Chapter 106 – The Grave Marker – Silver Brooks

Perri and I watched silently as Officer Morelli took something out of the opposing closet. Fortunately she didn’t realize that we were watching her from behind. Of all the tools to take out of that closet, she pulled out a dirty shovel. Once she had it she closed the closet again and walked out of the room. It wasn’t long before she left the kitchen through the backdoor. Perri and I scrambled out of the closet once we realized she wasn’t coming back in.

“What the hell is she doing here?!” Perri asked me, straining to keep her voice down. “She’s from our school!”

“I have no clue.” I said. “I don’t think she knew the former owner of this house… The lady was my babysitter for a time. I would’ve known if Officer Morelli was visiting her regularly. She also wasn’t at the funeral. Only a handful of people showed up to the funeral, and that’s including my family.”

“Then whatever she’s here for, in the middle of the night, can’t be good. I want to see if we can get a look at what she’s doing with that shovel but I’m afraid we might get caught. Suspicious or not, she’s still a police officer from the city that we live in. If she caught us here…”

“There would be hell to pay.” I said. “My mother would never let me out of my room for anything other than school ever again.”

“So yeah, we can’t get caught. What else can we do though? Just hide in the closet until she leaves?”

“Hmm…” I said, “There’s a small sunroom connected to the other side of the dining room. The lady that lived here used to read to me there. That room has a door that opens up to the side of the house. We should be safe to watch her from there. Come on, I’ll show you where it is.”

“Alright,” Perri said.

We hurried through the dining room, the sunroom, and made it outside. We stayed close against the house, leaning into the shadow of the building. From there we could see Officer Morelli walking through the grass of the backyard. The situation in the backyard close to the house wasn’t as bad as the grass surrounding the immediate sides of the house. She took careful hold of the shovel she was carrying and began digging. First she was just clearing out the grass in a given space. Next, she redefined the vague area she was digging in by turning it into a rectangular shape.

After a couple of minutes of that she wiped some sweat from her forehead and let the shovel drop to the ground. She turned to head inside. Perri and I quickly dropped into a prone position into the grass. She didn’t see us as she went back inside, but my heart was still beating dramatically. Perri and I started to get back up when we heard the front door open again. We walked against the side of the building to peek at what she was doing. She picked up a black bag lying beside the trunk of the police car and brought it into the house.

I could sense where this was going and signaled to Perri to move back to our original position. We crept back to the spot where we watched her digging. As expected, she came out of the house, hoisting the black bag over her shoulder with a great deal of effort. She wasn’t just worn out from digging. The bag must’ve been heavy for her. She gracelessly dropped the heavy bag beside the hole, sending loose dirt everywhere. She picked her shovel back up to get inside the hole and do some more digging. Perri and I, watching this in prone, backed away from the scene.

“You don’t possibly think that…?” Perri asked me in a disbelieving whisper.

“That it’s a body…?” I whispered back.

We exchanged hard looks before crawling back up to continue watching this unfold. It looked like she was already done. She haphazardly kicked the black bag into the ground and started shoveling dirt right on top of it. Covering it up with dirt didn’t take nearly as long as digging the hole in the first place. When that was done, she took something out of her pocket and violently struck it into the ground. We couldn’t tell what it was but it looked to be of some significance by the way she handled it. She stared at it in silence for a moment, before picking up the shovel and heading back for the door.

We waited in the darkness before doing anything else. Eventually we heard the car pull out of the driveway and roll away. Perri and I rushed over to see what she had stabbed into the ground. It was a silvery necklace with a cross attached to it. Perri and I looked at it and then back at each other.

“No…” Perri said in disbelief, “It can’t be… Why would it be…?”

“A secret burial…?” I asked. “What else could it be? Why else come this far to the middle of nowhere, to an unused large property, in the dead of night? She knew exactly where the shovel was. She’s been here before.”

“Maybe she was burying a pet or something?” Perri asked.

“A pet…? Really…?”

“Why would a police officer bury a person here like this?”

“I don’t know, but I doubt it was a pet.”

“Let’s wait to talk to Jin and Bri about this when they get back. They can’t be too far.”

