Page 76 of Home Is Where the Bodies Are

“Crazy? Jesus, Beth, I’m not gonna hurt you. I could have done that a million times already if I really wanted. Now walk.”

I turn and look back into the dense mess of branches, dead vines, bushes, and trees. All these years, right in plain sight, this vegetation encased my mom’s deepest secrets, the roots contaminated, feeding off the decaying bodies of the past. Am I about to join them? I crouch down and crawl through the opening, swallowed into a womb of death.

“That’s far enough. Now turn around,” he says, passing through the clearing and standing upright.

My eyes go to the graves and the remains inside of them. “This is why you wanted the house so badly, isn’t it?”

“Ding. Ding. Ding. If someone would have just let me give her a ton of money for this dumpy piece of shit house, we would all be on our merry way, but nope. You just couldn’t do that, Beth.”

“You can have the house,” I say.

“It’s too late for that. Who else knows about this?”

“Just me.”

“Where’s Nicole?” He scans the area and listens for movement through the storm.

“I don’t know.”

“Mom’s station wagon wasn’t parked out front when I pulled in. Did she leave?”

“She must have.”

“Probably opened that letter from Mom and went and got a fix. Shit, when I read it, I thought about shooting up heroin, and I don’t even do drugs, so I can’t imagine what it did to her.” He smirks.

“What are you talking about?”

“I may have switched mine with hers,” he says with a shrug. “Mom had much nicer things to say to Nicole than she did to me, which was surprising since one of us is a drug addict and the other is a successful tech entrepreneur.”

“Yeah, and one of you is a murderer. So, I bet for Mom, that canceled out your success.”

“I’m not a murderer,” he says in a serious tone while standing stone-faced.

I gesture to the holes. “Then why are you pointing a gun at me while hovering over three unmarked graves?”

His eyes shift to the holes, and he sighs, lowering the gun to his side. But I notice his finger is still on the trigger.

“Did you kill Emma?” I ask.

“No... it was an accident.”

“How? If it were an accident, Mom and Dad wouldn’t have buried her. They would have called the police.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” He shrugs. “It’s hard to know what someone will do in a stressful situation.”

“What happened?” I press.

He pulls his lips in. “Does it matter? She’s dead, has been for a really long time.”

“It matters to me.”

“Like I said, it was an accident.” His nostrils flare.

“How?”

“We were playing down by the creek, skipping rocks, just goofing around. We climbed the hillside to the bridge, so we could skip rocks from up high. Emma leaned over the guardrail and pretended she was in thatTitanicmovie, arms out, declaring she was the queen of the world.” There’s a sheen to his eyes, but he speaks with no emotion like he’s reading from a cue card, a rehearsed speech. “I thought it’d be funny to scare Emma, so I ran at her like I was going to push her off. I wasn’t going to, but she turned just in time to see me running and got startled. She leapt back and fell.” Michael lets out a sigh and blinks five or six times as though there’s distance between himself and his story. “She missed the creek by a foot, hitting the bank instead. Her head must have caught a rock because there was blood everywhere.” His jaw tightens. “I tried to wake her, but she wouldn’t move. I was just a child. I didn’t know what to do, so I covered her with brush like we were playing a game of hide-and-seek.”

“What about Dad?”

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