The Lies That Bind

26: White Picket Fence

We lost one of our best waitresses last year.

Calla speared her mother's trowel into the hard, frozen earth.

"Crazy story, actually," she said aloud, to the old oak tree and the gray sky and the dead, brittle grass. The trowel cut through dirt and stone, clay and mineral. High overhead, the oak tree of her childhood swayed in the bitter wind, branches creaking in warning. Buried secrets, they whispered. Buried deep in the deep dark, where they belong.

Calla tore the trowel from the ground. Brought it back down.

Thunk.

Again.

Thunk.

Again.

Thunk.

Again.

One of the bouncers found her strangled to death in her car when she didn't show up for her shift.

That. Fucking. Waitress.

Liberty. Fucking. Schwartz. 

A nothing girl with a nothing name.

"Nothing but a loose end," Calla muttered. A loose end to be tied with a finishing line wrapped tight around her neck.

As if I wouldn't see right through him and all his talk about tying up loose ends.

Calla discarded the trowel, hands braced against her knees, sucking down the cold, cold air into her cold, cold lungs. She did not want to die as Liberty had—thrashing against the inevitable, tears streaming down her face. Cornered. Helpless.

Alone.

It was why Calla was here, raking her claws through the muck and mire. Desperation clawed at her belly. Tore her wipe open.

Fascinating animals, rats. Their survival instincts are incredible.

Calla glared at the trowel. "I am not a rodent," she declared.

The wind howled around her in answer.

"Fine," she snapped, reaching for the trowel, the broken seashell in her pocket prickling her skin as she stretched. She'd found the unusual little thing, brown with age and soil, on the far side of the oak tree. A marker to the treasure beneath.

Stephanie sells seashells by the seashore.

Mad. Stephanie was mad. And brilliant. And mad.

Maybe Calla had gone a bit mad, too. 

She attacked the earth with renewed vigor. "I'm—" The trowel breaking through earth and ice, "—not." Roots cracking under its blade. "A—" Fingers scraping aside stones and little birdy bones, "—loose—"

You're going to get us all fucking killed.

"End."

The hole she'd carved out was just a shallow thing, but as she scraped aside another layer of earth, she saw it: a scrap of dirty fabric, ballerina pink, jutting out from the earth like the first of the spring flowers in bloom, desperate for sunlight.

Calla tossed the trowel aside and used her fingers to dig around the square of cloth, tearing away old pieces of cardboard—the remnants of the shoebox Stephanie had buried here, rotted to mush over the years. It didn't take much to pull the fabric free. And with it, nestled within those layers of cotton and polyester: a black, nondescript flashdrive, sealed safely away inside the same ziplock baggies her mother liked to keep stored in the kitchen.