My eyes widened.

“Which way did Officer Morelli drive off to?” I asked quickly.

Perri’s eyes widened as she realized what I was getting at. I pulled out my cell phone and called Jin directly. Jin was quick to pick up.

“Jin, where are you and Bri at?” I asked.

“Hold your horses, we’ll be there soon.” Jin said. “We just came out the store and started heading down the street. You won’t believe what…”

“You need to get off the road!” I said.

“What, and walk there? Why would we…”

Perri took the phone out of my hands and put the phone close to her mouth.

“There’s a police officer headed straight your way! Hide!” Perri shouted.

“Oh shit!” I heard Jin yell from the phone.

Perri handed the phone back to me and I saw that Jin immediately hung up. It seemed like she took that warning in full seriousness. We went around to the front porch to wait for them. It took a few minutes, but eventually we saw them riding their skateboards down the street while heading our way. Perri and I ran out to the street to greet them. I was reminded of my ankle pain as I jumped from the porch, trying to follow Perri. She noticed me suddenly start limping and helped me walk out to the street. Jin and Brianna seemed to notice our strange behavior as they pulled up.

“What’s going on?” Brianna asked.

“Did you see the police car we warned you about?” Perri asked.

“We did!” Jin said. “Thank god you called us when you did! We saw the headlights from the car just as we were taking cover. We were skating in the middle of the street too. We would’ve been stopped and questioned if you hadn’t called us.”

“It would’ve been a hell of a lot more than that…” I said.

“What do you mean?” Bri asked.

Perri pointed at the bags they were carrying.

“Let’s drop this stuff off inside and then we’ll show you something in the backyard.”

Jin and Brianna literally couldn’t believe the story that we were telling them. They were so sure that we were pulling their leg and laughed it off. They assumed that it was one of us that planted the cross necklace into the ground while they were gone. Like this was some sort of prank we came up with while they were at the store. Jin believed we noticed the police car going that direction and decided to make a joke out of it. Brianna told me that the story would be more believable if I didn’t use Officer Morelli as the police officer in the story. That sounded too convenient for her.

Of course I wanted to be mad at them for not believing me, but I could see where they were coming from. Normally we pulled ridiculous pranks on each other like this all the time. Naomi especially loved long-winded jokes and that fact sort of permeated through our group’s culture. Even Perri was against digging up the hole to see what was really place down there. She was seriously siding with the ‘pet’ idea and saying it would be in poor taste to dig it up to fulfill our curiosity. I really doubted that it was a big dog that she buried. It was too unusual that she was doing it here and at this time of night.

I could understand Jin and Brianna not believing things, but Perri? Was she really so disturbed by the possibility that she wouldn’t even consider it. When I said as much to her she turned the idea on me. She believed that my imagination got the better of me and was making the situation out to be worse than it actually was. That was a gut punch. It made me doubt my own thoughts and forced me to question what I actually believed. What I believed, above all else, was that something weird was going on here. Perri at least agreed with me on that much.

For the rest of the night I tried to put that out of my mind. Instead, I wanted to spend time having fun with my friends. This would probably be my only night out during Thanksgiving break, after all. It was just that the situation soured the fun for me. It was hard to focus on having fun with everyone else when it felt like I was just ignoring something massive. Perri seemed to have an easier time ignoring it, but not without some consequence. This created a bit of tension between us and we were more distant as a result.

Everyone else seemed to be having a good time. Jin and Brianna managed to get a lot of food and drinks considering the amount of money they had. We all stayed in one of the upstairs rooms and used the spare blankets to create impromptu bedding. Perri originally planned to sleep alone with me, but Brianna insisted that she join our makeshift bed also. Then Jin wanted to join and suddenly whatever plans Perri had went out the window. Perri probably was hoping for an intimate moment between the two of us, but this wasn’t bad. It was comforting to be surrounded by my friends while I was stuck thinking about the things that happened.

