Buried Secrets (New Adult Dark Suspense Romance) (2 page)

“I sent you to find her, Shane Curtis, not make out with her!” Julia snapped. “You’re a pallbearer for God’s sake! Button your jacket. Dusty, where’s your coat?”

“I…” She stood there, reduced instantly to a child. Julia always made her feel that way.

“Here.” Shane grabbed Dusty’s long, black wool coat off a hanger, holding it out to Julia with one hand and pushing Dusty forward with the other. “Take her.”

“Shane…” Dusty turned to him, frowning, but he had grabbed his jacket off a hanger and was gone, out the door, and Julia was standing in her way. It was so much like that day at the pond—the breathtaking kiss, followed by Shane’s dismissal, just walking away—Dusty had a momentary lapse into the past, could almost see the shimmer on the water, feel the heat of the sun on her back.

Instead it was just Julia, clucking over her and slipping a coat over Dusty’s shoulders, pulling it closed and buttoning it to her chin. She used a handkerchief to erase the black mascara streaks on her stepdaughter’s cheeks, turning Dusty’s head from side to side, angling her toward the light coming in from the doorway so she could inspect her more thoroughly.

“There. That’s better.” Julia gave a satisfied nod. “Come on. Your father’s waiting. We won’t talk about… this.”

Of course they wouldn’t.

They never talked about anything, not if it was really important.

“There he is.” Julia steered her around toward the door and her father filled it, the corners of his mouth turned down, eyes hollow and sunken.

“Daddy?” Dusty could barely swallow, her throat so full of bitterness. He’d barely seen her this morning on the way out of the house. They’d all been wandering lost for days. It felt like an eternity. She’d curled herself into the corner of the back seat for the short ride to the funeral home that morning and had disappeared shortly thereafter, seeking the solace of the closet.

He didn’t say anything, but he held his arm out to her and she went to him. The comfort he offered broke her further and she choked on her sobs, taking the handkerchief Julia offered, feeling her stepmother’s hand on her shoulder, a gentle squeeze. Julia handed him his coat, plucked from a hanger, and Dusty saw the hallway filling with people coming toward the closet, getting ready to head over to the cemetery.

“Let’s get this damned thing over with,” her father said gruffly, giving her a one-armed squeeze before turning and stalking down the hallway, directly through the crowd. They parted for him easily, as if he were a leper. Dusty watched him straight-arm the front door, passing the casket containing what remained of his only son without a second glance.

“Dusty!” Julia called, but she was already weaving her way through the darkly dressed relatives looking for their coats, heading for her brother. The casket was closed. She had refused to approach it until this moment, putting a hand on the slick brown surface, as if she could feel him somehow, but he wasn’t there.

“We have to take him now.”

Dusty looked up at the funeral director, leading the pallbearers behind him. Shane was there, his gaze fixed on her. She looked behind him, seeing Nick’s high school friends, the rest of the gang. Dusty had intended to be among them, but Julia had quashed that plan. Girls couldn’t be pallbearers, her stepmother had insisted, aghast at the thought. So her father had abdicated too, leaving Nick to be carried to the hearse by other friends and relatives.

“Dusty, let’s go to the car.” Julia was at her elbow.

She had a sudden image of throwing the casket open and diving inside. It wasn’t the first time she had the thought. When her mother died, she’d fantasized about crawling into the coffin and curling up with her like she had as a young girl, letting the world bury them both. The closet had been the next best choice. And it had been Nick who kept her from it, giving her a reason to be in the world.

But now Nick was gone, locked in a box they were about to bury in the ground.

She had nothing left to live for.

Dusty felt her knees begin to give way and she leaned against the coffin for support, burying her face in her arms. Julia’s hand touched her shoulder, squeezing, trying to steer her away, but Dusty shook it off.

“Leave me alone!” She didn’t say it, she screamed it, throat aching, voice already hoarse, knowing this type of scene was Julia’s worst nightmare and not caring in the least. “You’re not taking him anywhere!”

If they took Nick—then what?

She couldn’t bear it.

