Dead Weight

"Slower," Rainer said. "You'll crack the lid."

Jose stopped. He was standing in a hole up to his thighs, shovel in both hands, and he'd been digging for forty minutes without a sound that wasn't breathing. The dirt here was loose. It had been turned, tamped, and turned again. It came away in clumps that smelled of cold iron and leaf rot, and every time the blade went in it met nothing.

"How far?"

"Another foot. Maybe less." Rainer crouched at the edge with a flashlight cupped in his hand, the lens covered by two fingers so only a red glow leaked out. "I stopped at the lid last time. Packed it back over. Pell never used a vault, he said the family couldn't afford one."

"Did he say that to you?"

"He said it to the bank. I paid for the cinder blocks."

Jose laughed. It came out of him sideways, dry, and he didn't like the sound. He put the shovel in again.

The cemetery lay behind them in rows, stone after stone fading into the dark. Somewhere beyond the fence a truck went by on the county road, and the hole filled with the sound of it, then emptied. A single sodium lamp burned at the far gate. He kept the headstone at his shoulder, a gray slab with a name carved in it. ELIAS JAMES VOSS. Two dates. Beneath that, in smaller letters the stonecutter had charged extra for: *Brother.*

He'd chosen that. Camille had said *whatever you want,* and he had stood in a showroom with a catalog and said *Brother,* and she'd written it down.

The blade hit something that rang.

They both stopped.

"That's it," Rainer said quietly.

Jose scraped. Dirt slid off a rounded edge of steel. Dull gray, with a seam running down the middle, and a smear of brown that might have been rust or might have been something else. He kept clearing until he'd uncovered a hand's width, then a forearm's, then the whole lid.

He climbed out because there wasn't room to work. Rainer dropped down in his place and put his hands against the seam.

"Hold the light."

Jose took it. The red glow slid across the steel.

"Pell sealed it with silicone," Rainer said. "Cheap stuff. It'll give." He wedged the flat end of a crowbar into the seam and leaned. "I put a dozen latches on it myself so nobody would ask why it was light."

"You carried it?"

"Four of us. Two of Pell's men and two of mine." The bar creaked. "It took four. It should have taken six."

"Because there was nothing in it."

"Because I didn't want it to feel like nothing."

The latch went with a crack like a knuckle. Rainer stopped, listening. The truck on the county road had gone. Nothing moved among the stones.

"Now," Rainer said.

He didn't lift the lid. He looked up at Jose, from the bottom of the hole, with dirt on his forehead and his stitched hand bleeding through the gauze, and he said, with great care, "You don't have to see it. I could tell you what's in there and you'd believe me."

"I wouldn't."

"No."

"Open it."

Rainer set his shoulder under the lid and pushed.

It came up with a sound like a drawer in an old house. The red light poured in.

Jose had thought he knew. He'd seen eight photographs. He'd held them under a bathroom ceiling and counted every brick. He had told himself, on the drive over, *you've already seen this, you're only confirming.*

The cinder blocks were still wrapped in their towels. The towels had gone brown and stiff, stuck to the satin, and the satin had gone dark in a long stain where water had come in through the seam. A folded blanket lay in the middle of it, mildewed, the plaid nearly gone. On top of the blocks, on top of the blanket, lay a gray hooded sweatshirt.

It had almost rotted. The cotton was soft, collapsed, patched with white. The hood had flattened to a shape. But the left cuff was intact. It had been stiffened by dried paint, and the paint was still blue. Cerulean. Bright as the day it went on.

Jose got down on his knees at the edge of the hole.

He didn't know when he'd lowered the flashlight. It was pointing at the dirt. He reached into the grave with his bare hand and touched the cuff and felt the paint crack under his fingertips, small, brittle, like the shell of a very small egg.

There was no body. There was nothing that had ever breathed.

He stayed there a moment with his hand in the cold.

"Jose?"

He didn't answer. He'd thought something would happen. A noise, a wave, a collapse. He'd braced for it for three weeks. Instead there was a kind of flat quiet, as if a wall he'd been leaning on had been taken away and he'd stayed in the shape of leaning.

"There's something else," Rainer said.

