Page 77 of The Gallagher Place
It meant something else.
A sudden moment of clarity brought her straight back to her college anthropology class, the pen gripped in her hand as the professor, a charming Brit, talked about burial rites.
“You’ll see these all over the United Kingdom,” he’d said. “Piles of stones to mark significant locations or graves, or in some cases, the stones cover the actual bodies. Some societies buried the dead in rocks instead of digging into the soil. Sometimes it was a necessity, especially for soldiers or travelers, but other times it was the tradition.”
Her professor had shown a variety of pictures. The piles could be elaborate, or simple mounds. They could be stacked high into the sky or feature tall rocks upright like pillars. But they weren’t stone walls. They were different from the walls that bordered sheep fields and marked property lines. Stone walls were just stone walls. A stone wall was not a cairn.
Somewhere in his addled brain, Enzo had seized on something that made sense.
The detectives wouldn’t have caught on during his babbling about Europe. Maybe only Marlowe understood. Hadn’t she asked him the day before where Nora was? In his own way, Enzo had answered.
Find the Bend,he’d said.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Marlowe fled the house before anyone could stop her. Snow started falling in light flurries as she passed the Gallagher barn.
Her trek the previous night had been painful and plodding, but the walk in the opposite direction, over the Rise and to the Flats and the river, seemed to pass in a blur. She continued upriver, away from the Bend and where Harmon had been killed, toward the swamp.
Marlowe stopped when she reached the stone wall, pausing to take it in. She had been content when it came up to her shins, but Nate had insisted on building it higher. It wasn’t like they were keeping livestock fenced in, she’d argued—so what was the point?
“Aesthetics,” Nate said.
Higher and higher it went as they carefully placed each rock—and shouted in frustration when a section caved in—until it reached Marlowe’s stomach and was a yard in width. They had made sure to build it a few steps from the edge of the swamp, where the earth was solid. Nate envisioned it stretching for forty yards or so before stopping where the river coursed out from the swamp. Instead, it ended abruptly at less than half that length. Still, nothing to sneer at. It was a monument of sorts. Marlowe couldremember the dull ache in her muscles, the sweat dripping from her brow at the end of a long day.
Now the stones looked like they’d been there for a century. It amazed her what time and harsh weather could do to something left untended. She reached out and skimmed her hand over a smooth length of the wall.
And then she set herself to the task of gently plucking rocks from the wall one by one and placing them on the ground behind her. It felt like sacrilege to undo the work of that long-ago summer. She remembered how hard they had all labored to arrange the stones just right. All four of them had wanted to build something that would last.
Still, she persisted. She removed the top layer of rocks from a six-foot section at the center of the wall, the discarded stones forming a haphazard pile around her. She had to be quick. If any of her family caught her in the act, she wasn’t sure what they would do, but she supposed their reactions would be telling.
An hour later, the section she was working on was down to her thighs, and she saw the sheen of black canvas.
Marlowe’s hands yanked at the rocks, and she didn’t flinch when a few stones tumbled onto her arm—she just hoisted them away.
There was something in the wall that Marlowe had not put there. She’d been present for every second of its creation, and none of them had included a black canvas tarp.
After another layer of rocks was gone, Marlowe could grip the canvas. She started to tug on it, and bit by bit it emerged. She had the strangest urge to be gentle, as if the thing in the tarp could still be hurt by rough handling.
Marlowe worried she would need a knife to cut through the tarp, but it turned out not to be wrapped very tightly. Before she pulled it all the way out, she was able to unravel one side to revealdust and debris surrounding frayed and faded denim. Part of someone’s blue jeans. And a deteriorating black wellie that had once gone on a small foot. And beneath that fragment of cloth, a bone.
She started to tremble. Tiny needles were pricking every inch of her skin.
It was Nora. It was Nora in the stone wall.
Marlowe always thought the attacker must have come from behind and hit Nora on the back of the head. She would have had to be rendered unconscious right away, or else they would have heard her yell. She always shrieked when she was startled. Nora’s scream would have torn through the air with a vengeance. Everyone would have heard it.
But she hadn’t screamed that night, because she hadn’t been startled. Whoever was waiting for her at the trash cans had not surprised her.
Nora knew her killer.
Marlowe knelt at the ruined section of the wall, staring down at the partially exposed tarp for what felt like an eternity.
The snow started to fall harder, and she thought about staying still and letting herself get buried. She’d freeze to death, right next to Nora, as it always should have been.
She pulled at the tarp a bit more, revealing more bones and black muddy grime, which she realized with a flip of her stomach were the decomposed parts of her best friend. It didn’t take long for a body’s soft tissues to liquefy. She knew that from her anthropology classes too.
If the ground was too hard to dig, rocks did a good job of keeping a body protected. And, in some cases, hidden in plain sight. Whoever had done this had been careful. Nora was perfectly encased in stone.
