Across the open grave, Stan Forester stood looking dazed and broken, his bent little mother beside him holding his toddler, Maggie. When Monica squeezed Stan’s hand after the service it was like touching a dead man. He looked straight through her. Maggie screamed and kicked in her grandmother’s arms. And then, just as she was set to pull away, to chivvy the boys into the caravan and head home to begin Casserole Patrol for the grieving family, Stan’s grip tightened. His eyes focused.
“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Did you?”
“I didn’t,” said Monica, deeply uncomfortable with how much Stan reminded her in that moment of Stevie at the age of six, his big blue eyes wide with shock as he clutched his cheek where Wayne had slapped him. “You can’t blame yourself, honey.”
“Do you have her diary?”
Monica blinked up at him. “What?”
“They’re all there, back to eighty-two, but this year’s…” His face crumpled. “I can’t find it. I thought if I could find it … if I could … do you know where it is?”
“I’m so sorry,” said Monica, backing away. She pulled her hand from his. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about that.”
She left the church—not Righteous Heart, but a much smaller Episcopalian ministry nearly an hour’s drive from Angel’s Climb— at a walk quick enough to flirt with running, ignoring the stares and murmurs that followed her. Her heart was pounding as she hurried down the whitewashed wooden steps. “Brian!” she called, her voice wavering. There were children at the graveyard’s edge, girls standing together at the wrought-iron fence, boys whipping rocks and clods of earth at one another, scaling the side of the groundskeeper’s shed. Animals. “Stevie! If I find you making fools of yourselves on holy ground, you will be very sorry!”
They met her at the van, both of them red-faced and sweating, Brian still surreptitiously wiping his hands on the seat of his pants where later, Monica knew, she would find grass and dirt stains. “Car,” she said. “Now.”
“But Mom, we didn’t do anything,” whined Stevie.
“Can I sleep over at Trevor’s?” Brian interjected. “It’s not a school night and his mom said—”
The boys fell abruptly silent, like rabbits when a dog is near. Monica stared at them in confusion for a moment until she felt Wayne’s familiar crushing grip on her wrist. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he snarled in a tone a stranger might have mistaken for solicitous. He was standing close. She could smell the spearmint on his breath, and the earthy stink of chew beneath it. “You ran out of there like you were on fire.”
“I … I think I left the oven on,” she lied, grasping for the first excuse that came to mind as she turned to face him. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
He was silent, his dark eyes narrowed. “You’d better hope you didn’t,” he said finally, his voice low and dangerous. “Go and get Casey. She went back to the grave to say goodbye. Some people have a sense of decency.”
Monica scampered away, rubbing her wrist where he’d gripped it. Wayne had always been strong. He’d pulled Brian’s left arm out of its socket once when he’d found the boy poking around his office. In the emergency room, four-year-old Brian sobbing in her lap, Stevie hungry and bawling in her arms, all Monica had been able to think about was Wendy Torrance stammering to Danny’s doctor in The Shining that Jack hadn’t meant to hurt him, and that he’d felt just awful. She’d seen the movie on television late at night as a teenage girl, sitting enthralled and disgusted by its dark spell, moved to wonder at a world beyond church and school and the kitchen. A world of secret thoughts and hungry ghosts, beyond the grace of God.
Wendy, she thought, still feeling a little hysterical. I’ll never touch another drop.
She hurried through the graveyard, cutting between headstones and monoliths, ignoring the leaf-strewn walking paths. The sun was setting and a light sprinkle of autumn rain had just begun to fall when she reached the final resting place of Terry Forester. Casey knelt at the edge of the open grave. Monica walked briskly toward her, wondering again what had gone on between Carol Anne’s son and her daughter. Then she heard the whispering. It wasn’t words, or at least not words she understood, but her daughter was speaking into that hole in the ground, and above the gentle autumn wind, Monica heard something whisper back.
“Casey?” she husked, but the words died in her throat. She couldn’t draw a breath.
Nevertheless, her daughter stiffened and fell silent. Slowly, very slowly, she turned to look back over her shoulder at Monica, and there was a cold, alien shrewdness in her stare that Monica didn’t like at all, that made her think for a single terrifying, exhilarating moment of rushing at Casey and pushing her into the open grave. And then it was only her daughter, looking at her with mild concern. Casey rose. “Are you okay, Mom? You’re so pale.”
“I’m all right,” said Monica. Her mouth was dry. It took every inch of willpower she had not to take another step and look into that yawning hole, look down at the thing that could not have whispered to her daughter. She wet her lips. “We’re leaving, honey. Your brothers are in the car.”
“Oh,” said Casey. “Okay. I was just saying goodbye.”