We woke up early in the morning so that we could catch one of the first trains out of town. We didn’t know the exact train schedules so we spent a lot of time waiting. Brianna spent this time talking about some of the bands that played last night and I felt like I might fall back to sleep. The sound of a train horn piercing the air interrupted her story and we were forced to get ready. Just like before, we hid before jumping onto the train. This time I was less nervous about getting on, but my ankle injury was still giving me trouble. We were wise enough to prepare for this in advance. Jin and Perri got up first, and then pulled me up together.

We jumped off near the same brick underpass that we rallied at yesterday. We went our separate ways from there, with Perri and I being the last to depart. She tried to ease my conscience and comfort me with a long embrace, and I honestly tried to look more positive to her, but it wasn’t very effective. I still felt concerned and she could probably see through my attempts to act otherwise. More importantly, I had new concerns. It took longer than expected to get a train ride back and that meant I’d be arriving home later than expected. My mother probably wouldn’t be happy with me arriving home this late in the afternoon.

Instead of walking through the front door I decided to sneak in from the back. It looked like a lot of my relatives had already arrived and were standing around the living room, watching Addison play the piano. It was thanks to that fact that I was able to creep through without anyone noticing me. My mother caught sight of me and gave me an annoyed glare, but didn’t move to intercept me. I thought that meant that I was home free. I went into my room and started to lie down, before my mother came in.

“Get up.” She said flatly, “I want you to get changed into this.”

She tossed what looked like a brand new dress into my lap. I sat up in my bed and looked at it.

“I thought you said…”

“Forget about that and make yourself presentable. Don’t come downstairs until you’ve done something about your hair. We’ll talk about your recent behavior later.” She said.

I pulled the dress out of its protective wrapping and scowled. It wasn’t a type of dress that suited my style, and my mother knew it. She was trying to dress me up like I was still a little girl attending Sunday school. She gave me a look like she was daring me to say something back to her about it. I sighed and started to get undressed. When she saw that I was obeying without a fight she left the room and closed the door behind her.

I went over to my mirror to see how I looked once I got the new dress on. It honestly wasn’t that bad. In fact it was better than my initial impression of the dress now that I had it on. It’s just that I usually preferred simpler clothing. This one had lines and flowery patterns on the bottom that made the design feel too busy. I realized that this was meant to match Addison’s dress that I saw her wearing when I came in. She was wearing hers differently from how I was wearing mine. She was showing a lot of her bare skin, but I was wearing a black long sleeve shirt underneath mine.

While I was checking myself out in the mirror I heard a rustling sound. For a second I thought it was going to be my mother coming to tell me that I was taking too long. Then I realized it was coming from the window. I turned to see Casper opening up the window and crawling in head first like an animal. She looked at me and her jaw dropped. I must’ve looked better than I expected because she goofed up on the way in and fell inside head first like an idiot.

“Good going,” I said with a small laugh as she stood upright.

I turned back to fix my hair in the mirror.

“Perri told me that you two saw Officer Morelli burying somethin’ or someone in the middle of the night!” She said excitedly. “It’s just like out of a crime movie!”

Of all the people from our group who might believe the things I believed, Casper was the number one candidate. Only, she had a reputation for making up larger-than-life stories herself so I wasn’t exactly excited to hear this from her. She and I lived close so it was pretty normal for her to come visit me more than anyone else. In fact, I knew her long before ever joining Naomi’s gang. I was the one that finally convinced her to join after she had a hard time at our school. I didn’t expect her to adopt the culture as much as she did, but she fit right in.

“Say, whatcha wearing?” She asked.

“A Thanksgiving dress… Shouldn’t you be with your family on this holiday?”

“Nah,” She said and went over to sit on the bed. “My folks don’t really do anything for Thanksgiving other than order a bunch of extra food.”

“I wish my Thanksgivings could be so simple…”

“I was bored and wanted to check up on you. They said in the ChatCat that you broke your leg or something.”

“I sprained my ankle but it’s getting better.”

“Also I want to hear the full story of what you saw!” Casper said. “Perri only gave me the quick version.”

“I’m not really sure there’s much more to say…” I admitted.

She had puppy dog eyes on her face and I gave in with a sigh. Maybe it was worth considering what she thought about things. I went over to sit next to her on the bed.

“Alright, I’ll start from when we were leaving the concert.”