A Family of Killers by Bryce Moore

Author:Bryce Moore [Moore, Bryce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

Chapter Fourteen

“They kept a sort of wayside inn, and whoever entered to seek shelter in their quarters never saw the light of day again.”

—Calhoun Times (Georgia), August 8, 1880

If things had felt like a whirlwind before, they only got more intense now. Leroy called out to the different groups, and everyone dropped whatever task they’d been working on to descend on the orchard with a slew of shovels. In a quarter of an hour, six different depressions had been identified, and a group of men dug into the soil over each. Less than five minutes after that, one of the men yelled out and stumbled backward from a hole over to the side of the orchard. The rest of the team there moved away from it as well.

I could smell the reek from ten yards away. There were plenty who elbowed their way forward to get a better look, but even the thought of that many bodies pressed in around me was enough to make me clench and unclench my fists. Instead, I listened to the cries of disgust and anger, along with a swarm of mutters.

One of them—an older man with a slightly stooped back and a thick beard—let out a stream of what I thought was German, a constant spout of words that just kept going under his breath. He was talking to himself, perhaps cursing the Benders, but it drew curious looks and one or two glares.

Others closer to me drowned him out as he stalked off.

“—even tell it’s human, from the state it’s in.”

“—worse than Appomattox was, when I—”

“If I ever get my hands on them Benders, they won’t—”

I let the words wash over me. My knees buckled, and I plopped down in the middle of the dirt without another word.

Until now, I’d thought I was prepared for whatever my investigations might uncover. I’d read more than a few books about detective work, and I’d seen Father, Wyatt, and the others work on different cases over the years as well. But until I smelled that grave, it had all been academic. In that one breath, I’d recognized how real it all was. That smell had once been a human, living, crying, and hoping, just like me. If it hadn’t been for the Benders, they would have gone on doing that. Instead, they’d been tossed into a grave and forgotten.

That was just a single corpse. How many others could there be?

And what if Father was among them?

My hands trembled when I held them in front of me, and it felt like someone had tilted the ground, making everything I did feel unbalanced.

The evening grew later, and the body count kept getting higher. With each one, I steeled myself, ready to look down into the grave and recognize something. The clothing. The face. Could I even handle facing that, with the rest of my family miles away?

But each time, it was another stranger. In a way, that made it worse because it raised my hopes. Father was one of the most capable men I knew.

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