They walked back in silence. A light mist was rising in the fading daylight as rain swept the graveyard. The last leaves clinging to the oaks and maples danced dark and wet on the gusting wind. It was on that walk to the car that Monica finally allowed herself to think what her shocked mind had volunteered when Casey first returned from camp.
This girl was not her daughter.
“Monica,” Pastor Daniel sighed, massaging his lined forehead with clear frustration. Monica had always thought he looked more like a personal trainer than a pastor, with his broad shoulders and clearly defined muscles, his short blond hair and icy eyes. He was softening a little as he came to the end of his forties, but not much. “It’s so easy not to trust success when we’ve grown used to failure. Your daughter is home. She’s happy. She’s healthy. Her issues are behind her, and she’s going to have a warm and blessed final year of school. You should be thankful.”
They had been talking for close to two hours in the gray of early morning. She’d come straight to the church after bringing Brian, who’d missed his bus, to school. Righteous Heart was an enormous complex off of I-90 just over the Greer town line, one of the new breed of vast white churches with neon crosses and gigantic billboards that had been steadily creeping north and east since the Reagan administration. A lot of money moved through Righteous Heart. Millions of dollars a year. Her proximity to Wayne, the steward of that fortune, meant Daniel had to take her early morning walk-in, but his patience was obviously beginning to fray as they went in circles around the issue of Casey’s transformation and her strange behavior at Terry Forester’s funeral. Monica had omitted the voice from the grave.
“I am,” said Monica, though she wasn’t. She wasn’t grateful at all. She hadn’t slept in close to thirty-two hours. When she’d gone to the bathroom and seen a light under Casey’s door at half past two, she’d been too frightened so much as to knock. She gripped her skirt, twisting the fabric in her knotted hands. “I just can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong, Pastor. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“You had a hard time with Casey these past few years,” said Daniel. “Wayne shared with me some of what you and your daughter went through. That kind of strife can be very rough on a family, and sometimes even after it’s gone, we keep trying to recreate it because that’s what we know. Our hearts want what’s familiar, even when it leads us into sin.”
Monica frowned. Wayne? Shared? It didn’t sound right. She forced herself to take a breath. “I’m not worried she’s gone back to … to what she was doing before. I’m worried there’s something else. Something worse. Schizophrenia, or…” She could hardly make herself say it. “A demon.”
Pastor Daniel’s eyebrows shot up. “She’s a straight-A student, Monica. She volunteers three days a week right here, where she’s a beloved member of the congregation.”
“I know how it sounds, it’s just—”
“I’m going to be frank with you,” said Pastor Daniel. “I think you should consider a rest, Monica. Stay with your sister. Or a bed-and-breakfast, maybe. Somewhere you can get away from all this stress and give yourself a chance to catch up.”
Monica stared at him. He wouldn’t help her. She’d known that, but she’d come anyway, because where else was there to go? She had seen evil in that graveyard yesterday. She had heard its quiet voice at work beneath the ground, but nobody was going to believe her for the simple reason that she wasn’t very likable. “No,” she said, brushing back a stray lock of her lusterless, graying hair. “No, of course, you’re right.” She allowed herself the luxury of tearing up. “I’ve just been worried for so long. My nerves are … and losing Carol Anne, and Terry…” She let out a sob. “I just don’t know my left from my right, Daniel.”
He rose and came around the desk to rest his hand on her shoulder. “God knows,” he said, smiling kindly. “Let Him do the worrying for you, at least for a while. We forget it’s Christian mothers who’ve always had the weight of our future on their shoulders—you deserve a rest.”
“I’m sorry for being so silly,” she hiccup-laughed, still crying. “I know how busy you are. I’ll get out of your hair.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” said Daniel, his smile taking on a pained quality. “I’ll see you at the silent auction this Wednesday. Wayne tells me it should be quite a crowd!”
“Th-that’s good,” said Monica, rising from her chair. “Thank you, Reverend.”
He resumed his seat, reaching for his cup of coffee and the book he’d been reading before she arrived. The Turner Diaries. She’d seen her father reading that once. Years ago.
“Thank you, Monica.”
When Monica pulled into the driveway half an hour later, Wayne’s car was still in the garage. She had a strange feeling as she got out of the van and locked it. Wayne never overslept. He never called in sick. She went inside. The house was silent. In the kitchen she found PB&J detritus. Casey must have made lunch for Stevie before walking him to school. Monica sniffed. That wet, sugary smell hung in the air. The smell of Wayne’s box. The smell that had wafted out of Terry Forester’s open grave as Casey knelt beside it, whispering to something.
Stan’s voice echoed in her memory. Do you have her diary?