“Hey.” Shane. She felt him even before she heard him, his presence making the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. “Listen, I know how you feel...”

She lifted her head, straightening to turn and look at him. The relatives and friends who had gone as a group to don jackets and coats were returning now, heading toward the door to the parking lot. They stopped at the scene unfolding in front of the recently deceased’s casket.

“You know how I feel?” she hissed. “He was my brother! Mine! He wasn’t your… anything! So don’t tell me you know how I feel!”

“I’m sorry.” His jaw tightened, but he reached for her hand. She shook him off too.

“You should be!” Dusty turned on him, hands balled into fists, the surrounding crowd the only thing keeping her from going after him like she first had in the coat closet, ready to gouge his eyes out. “Where were you that night, Shane? Where were you?”

“Whoa…” Shane held his hands up, taking a step back. “Let’s not do this here.”

“He’s right,” Julia insisted, putting an arm around her stepdaughter’s shoulder. “Come on. Your father’s waiting.”

She ignored Julia, closing the gap Shane had created between them, getting close again, close enough she could see the fear in his eyes. “Where were you?”

“Dusty!” Julia pulled at her coat, but she refused to move.

“You’re right.” Dusty felt a little, bitter smile edging around the corners of her mouth, but she wasn’t talking to her stepmother. She was talking to Shane and he knew it. She made sure he knew it, putting her hands flat on his chest and pushing him hard enough to make him stumble back against her brother’s casket. It was only the funeral director’s catch that kept it from sliding disastrously to the floor. “You’re right, you son-of-a-bitch! It should have been you!”

Then she was gone, running through a stunned crowd of relatives, bursting through the front door into a bright, blinding, outrage of sunshine.

✝
Chapter Tw
o
✝

Dusty stood, hands clenched, nails making little red crescents in her palms as she listened to the reverend's perfect monotone reading Psalm 23—Julia's favorite, Julia's choice. Chewing her lower lip, Dusty looked down the sloping hill, pa
st slanting headstones, and saw the procession of cars lined up on the asphalt drive. Shane's black Mustang was among them.

Bastard.

She tasted blood, coppery and bitter.

Her father's hand found hers, coaxing her fingers open, squeezing. Dusty didn’t look at him. Her palm stung where the small half-moons absorbed the sweat from his hand. Julia wept at his right into a monogrammed handkerchief.

From this angle, Dusty could see beyond the fake green of the astro-turf and into the open darkness beneath her brother's casket. She had now skipped through sad and had gone straight to anger in the infamous Kubler-Ross stages of grief, but the sight of the infinite darkness beneath her twin’s coffin made her knees feel weak. A wave of real sorrow hit and stopped her as if she’d run full-tilt into a brick wall.

This can’t be happening.

She looked into the darkness beneath the satin-lined box where her brother’s body now rested. Nick was going to be lowered into that yawning hole when everyone was gone and she couldn’t bear it. She’d made a scene—and had heard about it in the car from Julia, the whole way to the cemetery—and she didn’t dare make another. But she fantasized about it. What if she just crawled in with him, unnoticed?

Then they would lower her too, six feet underground.

John Evans would do it. He only worked at the cemetery part time from the spring to the fall, and drove the twenty-five minutes to the Wal-Mart in Millsberg in the off-season to greet shoppers. He would get a local kid to help him, one on each side, and they’d use the straps to lower the box into the ground. Then Evans would rev up the backhoe and fill up the empty space with dirt.

That was the thing she couldn’t stand. The empty space. She stood there looking into the darkness, fighting a wave of nausea and tears, wanting more than anything to be buried too. It was easy to fill up a hole with dirt. It was impossible to fill the empty space in her life.

Dusty leaned against her father, his big shoulder a safe place to rest her dizzy head. He glanced down at her for a moment, blinking like he didn’t quite remember who she was. She fixed her gaze on the darkness, forcing herself to look there, knowing it existed for the sole purpose of swallowing her brother’s body.

He’s not in there,
she reminded herself.

She shivered then, in spite of the warmth of the sun, her gaze moving up the casket again, back toward the light, where an enormous blanket of red roses cascaded over the sides. Those had been Julia’s idea too. Dusty had suggested yellow—Nick’s favorite color—but the idea had been shot down in horror.

