Chapter 3: The Bone Orchard
I set Lily down on a dry patch of grass behind the massive trunk of a thick oak tree. “Stay here, Lily. Don’t look. Keep your eyes on the stars, okay? Just look at the stars and think of the beach.”
She nodded, clutching my fleece as if it were the only thing keeping her from floating away into the fog. I walked toward the rotted plywood in the corner of the yard, my heart a cold stone. My hands were steady—a byproduct of too many nights spent in the valley of the shadow of death—but my soul was screaming. I reached the plywood and kicked it aside with a heavy boot.
I clicked my tactical flashlight to its highest setting—1,000 lumens of surgical white light that cut through the Appalachian fog like a saber. The beam hit the bottom of the shallow depression, and for a second, I forgot how to breathe.
The light illuminated a small, ivory-colored curve protruding from the silt. A rib. Then, as I shifted the beam, the hollow, mocking sockets of a skull stared back at me. The remains were small—a child’s remains. Tangled in the cervical vertebrae was a tarnished silver chain, the metal caked in decades of Appalachian soil but still holding onto its identity.
I reached down, my fingers numb and tingling, and wiped the grime from the metal plate.
THORNE, GABRIEL. B POS.
The air left my lungs as if I’d been hit by a mortar round. Gabriel. My younger brother. Twenty years ago, the town had been told he had “run away” to join the merchant marines to escape our father’s strictness. My father had died believing his youngest son had abandoned the family in the night. I had spent my entire youth looking for him in every port I visited during my service, hoping for a ghost that had never existed.
He hadn’t run away. He had been “disciplined” by the woman who now held my daughter’s life in her hands. He had been a “weed” in her meticulously kept garden of God’s will.
“I always knew you were too observant for your own good, Elias,” a voice called out from the porch. It was sweet, melodic, and entirely devoid of human empathy—the sound of a siren calling from the rocks to a sinking ship.
I turned the light toward the house. Margaret Vance was standing on the porch, wearing a floral apron over her Sunday dress. She looked like a grandmother from a baking commercial, except for the twin barrels of the Remington 870 pointed directly at my center mass.
Cliffhanger: “He was a difficult child, your brother,” Margaret said, stepping down into the yard with the grace of a woman half her age. “But don’t worry, Elias. I kept a spot right next to him for you. It’s a family reunion, after all, and the ground is so very hungry tonight.”
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