was gathering on the hill, flowing to where Sofia was shouting her discovery: half a dozen gravestones marked with Lucy’s family name, indicating half a dozen of her buried relatives.

A few graves down from Lucinda Vale Ellis, b.

1945, d. 2009, was a tombstone slightly apart from all the others, as if it had some contaminant associated with it.

It was inscribed simply with the initials LRF .

We were stunned.

The coincidence, if it was a coincidence, was extraordinary. The Shady Glen cemetery was belted with swaths of untouched hillside and plenty of open land for burying whole generations of dead bodies. Yet somehow Lydia Faraday’s body wound up spitting distance from a cluster of Vales.

Alex Spinnaker and Skyler Matthews took photographs of every headstone. There were six Vales in all, some dead half a century. We thrilled at each name, sensing in each another mystery, another online thread to unravel.

There was no sign of police activity at Lydia Faraday’s grave.

Not that we’d really expected any; in some ways, we’d instead been looking for reassurance, proof that Lydia Faraday was where she should be.

But Evie Grant pointed everyone’s attention to the bouquet of blue hydrangeas resting next to Lydia Faraday’s headstone, visible in the photographs that Skyler had posted to our server.

@badprincess: what’s up with the flowers??

At home we clutched our phones, refreshed our browsers, and maximized the grainy hydrangea image. They were bundled in what looked like newspaper, hardly wilted, and arranged with precision.

A gift for the ghost of Lydia Faraday.

@badprincess: helllooooo

@badprincess: Who brought the flowers for LRF?

Nobody knew. But for a second all of us unraveled a length of road in our imaginations, traveling down the slick of moon-skimmed streets to Lily Lane until we skidded to a halt at number 88—where, behind the iron gates, the Vales’ garden erupted in color.

Where newly painted trellises dripped with beaded roses and clutches of azaleas nodding off among their branches.

Blue hydrangea bloomed like fat fists on great arms of green swaying faintly in the breeze, as if to the rhythm of secret music.