Too cheerful for the occasion, dear. Definitely not proper.

Proper.

That was Julia for you.

Dusty had given up after that on suggesting anything for the service. She let Julia make her little plans, get her way, as usual. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Nick had been about to go off to college, their lives just beginning, but now everything had stopped. She felt the sudden inertia of it, remembering how much both she and Nick had talked about getting away from small town life.

But this place was home. Like nothing else, this little town reminded her of Nick. She remembered him with a vengeance as she stood in the middle of her little upstairs room, her dead brother’s door open just down the hall. She stood and felt Nick profoundly as she’d always known him, the twin brother who teased and taunted but loved her, she knew, above all others.

Well… almost all others.
A dark voice came into her head as she scanned the group gathered around the casket. Relatives and friends formed a circle, like druids dressed in black.

Nick’s friends, the people they’d just graduated high school with, his on-again off-again girlfriend, Suzanne; Shane—they all huddled together, slightly separated from the family, almost breaking the circle.

Dusty tried to hang onto her anger. Without it, an unbearable emptiness moved in, numbingly cold. Without the heat of her rage, she felt husked out, a fat Halloween pumpkin with a twisted visage, sitting helpless while the world finished the job bit by bit, scraping out all the extras.

Do I look like that?
Dusty stared at Suzanne, eyes downcast, blonde hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.
Like an enormous hand plunged into me and pulled out my insides?

Her gaze moved down the line to Shane, flanked on either side by the same gang of guys he’d hung around with all through high school—Jake, Nate and Cody. Ryan had come to the funeral home, but he wasn’t at the cemetery. They’d all been Nick's closest friends too, next to Shane.

What about you?
That dark voice again. She tried to push it away.

She’d known them all since—well, it seemed like forever.
Since you were twelve and Nick met Shane and you became just his sister again
.

Damn it! She shoved the thought away with brutal force.

Where are you, Nick? You're not in that box. Where are you really?

It was an existential question, one she didn’t really know or expect an answer to. The problem was, she couldn’t quite believe it was real. He couldn’t be gone. Even as she looked into the darkness beneath his coffin, she denied it. He wasn’t in there. The person she’d shared sweatshirts with, secrets with, the womb with—he wasn’t in there.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...”

Valleys. Shadows. There were plenty of those among the green pastures littered with gravestones and mausoleums. Nick had been killed in the very cemetery where he was about to be buried.

Across the coffin, Shane's gaze was on her, but when she glanced at him, he looked away.

Bastard,
she thought again. Her heartbeat quickened, that bitter taste back in her mouth. She could almost convince herself that moment in the closet hadn’t just happened—like she hadn’t thought about the tree house and the day by the pond for years. Until today. Until he’d grabbed her and kissed her and forced the memory to surface. Now it refused to dissipate, like an oil slick on a lake.

She tried to shove the memory away, watching Shane. The sun blazed on his sandy blonde hair, turning it almost white, matching his pallor.
He looks guilty.
The way his eyes fled from hers told her that much. In the bright sunshine, he had the look of a man whose entire world had collapsed, like he was being buried alive beneath the rubble.

Was he with you that night, Shane? Was he?

There was another memory begging for her attention as she tried not to look into the darkness beneath her brother’s coffin, her mind going there no matter how many times she turned away. Her gaze never left Shane, but her memory returned to the night she’d seen Nick for the very last time.

“Did you hear? I finally got my acceptance letter from U of M!” Dusty plopped herself on Nick's bed. The old mattress sighed under her weight. U of M was the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and it was her “first-pick” college. She’d turned down MSU and plenty of others, waiting to hear if U of M could take her. “It's for the winter semester, but at least I got in!”

“What?” Nick stood at the mirror, blow-drying his hair. She repeated herself over the noise. “You mean you're actually going to college?”

“Of course!” she scoffed, propping his pillow behind her head.

Nick put gel in his short, dark hair, spiking it with his fingers.