He was crouched in the grave, one hand in the corner of the coffin, working at something. He drew it out. It was a plastic bag, a ziplock, grimy, with a small flat tin inside. He wiped it on his sleeve and held it up to the light.

"I put it in at the last minute," he said. "I took it out of his room at Maggie's. I don't know why. A man's supposed to have something."

It was a mint tin, bent at one corner, with a faded label. Jose took it. He opened the zip. Inside the tin, in a nest of cotton, were the stubs of pastel sticks. Greens, mostly. A rust red. A blue so worn it had stained everything near it.

"He drew with those the year he was fourteen," Jose said. "The year with the cat. He wouldn't let me touch them."

"I know."

"Mrs. Hallett had one of his drawings."

"I know."

"He's *alive,*" Jose said. It was the first time he had said it, in the open air, over the open ground. His voice broke on the second syllable and he didn't try to stop it. "I put my hand on this. I stood here and I put my jacket on the grass."

"Jose."

"I *cried* on this."

"I was there."

"I know you were there."

A sound cut through them.

It came from beyond the hill, thin and metallic. Tires on gravel. A car on the service road, driving slowly, with its lights off.

Rainer's head came up. He was out of the grave in one motion, and the flashlight was off, and they were both in the dark, with the lid open between them and the stone with *Brother* on it.

"Groundskeeper," he said. "It's not two."

"It's *two-oh-five.*" Jose looked at his watch. "We lost track."

"Shovels."

"Leave them."

"Fingerprints."

"Rainer. Leave them."

Light swept the hill. Not headlights. A spotlight, white, mounted on a roof, panning slowly across the row of headstones. It touched a marble angel, moved past, came back. Behind it the pulse of blue began, faint, rhythmic, bouncing off the stones.

"That isn't the groundskeeper."

"Somebody called it in."

"Somebody *was told.*" Rainer grabbed the tin out of Jose's hand and shoved it into his own jacket. "Go. East fence. The maintenance shed. Keep low."

They ran.

The ground was uneven and the stones came up out of it like teeth. Jose caught his foot on a flat marker and went down on one knee, hard. Rainer had him by the collar before he finished falling. The spotlight passed over them, a bar of white three rows away, and Jose pressed himself into the damp earth behind a family plot, his cheek against granite. His heart was making a sound he could hear.

*Stay down.*

The beam swept past. A radio crackled, tinny, someone reading out a plot number.

They moved on hands and knees. Jose's palm tore on something sharp, a broken vase. He felt the warm wet start and kept going. The fence was an iron grid, eight feet tall, with a spear at the top of each bar. Rainer went up it like a man who had done it before, because he had. He turned at the top and reached down.

"Give me your hand."

"It's cut."

"I don't care. Give it to me."

Jose took it. Rainer hauled. His shoulder cracked against the bar and the bandage burst on his stitched hand, and he held on anyway, and they went over together in an ugly heap on the far side and lay in the weeds with the sound of a door slamming somewhere inside the cemetery.

Footsteps. A man's voice, calling.

They crawled to the Corolla. Rainer had left it nose-out in the lee of the shed, and he'd taken the plates off. They got in. Jose pulled the door shut as softly as it would go.

The engine caught. Rainer didn't switch on the lights. He rolled the car down the service road in the dark at fifteen miles an hour, past a row of dumpsters, past a pile of wreaths. At the county road he turned left, away from the cruiser, and only then did he touch the switch.

Neither of them said anything for two miles.

In the rearview, Jose watched the blue light on the hill shrink to a pinprick. He could see a figure at the lip of the grave. A flashlight, pointed down. Then a small movement, an arm lifting. A radio.

"They'll run the plot number," he said.

"Yes."

"They'll call the family of record."

"Yes."

"That's me." His voice was steady. "And Maggie. And the firm that settled the estate."

"Camille's."

"By seven o'clock someone will tell her the grave's been opened."

Rainer kept his eyes on the road. "Probably before that."

Jose looked down. There was blood dripping from his palm onto his knee. It had soaked through the denim. He wiped it on the seat without thinking, and then thought, *that's mine, that's on the seat,* and almost laughed.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

He took it out. The screen was lit. *Camille,* it said. Eight missed calls.

The ninth came in while he was looking.