Page 30 of House of Pawns
Marlane Ryan. Beloved mother.
The world grows very quiet as reality falls away. Tunnel vision takes over, and the only thing I can see is my mother’s name. My fingers and toes go numb and I’m not really sure I’m anchored to this earth any more.
Something garbled and far away sounds in my ears, but I can’t process it.
I fall to my knees before the headstone. My fingers brush over its polished surface.
Mom.
Here.
That cement box is what she was lowered into. Inside it is her decomposing body.
I laid her to rest three and a half years ago. In Colorado.
But here she is, in Mississippi.
Finally, my body leaps back to life. I vomit, barely turning my head before the sick arrives. Dry heaves then take me over. The violent tremors start.
And the hatred burns in my veins.
“Did Jasmine do this?” I hiss as I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Did Jasmine dig up my dead mother and deliver her to my front steps as revenge?” My voice quakes with rage.
“I would assume so,” Anna answers. She isn’t wary or afraid of my emotional reaction. She’s prepared for orders. “No one else would have reason to do something so vile.”
I climb to my feet and place my hands on the lid of the box, taking slow, deep breaths. I remember having to go down to the coroner’s office and identify her mangled, broken body. The deep gash on her forehead. The breaks in her legs and one of her arms.
For three days straight, I sobbed until I had no strength in me.
Inside this box is the woman who was too young, too unprepared for my arrival, but she kept me anyway. Did everything she could to make me happy and safe.
A young, stupid girl with a cell phone and a car ended her life.
And, here she is.
Dead.
Decomposed.
Across the country because of my enemy.
Rath was right. This will break me. This will change everything.
I’ve tried being civil. I’ve tried doing this without devilish tactics. But when my enemy insists upon becoming the devil, I have to fight back with horns.
“This will not go unanswered,” I promise my mother.
I CAN ALWAYS TRUST RATH to take care of things.
He has a new above ground tomb built in the tiny family cemetery the next morning. Right next to my father. After all these years, after only one night spent together, they are here again, side by side. It’s a beautiful and peculiar thing.
I cannot be present when they remove her body from her burial vault and the coffin I scraped every penny I had together to pay for. I want to remember my mother as human, soft, and motherly, and whole, not the decomposing nightmare she surely must look like now.
Rath takes care of it. I’ve never been so grateful for him.
I tried calling Ian. I needed him here by my side as I stood at her new grave. I needed him to hold my hand and talk me down, to say that everything would turn out okay.
But he never answered any of my calls.