“Remember what Julia says.” Dusty toed off her Reeboks, letting them clatter to the floor. “Who’s going to marry me if I don't have a college education?”

Nick snorted, scrutinizing his hair in the mirror. Satisfied, he looked for something to wipe his hands on and opted for a folded t-shirt sitting on the dresser. Julia had left a stack there for him to put away.

“You're such a slob.” Dusty shook her head in disgust.

Nick shrugged, putting his wallet in the back pocket of his jeans. “So? I don't have to impress anybody. Why can't I be a slob?”

She sat up. “It's a matter of principle. You're going off to college tomorrow. Are you still going to wipe your hands on t-shirts at MSU?”

“Now you sound just like Julia. Besides, she bought me enough Oxfords to last three months without doing wash once.” He grinned. “And Michigan State isn't exactly Harvard.”

“Where are you going tonight anyway? Shouldn’t you be packing?”

“I’m packed. Van’s got all my stuff in it.” He picked up his red and white high school jacket with
Millsberg
printed on the back. Larkspur was too small to have its own high school. “We’re going out to the path. My farewell party.”

“Who’s we?” She moved to the edge of the bed.

“Come on, Dusty.” He shrugged his jacket on. “Who do you think?”

She sat silently, knowing exactly, fuming at the thought.

“Hey listen.” Nick sat next to her on the bed. “I know it’s kind of my fault, this whole hatefest between you and Shane…”

“Your fault?” She laughed. “How do you figure?”

He looked across the room into the mirror, meeting her eyes there. They were fraternal, not identical twins but they had the same little snub nose, rosebud mouth and big, dark eyes—just like their mother. Nick’s features were as delicate as her own, almost pretty, too pretty on a guy, with those long dark lashes and that perfectly shaped mouth. He was the most sought-after guy in high school and Dusty couldn’t blame the girls for chasing him, although few rarely succeeded.

“I know you two have never really liked each other.” Nick slid his hand along her arm, threading their fingers and squeezing. “But I think I just added fuel to the fire. I’m sorry about that.”

“Wasn’t your fault.” She leaned her head against his shoulder.

It wasn’t true, that they’d never really liked each other, not exactly. But she wasn’t going to tell her brother that. There were some things you didn’t talk about, even with your best friend—or your twin. Nick just happened to be both. And while she did often resent Shane for taking up Nick’s time, stealing his attention, Shane had made his own bed, as far as she was concerned.

“It kinda was.” Nick kissed the top of her head fondly. “You know, I have this feeling, if I hadn’t been around, you and Shane might have ended up together.”

“Are you kidding me?” She startled, turning to look at him, not in the mirror anymore. “Together how? As in dating?”

“I’m not blind you know.” He nudged her. “I see the way he looks at you.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You mean like he wants to kill me?”

“You look at him the same way.”

“Like I want to kill him?” She laughed.

Nick grinned, leaning down to whisper into her ear, “I’m not sure that’s what you want to do to him.”

She pulled away, shaking her head and laughing. “That is
so
wrong.”

“So wrong it’s right.” He waggled his eyebrows.

Dusty rolled her eyes. “No. Just no.”

“What’s so bad about Shane Curtis?”

“Do you want a list?” She started ticking Shane’s faults off on her fingers. “He’s smug, he’s arrogant, he’s demanding, he’s impatient, he doesn’t ever listen to anyone else’s opinion, he’s stubborn, he’s defiant, he’s—”

“See, that proves it!” Nick laughed when she punched him in the shoulder, ducking when she aimed a magazine at his head from the stack on his bed. It fluttered uselessly to the floor. “Look how much you’ve thought about him!”

“Shut up!” she fumed, feeling the flush in her cheeks. “Besides, he’s probably going to end up in jail, just like his brother.”

“Hey, that’s not fair.” Nick straightened, eyebrows knitted. “He’s never even been arrested.”

“No?” She crossed her arms over her chest, narrowing her eyes at him. “How about the fireworks stolen from Cougar’s last year?”

“That was my fault.” He smiled, a little sheepishly, reminding her. “Besides, no one was arrested. We were just… questioned.”